Tag Archives: Beethoven

Music, Poetry, The Press, Uncategorized

The Silent Night Coming, Deep and Shallow Fakes, and a Jazz Medley

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But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
         His reign of peace upon the earth began:
The winds with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kist,
         Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.
...
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
         Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
         With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-ey'd priest from the prophetic cell.

Two stanzas from John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity“

Obituary: “And I feel so sorry for him, I feel so sorry for this tender man,” Nabokov writes, “that suddenly the line I am writing seems to slip into mist.”

Easy Photo Fakes: With advancing artificially intelligent image generators, creating convincing pics from a handful of social media posts is fairly easy. The better images AI can create, the more dangerous it is to everyone. Maybe we should take our photos offline.

Artificially Created Videos: In a few years, an Israeli company may be able to produce computer generated video avatars that look as real as actual video.

Why Journalists Fall for Hoaxes: “Every hoax in America the past 200 years originated in the news business, or passed through it. When the world moved much slower, hoaxes were publicity stunts carried out by newspapers.”

Not Allegory: “The Twelve Days of Christmas” celebrates the meaning of Christmas and Christianity

Beethoven and Christmas: “If beauty will save the world it must be qualified that love will save the world. Because in beauty we find love. In finding beauty and the love that governs it, we are always directed to the Christ who came into our lives and taught us how to love. St. Augustine said that we often first come to know God (who is Love) through the love of others and the love that others show us.”

And though this is not Beethoven, it’s a good Christmas share.

Three original arrangements by Tony Glausi, “A Christmas Jazz Medley”

Photo by Angela Roma/Pexels

Music

Beethoven’s Fifth As It Was First Heard

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Gerald Elias paints a slice of life in 1808 Vienna for someone looking forward to the premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Of course, as a music lover, you sing in your parish choir and play duets and trios at home with the family (you on piano, and assorted family members doing the vocalizing). You are partial to Mozart’s concert arias, though they are the devil to get through unscathed.

The only music that is possible for you, or anyone in the world, to hear is live, face-to-face. That makes life pretty quiet. The cows low in the field on the hill, the goldfinches chirp in the linden tree in front of your house, the easy flow of the brook gurgles behind it. At night, sometimes you can hear loud talk from the tavern on the corner, but otherwise from dusk until dawn life is essentially silent.

…

While you wait for the performance to begin you wonder why it takes Beethoven so much longer to write a symphony than other composers – a mystery to you because from everything you’ve been told, his symphonies are rough around the edges, disconnected, and make an altogether unpleasant noise. The program, which Beethoven himself is conducting (though it’s well-known he’s hard of hearing), is as crazy as the man himself: the Sixth Symphony, one of his concert arias, the Gloria from his Mass in C, and his Fourth Piano Concerto, which Beethoven will perform himself. That’s the first half.