Secular Religion

We are just in from a great performance of Haydn's "Seasons" here in Fred'ton.  The work was performed in a large wooden church which may have inner buttresses causing acoustic issues.

Regardless, I got to wondering about how many of us miss choirs.  Here was a piece which could be performed on Sundays through the year: Spring for 3 months, then Summer and so forth.

The problem is with the arrangement for the close of Winter.  At my age, it is already striking in how the work moves inevitably to this end.  The finale is a trio with double choir.  It begins with the baritone/bass and then the tenor and finally the soprano. The Trinity.  No question.

The Trinity, like physical ascension, like Divinity of a man - all of these are deal-breakers.  Not to mention the virtuous maidens, the plowman in the furrow. But, oh, that verdant Spring, verdure and then praise of Sun and praise of Wine !  And ending with the traveller, salvation, and the final Amen.

Just think what a small city Vienna was in 1801 !  Not even the Vienna of Musil's Ulrich and the suburbs.  So it is sad to think that even in Papa Haydn's work, a work so close to nature, the secular cannot quite find even seasonal anthems and processionals and recessionals and some more regular occasion for the diapasons, the dithyrambs, the recitations, high, piercing clarabellas - all of which we miss in secular life - between concerts.

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legato, then rubato

re: Jan Zwicky

Two terms for music and metaphor: legato and rubato

see etymologies, both curious.

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Zwicky, Wittgenstein, music

IN 1992, would it not truly have been "fresh air" if, instead of the praise of Ronald de Sousa, the U of T Press had broken with good form and marketing and placed a dissenting view of the book on the back cover of the paperbound edition of Kan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy? On a tasteless dust jacket for an oh, so expensive hardcover destined for the shelves of libraries and so, discarded?  And then from the stacks to storage?

Consider that not a single page is colour - in a book of so many reproductions.  Not even the addition of colour to the bass clef.  Or the alto clef of the Mozart.

The music extends only across Wittgenstein's taste.  The melody of Ben Jonson's 1616 "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" cannot find a place in the narrow band from Bach to Bruckner's 7.

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner. Where is that Haydn piano sonata? The Weber clarinet?

Among post-Wittgensteinians, a question of good form?  „Listen - can you hear it?“

Hopefully another edition would include links to fine interpretations of each selection included.

But is it assumed the reader can read music?  Yet we could not have the Kant with the original German?  This was Toronto Studies in Philosophy.  They had published Fackenheim.  Who are these readers of Wittgenstein who cannot read him in German?

It is as sad as those books of Haiku in translation with largely blank pages and not so much as a romanji version of the original.  No special typesetting required (beyond a few diacritics.)

What explains the absence of Suzanne Langer?  A failing of her editor?  A misplaced set of note cards?  A mis-labeled box of index cards?  A single set of large file cards used on a plane while travelling back from an APA conference - and then misplaced?

Should this post be re-worked with an eye to form, to ensure balance, to allow thought to etch the mean plate of experience?

Wittgenstein — said to have interrupted a performance of a Schubert quartet ... a question of style.  A shoebox of notes, perhaps not quite in order.

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note: the 2003 Gaspereau Press volume has the author's name in a subtle red on the title page.
v. Rorschach colour shock; red-inked seals, kanji, on Japanese prints, 朱印

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