On the heels of yesterday’s posting about the early 19th-century composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, more people named Hummel (with the accented vowel rounded [U] (as in English put) in German or German-influenced English varieties, like Pennsylvania Dutch English; but unrounded [Ʌ] (as in English putt) in ordinary American English). The German landscape painter Carl Hummel. The fictional Kurt Hummel in the American tv series Glee. And the artist nun Maria Innocentia Hummel, whose paintings provided the original models for Hummel figurines, which is what this posting is mostly about.
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
More Hummels
March 25, 2024Johann Nepomuk Hummel
March 24, 2024Another chapter in the musical world of Europe in the early 19th century, in the transition from Classical to Romantic times. Today’s transitional figure, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, started his musical career as a child-prodigy pupil of the former child prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and went on from there. I’ll start by reviewing some postings of mine on others in this transitional cohort; then turning to his Wikipedia entry, focusing on his music (rather than his life); and ending with information about the one album of Hummel’s music I have in my Apple Music, which provides some pleasant surprises.
Chopin x Gottschalk
March 23, 2024This morning I awakened to a sparkly, flashy, melody-filled piano concerto that I didn’t recognize — it sounded like a cross between Chopin (but much more expansive) and Louis Moreau Gottschalk (but without the Caribbean flavor) — which turned out to be by Friedrich / Frédéric Kalkbrenner (hereafter K): his Piano Concerto #4 in A Flat, Op. 127 (of 1835). K, a major figure of the transitional period between the late Classical music of Beethoven (1770 – 1827) and Schubert (1797 – 1829) and the early Romantic music of Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847) and Chopin (1810 – 1849) who was in fact admired by both Chopin and Gottschalk (1829 – 1869).
From Wikipedia:
Friedrich Wilhelm Michael Kalkbrenner (7 November 1784 – 10 June 1849), also known as Frédéric Kalkbrenner, was a pianist, composer, piano teacher and piano manufacturer. German by birth, Kalkbrenner studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, starting at a young age and eventually settled in Paris, where he lived until his death in 1849. Kalkbrenner composed more than 200 piano works, as well as many piano concertos and operas.
… It was not until the late 1830s that Kalkbrenner’s reputation was surpassed by the likes of Chopin, Thalberg and Liszt. Author of a famous method of piano playing (1831) which was in print until the late 19th century, he ran in Paris what is sometimes called a “factory for aspiring virtuosos” and taught scores of pupils from as far away as Cuba. His pupils included Marie Pleyel, Marie Schauff, and Camille-Marie Stamaty. Through Stamaty, Kalkbrenner’s piano method was passed on to Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Camille Saint-Saëns.
He was one of the few composers who through deft business deals became enormously rich. Chopin dedicated his first piano concerto to him.
Despite all this, you’ve probably never heard of K, or of Johann Nepomuk Hummel, or of Ignaz Moscheles, two other figures of this transitional period who, like K, were once really famous and then largely vanished from sight.
Yet another band name pun
March 22, 2024Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon, with yet another pun on the name of a rock band; this time it’s Rage Against the Machine that’s being punned on:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Tomato Based Ideology”, alluding to the fact that what’s commonly called ragu (or Bolognese sauce) in the US is tomato-based (and sometimes meatless, as in the “traditional” variety of the commercial brand RAGÚ), though classic Italian ragù (aka Bolognese sauce) is a meat-based sauce with only a bit of tomato in it, and though the most common US name for meatless tomato-based pasta sauce is just spaghetti sauce (in fancier settings, AmE marinara sauce) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
The text in the speech balloon — with a RATM anti-corporate political message — coming from a thoroughly American source, emphasizes the meaty side of (some) American ragu; this is ragu used to name what is mostly called just spaghetti sauce in the US (a tomato-based sauce with substantial amounts of browned minced meat, usually ground beef, in it), though in fancier settings this everyday pasta sauce might be billed as AmE Bolognese sauce.
Obviously, food naming in this domain is a gigantic rat’s nest, but vocabulary isn’t the point of the cartoon, the band name pun is, so I’ll put off the lexicography for the moment and focus first on the pun and the rock band.
Etheric armies cloud the sky
March 21, 2024From Tim Evanson on Facebook yesterday, this splendid piece of cover art for the May 1954 issue of Mystic Magazine, an illustration by Malcolm Smith showing a sci-fi Archangel Michael (as I see it) leading his etheric army of the skies in a charge into battle:
(#1) Smith’s diaphanously robed Michael, shining in white, muscular, with long arms, long legs, enormous wings, wielding a beautiful bright sword (have I mentioned that I have a thing for hunky well-um-armed men with wings?)
