Cat and Shanmao's blog

A co-worker who is originally from China asked me yesterday if '21th' is an English term.

I assured him that 21th is not the correct team. Instead it should be 21st.

He went back to his cubicle but it seems he doubted me because he came back asking if I was sure. I assured him I was.

A few minutes later he came back with 'proof'. He googled and gotten 1 800 000 hits so surely it must be correct. I thought about it for a moment then googled 21st and got about 10 000 000 hits. I concluded that a sizeable minority of people mispell this abbreviation and told him so. He now seemed convinced.

He then explained that this was something his child's teacher had written down so he had assumed that surely this must be the correct spelling.

A colossus beyond the grasp of most mortals, with his totally uncompromising power, his unsensual and uningratiating way with music as with people.
-- Yehudi Menuhin, Unfinished Journey (1976)

I was randomly surfing around today and discovered the above quote by one of the 20th century's great classical violinists, Yehudi Menuhin. This quote struck a chord with me because it brought together two things I had absorbed recently. The first was listening to some late period pieces by Beehtoven, the Diabelli Variations and the Missa Solemnis. The other was reading a book lent to me by my friend and pianisitic co-conspirator, Arrau on Music and Performance.

Gui's mother bought a dvd for me in Beijing that showed Piotr Andreszewski, a young and brilliantly thoughtful pianist, playing the Diabelli Variations. This was a piece written for a period of 3-4 years from 1819 to 1823 when Beethoven was around the age of 50. There are 33 variations (actually 'transformations') on a quirky waltz theme. Andreszewski explains that Beethoven takes the theme, picks aspects of it, and explores them - this exploration is what Andreszewski terms 'Beethovenism'. Taken as a whole, the set of variations cannot be described as a work of pure beauty or passion or intellect or pianism. There are moments of each, with the set moving from merely musical exploration to playfullness to profoundness. Overall, there is a certain ruggedness, a lack of charm, a lack of finesse. This lack is not a flaw in the piece but merely a fact and a reflection of its creator and his style.

Beethoven's Missa Solemnis is a completely different type of piece, a large choral work that doesn't have the luxury of the wide variation of unexpected exploration as the Diabellis, but this religious choral work also has a certain lack of finesse. It leaves the listener feeling that they have listened to a well-composed and interesting piece but not one that has personally engaged them. The Diabellis are more engaging for me.

Array relates to this because he makes the interesting statement of describing various pieces as 'erotic' and 'orgasmic', terms that are not often associated with classical music, with the exception of Bolero by Ravel. He describes Beethoven's music as unerotic. Since they were contemporaries, perhaps Arrau and Menuhin were acquainted and had discussed this viewpoint. Or perhaps they were influenced by the same sources.

I find it interesting that although Beethoven is described as the bridge between the classical and the romantic and he wrote one of the most romantic pieces, the moonlight sonata, if you listen to a lot of his music, there is at times a certain gruffness, at other times masculinity, at other times profound meditation, but perhaps a lack of sensuality, a lack of describing or bringing to mind sensual and sensory experiences. The Pastoral symphony would be one large exception to this trend, with it's effective painting of countryside scenes, even inserting the calls of various birds into the scene by the brook, the merry-making of the peasant dance, the best ever musical description of the electricity and tension of an unexpected summer thunderstorm, then finishing off with the cheerful dance of the shepherd who has crawled out from the shelter he took from the storm.

I've been downloading copyrighted classical music for a while now. The two methods I use are bit torrent and direct download from a file sharing site. Bit torrents are available from bit torrent search engines on the web. Direct downloads are available if you go to the correct forums. For example, the Musician's Library Classical Recordings Sharing thread on gamingforce.com

The reason this merits a blog note is that I'm currently using Azureus, a bit torrent client, to download the Philips complete Mozart edition. This massize 40 Gb (lowered quality sampling rate) comprises 180 cds containing, you guessed it, recordings of all music Mozart ever wrote.

I've liked some works by Mozart and most of these fall into either the 'greatest hits' category and/or are the stormy and moody pieces.

