Josquin in Montréal

This year, as I’ve noted before, is a Josquin anniversary year. A few days ago I went fishing on YouTube for performances of his music, and I found this from a hometown team: Le studio de musique ancienne de Montréal singing his five-voice setting of Ave verum corpus [score]. This is quiet, contemplative music, and if you’ve got seven minutes to spare I highly recommend it. It’s a sensitive and beautiful performance, gorgeously sung.

Another missed concert

Last weekend I did not get to see Hilary Hahn in concert. Tonight I don’t get to hear the Latvian Radio Choir in concert. But I can stay home and listen to them sing Arvo Pärt’s Nunc dimittis. This is a quiet and slow piece, but difficult to sing well. It’s delicate, and fragile, and will break if the choir fumbles it. It’s safe in these hands:

I wonder what concert I will not attend next weekend?

A missed opportunity

This weekend Hilary Hahn was in town for a concert. Despite my best efforts, I was not able to go; six or eight hundred people were better organized, and all the tickets were sold.

It had the potential to be a memorable night: one of the great musicians of our time, and certainly my favourite living violinist, playing nothing but Bach’s music for solo violin. A dream come so nearly true. The pain of regret is slightly alleviated by looping this short video, in which she plays the Presto from Sonata No.1:

Deeper roots of The Tree of Life

I’ve been watching my favourite film again, and I’ve discovered a worthwhile commentary on it in the form of a video essay. This format is especially well suited to a visual analysis of a film, and if there was ever a film that would benefit from a visual analysis, it is The Tree of Life. Recommended to those who’ve seen the film at least once; it’s about 20 minutes in duration.

Note that the essay relies heavily on the screenplay to draw out the film’s structure and themes, which does seem to shed some light, but is also, perhaps, misleading, for Malick generally feels free to depart from script during both filming and editing, and indeed it is obvious that he did so when making The Tree of Life. That said, and despite a few other minor missteps, I learned some valuable things from watching it.

Thinking on your seat

This is pretty great: Marie João Pires was scheduled to play a Mozart piano concerto with Riccardo Chailly and (I assume) the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. When the orchestra began to play, though, she realized that she had practiced a different concerto!

It’s difficult to hear the exchange between Chailly and her during the introduction. He seems to be rather enjoying her quandary. But his faith in her is not misplaced; taking a few moments to recollect herself, she finds her footing and begins to play.

When I see something like this, it helps me to realize what a wonderful and perilous thing music-making before a live audience is. It could collapse at any moment, and is only kept afloat, note by note, by superb musicianship and retentive memories.

If ye love me

Here is a good recording of Tallis’ If ye love me in rehearsal, sung by the superb ensemble Vox Luminis. I always find these rehearsal videos a bit jarring: it seems incongruous to see such a slovenly assortment of unshaven, rumpled creatures producing such a heavenly sound. I imagine it must have been quite amusing to this group to show up on rehearsal day and find that two of the singers had dressed the same. “Let’s put them in the middle!”

Anyway, the music is divine.

 

In memoriam Josquin Desprez

Today is a good day to remember Josquin Desprez, who died on this date 496 years ago. Here is a video I made a few years ago to go along with one of my favourite of his pieces,  Mente tota (more background here).

Incidentally, I’m pretty proud of that video. The closing section, from about 3:10, turned out especially well.

And, since we are remembering Josquin today and not just celebrating him, here is the opening section of Jean Richafort’s impossibly gorgeous Requiem in memoriam Josquin Desprez:

Lecture night(s): At Notre Dame

A couple of weeks ago the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame held their annual fall conference, this year on the theme “You Are Beauty: Exploring the Catholic Imagination”.

I wasn’t able to be there, and neither, I expect, were you, but they’ve just published a set of the lectures to their YouTube channel, and quite a number of them look intriguing. Roger Scruton was there, Mary Ann Glendon, Alasdair MacIntyre, Daniel Mahoney. Here is a list of the featured presentations, with links to the videos. Where to begin? Right here, of course:

Lecture night: Hart on consciousness

Today’s lecture is a treat: David Bentley Hart speaks about consciousness to an audience at (I believe) Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. Hart is currently writing a book on the subject, a book which is to be an expansion of the treatment he gave the topic in The Experience of God. The talk describes a number of the problems faced by attempts to provide a materialist account of mind and consciousness, and outlines the features that a successful account of consciousness would need to have.

As usual with Hart, the ideas are challenging, the perspective is fresh, and the whole is expressed in melodious prose.

The talk raises a number of questions in my mind, but foremost among them is an issue that has long puzzled me. Many of the arguments against a materialist account of mind have the following structure: “Given the premises of the mechanical model of nature, it is impossible to provide a scientific account of this-or-that feature of mind.” The mechanical model is the one that has prevailed since the early modern period: the real is just atoms and the void, there are no formal or final causes, the mathematical structure of matter exhausts its properties. And, given those premises, I think the arguments Hart (among many others) offers are persuasive.

Yet it seems to me that one possible response, for those committed to a “naturalistic” view of mind and consciousness, is to challenge the prevailing premises of the mechanical model. Perhaps a materialist model of mind could succeed if the potentiality of matter were not stripped down to its mathematical minimum. For instance, if contemporary models of mind fail to bridge the gap between matter, on one hand, and characteristically mental properties (intentionality, unity, conceptualization, teleology), on the other, might this not be plausibly due to the fact that, in our theory of nature since Descartes, matter has been defined to have none of those characteristically mental properties, no final or formal causes? As such, the project was doomed from the outset by the very terms in which it was posed. If we were to restore the full panoply of causes to nature, à la Aristotle, might that not provide sufficiently rich resources to permit mind to find its place within the natural order? The pan-psychism that has been advocated by, for instance, Thomas Nagel, seems to me a step in this direction, and a not unreasonable one, given the objective and the obstacles.

In the lecture, however, Hart raises this prospect only to dismiss it, and I admit I didn’t understand his reasoning. If somebody feels able to explain this to me, I’d be grateful.

The wind began to howl

Here is an informative exploration of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”, which is surely one of his greatest songs:

(Hat-tip: The Music Salon)