Goines On: The magic “ha! ha! ha!”

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While Goines craned his neck back to squeeze artificial tears into his eyes, he became aware that, with each breath, he was emitting a barely audible “ah” sound. The repetition of “ahs” put him in mind of Philip Glass’s glorious music in the final act of Akhnaten, which he and Mrs. Goines had gotten to listen to on the car radio four days earlier, as they drove home from another foray of theater-broadcast opera in Chapel Hill. Saturday’s opera hadn’t been live, but a recording of the Met’s premier live broadcast from 2006, of Julie Taymor’s abridgment of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Second Monday Music: The marvel who was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Two anecdotes

Edited by Morris Dean

[The following anecdotes I found in a short search of the World-Wide Web.]

Mozart's young memory:

Part of the service used in the Pope's chapel at Rome is sacredly guarded and kept with great care in the archives of the chapel. Any singer found tampering with this Miserere of Allegri, or giving a note of it to an outsider, would be visited by excommunication. Only three copies of this service have ever been sent out. One was for the Emperor Leopold, another to the King of Portugal, and the third to the celebrated musician, Padre Martini.
    But there was one copy that was made without the Pope's orders, and not by a member of the choir either.
    When Mozart was taken to Rome in his youth, by his father, he went to the service at St. Peter's and heard the service in all its impressiveness. Mozart, senior, could hardly arouse the lad from his fascination with the music, when the time came to leave the cathedral.
    That night after they had retired and the father slept, the boy stealthily arose and by the bright light of the Italian moon, wrote out the whole of that sacredly guarded Miserere. The Pope's locks, bars, and excommunications gave no safety against a memory like Mozart's. [Web source]

Second Monday Music: An amateur opera

No, the reviewer, not the opera!

By Chuck Smythe

[Editor's Note: Chuck did say in his most recent character update: “Want an amateur opera review?”]

I recently attended a performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Colorado’s Central City Opera. This was, if I recall rightly, only about the eighth opera I’ve ever attended. I hope you will be entertained by the impressions of a neophyte. The location alone makes this an Experience. Central City was one of the richest of Colorado’s gold rush towns.

Second Monday Music

Tom Hulce in a scene from the 1984 movie Amadeus

Mozart’s Orphic genius

By Geoffrey Dean

[Adapted from “Orphic Artistry”]

We idolize Mozart. We may not be sure what constitutes musical genius, but we know Mozart had all the necessary qualities, including a talent that emerged at a prodigiously young age, incredible improvisational skill, and the ability to compose—as he put it—“as if in a dream.” We also know what he looked like, what he acted like, about his racy jokes and tittering laughter, his awkward frankness when it came to assessing the inferior ability of lesser composers such as Salieri, who in spite of persistent rumors to the contrary did not poison Mozart. But in recalling these “facts,” are we describing Mozart himself, or his reinvention in the 1984 Milos Forman movie Amadeus, based on Peter Schaffer’s play and starring Tom Hulce?

Business plan

The overbalanced-wheel
perpetual motion machine

Some friends and I were free-wheeling this morning what sort of retirement business we might go into. One of us suggested that we do consulting, in which our core service would be to put clients into a therapeutic trance, during which we would implant suggestions congruent with what we had previously learned of their desires for changing their lives or "succeeding." Our suggestions would generally be of the sort that the next day or the next week a revelation about "what to do" would pop into the client's mind accompanied by a sense of his or her resourcefulness to undertake the revealed action or first step.
    "Ram Dass already did something like that," somebody said.
    "What? He's patented it? Would we have to buy a license?"
    I said I didn't think so, our idea was different. Our marketing plan would feature the guarantee that our service was entirely free if nothing materialized—for whatever reason, even including the client's not having the courage to undertake a revealed action (and of course including the possibility that no action ever got revealed in the first place). We'd get paid only if an action were revealed, the client acted, and the results were beneficial. (We haven't worked out a fee schedule yet.)

It occurred to me later (as something almost always occurs to me when I'm trying to think of something for the day's web log) that the religion business is somewhat similar. People go to church and either are put into a trance or put themselves into a trance and expect good things to happen as a result.
    For most people, something good happens frequently enough that they continue to pay the fee of continuing to go to church and contributing to its upkeep.
    The main difference with the religion business is that the client doesn't have to do anything but pray. When the thing prayed for happens, prayer is confirmed; when it doesn't, it doesn't count—according to the casuistry that "God answers prayer according to his will, not to that of the person praying." Religion thus perpetuates itself.

The blogging business (or the business of dedicated writing in general) is much more like the trance-induction business plan than religion is. Signing on for the writing business, thinking of yourself as a blogger or a short story writer or a novelist, dedicating yourself to it, is an act of auto-suggestion, which, if you're lucky, results in regular "revelations" of things to write about or ways to approach a piece or even (when you're really lucky and tending to imitate Wolfgang Amadeus) what words to write.
    And the result, like the daily web log, is the practitioner's reward, his pay-off. On days when nothing materializes, no pay.
    If reward is paid often or regularly enough, a habit is established, revelations establish expectation, expectation provokes revelation. A perpetual motion machine has been set running.
    A doing-business-as name may have just popped into my mind.