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Blog post #16

1. Two people who inspired Richard Strauss while he worked on An Apine Symphony were Karl Stauffer-Bern and Gustav Mahler. Both of them died early, one from suicide.

2. He tells us that we should expect this to be a large production, since it Strauss specified that it should be. There’s wind machines, cowbells, lots of french horns, and it should basically make us think of ascending a mountain and then returning down and escaping a storm like he did.

3.

4.  (Finish in the morning)

Nacht (Night) - 0:44 Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise) - 4:17 Der Anstieg (The Ascent) -  Eintritt in den Wald (Entry into the Forest) Wanderung neben dem Bache (Wandering by the Brook) Am Wasserfall (At the Waterfall) Erscheinung (Apparition) Auf blumigen Wiesen (On Flowering Meadows) Auf der Alm (On the Alpine Pasture) Durch Dickicht und Gestrüpp auf Irrwegen (Through Thickets and Undergrowth on the Wrong Path) Auf dem Gletscher (On the Glacier) Gefahrvolle Augenblicke (Dangerous Moments) Auf dem Gipfel (On the Summit) Vision (Vision) Nebel steigen auf (Mists Rise) Die Sonne verdüstert sich allmählich (The Sun Gradually Becomes Obscured) Elegie (Elegy) Stille vor dem Sturm (Calm Before the Storm) Gewitter und Sturm, Abstieg (Thunder and Tempest, Descent) Sonnenuntergang (Sunset) Ausklang (Quiet Settles)

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Project Proposal

1. Working alone

2. Die Walküre, a summary of the opera and why Berger (Wagner without Fear) suggests that if you can’t enjoy it, give up on opera.

3. Wagner Without Fear - William Berger

Youtube of Die Walküre, Bayreuth 1992 (Barenboim, Tomlinson, Elming, Secunde) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nuu9Rr1o9w

Other sources that I might find interesting while researching

4.  Likely going to use all from same youtube video, although may Google individual motifs

5. N/A

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Lohengrin Act II

I actually kind of like it. I can’t give my full attention to it though, since I have the attention span of a moderately intelligent walnut, and the plot takes an hour to accomplish what could be done in 30 seconds. The music has an epic quality to it, which kind of reminds me of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Specific things I liked was how Lohengrin was singing with the crowd while Elsa was lying on the ground, and then he just turns around and basically told her to get up. That he was basking in everyone’s attention while his wife to be was ignored on the ground cracked me up. I liked the imagery at the very end where the crowd left the stage as the music swelled and left Ortrud and Telramund in the light until it eventually went out. That part had my attention for some reason.

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Blog #15

1. After reading these two articles, I believe we can perform Wagner’s work ethically. I think we can do this because the work is considered very good, and hatred of Jewish people isn’t a main theme in the work. It’s clear that Wagner didn’t like Jewish people, but as it was put by the article on Daniel Barenboim’s website, “The anti-Semitism of his era was already a widespread illness since time immemorial, even if Jews were accepted, respected, and even honored in certain circles of German society.” Although what he said was clearly wrong, a lot of it was a symptom of the times. I think we can separate the art from the artist in this case, because the art doesn’t come from a place of hatred towards Jewish people.  In the other article, Marc Neugroschel mentioned that Netta Or saw her role as a way to “take” the works away from that anti-semitic attitude. Or plainly just says, “Wagner is dead. He can’t do anything anymore. I am here to sing his music and to make sure that Bayreuth isn’t ‘judenrein.” For these reasons, I think we can use Wagner’s works while still knowing that he was a jerk.

Stephen Fry

1. I think Stephen Fry comes to the same conclusion as Or did in the previous articles. I think Fry recognized that what Wagner had done, and more importantly in that film, what his work was used to inspire, was absolutely terrible. And he mentioned that he always wrestled with the issue since he lost family in the in holocaust. But like Or, he managed to separate the things that he did not respect about Wagner so that he could enjoy the work that he did respect. 

2. Some things that I learned from it were

             1. The Wagner family line not only exists, but is still involved in producing his works. I had never really thought about his lineage.

             2.  I learned that Hitler loved Wagner a ton, so much that when we see footage of nazis, we often hear Wagner in the background.

             3. Some of the machinery and technology used at Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus is actually very advanced, and the back stage area is very tall. Couldn’t really imagine it until Fry was up a few levels looking down.

