Much ado about Mahler

So, I ended up going to a concert at the Queensland Conservatorium last night which featured Mahler's 5th Symphony.

I'm here to tell you:   I officially do not care for this composer's work.   I've heard something of his once before at a concert, but I forget what.  I think this is the first time I sat through a whole symphony, though.

I take it from the notes on the program that he was into creating innovative work that might not be understood for another 50 years.  Well, we've gone 120 years and I still don't get it.   

From what I can gather (and I am speaking a music illiterate who just goes to concerts and "knows what he likes," and then tries to justify his gut reaction later), the fourth movement (a string-y romantic love poem for his much younger wife) is famous, sort of conventional, and much admired.  It seems to have escaped my attention entirely until last night, but I thought it entirely underwhelming.   Why is it popular?

Out of the 5 movements, I thought the 3rd was the most interesting and pleasing.   As for the 5th and final movement - talk about a composition in search of a final climax!  There were so many points where it seemed to be building to an end, only to flitter away again.  I know, I have felt this about other classical pieces at times, but for this one it felt particularly acute.

The basic problem I have with the whole piece is the sense of a lack of direction, or structure, or ...something? There are portions that are good and pleasing enough (and pretty loud - if you like it when an orchestra gets dramatically loud [and I do] - there are some good bits), but the thing just doesn't seem to hang together in any pleasing way.  I think that some orchestral players may like the way he does give every part of the orchestra a big role at different times - the students playing last night seemed really happy at the end - but that's not enough to satisfy me, in the audience.

Happily, the internet being the internet, Google searching the topic "I find Mahler completely overrated" shows me that I am not alone - even people who don't understand why that 4th movement is considered good:

it feels like his music sounded better on paper than in reality.For example, the legendary Adagietto from Symphony no. 5 didn't move me that much - in fact, sounded kind of cliché to my ears.

(Actually, it didn't move me at all.)   

It would seem that Reddit contains a fair bit of pro- and anti- (or at least, not getting) Mahler argument, both sides saying they don't understand the other.   But it's good to find people much more familiar with music than me sharing what was just my gut reaction:

Often when I listen to something by him for the first time I have a hard time making much of it. There often doesn't seem to be an obvious sense of direction or a clear emotional implication at any given moment like you would find in Beethoven/Mozart etc.

Or this:

Also, I feel like a lot of Mahler's music doesn't have much of a sense of momentum. Yea, he might make this part faster or louder than that part, but music by composers like Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms, seem to have an intrinsic sense of momentum and development. Brahms never has to force the music to go from here to there, it just happens naturally. Something about Mahler's music feels forced to me.

Yes, exactly.

As for Mahler as a person, here he is, looking stern, as I guess all classical composers usually do:

 Curious things Wiki tells me about him:  

*   his parents had 14 children (!), a lot even in those days, surely;

*   he was big on German philosophy:

Mahler developed interests in German philosophy, and was introduced by his friend Siegfried Lipiner to the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Fechner and Hermann Lotze. These thinkers continued to influence Mahler and his music long after his student days were over. Mahler's biographer Jonathan Carr says that the composer's head was "not only full of the sound of Bohemian bands, trumpet calls and marches, Bruckner chorales and Schubert sonatas. It was also throbbing with the problems of philosophy and metaphysics he had thrashed out, above all, with Lipiner."^[18]

 (Maybe I can blame a fondness for Nietzsche as ruining his music...heh.)

*  What a surprise, he could be a jerk:

In spite of numerous theatrical triumphs, Mahler's Vienna years were rarely smooth; his battles with singers and the house administration continued on and off for the whole of his tenure. While Mahler's methods improved standards, his histrionic and dictatorial conducting style was resented by orchestra members and singers alike.^[67] In December 1903 Mahler faced a revolt by stagehands, whose demands for better conditions he rejected in the belief that extremists were manipulating his staff.^[68]

*  He did face a lot of anti-Semitism though, so he sometimes had reason to be cranky.

