Beethoventown

Bonn isn’t about to let any visitor leave without knowing that its most famous son, the composer Ludwig von Beethoven, was born here. There is obviously the Beethovenhaus which I visited today. There is a Beethovenstrasse, a Beethovenhalle, a Beethoven Gymnasium, a Beethoven Park. Shop windows of everything from Apothecaries and Antiquarians to Restaurants and Tobacconists feature his bust, his statue, or the modified smirking one at right, complete with falling-down trousers; a copy of this sits opposite me in the garden of the basement flat where I’m typing.

What impressed me about the museum visit was just how many images had been made of this composer, in an early nineteenth-century masterclass in image curation. Multiple busts, drawings, paintings, but also his correspondence with adoring literary admirers, who stoked the fire of his burgeoning fame.

I was especially entranced by Beethoven’s “last quill” — as you see below, there are no annoying feathers that seem de rigueur in period films but which get in your nose and are quite impractical, as well as being irresistible to moths. Beethoven’s quill was able to hold a fine line and live up to multiple parings, and his working and re-working of pieces was displayed in a pentimento-style buildup. (It reminded me of how Numenius and I first met online over 30 years ago now, a conversation about goose quill knives for calligraphic purposes.) Beethoven’s goose was almost certainly a greylag, which are ubiquitous along the Rhine. Of special interest to me is the length of the central slit, much longer than I was taught to cut, but if might also be damage from a later time; 200 years is an astonishing length of time for a quill to survive, assuming they’re not fibbing about it.

I leave this lovely cherry-blossomed city tomorrow for the UK and friends and relatives. I’m not sure if I’ve been able to do as much chatting with strangers as I’d hoped, but with bronchitis having walloped me, I think it’s okay.

For Fun Or For Beauty?

Thanks to a link on MetaFilter, recently I watched a masterful long-form video by jazz bassist and YouTuber Adam Neely entitled “Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future”. Suno is the technology company that has become the biggest powerhouse in AI music. A usual workflow with Suno is to give it some text prompts describing the characteristics of the music you want and perhaps some lyrics and then Suno will take that and generate a fully instrumented song for you.

Needless to say, Neely is not a fan.

Commercial generative AI is bad in ways which are different from other disruptive music technologies of the past, like MIDI sequencing and samplers, because there is a sociopolitical agenda behind its adoption. This agenda will be bad for musicians, it will be bad for music lovers, and it will leave us feeling more alienated and alone…Like any culture war, it’s a distraction from the real war, the class war. You see, there is a class of techno-capitalists who are currently using generative AI as a means of wealth extraction. They do this by circumventing intellectual property laws…

Fifty-nine minutes into the video, Neely links AI music to technofuturist movements past and present. He discusses the Italian futurists, in particular Filippo Marinetti who in 1909 pens The Futurist Manifesto. Nine years later he goes on to write the original Fascist Manifesto. Today’s technocapitalists such as Marc Andreessen view Marinetti as a patron saint. Theirs is the same worldview that produces abominations such as Reflect Orbital’s plan.

Suno describes their core values as being “Music, Impatience, Aesthetics, and Fun”. Neely would replace these values with Service, Patience, Craft, and Beauty.

Neely believes generative AI will cause music to split into two different art forms, just as theatre and cinema are different but related art forms. These will be live and recorded music, and he has a lot of hope for the future of live music.

50 Years Ago Today

… A freighter carrying iron ore was sunk on Lake Superior in hurricane-force winds.

I don’t follow the shipping news and even if I had I’d never have heard of this particular tragedy if it weren’t for a song by Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian musician who died in 2023. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a masterpiece of storytelling and melody.

Every year the Mariners’ Church in Detroit tolled its bells 29 times to commemorate the lives lost on the freighter. After Lightfoot died they changed it to 30.

How we as humans choose to memorialize our dead is an interesting question I’m pondering as I’m planning a trip to Bodega Bay tomorrow to have my own memorialization of my parents…

House of the Perpetually Setting Sun

Pica has been subscribing to Netflix for the past few weeks mainly to watch the new season of “The Great British Bakeoff”, and yesterday I took advantage of the access to view the new movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow, “A House of Dynamite”. This is a nuclear war thriller about the response of the United States government to the detection of a single ICBM of unknown origin on a suborbital trajectory leaving the Pacific to strike the continental U.S. This covers a period of about 18 minutes between detection and impact, which makes for a quite short movie in real time. Bigelow’s intent in the movie is to show the reactions of the key people involved in the crisis, and she accomplishes this by following different sets of people in three different retellings of the 18 minutes. The first part follows the duty officer in the White House Situation Room (played by Rebecca Ferguson) as well as the crew of the anti-ballistic missile base in Alaska trying to shoot down the ICBM. The last part focuses on the response of the President of the United States, played by Idris Elba. Narratively I didn’t find that this structuring of the story worked well. The first portion was quite exciting, but in passes 2 and 3 it grew tedious. The strongest performance in the movie was from Rebecca Ferguson, but her story ended in the first portion.

The movie was good, not great, more didactic than memorable cinema. We certainly learn about the impossibility of communication among decision-makers under a crisis of such a short timespan, and the doubtful utility of the present-day anti-ballistic missile system (“hitting a bullet with a bullet” is the phrase they use in the movie). My favorite movie in the genre of nuclear war films still remains “Dr. Strangelove”.

A Visit to Berkeley

I took myself to Berkeley yesterday to visit my mother-in-law whom I love but don’t see very often. She had recently had a heart procedure but wanted to give me a hug in person following mum’s death.

