Alright, here is my attempt at an Advent playlist (not a Christmas one). Most of these are on the somber side of things. Remember, Jesus hasn’t come yet.
Fantasia on Greensleeves, Ralph Vaughan Williams, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields recording
The Holly and the Ivy, Loreena McKennitt, from A Midwinter Night’s Dream
Veni Veni Emmanuel, Loreena McKennitt, from A Midwinter Night’s Dream
O Come O Come Emmanuel, Chanticleer, Our Heart’s Joy
Noel Nouvelet, Anuna, from Christmas with Anuna
It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, The Honey Trees, single
Creator of the Stars of Night, High Street Hymns, from Love Shall Be Our Token
People Look East, Al Petteway and Amy White, Winter Tidings
Advent Suite, John Michael Talbot and Michael Card, Brother to Brother
Christmas in the Room, Sufjan Stephens, from Silver and Gold Vol VIII
Christmas Lights, Coldplay, single
O Come O Come Emmanuel, The Cascade Horns, from Christmas Brass
Notes: Probably any recording of the Vaughan Williams piece will do.
The Advent Suite from Talbot and Card is a real power house. You might need to stop and replay that one a few times.
Sufjan Stephen’s 10-disc Christmas album is absolutely bizarre and not recommended. There are a few gems though. Make sure you listen to the volume 8 version of this song. The other one is terrible.
The Coldplay song is not bad, really.
There are about 30 brass quintet versions of O Come O Come Emmanuel and I’ve heard many of them and performed several. This is, without question, the very best one. And no, it’s not on iTunes so good luck.
Here Knuth reflects on his early pioneering work in digital publishing and typeface creation:
When I first began to use a computer to produce letter forms, I thought the task would be easy. But actually I had to work on the task for five years before I got anything that satisfied me. And the first book that came out was a great disappointment to me after I saw it in print. I BURNED with disappointment – I actually felt a hot flash when I first saw it. I opened the covers, expecting to be really happy, but “Oh, no!” it was back to the drawing boards; still more work was needed.
When you design something yourself you are overly sensitive to it. You can’t view it dispassionately. If I’m watching a lecture in which my fonts appear in the slides, I can’t concentrate on that lecture; I keep wondering whether I shouldn’t have changed the letter S a little bit. I’m sure all artists go through this trauma. The more subjective a task is, the harder it is for you to know that you have produced anything of quality.
-Donald Knuth, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, p.131
I don’t have much to say about this. The highlighted sections are ridiculously true. Don’t forget.
During a panel discussion about computer science and religion in 1999, Donald Knuth made this comment while complaining about the sensationalized accounts of theoretical physics research that often appears in places like Popular Science or Scientific American:
The extra detail that gets suppressed when quantum physics gets popularized amounts to the fact that, according to quantum mechanics, the universe actually consists of much more data than could ever be observed. [Paul] Dirac states, for example, that:
[Nature’s] fundamental laws do not govern the world as it appears in our mental picture in any direct way, but instead they control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies.
There is this widely-held belief that when scientists discuss things, they are talking about the REAL world while theologians are just hanging out in a made-up fantasy world. People who love to sport T-shirts emblazoned with the idiotic “Flying Spaghetti Monster” are of this ilk. Today, nearly every psychologist in business is trying to get the “neuro” prefix worked into his title somehow to emphasize how much what he is studying occurs in solid, actual “nature”, rather than some dubious construction. Mathematicians work in an imaginary world, but they are given a pass since their work ends up being fundamentally useful to natural scientists in the end. There is some popular push-back against physicists that like to talk a lot about “string theory” or “chaos theory”. Even the dimmest person in the room can detect the funny smell of a made-up world behind their conjectures.
But wait! This is all a false dichotomy. It’s not us and them. It’s not the real and the imaginary. The real is indeed very real, and what is going on in our heads is a representation of that – not the reality itself. This is equally true for both philosophers and engineers. We are working inside of a mental picture we have formed. Lots of details have been boiled down so we can contain them. And what gets introduced along the way? Irrelevancies. Garbage. Biases. Mistakes. Misunderstandings. Wildness. You name it – stuff that causes problems because we are working with a sampling of the universe small enough to fit in our heads, not the universe itself.
Everyone is doing this all the time, and doing a good job at it requires some musing. This is why artistic creativity often proves to be a boon to scientists, rather than some kind of saboteur. Boring, unimaginative scientists and theologians are equally bad. Some of our best science has arisen from science fiction. Talking about God well requires a sense of adventure rather than a micrometer. What can keep the cancer researcher picking up her pipette for the 100,000th time? Imagining cancer to be a dark evil worth slaying. What can keep the pastor coming back to comfort his wayward parishioner for the 1000th time? Love, and the belief that the doctrine of the Trinity might actually be a valid “theory of everything”.
Come on all you people now! You’re already dreaming. Dream bigger.
Here, computer scientist Donald Knuth explains his experience digging through biblical commentaries for the first time in the library. Having grown up in church, he was at least familiar with scripture, but hadn’t ever dug into much theology before. His account here rings true to me and is especially of value I think because of his status as a bit of an outsider to the subject but familiar with research writing.
Some of the commentaries I ran across were big disappointments to me. in some cases the authors did a superficial job, nt looking closely into the material as a good scholar would. They ignored the challenging questions that other commentators wrestled with. In other words, they were writing for another audience, not for me.
In several other cases the comments seemed to me very lifeless and dry They reeked of academic gamesmanship. Being a college professor myself, I think it is fairly easy to smell such pretensions from a long way off. Of course, I can’t help but sympathize with people who work in academic departments of theology, because they have to deal with much harder questions than I ever need to face. it must be enormously more difficult to do innovative work in a field that has been in existence for thousands of years than it is to do computer science research today. I supposed the best way to get tenure, as a theologian, is to say the wildest new things while not disagreeing too strongly with the people at your institution who received tenure just before you did. In any academic field, people’s egos are bound to intrude on the work they do, especially when their livelihood is at stake.
Fortunately, enough people are left who really love what they do and who aren’t just acting out some supposed strategy for success. I did run across a number of commentaries that I thought were not only excellent but also truly great. They combined superb scholarship with a genuine love for the subject that came through in the writing.
-from Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
You see that part at the end: “People that combine great scholarship with genuine love for the subject”. People that are untainted by money and the stress of deadlines and the politics of the academy. Who does that sound like who is writing this “truly great” stuff? I’ll tell you who. AMATEURS. That’s right. Hobby bloggers and even some self-published enthusiasts are writing some of the best dang stuff out there – concerning all subjects. Oh, but we need professionals to do the best stuff. Nonsense. They have a bunch of other problems they have to deal with that often prevent them from working through really good (or new) ideas. Amateurs might have the true love and creativity, but without the hurdles that come with an attached career. This difference is now it’s easier to discover or become(!) one of these people than ever before.
Ah, can you tell I dug up an old hard drive and found a bunch of projects I did 10+ years ago back at the university? This one was for a friend of mine who played bass clarinet. This solo part has been adapted to keep the lines within a nice range, occasionally taking certain phrases down an octave. Double stops have also been either removed or replaced with arpeggios. If I recall, she didn’t get the opportunity to actually play this with an orchestra. It’s a good piece though and should actually sound pretty nice on a B.C. provided they could get enough volume out of it.
This fall I directed a small string group that ended up consisting of 6 kids aged about 8-11. They were all in at least Suzuki book 2, but a couple could barely read and a couple others were fairly advanced. No published music I could easily find bridged the gap, so I arranged something practical on my own this evening. As I have greatly benefited from people offering free ensemble music online in the past I figured I would post this for anyone else to use or adapt if they wish, even though it isn’t particularly good! The files are PDFs in letter format.
Everyone gets the melody at least once during the three variations. The tremolo at the beginning is meant to provide a somewhat mysterious feel. The small interludes given to the first violin are supposed to have a middle-eastern flavor and be taken out of time and possibly embellished upon. The 2nd cello part is meant to be the easiest although there are a couple of brief finger extensions.
A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of Celtic Daily Prayer, a great book of daily prayers and readings published by the Northumbia Community. When my copy arrived in the mail (purchased used on Amazon), I removed the dust jacket and discovered the outside had been attacked with a Sharpie. The inside too had some warnings in place.
Apparently the previous owner felt it necessary to warn future owners of the danger of abandoning scripture in favor of, well, preselected scripture and liturgical prayers. They also are apparently not too keen on the NRSV, which apparently was devised by the sons of Cain, or perhaps a “serpent Jew”.
I share this just because I think it’s kind of funny and because as a book lover, it’s fun to find hidden treasures left by previous owners.
This made me think though – what a relatively recent idea to warn people not to fall back on liturgical prayers. My children just studied Gutenberg in their history lessons. Before his time, nearly 1500 years after the time of Christ, very few people on earth had access to a bible for use in personal devotions. What did they fall back on? Liturgical prayers and scraps of the best memorized passages – exactly the sort of thing you find in a prayer book like this. Oh such a step backward to return to their unenlightened ways! I’m not so convinced. It sounds too much like the “dark ages” myth all over again. Recently, I have been encouraged by using a prayer book for daily devotions rather than raw scripture reading, which is very hit and miss. Of course I still study the bible – for all kinds of things, but it’s been helpful to be shown another way to pray and meditate. The constraint is a comfort.
I’ve written well over a thousand blog posts here and I can probably count on two hands how many qualify as genuine “rants”. It’s just not a genre I’m interested in reading much of so I don’t write it either. I am compelled to say something this time though.
Like everyone else who reads anything on the internet, I saw all the brouhaha over Miley Cyrus’s raunchy performance at the MTV video awards last month. I remember thinking, “Who is this other guy, Rob Thicke? (It’s pronounced “thick”). I didn’t think I’d ever heard of him.” Well, it turns out I had heard his hit song “Blurred Lines” on pop radio a few times, I just had never made the connection. Then I saw this interview with some gal named Emily Ratajkowski who was apparently a model in Thicke’s music video, but had just hit it big in the acting world by being cast across from Ben Affleck in the upcoming film adaptation of the bestselling thriller novel Gone Girl. Alright, so out of curiosity I looked up the music video. OK, that was a mistake. I shut it off after less than half a minute.
The film purports to be put together by famed music video directing master Diane Martel. Well let me tell you exactly what Martel needed to produce this video:
A room with cream colored walls
A couple of lights
1 camera and tripod
1 bale of hay
1 goat
3 young women to take all their clothes off and walk around the room
A cheap CD player (off screen) to sing along with
That’s it. It’s a wrap! I guess if I wanted to be technical, I should say that someone had to do some post-production color-correcting to make Thicke’s eyes some unnatural blue color. That’s got to count for something.
So the song, which itself sounds so much like an old Marvin Gaye tune that the record company is being sued, features Thicke who is a good 15 years senior to the naked ladies on the screen, barely singing, lip syncing lines like “You the hottest bitch in this place, hey hey hey, you know you want it.” Man, what a star! What an artiste! What genius! Just prance some fresh meat around on the screen for a few minutes and call it good.
In an interview with GQ after the video was banned from YouTube, Thicke commented,
“We tried to do everything that was taboo. Bestiality, drug injections, and everything that is completely derogatory towards women. Because all three of us are happily married with children, we were like, ‘We’re the perfect guys to make fun of this.’ People say, ‘Hey, do you think this is degrading to women?’ I’m like, ‘Of course it is. What a pleasure it is to degrade a woman. I’ve never gotten to do that before. I’ve always respected women.’ “
Oh, haha. Now we get it. It’s all just tongue-in-cheek! That’s pretty clever there Rob! You’re alright dude.
I think I’ll just quote Mark Knoffler, also tongue-in-cheek – sort of:
“Now look at them yo-yos. That ain’t working. They play the guitar on the MTV. That ain’t workin’. That’s the way you do it. Money for nothing and your chicks for free.” (Dire Straits, Money for Nothing)
That was penned back in the 1980s, when the musicians actually still played guitars (albeit barely) and the ‘free’ chicks at least still wore clothing in public. Ratajkowski said in her interview that she’s glad she’s made it big in Hollywood now so she won’t have to do nudie shoots anymore. Well good for her. I’m glad she had that as a stepping stone to fame and riches. What about all the other girls in her situation? They’re rock bottom with nowhere to go, surrounded by a bunch of cocky guys that are pretty happy to keep ’em right where they’re at.
