Sort-of-but-not-really because it's Halloween I finally sat down and watched the 1926 silent film Faust, which I had never heard of but just read about over at the A.V. Club. (That web-site has some good things, but its advertising is consistently obnoxious.) If you haven't seen it and fancy yourself a film-lover, you should see it. The modern moviegoer is perhaps reluctant to take silent films seriously — so conditioned are we by the special effects and other conventions of movies these days — but once one discards certain expectations and assumptions it becomes clear how original and effective the best silent movies are. To employ an inadequate metaphor, it's like drawing a circle: sure, it's quite easy to open MS Paint and make a perfect circle, but it takes real practice and dedication to actually draw a circle, with a pencil, on paper. Faust passes the test of all real art: it's still worth experiencing today.
It occurred to me that Faust can be understood as symbolic of 20th-century German history: Faust renounces God to reshape the world according to his own ideas, with disastrous consequences. It then occurred to me that Thomas Mann already noted the Faustian resonances in the Third Reich. It then occurred to me that I really ought to begin reading Mann's Doktor Faustus: presently all my knowledge about it is secondhand, by way of The Rest Is Noise, which you really should read.
31 October 2011
25 October 2011
Quam dilecta!
You'll pardon, I hope, my low output as of late. (I won't apologize for it, anyway.) I have been thinking about several things — Montaigne and friendship, the pleasures of Indian summer, the nature of consciousness (with a nod to Andrew Bird) — but am not yet prepared to expatiate upon any of these themes. I shall, however, refer you to several other things worth reading.
- Philip Larkin: "An Arundel Tomb"
- Jason Peters: Curiosity Killed the Keg: A Tribute
One can read lots of tiresome articles of socio-political claptrap by conservative Christians; sometimes that sort of thing shews up on FPR. But Peters, though he could quite fairly be called "conservative" and "Christian", manages again and again to write things that are actually worthwhile. In this particular treatise — O Theophilus — he makes several very good and entirely accurate points, among them observations about booze, O'Connor, and contemporary Protestant hymnody. - I have had Coverdale's version of Psalm 84 in my head for a while, now. (I suppose this is mostly due to the Vaughan Williams setting.) Its palpable desire for God is quite arresting, I think.
O how amiable are thy dwellings, thou Lord of hosts! My soul hath a desire and longing to enter into the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God. Yea, the sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young, even thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. Blessed are they that dwell in thy house; they will be alway praising thee.
18 October 2011
Thoughts from Concordia
Thoughts that have occurred to me whilst attending the 2011 Lectures in Church Music Conference (at Concordia University, Chicago):
- Good music is, inevitably, about addressing issues, solving problems. The issue/problem may be one about musical form, or color (e.g. instrumentation, texture), or compositional process (canons, fugues), or, in vocal music, text, or other things. Bad music, when it refuses to acknowledge a problem, is saccharine; when it fails to adequately address a problem, it is unsatisfying.
- Most defects of musicianship can be fixed, but I suspect that a poor interior sense of rhythm is irremediable. How can you learn something that ought to be inborn? (Well, technically, a sense of rhythm is acquired, but this takes place so early in childhood that it's like original sin: probably not inborn, but as good as.)
- Fr Anthony Ruff, whom I admire more and more, gave a presentation on the implementation of the new translation of the Roman Missal, with special emphasis on ecumenism (since this is, after all, a mostly-Lutheran conference). It is hard not to be disgusted with how Rome has bungled the new translation. It's not only that it is fundamentally flawed — after all, the current translation is deeply flawed, albeit in a different way — but far worse is the autocratic way Rome has handled things. From time to time, when utterly frustrated with the follies of Protestants, I find solace in the fact that at least we don't have to put up with the Roman Catholic hierarchy. If "by their fruits shall ye know them", then I fear we know the hierarchy all too well.
- Last night we had a concert of seventeenth-century Lutheran music (mostly Schütz, Schein, and Scheidt; no Praetorius, unfortunately). I've said it before: it's too bad that we hear this repertoire so rarely nowadays. One of these days, when I've got an early music consort at my disposal, I shall endeavor to do some of it.
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