(cont.)
Of course, these things bring me to one of the most appealing aspects of The Silmarillion, which is one of the appealing things about any old myth: What awesome and totally badass thing is going to happen next? It reminded me of reading Beowulf in high school, where there were men who were doing things like fighting sea monsters and ripping off arms of monsters and beating them with it and diving to the bottom of the sea and fighting creatures and using magical swords and heroic sacrifices against dragons! What's not to love? Nothing, that's what, and The Silmarillion delivers this in spades.
Non-Fiction:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann
"Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!"
I hadn't actually expected to be
too surprised by what I learned in this. I haven't read many (read: any) books about pre-Columbian American culture, but I had picked up on a lot of things - I had read that there were cities that were larger than the biggest European countries at the time in Mesoamerica and South America; I had read that contra American stereotypes, they did have understandings of property; I had read that modern population estimates of pre-Columbian Americas placed the number of people in the hemisphere at upwards of fifty million. I knew that there were things I didn't, obviously, but I wasn't expecting that they'd be revelatory. I was quite wrong.
It wasn't the information about the scope of Mesoamerican and South American civilization, finding out how much we knew about pre-Columbian history, learning that some researchers believe that much of the Amazon's 'pristine' state was actually the result of human development, or that the prairies of tens of millions of bison in the American West were actually the result of the vacuum created by the collapse of native societies in the wake of disease rather than representing some sort of 'pristine' state of nature. It wasn't the way it painted the Indians not as people simply suffering along with the vagaries of disease and fate, but actively attempting to shape their destiny, or one that presented them as not being inferior to Europeans so much as 'different' when it came to their cultural and technological achievements. These things were all fascinating, and many of these things were things I either didn't know, or didn't know very well.
But there was one section that discussed Mexica (Aztec) philosophy, Nahuatl (their language) rhetoric, and how they thought about issues of mortality, Truth, and finding meaning in one's existence. I don't really feel I can do justice to it, so I'll quote at length:
"But the tlamatinime shared the religon's sense of the evanescence of existence. Truly do we live on Earth? asked a poem or song attributed to Nezhualcoyotl (1402 -72), a founding figure in Mesoamerican thought and the tlatoani of Texcoco, one of the other two members of the Triple Alliance. His lyric, among the most famous in the Nahuatl canon, answers its own question:
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Be it jade, it shatters.
Be it gold, it breaks.
Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
In another verse assigned to Nezahualcoytol this theme emerges even more baldly:
Like a painting, we will be erased.
Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth.
Like plumed vestments of the precious bird,
That precious bird with the agile neck,
We will come to an end.
Contemplating mortality, thinkers in many cultures have drawn solace from the prospect of life after death. This consolation was denied to the Mexica, who were agonizingly uncertain about what happened to the soul. Do flowers go to the region of the dead? Nezahualcoyotl asked. In the Beyond, are we still dead or do we live? Many if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
In Nahuatl rhetoric, things were frequently represented by the unusual device of naming two of their elements a kind of doubled Homeric epithet. Instead of directly mentioning his body, a poet might refer to my hand, my foot (noma nocxi), which the savvy listener would know was a synecdoche, in the same way readers of English know that writers who mention the crown are actually talking about the whole monarch, and not just the headgear. Similarly, the poets speech would be his word, his breath (itlatol ihiyo). A double-barreled term for truth is neltilitztli tzintliztli, which means something like fundamental truth, true basic principle. In Nahuatl, the words almost shimmer with connotation: what was true was well grounded, stable and immutable, enduring above all.
Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as dreams, the tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature beyond human experience. On the ever-changing earth, wrote Leon-Portilla, the Mexican history, nothing is true in the Nahuatl sense of the word. Time and again, the tlamatinime wrestled with this dilemma. How can beings of the moment grasp the perduring? It would be like asking a stone to understand mortality.
According to Leon-Portilla, one exit from this philopshical blind alley was seen in the fifteenth-century poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, who described it metaphorically, as poets will, by invoking the coyolli bird, known for its bell-like song:
He goes his way singing, offering flowers.
And this words rain down
Like jade and quetzal plumes.
Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?
Is that the only truth on earth?