*  This was mentioned last night - he married a woman 19 years younger than him who was already a pianist and composer of some talent (they did some of her songs last night, as it happens), but as part of the marriage deal was that he insisted she stop composing.  As Wiki explained:

Alma soon became resentful because of Mahler's insistence that there could only be one composer in the family and that she had given up her music studies to accommodate him. "The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner ... I'm asking a very great deal – and I can and may do so because I know what I have to give and will give in exchange."^[91] She wrote in her diary: "How hard it is to be so mercilessly deprived of ... things closest to one's heart."^[92]

Huh.

Anyway, that's it for my amateur take on a classic.   Maybe the Ring cycle ruined him a bit for me - classical music that was, more or less, going somewhere, even it if was 15 hours!  I see that in fact Mahler was big on Wagner:

Along with many music students of his generation, Mahler fell under the spell of Richard Wagner, though his chief interest was the sound of the music rather than the staging. It is not known whether he saw any of Wagner's operas during his student years.^[14]

It says he became a leading interpreter of Wagner.  Did they ever meet?   Not exactly:

 It was on 02-03-1876 at a performance of Lohengrin in the Vienna State Opera. ... Mahler saw Wagner in the wardrobe, but as a young student (aged 16) and admirer he did not have the courage to talk to him. It was the second time Wagner conducted his Lohengrin.

Wait!   I was about to end this now meandering post, when I find that even his wife didn't think much of his work, and was very upset that he demanded she stop composing:

On her part, Alma moderately appreciated Mahler’s music: she wrote in her journal “As a composer, I do not believe in him very much”. When she received Mahler’s letter on Friday, the 20th of December 1901, her heart froze “Surrender my music? Give up the reason I have lived for until now? My first reaction was to refuse. I cried, I couldn’t help it, because I had just realized I loved him”. Alma finally said yes and agreed to give up her vocation – she would however keep a grudge against her husband her entire life.

Also - he once had a long consultation with Freud:

In 1910, he was shaken by an uncontrollable burst of depression when he discovered his wife Alma was having an affair with Walter Gropius. Divorce was out of the question. Mahler thus looked for help with Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The treatment was too brief though (a sole four-hour discussion-walk) to show results.

Ah, just another typically dramatic life for a temperamental artistic type.   I mean, how many of them ever have a life that was simple and pretty straight forward?   "Met his wife at age 20, married and remained devoted to each other until his death at the age of 75, enjoying good health, financial success and the company of his family until then".  

Fin.

A happy face

I'm lacking inspiration for a post, so....

More on China

 

Agree with this, and note again how the Catholic Church is also on side with globalisation for poverty reduction.  Conservatives who think countries (and their people) should be left to rot because it might hurt Western economic prosperity do not follow Catholic social teaching.   

This is a test of Queensland luck, if ever there was

It's kind of incredible that Brisbane, and Queensland, have avoided extensive COVID outbreaks this long into the pandemic.

Given our charmed run, I wonder if this will break it, or if we will continue to have a semi-mysterious ability to avoid it, despite relatively slow vaccination rates...

Space based manufactured patriotism

As regular readers (all 4 of you!) know, I recommend people look at videos on China's propaganda news  network CGTN to get an idea of what the nation is thinking - or perhaps more accurately, what the government wants the nation to think.   (Or is it what the government wants other governments to think the nation is thinking? Who knows?)

Anyway, the advent of the recent semi-built space station is being used for what looks to Western eyes like some extremely corny and old fashioned manufactured patriotism.  Have a look at all the saluting and reverence at this press event where the latest three taikonauts were introduced: 

 

And then the send off ceremony when the blasted off a few days ago:

  

The thing is, it's hard to know whether the Chinese public is also cynically aware of how intensely media manufactured this looks, or are they genuinely swept up in this space based patriotism.  

I also am always amused at how they are obviously pretty good at this space stuff now,  except for an apparent inability to design sleek and futuristic uniforms and spacesuits.   These always look to me to pretty baggy and daggy to me - like they are still being designed with a left over Mao era vibe.

If ever they have a death on a mission (and surely they are bound to eventually), I hate to imagine the media dramatics that would be around the funerals.