             4. Stephen Fry “Wishes he could be a valkyrie sometimes.”

             5. The memorial bust of Wagner outside Bayreuth was made by Hitler’s favorite sculptor. 

             6. Stephen Fry is just super into Wagner. Really, really, into him.

Lohengrin

1. Lohengrin is “rooted” in AD 933, when “King Henry the Fowler of Saxony was uniting various German states to fight against Hungarian invaders.” The story is basically about love and it limits.

2.  I absolutely believe that we are supposed to see Lohengrin as Wagner. He travels from far away, is apparently better than everyone else, but still “needs love.” The character definitely stems from Wagner’s self image.

3. The difference between a prelude and an overture, as described by this author, is that an overture would rely on melodies we would see throughout the show. The prelude in this case is more of just setting the tone. 

4. Elsa is on trial for fratricide and apparently shows guilt by trembling. Also, she is accused of having a secret lover.

5. Telramund appears at Elsa’s bridal procession, as well as Ortrud.

6. Ortrud is a pagan, probably because Wagner never fully reconciled himself to Christianity.

7. She wants to know his name, because she believes that if he is so important and magical, he will be “carried away by the swan” later. She doesn’t understand why he is interested in someone like her.

8. Elsa, Ortrud, Telramund are dead, and Gottfried is turned back into a person (?) so only three deaths I think.

9. The line “When does the next swan depart” did actually crack me up.

10. I’ve never really understood opera, so I would like to find a soft-spot for it at least. It would be nice to feel what Stephen Fry feels about it, since I’ve never really liked opera before. 

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Blog Post #14

1. I think it’s fairly clear that Wagner is an antisemite. In this rambling reading, Wagner attacks literally every aspect of what he considers to be “a Jew”, which is just a caricature of everything that annoys him summed up in one person. Not only does he make it seem that one Jewish person is indistinguishable from the next, but they apparently only have bad qualities as well. Everything from the way they look and talk to the jobs they have and the art they create is a problem from Wagner. 

With regards to Mendelssohn, Wagner seems to believe that his success is centered around the fact that he already had wealth and status, and that his art had no real depth to them. He seems to praise Mendelssohn slightly in his rambling, but makes sure to continue on to say that his work has a “washiness” to it, and can’t appeal to people’s deeper emotions. If this was how Wagner viewed successful Jewish artists, then I would imagine no Jewish person could ever be comfortable around him. It’s clear to me that his emotions on Jewish people are not at all rational.

2. Wagner was definitely an innovator in theater. Some of the things that he created that we would recognize today are simple, like darkened theaters to focus your attention on the performance, or having the musicians out of view to prevent them from distracting the audience from the stage (similar to how we have music in movies but never actually see musicians playing it). Some of them were more complex, though, like introducing ideas of forced perspective to make his characters larger than life. Another was how he placed the orchestra and designed the acoustics to prevent the listener to distinguish where the individual instruments were coming from.

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Blog Post #12

1. Ludwig doesn’t seem like he’s satisfied with a partner. He seems to feel like any relationship would be limiting and be a bad decision in the long run. He said “I realized this bond would not be happy for either of us.” He continued to say the his “future was shrouded in darkness.” I think it was still possible that he was gay, but it doesn’t seem to be the reason that he was pulling out of the marriage.

2. Wagner initially became friends with Ludwig because he was “financially and morally devastated”, and Ludwig gave him money and a place to live after meeting with him. 

3. The first thing Ludwig encountered of Wagner’s were two essays that he stumbled upon in the library of his uncle Duke Max. He wasn’t allowed to see Wagner’s opera Lohengrin because he wanted Ludwig to “become familirar with the Christian ruler’s ethos of kingship through the grace of God”.

4. Eventually he was allowed to se Lohengrin in Munich. He thought it wasn’t performed perfectly, but still considered it to be “divine work”.

5. Ludwig was actually the person who forced Wagner to leave Munich, because he was getting too much pressure from his entire cabinet, who were threatening to resign. 

6. Ludwig started to get involved in Wagner’s performances, which created a tension between them. Later, Ludwig basically began to “get back at Wagner” by forcing performances and things to happen in ways that made Wagner look bad.

7. He probably shouldnt have helped Wagner as much as he did, considering that he was in pretty excessive debt. However, Wagner had been able to repay the debts with interest.

