A Musical Interlude While We Wait

In old movies about World War II there are the required scenes from home: families gathered around a large radio, listening for reports “about the boys”. In between urgent announcements of “news from the front” filled with crackly static, radio stations would play musical interludes to distract their audience from the distant low grumblings of the dogs of war.

So here we sit again, waiting to see if President Obama blinks, which is what the Baron thinks he’ll do (I read somewhere this morning that NINE percent of Americans approve of what he is threatening to do to Syria). I hope the B is right since the consequences for surrounding countries will be dire indeed. So much for that ill-advised Nobel Peace Prize. Do you think Norway permanently devalued that award? They certainly made the man even more insufferable.

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And as our musical interlude, we offer this young man’s talent. May it, too, distract you for awhile, or tame those dogs:

Young Mr. Lapps has titled this piece “For the West”. Our translator JLH and I have been debating whether or not the composer meant “Western Civilization” or if he intended this merely for California. Since I don’t know the answer, I’ll choose our civilization. It needs all the help it can get.

In my Sunday sermon while the Baron was away, I talked about the necessity of developing an aesthetic sense. I didn’t say, but wish I had, that the Chinese, recognizing the utilitarian value of Western music — i.e., many studies have proved that learning to read and to play Western classical and baroque music develops young minds — making them more proficient at mathematics and science. Perhaps a specialist in epigenetics could tell us why?

To this day I am grateful that the future Baron was so diligent in learning to read and play music, specifically the piano, twelve string guitar, and to some extent, that whole body instrument, the organ.

Was he a prodigy?

No, thank heavens. What he possessed was diligence. The adults in his life, the ones he trusted (not just his parents) told him what he was doing was important and urged him toward the development of whatever gifts he had. Their message was an obviously moral and utilitarian one, just like the Chinese.

His talents turned out to include an excellent “ear” — in other words he could tell you what note you were hitting without looking at your hands on the piano (a little entrance exam from his jazz piano teacher); and a prodigious memory which made learning musical notation much easier. He always showed a fondness for a wide variety of music but he never had to pretend to like something in order to be “correct”. After all those years of practice, he now has the depth of knowledge necessary to say why a piece of music is good, not to mention the experience and vocabulary to make a reasonable defense of those judgments.

The future Baron is a grown-up now. He sings in a church choir — Bach and Purcell, etc., plus (I’m sure) more of those 19th-century American hymns than he would choose. Oh, and sometimes he performs with his guitar at open mic nights in the town where he lives. These are good things to do — sharing with those around you what you think is good and beautiful.

The fB may not know this, but when he’s ninety the music and the instruments of his youth will give him a solace he wouldn’t have had access to had he not trained, even over-trained via memorization, those neural pathways when he was very young.

At the moment he has no idea he’ll need them, and that’s the way it should be.

[And, no, he doesn’t read our blog. This is “just what DadnMom do”. He’s not entirely apolitical — i.e., he’s kind of libertarian with a dollop of contrary authoritarian spice to make him like the rest of us: not entirely congruent. Like many others he’s given up on the system as being about anything that concerns him.]

8 thoughts on “A Musical Interlude While We Wait

  1. Thanks for that Ben Lapps video.

    “So much for that ill-advised Nobel Peace Prize. Do you think Norway permanently devalued that award?”

    I don’t think the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama was ill-advised. It did not devalue the award at all. It confirmed it for what it was, the most perfect expression of how naive pacifists view the world.

  2. “His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”

    Beauty, particularly in music but also in all art, might be generally expressed as the aesthetic sense being satisfied that each element is fitting into a larger pattern. Much of the joy of classical music particularly is in finding ways that the basic theme can be transformed and interleaved with other versions to produce a more complex development while still leaving the essential theme discernible throughout and in each part. In visual art or sculpture a single curve might express an underlying function too complex for the formal equation to be easily understood but still immediately apparent as a unity of the entire line. Our aesthetic sense is pleased by the fidelity of a work of art to the underlying pattern, or theme. This is as true of narrative literature as of music, sculpture, or any other art.

    One of the principles that is particularly evident in landscapes is the way in which the small denotes the great, what can be called the fractal pattern of nature. This is particularly evident in our ability to immediately spot places where the pattern breaks down, perhaps because a competing and incompatible pattern is intruding. Sometimes a perceptual shift is all that is needed to make both patterns part of a larger whole, the transition between them itself describing in details the relationship between two apparently dissonant but fundamentally harmonious elements of the larger pattern. And sometimes such a perceptual shift is not available to us, whether or not it exists.

    Fidelity, the quality of remaining faithful to established pattern or rule. The reflection of the greater pattern in the smaller elements. Our aesthetic sense could be more than simply a source of pleasure to the senses, it might be an essential element of our ability to develop the quality of predictive adaptation which I consider the basis of real intelligence. Foreknowledge of events must be based on knowledge of a preexisting situation and understanding of the potential for change, what can follow and what cannot follow.

    Indulging our aesthetic senses expands that faculty of seeing what comes next, spotting an interruption in the development of one pattern as a different pattern takes hold, reconciling a transition by seeing both patterns as part of a larger pattern, sensitivity to those details which reveal the overall shape of the complete picture. Of course, if we become too enamored of the pleasure of a particular, limited aspect of aesthetics to willingly apply the faculties it develops in other areas, we lose the potential for intelligence. But we also abandon that potential by not allowing ourselves to appreciate beauty even when it is not immediately useful to us.

  3. I do hope that the Baron is correct. Militarily intervention in Syria, aside from consigning our remaining coreligionists to the depredations of the Peace and Tolerance guys, will bring us one step closer to being the most politically isolated country in the world – and with lots of enemies, not isolated in the way we would want.

  4. Mr. Lapps is extraordinary good at flageolets. It takes years of training to be able to perform his number (The thing he has placed at the 3rd ribbon on the guitar’s neck is called a “Capodastro”. Since as long as I can remember, I’ve called it my “Fidelcastro”.).

    As you know, I regard GoV and VladTepes as an excellent team. At the moment, I have the feeling of “The Calm before the Storm”. I hope I am wrong.

    But in the meantime, you can always let your mind run freely (In my case, the centrifuge is unstoppable.).

    Apart from working with langauge, I am an engineer (See my website thecart.se.). I want things to be measured.

    “Sensitivity” is a variable I’d like to measure in a Richter Scale. Let’s call it XS.

    Let me take a nasty example: A muslim makes a cartoon about Jesus [having carnal knowledge of] Judas and the other apostles from behind. What is the XS of the Christians, measured in reactions of Violence?

  5. – This situation reminds me of Mozart being played on the airwaves in The Camp of the Saints. If it ever came to that point, suspect that I would find lots of familiar names in The Village.

  6. Someone ought to ensure that the Christians in Syria are the most heavily armed group in the house.
    If they are going to be fighting for their existence, as now seems to be the case it seems like Russia or someone like that ought to be gun running the most up to date heavy weaponry to the Christians there.

    • I wholeheartedly agree. I would support that option. I think, though, that the Alawites may be a necessary ally in Syria.

      Not that I care about the reaction, but the media would do their all to make that look as bad as possible. When Gemayel’s Christian collation had the Presidency in Lebanon, the press never passed up a chance to note the word “Christian” as if it was utterly foreign to that region. In later years they stated that Lebanese and Egyptian Christians only “claim” to be descended from the early Christians and then implied that they must have picked up their faith from some other people. It was not not hard to see what they were doing – they were trying to get us to think that Christianity had been g0ne for a while that that Crusaders brought it back.

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