Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Monday, January 29, 2018
Sunday, January 28, 2018
The Oldest Song in the World
For fifteen years Prof. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer puzzled over clay tablets relating to music including some excavated in Syria by French archaeologists in the early '50s. The tablets from the Syrian city of ancient Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) were about 3400 years old, had markings called cuneiform signs in the hurrian language (with borrowed akkadian terms) that provided a form of musical notation. One of the texts formed a complete cult hymn and is the oldest preserved song with notation in the world. Finally in 1972, Kilmer, who is professor of Assyriology, University of California, and a curator at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, developed an interpretation of the song based on her study of the notation (fig. 1)..
The top parts were the words and the bottom half instructions for playing the music. Kilmer, working with colleagues Richard L. Crocker and Robert R. Brown produced a record and booklet about the song called Sounds From Silence. [Click score to hear a MIDI of the song.] For more information & another version MIDI by John Wheeler, click here:The song, it turns out, is in the equivalent of the diatonic "major" ("do, re, mi") scale. In addition, as Kilmer points out: "We are able to match the number of syllables in the text of the song with the number of notes indicated by the musical notations." This approach produces harmonies rather than a melody of single notes. The chances the number of syllables would match the notation numbers without intention are astronomical. [Note: The rhythm of the song is unknown.]
The top parts were the words and the bottom half instructions for playing the music. Kilmer, working with colleagues Richard L. Crocker and Robert R. Brown produced a record and booklet about the song called Sounds From Silence. [Click score to hear a MIDI of the song.] For more information & another version MIDI by John Wheeler, click here:The song, it turns out, is in the equivalent of the diatonic "major" ("do, re, mi") scale. In addition, as Kilmer points out: "We are able to match the number of syllables in the text of the song with the number of notes indicated by the musical notations." This approach produces harmonies rather than a melody of single notes. The chances the number of syllables would match the notation numbers without intention are astronomical. [Note: The rhythm of the song is unknown.]
This evidence both the 7-note diatonic scale as well as harmony existed 3,400 years ago flies in the face of most musicologists' views that ancient harmony was virtually non-existent (or even impossible) and the scale only about as old as the Ancient Greeks, 2000 years ago. Said Crocker: "This has revolutionized the whole concept of the origin of western music.".Find Confirms Theory.My own interest comes from a book I wrote, The Origin of Music. which put forward the view that there is a natural foundation to the diatonic scale, that it has existed likely even from antiquity. In addition, the book espoused evidence showing that harmony, as well, existed in antiquity.Music of various cultures, taken over a long evolutionary period, show patterns emerge (despite other differences) such as the universal use of octaves, 4th and 5ths, and the similarities underpinning the various musical scales between cultures. These facts led to the theory.Thus, the oldest song known from a cuneiform document has provided major confirmation to this viewpoint. In turn, the theory may even now help to interpret the findings. Kilmer wrote: "I certainly do like and am profiting from The Origin of Music"..Why Do Scales, Keys and Harmony Exist?.At the earliest times in musical development, a sense for "melody" would not have occurred overnight. Prior to it, music often was the playing of single notes, assigned to various rituals, such as one gong for moon, another for sun, another for death, birth, etc., and played without much or any regard to their succession as musical melody of any sort. Scales might even be virtually non-existent as was harmony.What is harmony for? After all, a single tone is more "pure" than any combinations of tones or chords, which are cluttered with overtones that are usually dissonant with each other. Why did humanity bother to add, to the relatively clean single tone, "harmony" notes (and therefore, greater dissonance)?The answer is that harmony's function has evolved mostly to make the notes of melodies "connect" or to make their connection to each other melodically more apparent to the ear by making their common inner overtones audibly explicit in chords.It follows that harmony had no reason to exist among any people who are lacking scales. Scales are, historically, "congealed" or "generic" melody in the abstract.Once scales developed (especially a favoured two, major and minor), then we are looking at a people for whom connections between notes is very important. The agenda is whether melody is important enough for them to overlook the dissonant elements in chords (compared to their purer, more consonant single tones), so as to allow them to use chords in the enhancement of their melodies. Only after the full scale and melody develop first can harmony even begin to appear on this historical agenda.The oldest song dates this agenda far earlier in time and gives to the diatonic scale a near-universal status not formerly ascribed to it."Tonality", which is defined as a "loyalty to a keynote", is also exhibited in the oldest song by repeating phrases found at the end of sentences, usually on the same note as the keynote of the tune...II. Ancient Pictures Indicate Harmony.After correspondence with Kilmer, to review the whole notion of ancient uses of harmony, I looked back at my old music books and the replicas of ancient vases, drawings and bas-reliefs, which depicted ancient musicians and instruments. I noted evidence for harmony that virtually jumped out at me, yet oddly had escaped me, and apparently others, for years before now.Note the position of the hands in the harp pictures (Fig. 2 below and also at top of article. [Click top picture to return back here]):
The hands are on different strings. Could they be playing different notes at once? Another possibility is that while one hand is shown playing a note, the other hand has played, or is preparing to play, the next note -- which certainly is not evidence of ancient harmony. But this interpretation may be lacking:We must digress momentarily: when we look at transcriptions of most folk-music, at ancient records, it is almost invariable to find that music for voices proceeds mostly in a step-wise manner, with leaps of 4ths, 5ths or greater intervals infrequently used. This would be true especially in religious participatory primitive music in which the choruses and soloists could be expected to be mostly under-trained and unable to sing accurately the leaps to far notes.Now, here's the point: If the hands on the lyre were interpreted as being set, not to play two notes at once, but one waiting in preparation only for playing the next note in a usually step-wise melody, then the bulk of the illustrations from the past would show these anticipating fingers and hands waiting on the next string, or two strings later at most.But instead, many illustrations show wide gaps between hands (more than would be common if these were notes in a step-wise melody), hinting at the note movement, not of melodies, but of the wider intervals of harmonies. In the nearest hand, indeed, sometimes it seems almost certain that thumb and forefinger have likely already plucked, or will pluck two notes.There is more evidence in ancient Greek writings (Aristotle, Problems, Book XIX.l2.):"Why is it that lower of two strings always has the tune? If one omits the paramese when one should sound it with the mese, the tune is there none the less; but if one omits the mese when one should strike both the tune is missing...." (Emphasis added.)The quote seems more than clear that two notes, and not just one at a time, were usually struck on the Kithara's strings.The Greeks and others had "double pipes" (aulos), sometimes one with holes, the second without. (Sometimes each had different sets of holes.) Both are shown in players' mouths at once. One, like bagpipes, played a drone (a keynote?); the other a melody. The harmonies must have been considered acceptable even then.Indeed, the usual concepts about ancient music are changing.
--Robert Fink
The hands are on different strings. Could they be playing different notes at once? Another possibility is that while one hand is shown playing a note, the other hand has played, or is preparing to play, the next note -- which certainly is not evidence of ancient harmony. But this interpretation may be lacking:We must digress momentarily: when we look at transcriptions of most folk-music, at ancient records, it is almost invariable to find that music for voices proceeds mostly in a step-wise manner, with leaps of 4ths, 5ths or greater intervals infrequently used. This would be true especially in religious participatory primitive music in which the choruses and soloists could be expected to be mostly under-trained and unable to sing accurately the leaps to far notes.Now, here's the point: If the hands on the lyre were interpreted as being set, not to play two notes at once, but one waiting in preparation only for playing the next note in a usually step-wise melody, then the bulk of the illustrations from the past would show these anticipating fingers and hands waiting on the next string, or two strings later at most.But instead, many illustrations show wide gaps between hands (more than would be common if these were notes in a step-wise melody), hinting at the note movement, not of melodies, but of the wider intervals of harmonies. In the nearest hand, indeed, sometimes it seems almost certain that thumb and forefinger have likely already plucked, or will pluck two notes.There is more evidence in ancient Greek writings (Aristotle, Problems, Book XIX.l2.):"Why is it that lower of two strings always has the tune? If one omits the paramese when one should sound it with the mese, the tune is there none the less; but if one omits the mese when one should strike both the tune is missing...." (Emphasis added.)The quote seems more than clear that two notes, and not just one at a time, were usually struck on the Kithara's strings.The Greeks and others had "double pipes" (aulos), sometimes one with holes, the second without. (Sometimes each had different sets of holes.) Both are shown in players' mouths at once. One, like bagpipes, played a drone (a keynote?); the other a melody. The harmonies must have been considered acceptable even then.Indeed, the usual concepts about ancient music are changing.--Robert Fink
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Friday, January 26, 2018
Omeros
BOOK SIX
Chapter XLIV
I
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze
rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain
marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears.