Etheric armies — armed men flying through the ether, the air, the sky — literally struck a chord for me. Well, they came with a specific tune, fierce and haunting, and the words etheric armies cloud the skies, which I eventually recognized as a Mystic Magazine-fostered amalgam of ten thousand angels filled the sky and a solemn darkness veils the skies. Both texts by Isaac Watts (from 1719 and 1709, respectively), tunes by William Billings (from 1778, a bright celebration of the angels attending to the resurrection and glorious ascension of Christ, while those heavenly guards around thee wait like chariots that attend thy state) for the first and by Amos Pilsbury (from 1799, that fierce and haunting tune for the same occasion, on which cherubic legions guard Him home and shout Him welcome to the skies) for the second.
The three Larrys
March 16, 2024A complex tale that begins with a follow-up to my 3/1 posting “The grace of lovers”, about the sharing of enthusiasms with my first male lover, Larry (the pseudonymous Danny Sparrick in my writings about my sexual life). That’s Larry1. There are gripping stories about our time together and his life now, but the tale of the three Larrys is fabulously intricate as it is, so I’ll put off posting about these parts of Larry1’s life for another time. And focus on our exchange of enthusiasms, which will lead, circuitously, to Larry2 (in NYC, some years after Larry1). And then, a recent posting about a French conference on interjections, in which a 1982 dissertation on discourse particles I directed at Ohio State brings us Larry3, who wrote it.
There is still more, a epic of geographical (and social) wandering for both Larry1 and me; he grew up in Del Mar, a beach community in San Diego County, and ended up in provincial Japan; I grew up in little suburbs of Reading, in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, and ended up on the San Francisco peninsula; in between these terminal points, he and I more or less wandered the world (we both taught in China along the way, but not in the same place or at the same time; we both lived in England at one point and were able to get together in London then; and once we rendezvoused in Washington DC). Perhaps these odysseys will make another posting — but, again, too much for today.
A dirge murmured around the grave
March 7, 2024Awoke this morning for a 12:50 whizz, with the line “‘Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave” (from “Hard Times, Come Around No More”) in my ear, causing me to think that if there were a memorial service or wake for me after my death, this is one of the pieces of music I would want played at it; death is a constant presence for me, so I muse on things like this.
But then I realized that there would be no memorial service for an old person whose surviving friends are spread all over the world; if they aren’t able to spend some moments with me while I’m alive, why would they gather to mourn my death? The song line for this is “Give me the roses while I live”, from Odem (Second), Sacred Harp 340 (more on this below). Come by and I will entertain you with random thoughts and stories from my life — and play for you my music of joy, or all the versions of “Hard Times” I have (listed below), or my favorite Mozart Operas (Figaro and Zauberflöte, but it’s a hard choice), or Sacred Harp songs, or the rock music I used to dance to (heavy on the Rolling Stones), or Haydn’s Missa in Tempore Belli, or Linda Ronstadt, or Louis Moreau Gottschalk, or Candide (the original one), or Company, or Heitor Villa-Lobos, or I can go on annoyingly for a really long time in this vein.
Infidelity Day on the planet UFO
February 13, 2024ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre
— Leporello cataloguing Don Giovanni’s sexual conquests
Mitch Marks has sent me a comic strip appropriate for the day (which drips with sex) and personally meaningful to me (it has a Zwicky in it, though only for alphabetical purposes): the 2/13 strip in Graham Harrop’s comic UFO, in which a character I’ll call John (for Don Juan / Don Giovanni) prepares to catalogue his infidelities, not by country as in the Mozart / Da Ponte opera (but in Spain there are already a thousand and three), but by letter of the alphabet, from Alice Aabz to Zelda Zwicky:
(#1) John’s Valentine’s Day gift to Moira
About the day. 2/13 is the day before Valentine’s Day; and also (my own invention) what I’ve called LDV Day, Lincoln Darwin Valentine Day, an occasion for rampant man-on-man sexual excess; and also (this year) Mardi Gras (whoop whoop) — so it’ s pretty much drenched in sex.
and it’s a cold rain’s a-gonna fall
January 31, 2024🐅 🐅 🐅 ultimate January — would this awful month never end? — so in leap the valedictory tigers (paving the way for the sweet introductory rabbits of February, who in turn herald the fabulous, fortunate, and beneficent dragons of the new lunar year); but the near future looks dark, with at least a week of cold rain, predicted to begin any minute now (I look out my window into the gloom of 9 am and can barely discern my winter-flowering cymbidium orchids — four cultivars now in bloom, more to come soon, all beautiful memorials to my long-dead man Jacques)
And yes, this is another posting serving as evidence that I’m not dead yet. I have projects that are taking much longer than I expected, I’ve been hampered by crippling pain (which you don’t want to hear about, but there it is), and I took most of a day off to welcome visitors (an extraordinarily big thing; I get visits from friends only every few months), who came bearing a small carload of really fine sushi and stayed for a couple hours of amiable talk — giving me the balm of good company. So this morning, as a diversionary tactic I will shamelessly extract bits of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (see my play on its refrain in the header for this posting), just to get the one line that appears to be of relevance to linguists: