For an Edifying Retreat
On the first of the year it’s tempting to give one’s imagination free reign to portray how things and the world will look by year’s end – with considerable trepidation, as the course of events, a...
View ArticleA Spirited “Marseillaise”
Today, observing the uprisings in France in an enthusiasm of sympathy from afar, a memorable rendition of the country’s anthem should be presented here, by way of tendering support for a populace now...
View ArticleThe Light This Time
Στον Φώτη Spritely though our stride may be, here and now, not least with the current vernal quickening, nonetheless, encompassed as we are by so many disasters, where is the corner around which the...
View ArticleValéry’s “Problème des Musées” After a Century
On its centennial perhaps even more apt in its statement of discomfort, and un-antiquated by the passage of a hundred years, its ephemeral first appearance in a newspaper notwithstanding, is this...
View ArticleNihil sub sole novum est – Im Westen ein neues Nichts?
Whether the terrible farces on today’s world-stages did enact once more some pieces from the tragedies of years gone by, shoddily? – a question these times will leave behind themselves, in a better...
View ArticlePisarev and “Pure Art” Some Notes
Cultivated humanity in its last representatives embalmed for scientific edification in some not-so-remote future, is one harbinger of an image found in a work by the nineteenth-century essayist and...
View ArticleA Notation by Leopardi
Two hundred years ago to the day, Giacomo Leopardi confided to his notebook an elegant sentence of such a precise sound and sense that the changes worked in them through the interval are nearly none....
View ArticleTwo Painters’ Compositions, Musically Considered
Burdensome heaviness of the heat, midway through the summer months, prompts at least a desire to evade it somehow, though if this wish is translated, transposed into a continuous stream of thinking,...
View ArticleRhymes of Squalor
A bit before an end came for Commodus, word of some portents was circulating in Rome, reported his main historian, Cassius Dio.* Superstitious forebodings, amplified incessantly, themselves surfeiting...
View ArticleJean Barraqué Fifty Years After
Today, a round number of years ago, in Paris, the composer Jean Barraqué (1928-73) died; the anniversary is reason enough to devote a brief presentation to him and one of his works in particular, by...
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