He is one of a group of conductors--others include Herbert Blomstedt, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Michael Gielen, and the now-deceased Gunter Wand--who give me a lot of inspiration. Pushing 90 years old, they are at the height of their knowledge, wisdom, musical passion, and communicative power. They give me hope that I still have time to accomplish something in the years left to me.
Saturday, August 8, 2015
Christoph von Dohnanyi
I just listened to von Dohnanyi's Cleveland recording of Bruckner's 5th symphony.
He is one of a group of conductors--others include Herbert Blomstedt, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Michael Gielen, and the now-deceased Gunter Wand--who give me a lot of inspiration. Pushing 90 years old, they are at the height of their knowledge, wisdom, musical passion, and communicative power. They give me hope that I still have time to accomplish something in the years left to me.
He is one of a group of conductors--others include Herbert Blomstedt, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Michael Gielen, and the now-deceased Gunter Wand--who give me a lot of inspiration. Pushing 90 years old, they are at the height of their knowledge, wisdom, musical passion, and communicative power. They give me hope that I still have time to accomplish something in the years left to me.
The Population Problem
From Alternet: Too Many Humans
Overpopulation is one of the biggest problems we face, perhaps the main source of many of our other environmental and economic difficulties. Wikipedia tells me that the highest estimates of Earth's carrying capacity is 16 billion humans (a number we are likely to reach and surpass by the end of the century). I suspect the number is closer to 1 billion, or less.
Empowering poor people, especially poor women, with knowledge and resources, seems like an answer (which won't solve but will at least mitigate the problem) which everyone besides religious extremists can get behind.
Overpopulation is one of the biggest problems we face, perhaps the main source of many of our other environmental and economic difficulties. Wikipedia tells me that the highest estimates of Earth's carrying capacity is 16 billion humans (a number we are likely to reach and surpass by the end of the century). I suspect the number is closer to 1 billion, or less.
Empowering poor people, especially poor women, with knowledge and resources, seems like an answer (which won't solve but will at least mitigate the problem) which everyone besides religious extremists can get behind.
Friday, August 7, 2015
The Really Big One
A few weeks ago, links to this New Yorker article were popping up around the Internet. Understandably, people in the Pacific Northwest were getting particularly excited about it.
Inspired by this attention, last night the University of Oregon held a "public forum" about this. In the two hours that I was there, several scientists and an emergency response coordinator talked about what's likely to happen, what would be the cause, how measurements are being and should be taken for early warning, and what one should be prepared to do. I had to go catch my bus before they got to the question-and-answer session.
(Despite what the New Yorker article says, Eugene is far enough inland that it will avoid any tsunamis, and none but the flimsiest of buildings is likely to totally collapse. However, basic infrastructure--roads, bridges, electricity, water, sewer, food and energy distribution--are likely to take from several months to a year or more to re-establish. That's for a magnitude 9 earthquake, which is about 15% likely in the next fifty years.)
Thoughts:
1) that we didn't really know about seismic volatility of the Pacific Northwest until just recently. There's so much yet that we don't really know, even about things of direct importance to us.
2) that the Native inhabitants had memories of earthquakes and tsunamis in their oral history, to which of course we paid no attention.
3) if the United States is to have a humane, progressive, ecologically responsible future, much of the conceptual and technological innovation is likely to come from this area. But only if Seattle and Portland (and Eugene!) continue to exist in something like our present form.
4) a thought that's harder to formulate. So much of human civilization is built with reckless disregard for the local or global environment it depends on being situated in. If we cared about what's good and worth preserving of humanity and its history and culture, we'd reduce our population to sustainable numbers, stop destroying the planet as a whole with our effluvia, located ourselves in the relatively less precarious places, leave some space to the uncounted other species that also call earth home, and work like hell to establish some outposts on other worlds as a backup. But we're doing almost nothing on any of those tasks, and won't.
5) Don't count on the government to be there to do anything but make things worse. Remember Katrina.
Inspired by this attention, last night the University of Oregon held a "public forum" about this. In the two hours that I was there, several scientists and an emergency response coordinator talked about what's likely to happen, what would be the cause, how measurements are being and should be taken for early warning, and what one should be prepared to do. I had to go catch my bus before they got to the question-and-answer session.
(Despite what the New Yorker article says, Eugene is far enough inland that it will avoid any tsunamis, and none but the flimsiest of buildings is likely to totally collapse. However, basic infrastructure--roads, bridges, electricity, water, sewer, food and energy distribution--are likely to take from several months to a year or more to re-establish. That's for a magnitude 9 earthquake, which is about 15% likely in the next fifty years.)
Thoughts:
1) that we didn't really know about seismic volatility of the Pacific Northwest until just recently. There's so much yet that we don't really know, even about things of direct importance to us.
2) that the Native inhabitants had memories of earthquakes and tsunamis in their oral history, to which of course we paid no attention.
3) if the United States is to have a humane, progressive, ecologically responsible future, much of the conceptual and technological innovation is likely to come from this area. But only if Seattle and Portland (and Eugene!) continue to exist in something like our present form.
4) a thought that's harder to formulate. So much of human civilization is built with reckless disregard for the local or global environment it depends on being situated in. If we cared about what's good and worth preserving of humanity and its history and culture, we'd reduce our population to sustainable numbers, stop destroying the planet as a whole with our effluvia, located ourselves in the relatively less precarious places, leave some space to the uncounted other species that also call earth home, and work like hell to establish some outposts on other worlds as a backup. But we're doing almost nothing on any of those tasks, and won't.
5) Don't count on the government to be there to do anything but make things worse. Remember Katrina.
Right-brain philosophy
This video (The Divided Brain) talks about the modern update to the popular but no-longer-sustainable understanding of the differences between the left and right hemispheres.
Assuming the perspective of the video, I take my favorite philosophers to be engaged in the task of bringing right-hemisphere balance to the philosophical conversation. (Particularly, William James, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead.) (I suspect that Heidegger was up to something similar, but I understand his work far less well.)
And I think that twentieth-century philosophy can be seen as a story of left-hemisphere counter-insurgency. Positivistic analytic philosophy in the Anglophone sphere. Either structuralism, cynicism, or yet another return to neo-Kantianism in the Continental sphere.
Assuming the perspective of the video, I take my favorite philosophers to be engaged in the task of bringing right-hemisphere balance to the philosophical conversation. (Particularly, William James, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead.) (I suspect that Heidegger was up to something similar, but I understand his work far less well.)
And I think that twentieth-century philosophy can be seen as a story of left-hemisphere counter-insurgency. Positivistic analytic philosophy in the Anglophone sphere. Either structuralism, cynicism, or yet another return to neo-Kantianism in the Continental sphere.
Our post-work future
People talk about a post-work and post-scarcity future. It all sounds rather breathless, science fiction, techno-utopian. The things is, we are already there--or at least at a point in our development in the first world, where what we need and genuinely want could be produced by something like 15-20 hours a week of labor.
But:
1) Advertising has been designed to pump up what are (for lack of a better term at the moment) "inauthentic" wants. (Marx lives!)
2) We don't have infrastructure to distribute the wealth we have so that regular people can subsist in such a society. (Universal basic income!)
3) Our culture hasn't developed so that people know how to meaningfully use their liberated time. Education is needed. It's not that the resources and opportunities aren't there (give or take, depending on the area of interest), it's just that we haven't evolved into thinking in those terms.
Anyway, this article in The Atlantic is an interesting look at the issues.
A World without Work
But:
1) Advertising has been designed to pump up what are (for lack of a better term at the moment) "inauthentic" wants. (Marx lives!)
2) We don't have infrastructure to distribute the wealth we have so that regular people can subsist in such a society. (Universal basic income!)
3) Our culture hasn't developed so that people know how to meaningfully use their liberated time. Education is needed. It's not that the resources and opportunities aren't there (give or take, depending on the area of interest), it's just that we haven't evolved into thinking in those terms.