Ayocuans remarks cannot be fully understood out of the Nahuatl context, Leon-Portilla argued. Flowers and song was a standard double epithet for poetry, the highest art; jade and quetzal was a synecdoche for great value, in the way Europeans might refer to gold and silver. The song of the bird, spontaneously produced, stands for aesthetic inspiration. Ayocuan was suggesting, Leon-Portilla said, that there
is a time when humankind can touch the enduring truths that underlie our fleeting lives. That time is at the moment of artistic creation. From whence come the flowers [the artistic creations] that enrapture man? asks the poet. The songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs? And he answers: Only from his [that is, Ometeols] home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven. Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.
When I read other things, I was impressed by their accomplishments, particularly in the realm of developing their environments in sustainable ways, with their achievements in agriculture being particularly impressive. But it's weird. I've never really felt this sense of familiarity when learning about Indians. I think it's the presentation of their cultures as being somehow static and unchanging, of being stuck in this sort of idyllic stasis. I like this book because it forced me to confront some narrow-mindedness I wasn't aware I had been holding. Learning that this people, from more than half a millennium and a culture almost entirely removed from my own was talking about finding ultimate meaning in ways that weren't just recognizable but resonated with me created this profound sense of emotional connection and loss, that never really felt as "real" before. I was discussing this with Kabbles, and he pointed out that it was because I did subscribe to the degree of pre-Columbian America as a land of primitives who were at a far earlier stage of civilization. And this is basically what learning these things, and this passage in particular, forced me to confront.
Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy, by James Stark
I started becoming interested in singing about four years ago while watching my first season of American Idol. I also was watching videos on Youtube that presented the vocal ranges of singers, and I noticed something curious about Mariah and Christina they both appeared to have had declines that I hadnt really noticed before. I saw how they were largely avoiding the higher notes they once had, and when they sang them they sounded odd. I wasnt really sure exactly what was causing it, though, and comments were so filled with drivel that I couldnt divine anything from that.
I eventually found my way to other forums that were discussing singers in ways that seemed informed, but I couldnt hear a lot of what they were talking about. I didnt know what they meant by head voice versus falsetto or what they were trying to communicate with phrases like pulling chest, and while I knew what flat and sharp
were, I didnt know when I was hearing them. And I
definitely couldnt tell you who was straining or who was producing something correctly.
Years later, I stumbled across a series of videos on Youtube that started explaining some of these concepts that I had only vaguely understood up until this point. It was like finding the Rosettas stone, the key to understanding these things. I was still curious, though: How did I actually know whether
these people knew what they were talking about? I mean, it was always possible that they were talking out of their ass and had simply come up with clips to match what they were saying. So, I asked one of them if they had any books that they could recommend, since I wanted to learn more. He (possibly?) recommended this book, and it turned out to be absolutely fantastic.
The term bel canto is contentious, simply because almost every vocal coach presents their regime as harkening back to the true principles of bel canto singing, which have now, of course, been utterly lost. It also refers to a particular style of operatic composition, exemplified by the bel canto composers such as Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini in the first half of the nineteenth century, which was followed by so-called verismo styles. Stark attempts to sidestep these debates by focusing less on which period or particular style of singing is called bel canto and instead focusing on the vocal qualities that were expected of bel canto style, and then offering his definition in the light of this. I thought it was an interesting synthesis, and made it possible to describe verismo works as being sung in a bel canto style of production, even if the composition did not make use of bel canto styles of expression.
The major subjects covered are the coup de la glotte, the quality of chiaroscuro and how the vocal tract is manipulated to achieve this, the problem of vocal registers, concepts of "breathing" as it relates to singing, particularly appoggio, the presence of what Stark calls "tremulousness" and what most people refer to as vibrato, and concepts of idiom and expression, where the vocal effects of bel canto singing are tied to expression rather than being virtuosic but ultimately empty assertions of mere technical skill. Within each of these chapters, Stark also covers a variety of related sub-topics and a variety of traditional theories and explanations, and concludes each chapter by comparing traditional explanations and concepts of singing with what modern science has taught us about the human voice, and then presents an overview of the contents in order to make a summation of the information presented. These sections are particularly helpful, as there is often a great deal of disagreement in the earlier sections.
The presentation is very serious and professional, and there are copious notes and references to a wide variety of historical, pedagogical, and scientific sources. It is not a book written with
instruction in mind, but rather written with the goal of presenting a synthesis of information from the worlds of voice teacher, laryngologist, and acoustician into one book. If you have an interest in the human voice, and would like to read something that helps you to interpret what youre hearing and give you new appreciation for singing done well, its a must-read.