I guess some part of my brain that controls musical taste must have recently rearranged itself. Perhaps due to excessive amounts of coffee, or doing too many underwater laps in the pool, too much sugar, or excessive amounts of time trying to figure out JSF. Regardless, it seems I've fallen under Mozart's spell. The charm and 'perfection' of much of his music no longer seems like a too sweet, too fragile decorated Viennese cake or porcelain doll. To be powerful, music does not have too be performed at loud volume, excessive speed, with a massive orchestra with a huge pallette of sounds, or consistent of thunderbolts being hurled down from on high.

One are that I haven't yet gotten into are his operas. Perhaps with the complete edition I can spend more time trying to absorb and appreciate some of this music.

Several months ago I saw the Al Gore movie about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. This is a topic I had avoided reading much about for a number of reasons. Because the scientific community seemed to be largely behind the concept I took that as meaning it's likely true, the timeline for the disaster was so far off that it seemed like humanity had bigger problems to worry about (war, nuclear war, revolution, starvation, economic meltdown, energy supply, etc). Also, the topic seemed not that interesting since you really had to read up a lot on the field to understand the nuances of the 'sayers' and 'naysayers'.

Well, after watching the movie, I've developed a little interest in reading about the topic. A friend recommended an article in The Economist Sept 9-15 2006 edition, actually a series of articles. As I read them I was interested to read that The Economist, that cheerleader of capitalism, free trade, and liberalism (at least in the economic sense), basically explained that there's a problem, humans seem to be the cause, and we should probably do something about it, although it's not clear exactly what's going to happen or how our actions will affect the outcome.

I'm not going to argue the details of these arguments for or against various aspects of the issue except for one detail, the statement that:

... Africe and India ... being poor, they are also more dependent on agriculture than the rest of the world; and agriculture is more vulnerable to climate change than are investment banking or car assembly.

My interest in this statement is probably because I focus to much on a misinterpretation of the statement. The author most likely meant that Africa and India are more economically dependent on agriculture than 1st world countries. This interpretation is what was intended and what most people would understand. But since the article is about such a potentially catastrophic, world-changing, broad phenomenon as global warming there is room to interpret the statement in a broader sense.

Since the modifier "economically" was left out you could interpret the statement as meaning dependency in the vital sense.

(Except for those few remaining hunter gatherers, those few people who survive solely on fishing, possibly those special few who survive on synthetically produced food, and other special cases) The lives of people in Africa, India, and every nation on the planet depend on agriculture. Dependency can be measured by estimating the effects of removal. Remove all agriculture and most everyone will simply die. Remove half of the world's agriculture and don't be surprised if something on the order of half the people eventually die of starvation. Etc. (Perhaps an agriculturalist can correct me on our sensitivity to agricultural output.) Global warming threatens not only agriculture-as-economic-good but also agriculture-as-human-requirement.

The statement in The Economist article emphasizes two assumptions that may be fatal: 1) global warming will merely result in some unpleasant but manageable shuffling of resources and ecosystems and 2) all human activity can and should be viewed through an economic lens.

Regarding assumption 1, of the many threats of global warming, one of the chief is that climate zones are predicted to change. This means that land that was previously hospitable for certain crops may support lowered or no yield for those crops. Various derivative problems may result including extinction of vital species, upsetting of ecosystems, flooding, drought, catastrophic storms, etc. This is a big thing. Agriculture may very well be under threat, which means that many human lives will be directly under threat. This is radically different from high level economic concerns such as reshuffling of global stock portfolios or from more basic economic concerns such as the mortality and loss of health from poverty and economic mismanagement. To assume that things will basically be not that bad and can be managed by twiddling with the dials means that we won't consider more radical, but perhaps necessary, solutions.

Regarding assumption 2, global warming should be viewed first and foremost as a physical phenomenon that requires scientific analysis and solutions. Only that which is physically possible is economically possible. An economic analysis may show that it is possible, given sufficient demand, to turn lead into gold or to reverse global warming, however science will have the final say.