Posts Tagged ‘Beethoven’
“Everything we do is Music”*…
It was… difficult to put a modern day figure on [the earnings of] the likes of Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner… for a few reasons. For a start, a lot of the musicians we took a look at were paid in long dead currencies such as thalers, ducats and florins – then there’s the fact that composers were also more likely to have made supplemental income from compositions and tutoring. Nevertheless, even with the usual caveats (there are admittedly a few problems with comparing 18th century incomes with 21st century incomes) we still thought you’d want to know if you’re out-earning the musical superstars of their day. So without further ado, why not take a look at the modern day salaries of famous composers…
Play the pay scales at “Do you Make More Money than Mozart?”
[via Slipped Disc, thanks to friend MK]
* John Cage
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As we struggle to keep up with the Johanns, we might spare a thought for (the moderately-remunerated) Joseph Haydn; he died on this date in 1809. An accomplished composer who was, effectively, the architect of the Classical style, Haydn wrote 106 symphonies, and was instrumental in the development of chamber music. His influence on later composers was immense: he mentored Mozart and taught Beethoven; his contributions to musical form have earned him the epithets “Father of the Symphony” and “Father of the String Quartet.”
Thomas Hardy‘s portrait of Haydn
“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination”*…
Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction…
The fantastic tale in full at “The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality.”
[Image above source]
* John Lennon
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As we question everything, we might recall that it was on this date in 1810 that Beethoven wrote Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor (WoO 59 and Bia 515) for solo piano– better known as “Für Elise” (click to hear).
Some scholars have suggested that “Elise” was Beethoven’s mistress; but others have suggested that the discoverer of the piece, Ludwig Nohl, may have have misunderstood the Master’s handwriting, and transcribed the title incorrectly, that the original work may have been named “Für Therese”– Therese being Therese Malfatti von Rohrenbach zu Dezza, a friend and student of Beethoven’s to whom he proposed in 1810… though she turned him down to marry the Austrian nobleman and state official Wilhelm von Droßdik. Today, Therese is forgotten; Elise, celebrated. In any case, it’s a beautiful piece…
The famous opening bars
“It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time”*…
Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson, curators of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, explore the wonderful history of made-up musical contraptions, including a piano comprised of yelping cats and Francis Bacon’s 17th-century vision of experimental sound manipulation: “Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments.”
* Johann Sebastian Bach
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As we tickle the ivories, we might spare a thought for Johann Nepomuk Maelzel; he died on this date in 1838. Remembered these days as the inventor of the metronome, Maezel was well-known in his own time as an inventor and impresario. He was especially well-known for his automatons– clock work trumpeters, chess players, miniature song birds, and the like that he exhibited widely. In 1804 Maezel invented a kind of “player orchestra,” the panharmonicon, an automaton able to play the musical instruments of a military band, powered by bellows, and directed by revolving cylinders on which the notes were stored. The “instrument” was admired across Europe, and earned its creator the post of imperial court-mechanician at Vienna, and the friendship of Beethoven (whom Maezel convinced to write Wellington’s Victory [Battle Symphony] Opus 91).
Everyone ever in the world…
About 10 years ago, Peter Crnokrak gave up his career as a quantitative geneticist, deciding instead to apply his talent for manipulating large data sets to the visualization of life at the human scale.
His visualizations, created under the nom de data viz of The Luxury of Protest, are both visually stunning and scientifically precise. And, as with his previous genetics research (he was trying to tease out the difference between nature and nurture in our genes), Crnokrak the graphic artist wrestles with enormous, core questions about humanity and history.
His most well-known piece, titled Everyone Ever in the World, tries to capture human history’s cumulative war dead as a proportion of every person who has ever lived since 3000 BC. That piece–meant, like all of his work, to be experienced as a physical installation rather than a JPEG–was honored last year by the journal Science in the National Science Foundation’s International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.
