Song of himself

It’s Walt Whitman’s birthday, a day that one fan predicted would be celebrated much like Christmas.

Steel engraving from a daguerreotype of Whitman.

We aren’t quite there yet, but for a guy who only wrote  one book, he’s made a lasting impression.  He was the poet of the Transcendentalists – Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau all thought highly of him.  The British treated him as a serious poet before his fellow-countrymen did and it took the death of a president to earn him acceptance here.

His poems, by mid-19th century standards, were considered obscene, shockingly sensual, but of course are laughably tame by today’s standards.

His only book – Leaves of Grass – was 30 years in the making, beginning with the first edition in 1855 and going through nine editions right up until two months before his death in 1892. He added poems, deleted or changed others all along the way, but declared it done at last while on his deathbed.

Whitman was born in 1819 in West Hills NY.  He was the second of nine children, had to leave school at 11 to help support the family – things were pretty sketchy for the Whitmans and they moved frequently, winding up at one point in Brooklyn.  When the family moved again, Walt stayed in Brooklyn to work, learning journalism first from a printer’s viewpoint.  He stayed in the newspaper business, on and off, most of his life, except for a government job in Washington during the Civil War, which gave him time to volunteer as a nurse in a military hospital.

Thomas Eakins portrait done late in WW’s life.

If you don’t know the poems well, chances are you nonetheless encountered ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ – his elegy on the death of Lincoln – at some point in school. But probably more of us are familiar with Ray Bradbury’s version of ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ than Whitman’s and ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ was co-opted pretty successfully by D.W. Griffith.

Here’s a brief, fairly readable sample from Leaves of Grass – IMO Whitman is kind of stilted and not very interesting:

Full of Life Now

Full of life now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,
To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,
To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)

Leaves of Grass, btw, means Pages of Trivial Stuff, ‘ grass’ being newspaper slang at the time for unimportant filler material. All of it is available at Project Gutenberg.  A good biography is Whitman:The Song of Himself by Jerome Loving.

Thanks, music lovers!

Whoa – missed Aram Katchaturian’s birthday on the 24th.  If you think you aren’t familiar with his work, oh you’re so wrong – an lol might be appropriate here – so stay tuned til the last nanosecond:

Nana and Dada

If there is an artist that vies with Peter Max for the title of 60′s icon, it has to be Niki de Saint Phalle.  She took his color and graphic sense into a third dimension with her sculpture, added the mosaic and sinuous line of Gaudi – one of her big influences – and tossed in a dash of women’s lib to create her signature ‘nanas.’

Stravinsky fountain in Paris, Saint Phalles in the center, Tinguelys on the circumference.

The nanas were giant female figures, wonderfully painted; they were featured in her outdoor installations and the gardens that she created as homages to Gaudi.  Saint Phalle was born in France to a French father and American mother. When the family moved to New York in the 30′s, she was sent to private school, which soon expelled her for painting all the fig leaves on their statuary with red paint.  She modeled eventually, married, studied painting in Boston and eventually went back to Europe, settling finally in Paris.

Somewhere along the way, she divorced her husband and in 1971 married Jean Tinguely. She died ten years ago yesterday at the age of 72. The video below is a very good overview of her work, though the background music is ill-chosen.

Jean Tinguely, whose birthday it is today, was born in Switzerland in 1925 and died in 1991.  His sculpture is in a Dadaist tradition and what he decided was absurd was the materialism of the modern world.  He created strange and somewhat distorted movable objects that reflect conventional machinery – many of them actually produce something, but it is a pointless, silly something, like bread with jam.

A good sample of Tinguely’s work is shown in the video taken at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, but so much in one place produces a truly distracting cacophony – only at the very end, IMHO, when one piece is seen at length does his message of blind, meaningless manufacture come across.  His work seems to belong to an earlier time – the 20′s say – but is nonetheless interesting.

All the science fit to print

Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer was born on this date in 1832 and grew up to become an astronomer and a serious fan of solar eclipses – he twice led expeditions to India to view them.  He was also interested in electromagnetic spectroscopy, especially as a means of determining the composition of planets.

Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer

That’s how he was able to identify a totally unknown substance that appeared as a yellow line around the edge of the sun during an eclipse in 1868 – in honor of the sun, he named it ‘helium.’ (It was discovered on earth ten years later.)