In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles
the light brought the bitter history of sugar
across the squared fields, heightening towards harvest,
to the bleached flags of the Indian diaspora.
The drizzling light blew across the savannah
darkening the racehorses’ hides; mist slowly erased
the royal palms on the crests of the hills and the
hills themselves. The brown patches the horses had grazed
shone as wet as their hides. A skittish stallion
jerked at his bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder
muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him in
like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line under
one fist, then with the other tightening the rein
and narrowing the circle. The sky cracked asunder
and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain
which can lose an entire archipelago
in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof,
hammering the balcony. I closed the French window,
and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof
tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed
with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar
of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered
Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector
trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen
as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure
I’d never see her again. All of a sudden
the rain stopped and I heard the sluicing of water
down the guttering. I opened the window when
the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms
of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized
roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the grooms
led the horses over the new grass and exercised
them again, and there was a different brightness
in everything, in the leaves, in the horses’ eyes.
Chapter XLIV
I
In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane
down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze
rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain
marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears.
In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles
the light brought the bitter history of sugar
across the squared fields, heightening towards harvest,
to the bleached flags of the Indian diaspora.
The drizzling light blew across the savannah
darkening the racehorses’ hides; mist slowly erased
the royal palms on the crests of the hills and the
hills themselves. The brown patches the horses had grazed
shone as wet as their hides. A skittish stallion
jerked at his bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder
muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him in
like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line under
one fist, then with the other tightening the rein
and narrowing the circle. The sky cracked asunder
and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain
which can lose an entire archipelago
in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof,
hammering the balcony. I closed the French window,
and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof
tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed
with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar
of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered
Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector
trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen
as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure
I’d never see her again. All of a sudden
the rain stopped and I heard the sluicing of water
down the guttering. I opened the window when
the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms
of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized
roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the grooms
led the horses over the new grass and exercised
them again, and there was a different brightness
in everything, in the leaves, in the horses’ eyes.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Monday, January 22, 2018
Adventures of a Man of Science - ELIF BATUMAN
A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE ACADEMY—the specter of close reading. But don’t worry: as the New York Public Library had the Ghostbusters, the academy has Franco Moretti.
Of course, Moretti is not the first or the only critic to object to close reading. For a good fifteen years, close reading has had a place in the ever-expanding group of things that might be bad for you; experts have shown that close reading will cause you to ignore history, reinforce cultural hegemonies, and “avoid commitment.”
But Moretti’s objections are different. Moretti is a man of the world, and men of the world do not reproach you for trying to avoid commitment. Instead, he finds close reading to be close-minded, superstitious, a fundamentally “theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously.” The problem with the canon, by extension, is not that it is sexist, racist, or classist, but that it is so—provincial.
These ideas appear in Moretti’s manifesto, “Conjectures on World Literature,” which appeared in the New Left Review in January 2000. In “Conjectures,” Moretti denounces the discipline of comparative literature for failing to be the study of Weltliteratur as defined by the likes of Goethe or Marx and Engels (“from the many national and local literatures, a world literature arises”). He reproaches comparative literature for having become a shabby and parochial affair, “mostly revolving around”—of all places—“the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature).” Goethe and Marx had the breadth of vision to give us a truly cosmopolitan model of literary production—and what did we do but head obstinately back toward the Rhine with our editions Gallimard?
The most liberally construed canon of Victorian English novels, Moretti continues, runs to about two hundred titles: yet “there are thirty thousand 19th-century British novels out there, forty, fifty, sixty thousand—no one really knows.” Ars longa, vita brevis—and, even if we lived forever, it still wouldn’t be a good use of our time to close-read every book ever written, because literature isn’t “a sum of individual cases” but “a collective system,” and we can’t grasp it by simply doing more of the same thing.
How, then, are we to obtain, given our meager human life spans, a godly cognizance of every last, lost Victorian novel? Moretti calls upon comparativists to practice “distant reading,” elsewhere “the quantitative approach”: a form of collaborative scholarship relying on giant utopian repositories of shared information, such that the study of literature will eventually be conducted “without a single direct textual reading.” Instead of theology, we need “a little pact with the devil”; we surrender the reading of individual texts, and in return we will get: “concepts.”
Moretti’s concepts have all the irresistible magnetism of the diabolical, especially when delivered in lecture form: imagine the charming Italian accent, the amiable panache with which he pulls out yet another overhead transparancy, graphing, say, the rate of increase in gross annual novel-production in Spain versus in Nigeria. One is reminded of Leporello’s “catalogue” aria in Don Giovanni:
In Italia seicento e quaranta;
In Almagna duecento e trentuna;
Cento in Francia, in Turchia novantuna;
Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre.
Like Don Giovanni, Moretti insists on his own heartlessness with a scientist’s zeal. It is rumored that, in a talk on novels “from the periphery” of world literature, Moretti claimed to have read “only the introductions”—and then, during the Q&A session, a professor from the Spanish department tricked him into betraying his knowledge of such details from an obscure Argentinean novel as could only have been known by someone who had actually read the whole thing. Moretti was allegedly flustered, and said something like: “Well, I don’t really remember, maybe I read it in the airplane.”
Personally, I suspect this anecdote to be a fabrication based on footnote 19 of “Conjectures on World Literature”: “OK, I confess, in order to test the conjecture I actually did read Krasicki’s Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, Abrahamowitsch’s Little Man, Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, Futabatei’s Ukigumo, René Maran’s Batouala, [and] Paul Hazoumé’s Doguicimi.”
But—who knows? Moretti, a mythopoeic figure, generates around himself a dense network of folklore and apocrypha. Franco Moretti, it is said, has hired five graduate students to retype the first paragraphs of every Victorian novel ever written; Franco Moretti is coauthoring a book on morphology with a team of Canadian ornithologists. Franco Moretti, who “doesn’t believe in” word count, prefers instead to calculate the average number of characters per word in his students’ papers, and anyone with an average of six or higher gets an F.
At Stanford, I once overheard two of my classmates at a department party, drinks in hand, debating the question of Moretti’s office hours. “I wonder whether he’ll be in this Friday,” mused the first student. “I need to show him my reading list.”
“I happen to know,” said the second student, a bit importantly, “that he’s going to be on campus at midnight on Wednesday, to be teleported to Sweden.”
Teleported to Sweden, she said, and nobody raised an eyebrow. Indeed the image glides easily before the mind’s eye: in the moonlit Stanford Quad, before the fake Spanish church, under the gigantic reproduction of Roselli’s Last Supper, Franco Moretti shimmers briefly in the ether and rematerializes, that very instant, in Uppsala.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Friday, January 19, 2018
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Monday, January 15, 2018
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Taking Leave of Cambridge Again
By Xu Zhi Mo
Softly I am leaving,
Just as softly as I came;
I softly wave goodbye
To the clouds in the western sky.
The golden willows by the riverside
Are young brides in the setting sun;
Their glittering reflections on the shimmering river
Keep undulating in my heart.
The green tape grass rooted in the soft mud
Sways leisurely in the water;
I am willing to be such a waterweed
In the gentle flow of the River Cam.
That pool in the shade of elm trees
Holds not clear spring water, but a rainbow
Crumpled in the midst of duckweeds,
Where rainbow-like dreams settle.
To seek a dream? Go punting with a long pole,
Upstream to where green grass is greener,
With the punt laden with starlight,
And sing out loud in its radiance.
Yet now I cannot sing out loud,
Peace is my farewell music;
Even crickets are now silent for me,
For Cambridge this evening is silent.
Quietly I am leaving,
Just as quietly as I came;
Gently waving my sleeve,
I am not taking away a single cloud.
(6 November 1928)