The incremental future gets overlooked

I agree with the sentiment of this tweet by a science fiction author (who I don't particularly care for, but his tweet account is OK.)

I think it's the incrementalism of the change in technology that sort of blinds us to how different things are.

Too much information

I'm not entirely sure why this is important to physics, but still, here's the abstract of a study trying to estimate all of the information capacity of the visible universe:

The information capacity of the universe has been a topic of great debate since the 1970s and continues to stimulate multiple branches of physics research. Here, we used Shannon’s information theory to estimate the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe. We achieved this by deriving a detailed formula estimating the total number of particles in the observable universe, known as the Eddington number, and by estimating the amount of information stored by each particle about itself. We determined that each particle in the observable universe contains 1.509 bits of information and there are ∼6 × 10⁸⁰ bits of information stored in all the matter particles of the observable universe.

But but - this doesn't include the information possible by how you arrange the elementary particles, does it?  It's all a bit confusing...

 

Against nuclear

I find it hard to fault the arguments in Greg Jericho's recent piece about why nuclear power is not the saviour for Australia.

I do tend to wish, however, that governments everywhere were trying to come up with very specific and concrete proposals as to how they are going to swap to all renewable energy in a relatively short space of time.   Making targets alone is not really enough.

Good grief

 

I do enjoy a good Allahpundit rip into Trump

This is about Trump's classless (to put it mildly) press release on the death of Colin Powell.   

It’s gratuitous since he wasn’t obliged to say anything about Powell’s passing. It’s narcissistic, turning Powell’s death into a complaint about Trump’s critics. It’s petty in that it’s unwilling to honor Powell’s accomplishments, of which there were many. It’s obsessed with media coverage, particularly how other figures are covered relative to how Trump himself is. And it’s dishonest inasmuch as Trump doesn’t actually care about the Iraq WMD debacle or Powell’s role in it. That was the low point of Powell’s public service and so it’s cited here opportunistically, to bolster Trump’s case against Powell to the reader. To 45, there’s only one test of a man’s value: Was he pro-Trump or anti-Trump?

If Powell had supported him, Iraq would have been forgotten and Trump would have celebrated his career.

 

We're dealing with idiots (or at least, fools), part whatever

The increased role of roof top solar

There was an article at Forbes recently that summarised a study which argued that the world could make significant inroads in clean energy by vastly expanding the amount of roof top solar panels - particularly in the densely populated parts of India and China, they argue.

I still say it should be a compulsory part of the building code in most of Australia, along with a minimum amount of home battery storage.   An extra $20,000 or so on your average build (which is around $300,000) isn't going to kill anyone, especially when you get the savings on electricity and gas costs.

Japan and zoning laws

Here's the video you always knew you wanted to see - explaining the loose Japanese zoning laws that allow for a very highly mixed use of land in very small spaces:

 

This guy's videos are always good and interesting.   He does make the interesting point at the end that the Japanese system seems both very capitalistic (allowing lots of freedom within a certain moderate set of restraints) but also sort of socialistic in the living spaces it develops (cars are not king; shops and facilities within walking distance - and neighbours living very close by - giving a sense of community).  

I think the key thing he perhaps misses here is that Japanese communitarian cultural values came first; its not as if the zoning laws created them.   And the Japanese are perhaps also inclined to just put up with certain inconveniences because of those values - such as people in apartments and houses living with loud talking drunks coming out of the pub or restaurant downstairs at 11.30pm every night to catch the last train. 

So, it's probably a mistake to think that such zoning would work as well in Western countries.

Well, duh

Today's life advice: wet your pods first

I like using laundry detergent in pod form.   They are convenient and not at all messy to use (well, subject to what I am about to say); it's easy to take a couple if you are going away for a few days and might need to wash clothes during the break; and they don't run any risk of gunking up pipes in the way the usual method of getting the detergent into a front load washing machine apparently can.    They're also very clear in terms of working out value, as there is a simple and direct cost per wash on the price ticket on the supermarket, given they have to show unit price.   (And by the way, they are a product on which supermarkets do this rotating specials thing continually - there always seems to be one brand which is on special for about 32 cent per pod, whereas the full price of the more expensive brands is close to $1.  I only buy them on the cheaper pricing.)