Crnokrak has also tried to illustrate the quantitative degree to which each of the 192 United Nations member states has contributed to peace and terror in the world. And more recently, he has graphed every known empire, colony, and territorial occupation since 2334 BC. In the resulting visual, individual empires overlap atop each other, revealing ebbs and flows in empire mania over time. That piece is called Never Forever Never for Now. (The titles themselves are meant to carry Crnokrak’s concepts in a poetic way, and he admits to having spent weeks just coming up with Everyone Ever, let alone doing the research for it.)
Explore these pieces and others at Crnokrak’s site; they’re intended to be viewed as physical objects, in person– still, the photos are very compelling.
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As we brood over the big picture, we might note that this date (Don DeLillo’s birthday) was the occasion, in 1805, of the first performance of Beethoven’s only opera (at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien): a work in three acts known then as Leonore— the story of Leonore, who, disguised as a prison guard named “Fidelio,” rescues her husband Florestan from death in a political prison. Like many of Beethoven’s pieces, the opera was subsequently reworked… in this case, distilled to two acts and retitled Fidelio.
From Beethoven’s manuscript for Leonore/Fidelio
We might also pause to send consoling birthday greetings to Timothy Evans, who was born on this date in 1924. Evans was accused in 1950 of murdering his wife and daughter, convicted, and hanged that year. Throughout his trial, Evans argued his innocence, and pointed to his downstairs neighbour, John Christie, as the likely culprit. Three years later Christie was unmasked as a serial killer, and confessed to the murder of Evan’s family. Evan’s case– its obvious miscarriage of justice– was a major spur to the abolition of capital punishment in the U.K. in 1965.
Evans (center) being escorted by police
Now you don’t…
Adam Harvey is a graduate student in NYU’s fabled ITP Program who is putting his considerable talents to work in the service of privacy. His thesis work, CV Dazzle, is aiming at finding ways to confound computer facial recognition systems. As The Register reports:
Concerned about the proliferation of face recognition systems in public places, a grad student in New York is developing privacy-enhancing hacks designed to thwart the futuristic surveillance technology.
Using off-the-shelf makeup and accessories such as glasses, veils, and artificial hair, Adam Harvey’s master’s thesis combines hipster fashion aesthetics with hardcore reverse engineering of face detection software. The goal: to give individuals a low-cost and visually stimulating means to prevent their likenesses from being detected and cataloged by face-recognition monitors.
“The number of sensors that are going into the public spaces has been increasing,” said Harvey, a student in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program. “There’s a lot of work to be done to catch up to where cameras are going because there have been so many advances in the last few years.”
Although still in its adolescence, face recognition technology is quickly being adopted by governments and corporations to identify individuals whose images are captured by surveillance cameras. At the 2001 Super Bowl, for instance, officials digitized the faces of everyone entering Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida and compared the results against photographic lists of known malefactors.
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But Harvey has discovered that face detection can often be thrown off by using makeup to alter the contrasts the technology looks for. For example, dark patterns applied around eyes and cheek bones, as in the image below, are one such possibility.
[full article here]
[see more on Harvey’s blog here]
Harvey asks, “How can hats, sunglasses, makeup, earrings, necklaces or other accessories be modified to become functional and decorative?”; and he explains “The aim of my thesis is not to aid criminals, but since artists sometimes look like criminals and vice versa, it is important to protect individual privacy for everyone.”
As we rework our pick-up lines, we might take inspiration from the memory that it was on this date in 1810 that Beethoven wrote Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor (WoO 59 and Bia 515) for solo piano– better known as “Für Elise” (click to hear).
Some scholars have suggested that “Elise” was Beethoven’s mistress; but others have suggested that the discoverer of the piece, Ludwig Nohl, may have transcribed the title incorrectly and the original work may have been named “Für Therese”– Therese being Therese Malfatti von Rohrenbach zu Dezza, a friend and student of Beethoven’s to whom he proposed in 1810… not actually so encouraging as an example, since though she turned him down to marry the Austrian nobleman and state official Wilhelm von Droßdik… still, a beautiful piece…
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