The Assoluta Voice in Opera, 1797-1847, by Geoffrey S. Riggs
"Most female voices tend to fall naturally into four principal categories: coloratura/lyric soprano, dramatic soprano, mezzo-soprano, and contralto. The light soprano usually sings high, florid music; the dramatic soprano sings high, stentorian phrases; the mezzo sings mostly in the middle register; the contralto, mostly in the lower register. Occassionally, a phenomenal singer comes along who can encompass every aspect of vocal writing for the female voice."
The Assoluta Voice is an overview of nine soprano roles Cherubinis Médée, Rossinis Armida, von Webers Reiza (in Oberon), Donizettis Anna Bolena, Gemma di Vergy, and Elisabetta (in Roberto Devereux, Bellinis Norma, and Verdis Abigaille (in Nabucco) and Lady Macbeth. Riggs premise is that, taken together, these roles share qualities a bifurcated tessitura, demands for complex and heroic fioritura, a range extending both below and above traditional soprano range, and an energetic orchestra that necessitates a full, heroic vocal line - that make them a defined fach.
In opera, a "fach" is a term for a) types of voices, b) roles which are written for those voices. In opera, fach is important for two reasons. The first reason is that in opera the voice is the primary means of characterization. This means that a flighty young girl would be sung by a light-lyric soprano, whose voice suggests youth. A bass is almost always as some sort of older patriarchal figure; a lyric tenor is almost always the protagonist. And it is because the voice is most important that you'll have fifty year old men playing teenage romantics: If their voice fits the character, that is important. The second reason is that knowing the fach of a role is a shorthand for knowing the technical demands of a role. If you are a lyric soprano, for instance, you will not likely seek out spinto soprano roles because you would either not be able to fulfill the demands, or you will damage your voice trying. And in most roles, it is not an issue to find women whose voices comport with the demands of the role, whatever they might be.
But with the assoluta roles, what has often happened with these roles is a series of compromises, where singers are able to encompass some, but not all, of the varied demands within them. A dramatic soprano might have the vocal size necessary for coping with the orchestral size, but lacks the flexibility needed for bel canto ornamentation. A light soprano would lack the size, or be unable to pair her flexibility with the heroic vocal line needed for the role. In order to deal with these things, these roles would often be pared down, as fioritura was written out of a performance or greatly slowed down, orchestra sizes were reduced, and vocal characterization suffered.
Riggs argues that it is in the combination of the superhuman demands of the vocal line of the assoluta role, combined with the heroism of her character, which makes the assoluta roles worth casting. These improbable vocal feats are a metaphor for the character's heroism. In the heyday of the castrato, roles were written for their voices which required a larger palette of expression from which to draw on. A female sorceress might have a voice with similar amplitude, but she would not possess the same vocal range, and her superhuman demonstrations of vocal power would not be balanced by more recognizably human feelings. The castrato was able to present a picture of vocal completeness, of both characterization, gender (by playing with gender in singing male roles in ways associated with women (e.g. light, crystalline tones and fioritura) or singing damsel-in-distress female roles in ways that suggested strength and power, with full vocal lines), range (by singing roles where all aspects of female vocal writing were represented, eliding traditional distinctions between female vocal types.
In this arrangement, the power of a castrato's performance came less from the writing or the libretto of a particular role, but rather upon the castrato performer's ability to present such a large range of musical and emotional states, in a single role that blurred traditional lines of female vocal categories. This led to the development of a large range working as a metaphor for the complete human experience. While the castrato fell away, composers began writing this way for women, as this metaphor became women's domain:
"The assoluta's heyday was the first four or five decades of the nineteenth century, the period which coincides with the flourishing of Romanticism all over Europe, and she represents the artistic emancipation from the neo-Aristotlelian properties of character: consistency, suitability to station, trueness to type, appropriateness of behavior, and so forht, along with the Romantic interest in human heroism, the defiance of the gods, the extremes of human character, or situation and behavior, and a total unpredictability. Whereas in the opera seria, we have already drawn attention to the fact that the sorceress might show a kind of wildness, it was not until the advent of the music drama of character that the mature woman was finally portrayed in her infinite variety and heroism.
