Recent stories of note:
“The sacred and the profane”
Marcus Walker, The Critic
In 1793, many of France’s revolutionaries—that sober, levelheaded bunch—organized the Fête de la Raison (festival of Reason) in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The partygoers, dressed as Romans, removed the altar, replaced it with one dedicated to Liberty, and etched “To Philosophy” over the church’s entrance. Contemporaneous accounts describe the affair as wholly depraved—one might even say unreasonable. Last week saw a similarly irrational co-opting of a sacred space when Canterbury Cathedral hosted a “Rave in the Nave.” The church allowed an electronic-music dance party in the church’s main space, during which no shortage of unholy lyrics were sung by the crowd. The Reverend Marcus Walker of The Critic takes the church to task for this profane use of the holy space, arguing that such desecrations are the fault of our “weird” brethren: “Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic folk” who see no difference between the sacred and the profane.
“Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Tantalizing, Unsentimental Prophet, Is Miles More American Than Maya Angelou”
David Mikics, Tablet
“If you want to understand America,” a professor once told me, “you need to understand Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Then, he added, “Isn’t that unfortunate?” David Mikics of Tablet agrees about Emerson’s necessity, although Mikics certainly doesn’t consider it as unhappy of a task. In reviewing a new Emerson biography, Glad to the Brink of Fear by James Marcus, Mikics identifies in Emerson a “tough, tantalizing prophet of the American self.” He praises the Transcendentalist’s aphorisms, his spiritual individualism, and his optimism; but Mikics is honest, too, about some of Emerson’s failings, noting especially his uselessness on the topic of “erotic longing.” Though Mikics paints what is perhaps too idealistic a picture of this idealistic man, it nonetheless provides a valuable glimpse at the paradigmatic American’s life and work.
“Beethoven’s Secret Code”
S. I. Rosenbaum, The Atlantic
Toward the end of her life, Hildegard von Bingen devised a secret language with its own script. She taught the language to no student, and never explained the invention’s purpose; it seems the language existed only for her own sake. The violinist Nicholas Kitchen believes he’s found something similar in Beethoven’s original manuscripts, although this language is one of musical notation. As S. I. Rosenbaum recounts for The Atlantic, Beethoven’s handwritten scores contain a number of shapes and symbols that most music historians have disregarded as irrelevant or merely cosmetic—most of these notations did not make it into the printed copies. Musicians and historians thus concluded that the composer considered them dispensable or known only to the composer. Kitchen, however, claims to have discovered a key to deciphering them: he argues that these shapes and notes communicate very specific instructions, forming what is essentially Beethoven’s “large personal vocabulary.” Some historians remain unconvinced, but Kitchen is nonetheless assembling a compilation of the composer’s corpus with all the original symbols and their supposed meanings included.