Anyway, this article in The Atlantic is an interesting look at the issues.
A World without Work
Monday, August 3, 2015
Resurrection
As noted in the previous post from a couple of months back, I have been working over the summer on a paper to submit for a conference. I'm nearing the end of that, so I thought I'd take the time for a couple of notes here about other things that have happened recently.
On July 12, Sandra and I went to the Oregon Bach Festival's performance of Mahler's 2nd symphony, titled "Resurrection". (My favorite piece of music, one that's meant a tremendous amount to me in a variety of contexts over the years. All of Mahler's symphonies mean a lot to me as I take the time to inhabit the worlds they create, but it's the 2nd that I always come back to.)
I didn't know how much to expect from this performance. Especially in the era of "historically informed performance", Bach and Mahler occupy rather different corners of the classical music universe. And Matthew Halls, the conductor, is someone I've never heard of before (though Sandra happened to run into him at Resurrection
And it was....perfect. I had no occasion to stop and question the conducting or performance, because I was hearing the music of Mahler from beginning to end, delivered with the utmost passion and devotion to the music. This is far more rare than it ought to be.
I believe it is the only concert I've attended that brought tears of emotion. I haven't listened to the 2nd symphony since, so as to not lose what I have of the memory of this performance. (Don't worry, I will.) But for those of you who didn't have this experience, I'll give you another good performance for your enjoyment.
The theme of resurrection is, of course, very Christian. Unlike Lutheran Bach and Catholic Bruckner, Mahler's religious/spiritual biography is complicated. Like Beethoven's, perhaps, but even more so. Mahler began, and arguably remained at heart, a Czech Jew. However, in order become conductor of the Vienna State Opera in the senescence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had to convert to Catholicism, and did, seemingly without qualm. Looking at his music reveals a syncretist spirituality that was at its core Pantheistic. You get Jewish folk tunes throughout, settings of Catholic hymns and legends of at least one saint, Cinese nature poetry, and texts from Goethe and Nietzsche. And that's where I'm at: a naturalistic pantheist who takes inspiration from a variety of sources. I don't believe in resurrection after death, but do believe that the idea of resurrection can mean something in the course of one's life. And that music can be a part of it.
On July 12, Sandra and I went to the Oregon Bach Festival's performance of Mahler's 2nd symphony, titled "Resurrection". (My favorite piece of music, one that's meant a tremendous amount to me in a variety of contexts over the years. All of Mahler's symphonies mean a lot to me as I take the time to inhabit the worlds they create, but it's the 2nd that I always come back to.)
I didn't know how much to expect from this performance. Especially in the era of "historically informed performance", Bach and Mahler occupy rather different corners of the classical music universe. And Matthew Halls, the conductor, is someone I've never heard of before (though Sandra happened to run into him at Resurrection
And it was....perfect. I had no occasion to stop and question the conducting or performance, because I was hearing the music of Mahler from beginning to end, delivered with the utmost passion and devotion to the music. This is far more rare than it ought to be.
I believe it is the only concert I've attended that brought tears of emotion. I haven't listened to the 2nd symphony since, so as to not lose what I have of the memory of this performance. (Don't worry, I will.) But for those of you who didn't have this experience, I'll give you another good performance for your enjoyment.
The theme of resurrection is, of course, very Christian. Unlike Lutheran Bach and Catholic Bruckner, Mahler's religious/spiritual biography is complicated. Like Beethoven's, perhaps, but even more so. Mahler began, and arguably remained at heart, a Czech Jew. However, in order become conductor of the Vienna State Opera in the senescence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had to convert to Catholicism, and did, seemingly without qualm. Looking at his music reveals a syncretist spirituality that was at its core Pantheistic. You get Jewish folk tunes throughout, settings of Catholic hymns and legends of at least one saint, Cinese nature poetry, and texts from Goethe and Nietzsche. And that's where I'm at: a naturalistic pantheist who takes inspiration from a variety of sources. I don't believe in resurrection after death, but do believe that the idea of resurrection can mean something in the course of one's life. And that music can be a part of it.
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)