What more natural metaphor could there be for such a character than a voice of infinite variety with both heroic weight and flexibility? In opera, the expressive medium of character is the singing voice- it is the voice that is the persona of the music drama, not the face and figure as in prose theatre. The voice in the assoluta repertoire is capable of daredevil feats with a chameleon's ability to change color, and she is therefore given the most difficult music to sing, high, low, trills, roulades, sustained notes. She must have the flexibility of a trapeze artist and the strength of the weight lifter. And this bewildering capability, these feats of vocal derring-do, are a metaphor for her heroism, and the breadth and variety of her character is measured by her astonishing range."
In each chapter, he describes a particular assoluta role and its vocal demands in great detail, and then launches into a discussion of the examples of that role on disc. He also discusses the development of these roles, as well as what he refers to as assoluta manquée roles, which share some qualities seen in the true assoluta group, but do not truly require such a voice to do it justice, though it may benefit from it.
My interest in this was primarily as a fan of Maria Callas, in wanting to better understand her accomplishments as a vocalist. Maria is the only opera singer in the twentieth century who could be fittingly described as an assoluta, and while Riggs is unafraid to criticize her when necessary, his praise for her goes far beyond what any other singer seems to receive:
The desperation of the stranded castaway, the overwhelming expanse of water, the volatile switches in Reizas mood all are vividly intuited in Callas reading.
The 57 performance enshrines easily the most captivating Anna on disc. No singer rips through this monster of a role with such panache. It may sound like a cliché, but Callas absorbed this music in her very bones.
As the Scala broadcast proceeds, Callass volatility dazzles more and more. Even the recitatives are mesmerizing. Her unerring instinct with this role calibrates exquisitely Normas alternating feelings of pride, helplessness, outrage, vulnerability, resignation all the myriad moods that make this role so demanding, both dramatically and vocally.
Her breathtaking passagework as she flings the torn pieces at Nabuccos feet culminates in a veritable snarl on mezogner. In the cavatina of their duet together, Oh, di qual ontna, there is another nasty snarl as Callas anticipates the populace bowing down before a mere slave in Alfine cadranno i popoli/Di vile schiava al pie. In the cabaletta, Deh perdona, both Gino Mechi and Maria Callas are electrifying. This is the high point of the entire performance. Callas is triumph incarnate, and Bechis searing desperation matches her intensity. Here, Gui comes into his own as well. The scene climaxes on a secure high E flat from Callas and Bechis high A flat.
DAmor al dolce impero achieves perfect line down to her lowest note (low G) in roulade after roulade. Moreover, she manages to make the whole genuinely enticing. Pandemonium breaks out in the audience after the final triumphant top note.
And so forth. In fact, the only singers who receive more consistently fulsome praise are singers whom neither the author nor anyone else alive today has actually heard their praise stems not from first-hand experience, but from the premise that because these roles were written for those women, it would stand to reason that they were indeed capable of doing those roles justice as written. Perhaps, but I find it difficult to imagine that they were truly capable of bettering Callas.
Frankly theres little point in reading this book if you have no interest in opera in general, in learning about why Callas was so unique as a vocal phenomenon, or in gaining a new understanding for the difficulty of a set of vocal roles. But if you
are interested in those things, you wont find a better book on the subject.
The Complete Dinosaur, edited by
The Complete Dinosaur is a godsend for dinosaur lovers. I just loved reading about dinosaurs when I was a kid, but as I grew older it became more difficult to find the same sorts of books written for adults. This book is exactly what I had been looking for, with articles written by experts in various fields for a lay audience (albeit a literate, educated lay audience) that cover an enormous range of topics. I particularly appreciated that the editors presented a warts-and-all approach, choosing to allow articles to contradict one another when experts disagreed. The book presents paleontology as something alive and interesting, rather than as a simply a set of settled issues.
It covers almost any interest in dinosaurs you might have: the early history of discoveries, the invention of 'dinosaurs' as a concept, dinosaurs in Asia and southern continents, osteology, reconstructing musculature and paleoneurology, restoration, early evolution, birds, stegosaurs, ornithopods, ankylsaurs, sauropoda, theropods, reproduction, growth patterns, debates over thermoregulation and aerobic abilities, the use of footprints to study locomotion, and dozens of other subjects are all given their own - sometimes even several - chapters. And at the end of each chapter, there are at least three or four pages of sources to dozens of scholarly books and articles for further reading.