But, I have found with the new front loading washer in my house that they can sometimes get squished against the window/door and fall into the rubber seal crease at the bottom, and take too long to get properly dissolved.  This is because the way to use them in a front loader is said to be to put them in the drum and then load clothes on top of them.  But, front loaders add water slowly, so they can be stuck spinning around for a while before everything gets wet enough for it to burst, and in the meantime can they move into the worst location for water contact.

My life hint, after trying worse methods (such as cutting them with scissors, or squeezing them with a cloth in the machine 'til they burst) is to briefly rinse the pod you are about to use under cold water and then put it in the machine.  This seems to give the dissolving process a head start, and I have noticed that the detergent seems to be released quite quickly this way.  

I do actually like watching the start of the cycle in our front loading machine to tell when the detergent seems to be released.   Family members do think it rather odd when I do this, but we all have our special interests.  :)

You can thank me for this important life advice, and I look forward to being the new Jordan Peterson.

Update:  it didn't work this morning. :(

Further investigation required.

A very odd commentator

I only noticed this commentator because someone I more or less trust (I forget who now!) linked to one of his tweets, which sounded sensible. But man, I don't think I follow anyone else who swings so wildly between sounding more or less sensible, to just ridiculous. 

He is, I gather, a small government libertarian type, and as such takes a "a pox upon both your houses" attitude towards the political parties in the US. But (I am reminded very much of Jason Soon) the thing that really seems to agitate him the most is Left wing identity politics. Which, as I have been saying for years, is a bit nuts in terms of how to prioritise serious problems. 

Anyway, to illustrate my point of how wildly he swings, have a look at these examples. Is he always serious? I think so, but it's hard to tell. I would pretty much bet a $1,000 that he is single, though!

A self explanatory link

https://digg.com/2021/this-reddit-thread-of-the-most-useful-websites-that-you-might-not-know-about-will-enhance-your-internet-browsing-experience

Update:  ok, here's a click-able link.  

Very naughty

Remember the early, quite funny, "Uncle Roger" video in which he took orders at a well regarded Singaporean food takeaway cafe at a market in London run by a young, blond, part Asian woman?   I didn't remember her name, but it's Elizabeth Haigh, and her reputation has just taken a serious nosedive after a cookbook she published has some pretty extensive plagiarism from another Asian woman's cookbook from 2012.

A long post giving examples is here.

It really does appear very blatant - and I would guess that the only way she could retain some credibility would be if it turns out it was largely ghost written, and the ghost writer is the one who did the copying.  I mean, that's not good, when you claim to telling personal anecdote;  but it's still a bit better than being the person doing the cutting and pasting with full knowledge.

Dog detective problem

I hadn't heard about this before:  the important role cadaver smell detecting dogs (and one dog in particular) have played in some American murder convictions - yet based on some very dubious science.

Modern parents and violence

A Sydney primary school has asked parents to make sure their children do not watch the popular Netflix series Squid Game, which depicts “extreme violence and gore”, because students are mimicking the games in the playground.

On what should I blame the modern parental de-sensitisation to violence being viewed by kids?   The parents themselves being de-sensitised by ever increasing violence in movies, TV and video games, I expect.

As someone who remembers as a child in the 1960's seeing some relatively B grade movie in the cinema (I forget what it was now) which featured a guy getting shot with a harpoon in his stomach, and feeling that was really kind of disturbingly violent, it is completely surprising to me that parents do not think that kids can imagine the effect of violence to a more visceral degree than adults.      

I haven't watched Squid Games.   I saw some of the violent first game while my daughter was watching it and thought it didn't look like my sort of thing.   I have seen commentary saying that it is worth watching even if it makes you uncomfortable, but I am not so sure.  I have never been one for the dystopia "games played to the death" scenarios.  Always seemed a bit silly to me.   Unless we're talking gladiator era stories, I guess.