I don’t see her very often, but I almost NEVER see her alone. Our conversation ranged far and wide — I told her about alchemy and what I’d been reading, we talked about music and its relation to poetry. I have always wondered whether composition is like poetry, in that it seems to fall out of the sky. Well, yes, she said, but there are rules.

I have never listened to much Schubert outside of the Lieder but she pointed me to his final piano sonata (D960 in Bb major). Sharon says he was the master of juxtaposition: in one bar your dog died, in the next, you’re eating cotton candy. I listened to this sonata after I got home and it really does plumb the depths of grief, so I think I’ll be listening to it some more. When she told me that Numenius’ father had asked for it to be played during his last 24 hours of life, it made me determined to listen to it even more carefully.

Write a book, she said. Write a book about your mother, since it’s really hot now. Even if only 10 people read it. Hot like an alchemist’s flame? It’s a thought.

Jazz Band

This is my urban sketch for this past Sunday. I went over to Central Park where the biweekly Davis Craft & Vintage Fair was taking place. The local New Harmony Jazz Band was playing at one end of the fair, as they often do.

I am getting used to sketching in this 7”×7” sketchbook. It’s a little bigger than what I’ve been sketching in previously, but this lets me be freer with the sketches. I like the combination of fountain pen fine line work with a gray Pentel brush for bolder ink strokes. I am still pleased with the Derwent line and wash kit. It was nice to have that bold Inktense yellow handy for the tent canopy. And I figured out how to mix skin tones with the paint pan set: I used a combination of poppy red with the mango Inktense colors.

The Monk Of Santa Cruz

I was saddened to learn yesterday of the death a couple days ago of the satirical songwriter and performer Tom Lehrer at age 97. By coincidence I was watching an interview yesterday with the creator of the website hosting all of Tom Lehrer’s works. The interview was from three weeks ago, when Tom was very much alive. The interview prompted me to check his entry in Wikipedia and I was taken aback to learn he died the previous day.

Tom Lehrer’s songs were very much a part of my childhood in the early 1970s. I don’t know if it was my record-collecting father or my record-collecting brother who brought the recordings home, but I heard his songs often. Judging from the accolades these past couple of days, many other people loved his songs as well.

He withdrew from songwriting and performing in the late 1960s, but his satire remains surprisingly relevant in 2025. The flip side of this is the unfortunate truth that we really haven’t solved any of these issues since then! (E.g. his song “Who’s next” is all about nuclear proliferation.) Starting in 1972 he settled into a quiet career teaching mathematics for non-majors and musical theatre at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Here is a just-posted musical eulogy for Tom Lehrer by the interviewer referred to above, Kira Coviello (aka Honest2Betsy).

On Catalan and Occitan

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I’m now dabbling in Catalan. I think I got drawn into the language in the following way. Pica just related how she herself started dabbling in Catalan because of the arrival of our Catalan neighbors. At that point, I watched a couple videos from the YouTube channel Easy Catalan. Easy Catalan is part of the Easy Languages network of language learning content that is built around street interviews that are doubly-subtitled in English and in the target language. When listening to these street interviews in Catalan, I thought to myself “Oh, I really like the sound of this language! It sounds a good bit like Old Occitan.”

How on earth do I know what Old Occitan sounds like? I don’t, of course, but long ago I discovered troubadour song and became enamored of that 800-year-old world of music and poetry. I collected many recordings of modern performers interpreting troubadour songs. One of which that stands out is a 1991 recording by the Camerata Mediterranea entitled Lo Gai Saber. The salient feature of this recording is that the singers all had contact with modern Occitan in their youth and assimilated the sounds of the language. Modern Occitan is not the same as Old Occitan but this is probably as close as one can get to recreating the medieval language’s phonology. This recording is at the present moment streamable on YouTube.

Catalan and Occitan are very closely related languages, described in an article in a site on troubadours as being one diasystem, two languages. Here is a YouTube video showing their mutual intelligibility. In it Laura (aka Couch Polyglot) has a conversation with Gabrièu (aka Parpalhon Blau), with Laura speaking Catalan and Gabrièu speaking Occitan. Laura has had very little exposure to Occitan prior to this point.

Good Night, and Good Luck

We had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Numenius’ family. His stepbrother is an actor and plays the part of cameraman in the George Clooney version of the above play on Broadway. This was streamed live today by CNN and we were able to watch it.

The media are very different now than they were in 1954… but scaremongering by those insatiably hungry for power is sadly still with us. Glad we saw it. And glad we saw Andy as Charlie on a screen seen by millions around the world!

State of Siege

Last week I finished reading Fernand Braudel’s masterful tome The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, a book which I’ve been wanting to get through for about twenty-five years now. Looking around for other retellings of the same theme I came across the author Roger Crowley, who has recently written the books 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West and Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World. Crowley is an able storyteller, and I finished both these books in rapid succession. Sieges are at the center of both books: the siege and the fall of Constantinople being the subject of the first, and the Great Siege of Malta in 1565 being the centerpiece of the second book.

After reading Crowley’s narrative I decide the siege of Malta would make a great movie, hitting a number of good storytelling tropes: an epic defense against overwhelming odds; the sacrifice of one contingent of the defenders to buy time for the rest; and finally rescue by the arrival of reinforcements just in time (delayed by the ditherings of Philip II off in Spain). Sieges don’t seem to make it into war movies very often though. What comes to my mind is Helms’ Deep in The Two Towers, and switching from fantasy to history, the 1964 movie Zulu. This list of top ten siege movies doesn’t really add any other examples of siege warfare, most of the movies on the list being thrillers or horror flicks. I don’t think the siege of Constantinople has quite the potential for being a movie as does the siege of Malta. Not that 15th-16th century Mediterranean history has the slightest chance of making it into the movies: how can you film a historical drama without there being any English royalty around?