So we’d know his name for that, in any case, but he did something even more special in 1869 – he started a little magazine that is now considered ‘ the world’s most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal’ and he remained its editor for the next 50 years, until his death.

He called it Nature and it was intended to make original science available to scientists in all fields, as well as the educated public.  Lockyer and his authors were Darwinians, liberals and progressives, and he wasn’t afraid to publish controversial theories.

Nature has been over the years the first publication to suggest the existence of a neutron (1932), explain the structure of DNA (1953). identify the hole in the ozone (1985) and describe the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep (1997). Its 53,000 subscribers are just the tip of the iceberg – it’s estimated that a single copy is, on average, read by eight people.

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Many happy returns to Taj Mahal (aka Henry Saint Clair Fredericks), who celebrates 70 years today – and he’s just so good that there are two videos to watch.  The second has a downside – a horrible little commercial – but it’s short and it’s a recording with some nice photos, so the upside is really good sound. Enjoy.

Taken for a ride

Smolenskaya station with typical marble pillars.

Russia was all set to build its first subway by the turn of the 20th century, but a revolution and a world war  put plans on hold until Stalin got his first five-year plan underway in 1928.  It would take five years of enforced industrialization just to provide the materials for the initial stages of the Moscow Metro and Stalin wasn’t planning to do it on the cheap.

It was the largest venture in Social Realism that Stalin had attempted.  Taking a page from Nikolai Chernyshevsky, described as “Lenin’s favorite nihilist,’ Stalin decided that riding a subway could glorify not only the Communist Party, but also its glorious leader. It was Chernyshevsky who declared that  “art is no use unless it serves politics” and every station on that first line served Stalin and the Party.

Massive chandeliers equal sun equal Stalin.

First, the decor was lavish, proving that sacrifices made for the motherland were well worth it.  Second, all the architecture and decorative detail were designed to draw the eye upwards, as toward the sun – and the sun of the Party was Stalin.

That made the lighting of particular importance and the torches, chandeliers and lamps were made of the newest, most efficient materials, which often meant aluminum.

So what tourists usually described as impressive and beautiful were actually carefully thought out exercises in propaganda, not for visitors but for the masses.

On May 15, 1935, the first line opened – it is the red diagonal on the map, the Sokolnicheskaya Line. The fare was one kopeck, about a penny.

Today, about 7 million of Moscow’s 11 and a half million residents ride the Metro daily.  It is the second most heavily used subway system in the world – only Tokyo is busier.

Flowers for Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day to all…with some pink ranunculus.

Fauré

Gabriel Fauré was born on this date in 1845 and is often referred to as a transitional figure between the Romantics of the 19th century and modern music.  Chopin was composing when he was born, but jazz flourished in the last third of his life. One of his great admirers was Aaron Copland.

He’s probably best known for his Requiem or Nocturnes, but I have lately found his Dolly Suite very pleasant – a work for four hands, it is deceptively simple;  repeated listening reveals an interesting atonality  which bolsters his claim to being a transitional figure. There are not many versions of this bit of the Suite – the Berceuse – on YouTube to choose from, so once again I’ve chosen sound quality over action:

The Company

The kind of thing that keeps liberals awake at night – a private company with its own army – was a thriving part of England’s economy for 250 years and no one seemed at all bothered by it.  In fact, it started with three ships and a Royal Charter under Elizabeth I and kept getting the royal imprimatur until Victoria.  Even Cromwell gave it his blessing.

Sepoy of the Madras Cavalry, ca. 1845.

It was of course the British East India Company and the trade it created in India and China made the aristocracy that were on the board of directors so very, very rich that what was not to like?  And the fact that the Company was willing to train and fund its own military – an absolute necessity for imposing your will on another country -  was a great savings for the Crown.

Until it all went pear-shaped in May of 1857.

At first, the Company’s army had been formed to fight the Dutch and French and any other European power that threatened its hegemony in trade, but once established in India, it became the basis for large contingents of native soldiers – known as sepoys, a Persian word meaning soldier – that kept order in each of the Company’s three largest trading zones: Bombay, Madras and Bengal.

The Company military academy at Addiscombe, 1859.