8. He’s hard to decipher because he makes so many references to so many different works of arts. They mention that it shows that he was incredibly well read, but doesn’t make it any easier to understand. I don’t think this changes my response to question 1.

9. “Neo” typically means recent version of or new version of something. I thought the Neuschwanstein Castle was my favorite one, mostly because it was styled to look medieval  but actually had many modern features. It’s also gorgeous.

10. In the end, Ludwig was buried by extreme debts literally 3 times his income. Doctors realized that he clearly had something they referred to as a “mental disease” which explained his issues with budgeting. After his death, they kept the castles open (even though he actually considered destroying them) and they can be visited by the public. 

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Blog Post 11

1. Ludvig II was born on August 25, 1845. He was 18 years old and studying in college when his dad died.

2. He began his rule attending to his duties diligently, appointing people from the liberal camps and signing over 100,000 orders. However, after 2 years it was clear he wasn’t enjoying his work and ran to the Alps every chance he could, forcing his cabinet members to travel to see him.

3. Wagner began playing a role in 1866, when Ludwig dismissed “Pfi” and “Pho” for their machinations against Wagner. Wagner ended up becoming a confidant for Ludwig.

4. His relationship with Kainz is wildly obsessive. He had the actor constantly repeating shows and acts for him, then took him traveling for no apparent reason. Then he made him climb mountains and hike endlessly so that he could recite more stuff at the top. Ludwig’s demands seemed lost in his own imagination and seemed entirely irrational. 

5. Ludwig didn’t like war, and actively told people that he preferred armed neutrality. However, he felt pressed to intervene, and did, resulting in accusations that he had lead Germany into a civil war. Apparently war also bored him, and he didn’t like taking time to visit the troops he deployed.

6. Bavaria was integrated into the German national state under Prussian leadership, although they managed to retain special rights for the region. A peace treaty was signed on May 10th, 1871 in Frankfurt.

7. Ludwig seemed a bit obsessive regarding the arts, as shown by is entire thing with Kainz, as well as becoming so obsessed over plays and stories. Additionally, he seems to love engineering and physics, like with his gondola/hot air balloon thing, but maybe for the wrong reasons. They mentioned that he may have been dealing with a mental illness, which might explain why he could get so fanatical. 

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Blog post #10

1. The alphorn shares history with the horn family, and is similar to the tuba. 

2. The article describes instruments like the trumpet to be cylindrical, and instruments that were horns to be conical. The alphorn is a conical instrument. 

3. Alphorns were commonly made from fir or pine trees that had a bend in them, were gouged out, then help together with shoots and bark. 

4. It has a melody that is calming and simple. 

5. Herdsmen used alphorns to interact with cows. They played their instruments to calm them and calm them. They were considered very valuable, even royalty sought them out. However, they spent winter months on the streets looking for food. 

6. There are 3 movements, the alphorn doesn’t play on the second one. The second movement was written for strings alone, and the alphorn couldn’t play the “lullaby” melody of the second section.

7. John Calvin arrived after fleeing Paris, and convinced a lot of people that music and instruments were the work of the devil, and destroyed many instruments. In 1805, a festival was held, but only to alphorn players showed up.

8. To help restablish the alphorn, the governor of Bern contacted Ferdinand Fürchtegott Huber, made 6 new horns for him to play, and asked him to teach 6 people how to play them. It slowly made a comeback and became a symbol of Swiss culture. 

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Blog #9

1. Jewish musicians experienced the same fate as most Jewish people captured. They still had become second class citizens, then lost their belongings, and were eventually sent to camps. However, Jewish musicians could get some special treatment because of their talents. In the case of Alice Sommers, she was allowed to play music for other prisoners and guards, as well as being sent to different camps where she was used for propaganda purposes. In her case, it seemed that musicians had better odds of survival, and their music lead to better moral and better odds of survival for others as well. 

2. They were similar to the scientists in that most of them really just didn’t want to get involved in politics. Most of them weren’t very political, and were more concerned with advancing their careers or creating music than addressing the conflicts around them. Out of the 5 stories that I read, it appeared to me that Herbert Von Karajan was the most opportunistic. He didn’t do anything very political and used the chaos around him to advance his career, even though he had some moments of failure. He lived comfortably and died one of the most wealthy and famous composers in the world. I feel that he didn’t have enough compassion for things happening around him; that while so many horrible things were happening around him, he only worked on his own career. 

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Blog #6

The life of Wolfgang Mozart was intense, and in my opinion, a bit unpleasant. He spent all of his youth composing and playing music, traveling through harsh conditions, and having to live up to the highest expectations. He seemed to live most of his life in his own head, not entirely in touch with reality. 

After traveling as a child, he composed in Salzburg for Colloredo, and didn’t get along well with him. After leaving and traveling on his own, he and his father stopped getting along. His dad was very controlling, and believed that Mozart owed everything to him. Even into his twenties, Mozart was still under his dad’s control, so he ran off and indulged in freedoms away from his family. Towards the end of the documentary, they made it clear that he was a fantastic composer, but he does seem like someone that had been traumatized by his past. 

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Blog #7

1. The town has a tower with a glockenspiel, which plays music at 7, 11am, and 6pm. 

2. Colloredo wanted to save money for Salzburg and invest it in other parts of society. One way he did this was to spend less on musicians and choose them indiscriminately. He also wanted to modernize, and partially did that through ignoring traditional music. He did what he did because he had more on his mind than just the local music. He was trying to save Salzburg from financial ruin, attract more scientific and artistic minds, and to foster a more tolerant environment. 

3. Two opportunities that existed were one at cathedral, and one at court. The reading explained that people needed to look past the court for opportunities though, since it wasn’t inspired under Colloredo. At the cathedral, they would regularly play holiday performances and would need to know more than one instrument. 

4. Mozart composed far fewer works than Hayden, and his work had more Italian style//inspiration behind it. People didn’t think his work was as good, either. Hayden’s “main theme” was stable, but Mozart’s had “no downbeat root position tonic chords and only deceptive cadences. 

5. Mozart wasn’t producing his best work at the time, and only ever focused on the court and didn’t expand outside it well enough. His biggest issue is that he put all the blame on everyone else, while not being critical of himself enough. 

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Blog Post #5

1. Bach’s personality was someone who was obsessed with music. Regardless of being offered many distractions (money and fashion), he always focused exclusively on his music. Everyone around him seemed to consider him a prodigy, and his rivals even declined to “compete” with him. He was never driven by audience, just his passion for music. 

2. The German renaissance occurred when they began to notice the culture developing in Italy. The Germans noticed the “throb of life” from Italy during the previous century. Bach was under this influence.

3. He had had two wives and 20 children

4. 5 of them were musicians. 

5. Supposedly there’s some talent in my heritage but you’d be hard to prove that any made it to me. 

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Blog Post #4

1. A German musician would regularly play music in groups of 2-4 in urban centers and for the upper classes. They would make money both through direct payments and also institutionalized subsidy. 

2. Some of this information was found through tax records and “chronicles”. 

3. It wasn’t too clear to me, however, I think that we see music and physics cross over as Nuremberg became wealthy as it produced metals and fine scientific instruments. Knowing what we do from the last article, it makes me believe that the same people who could make/buy expensive scientific equipment, like fancy sundials and globes, could also afford musical instruments. We know that the German-area musicians were held in higher regard, and it’s likely due to the sources of wealth, scientific expansions, increasing demand for entertainment, and possibly an increase in leisure time. However, I don’t think the article said anything about this specifically. 

4. Martin Luther’s instigation of the Reformation changed how people interacted in service. This lead to Chorale in service, where Luther produced some music (and others), but many were just based on existent secular songs. 

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Post #2

1. The significance of beats per minute on this digital metronome is how it relates to heart rate, where slower is a resting heart rate and faster is a stressed heart rate.

2. We measure pitch frequency by referencing the wavelengths of and speed of the wave.

3. The mouse would have a higher frequency. I think that frequency is related to size of things when it comes to instruments, however, in everyday life it’s not as clear cut.

4. If music doesn't have any pattern to it, then it’s probably bad music. If the composer doesn’t actually put any emotion or meaning into it, then the listener probably won’t as well.

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Post #1

1. My name is Chris Baker, I’m an engineering physics student, and I’m originally from Denver, Colorado. I’m a senior and planning to graduate in July of 2019, after returning from Germany. 

2. I’ve always wanted to see Europe, and could use a little more understanding of the arts since I know nothing about music.

3. I hope to learn as much as I can about music, because I know virtually nothing about it. 

4. I think I’ve played Settler’s of Catan (regular) before. I’m pretty sure I won...