What has been called variously the Great Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny or the Sepoy Rebellion is often said to have been triggered by the new greased cartridges the sepoys were issued for their Enfield rifles and it was certainlly the reason that all but five of 90 soldiers in Meerput refused to load their rifles when a lieutenant ordered them to.

The cartridge papers were greased with animal tallow, probably pork or beef.  The end of the paper had to be bitten off, which meant that Muslim soldiers might be touching pork, while Hindus were afraid it was beef.

The sepoys’ refusal was a small, limited protest, but they were promptly thrown into prison and that sparked a revolt in Meerput. Sepoys turned on their commanders, civilians attacked Europeans everywhere – and any Indian that tried to protect them – and by the end of the rioting on May 10, more than fifty people had died, civilian and military alike.

It wasn’t just about the cartridges, of course – it was about increasing resentment of the Company’s presence and high-handed behavior.  The rajahs and nawabs the Company supported found their incomes gradually dwindling and so were less inclined to repress their own people, the sepoys themselves were becoming an increasingly professional military and demanded promotions which were not forthcoming.  The cartridges were the last straw.

The Indian Mutiny lasted until July of the following year.  A highly detailed account can be found at Wikipedia.  The British reaction was harsh and relentless. It put the lid on nationalist movements until the next century.

It was also the end of the British East India Company. One month following the peace in July, the company was dissolved by Parliament and ruling India was taken over by the Crown.

The East India Club, still accepting members.

Of the 75 Bengali infantry units that had existed before the mutiny, only 12 were allowed to remain after.  The many Brahmins who had been recruited previously were dismissed, thought to be instigators of the rebellions.  Ranks were filled with Gurkhas and Sikhs and the ratio of British to Indians was increased, although more Indian soldiers were promoted to positions of authority.

The Raj staggered on, but the newly formed East India Club on St. James’ Square in London, founded by “The East India Company’s servants – Clerical, Civil, Military, Naval and Medical,” began losing members almost immediately.  By 1874 it joined the Sports and Public School Clubs to keep dues coming in.

But it’s still there and you can rent the Clive Room for a banquet if you like.

B is for Brahms

Johannes Brahms, born on this date in 1833 (d.1897), was the very first great composer to record his music. Sadly, not even today’s technology can improve the sound quality of the 1889 cylinder enough to hear much of anything, but you can find it on YouTube if you’re interested.

Born into poverty, Brahms became one of the most popular composers and performers of his time. He also got rich, but lived simply – he gave most of his money away to friends and fellow musicians in need.

On May 20, we’ll revisit Brahms and his relationship with Clara Schumann – in the meantime, here is a sample of his work performed by the YouTube orchestra.

Music maker

In 1747, right about this time of year, the Indian musician Kakarla Tyagabrahmam was born to a Telugu Brahmin family in the city of Tiruvarur in the state of Tamil Nadu.

Tamil Nadu shares the very southernmost tip of India with Kerala and is home to the tradition of Hindu music which is called Carnatic – the emphasis is on vocal music, in contrast to the instrumental style of northern India.

Kakarla Tyagabrahmam – named for the local temple deity Tyagaraja – was born in the house of his grandfather, a poet and composer at the court of the king.

Not much seems to be known about Tyagaraja’s life except for a few anecdotes: he was such a brilliant composer that the king showered him with gifts and offered him a place at court,  But he refused the offer – he preferred to live an ascetic life devoted to the worship of Rama, in whose honor he composed his music.

Tiruvarur temple, photo by Kasiarunachalam.

When Tyagaraja refused the king, his brother, furious, threw his statues of Lord Rama into the river and so Tyagaraja set off on  the first of many pilgrimages to visit all nearby temples and compose songs dedicated to their deities as an act of devotion.  He never committed any of his songs (called kritis) to paper, so his disciples wrote them down.  Of the thousands of kritis that he composed, about 700 still exist.

Tyagaraja (also called Tyagayya) is one of the three great composers of Carnatic classical music. About 50 years after his death in 1847, musicians began to gather where he had died  to hold a week-long festival celebrating his music.

They also gather in Cleveland, Ohio, in April for the same reason – the largest Indian music festival outside of India is held there every year.  You can find details at the festival website.

A sample of Tyagaraja’s music is below – it is his only composition in Sanskrit. Though live performances are much more interesting to watch, this was the best sound quality available: