Songs for Today: Dies Irae

The Dies Irae is a sequence of the traditional Catholic Requiem mass. I expect to return to mass music, and especially Requiem masses, because of the richness of the Western canon in this area. Most great composers wrote several masses, but few have written more than one serious Requiem. Like the symphony after Beethoven, but to an even greater extent, the Requiem has become a powerful, singular statement by a composer. It's a massive undertaking, typically utilizing combined choirs, orchestra, and soloists. One does not simply write a Requiem mass. The composer of a Requiem looks death in the eye. Worse, he stands astride centuries of the greatest music ever written. His audience will know those that have gone before. Thus, it takes some substantial figurative balls to put notes on the staff under the title Requiem. This issue will be addressed further in The Burden of Culture, Part II (forthcoming).

The basic Requiem text is more or less agreed, although its use in music has fluctuated somewhat according to the direction of the church and the conscience of the composer. Composers divide up the Requiem mass differently. Sometimes modern texts supplement or replace all or part of the traditional text; a trend started by two of the all-time greats, Johannes Brahms (Ein Deutsches Requiem) and Robert Schumann (Requiem fuer Mignon, oddly, a requiem in honor of the death of a fictional character). Whatever the final text, the composer of a Requiem is expected to base their work on a musical exegesis of the spiritual themes of the original, and to integrate the ancient musical themes which are closely associated with them. These necessary similarities and the extraordinarily high quality of composition make Requiem masses an excellent point of comparison between composers, especially with regard to comparable segments of text.

The Dies Irae is one of the most enduring movements of Requiem masses. It's often included even where other texts have also interceded.  This is presumably because the Dies Irae is FREAKING AWESOME. (If you disagree on this point, either 1. you've never heard it; or 2. we probably can't be friends.) It's essentially a condensed book of Revelations, focusing on the final Judgment. Musically, it is closely associated with a 13th century Gregorian plainchant hymn. Later composers, particularly after Mozart, have cranked up the terror on "day of wrath," hitting the opening of the movement with everything they've got. Following the opening tumult, the composer backs off into a more contemplative mood to consider the implications of Judgment. Resurgent fear often intervenes, either in the course of the initial Dies Irae, or in a subsequent Libera Me movement.

Because of its ancient pedigree and ability to be easily recognized, the Dies Irae theme has been borrowed in other contexts by a number of composers to evoke the fear of death and judgment, and the broader theme of death in general. As a musical tool of communication, there is probably no easier way to place these themes in the mind of the listener. When you hear the Dies Irae, shit gets real. In just two bars, the listener is reminded of the coming Judgment. This is sometimes controversial when the Dies Irae is placed in irreverent contexts, as we shall see.

Below I've embedded some notable implementations of the Dies Irae. If you know of others in popular culture, please post them to the comments.

Composer unkown, Dies Irae, plainchant hymn, 13th Century

The original Gregorian chant is the musical root from which the others have grown.

Wolfgang Mozart, Dies Irae, from Requiem, 1791.

Mozart's Requiem was unfinished at his death. According to the Pedia,  the vocal and basso continuo lines of the Dies Irae were complete, but the remainder of the orchestration was supplied by later composers based on his implications. Mozart gave us enough raw material to work out an utterly frightening day of wrath.

Giuseppe Verdi, Dies Irae, from Messa da Requiem, 1874.

Verdi was primarily a composer of operas, and it shows. The work is well-balanced vocally, but, gloriously, he asks for more out of the strings than any reasonable person would. The result is something like an explosion followed by a desperate search through the rubble.

Benjamin Britten, Dies Irae, from War Requiem, 1962

This is a crappy recording, but you can get the gist of it. Britten's War Requiem is a reflection on the horrors of World War II, written for the recommissioning of a 14th century cathedral destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Britten went to America before World War II, but returned to Britain in 1942. He was a conscientious objector, and he had a few things to tell us about the war. Indeed, the Dies Irae comes up several times in his Requiem, in different forms. The War Requiem uses both traditional texts and modern poetry.

Some other top-notch examples of a classical Dies Irae are found in Dvorak's and Bruckner's Requiems.

Hector Berlioz, Symphony Fantastique, Movement V: Songe d'une nuit de sabbat (1830).

One of the most famous uses of the Dies Irae is not in a Requiem at all. Hector Berlioz scandalized early 19th-century Parisian audiences by putting the Dies Irae in a programmatic romantic work:  a movement of a fantastic (read: like fantasy) symphony, the song of a witch's sabbath following the execution of his beloved in the 4th movement. Truly this is a day of wrath, wrought in pestilence and perversion. It is a mockery of the Requiem; an audacious and haughty rejection of the dignity of its truth. Here is a new fear: what can man do against such reckless hate? But it is also a work of musical genius.  The Dies Irae theme is introduced by funeral bells after 2'30" (but do listen all the way through!).  It is raised again after 6', where it ultimately succumbs and merges into the triumphant revelry. I don't like Ozawa's interpretation of this piece in general (far too fast, for starters), but the funeral bells are spot on, and the vinyl just sounds right.


Honorable Mentions:

• Berlioz (Dies Irae, Grande Messe des Morts)
• Dvorak
• Bruckner
• Penderecki
• Liszt ("Tottentanz")
• Rachmaninoff (Variations on a Theme by Paganini, variation X)

See also:
>Rice & Webber (Requiem for Evita, from the musical Evita)
>Larson (La Vie Boheme, from the musical Rent)

Freedom With Content, Part I

A boat at dock is safe, but that's not what boats are built for.

Boats are built for sailing.

This is a dinghy-scale version of a phrase that I have seen and heard in several places. It has been growing on me as a partial reply to my earlier post, Freedom Without Content. After taking the bar, I realized that my perspective at the time of writing the prior post was greatly affected by the fact that my substantive freedom was yet inchoate. It was as if I got into my boat still strapped to its lift, looked around, and declared it stupid.  My boat was safe, but that's not what boats are for. My boat is for sailing, and I knew then that I wasn't sailing.

The joy of freedom, like the joy of sailing, is about process and movement. It's about choosing objectives and finding ways to get there. It's about careful preparation, followed by constant adjustment for conditions. It's about looking back to learn from the boat's reactions, and looking ahead to see what's coming next. My boat is a good boat; it's fundamentally sound. Within its structure I can set the base of the mast at different points; I can pin the shroud at different tensions; I can choose my sails. So I have. Once I'm moving, I can set the daggerboard depth, tension or relax the main sail in four different ways and the jib in two, set the angles of my sails, and steer myself wherever I desire. Getting to the other side of the lake is not the fun part. That's almost an annoyance. The joy of sailing comes from loving your crew, and from applying your understanding to turn a clever system of tension and compression into motion, to maneuver around obstacles, and to devour your french toast on the run. True story. That seems pretty much identical to the joy of freedom. What further content is needed? (but see Part II, forthcoming) There is always more to be done; do it with your might.

On the lift, there is only hidden, unknown potential. A practical nullity. On the water, in even the slightest breeze, the pregnant sails give birth to effortless motion. Fly your sails and be free.

Why I Don't Use My Porch

The great outdoors, more or less.

I have a nice little porch, with a view to the nice little park across the street. I don't use my porch, despite having a perfectly good lawn chair and nowhere else to put it.  Here are my excuses:

1. It's too hot outside;
2. The view from my desk is just as good.  See above;
3. The Bar; and most importantly:
4. Shelob lives in the space between glass and screen.

Where's Sting when I need it?

Songs for Today: The Moon

I plan to run a series of posts where I look at several pieces of music connected by a theme or common musical elements.  I'll start off on a lighter note this evening with a set of songs about the moon. The classical canon is rich enough here, but I have a few other directions in mind as well. (For the classical cannon, see Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture.) Later posts will bear some degree of analysis; for this topic, I believe these settings can speak for themselves. They reveal night as a time for reflection, rebellion, or exultation, according to each writer's own unique... idiom. Guten Abend, alle.

Felix Mendelssohn, Der Mond: Mein Herz ist wie die dunkle Nacht, from the song cycle Op. 86, Six Songs for Voice and Piano, early 19C.
(first 2 minutes of this video)

Schoenberg, The Moonfleck, from the song cycle Pierrot Lunaire, 1912

Cat Stevens, Moonshadow, from the album Teaser and the Firecat, 1971

Jonathan Larson, Over the Moon, from the musical Rent, 1994

Spongmonkies, We Like the Moon, 2006

Honorable mentions:

• Orff, Der Mond
• Dvorak,  Rusalka, Song to the Moon (I recommend Renee Fleming's fully-staged performances)
• Songs for a New World, Stars and the Moon
• Les Miserables, Harvest Moon
• See also Les Miserables, Stars
• A lovely song in French and English called La Luna that I can't seem to find anywhere but my iTunes.
• Ozzy, Bark at the Moon
• Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata
• Sinatra, Old Devil Moon
• Rush, Between Sun & Moon

The Burden of Culture, Part I

The title of this post is an archetypal demonstration of its premise. We'll come back to that.

WiFi router sold separately.

Many points have been suggested as the dawn of modernity, or the modern age.  Several possibilities that come to mind are the rise of agriculture (cereal grains for the win), the birth of Christ (common era indeed), the Renaissance (the West gets back on the horse), the printing press (Gutenberg's series of woodblocks), the Declaration of Independence (liberte, egalite, fraternite), the industrial revolution (moar kittehs!), WWII (everything was founded in 1947), the Interweb (Al Gore's series of tubes), and... gun! These are all historical game-changers with effects that have permeated society and continue to influence its course. I'm sure you could think of many more roots of our culture, any time between 10,000 years ago and your coffee this morning.

Daily cosmogony?

I'm going to posit "the culturally relevant period" as my working definition of modernity. That is, the period of time preceding this moment from which the bulk of known or typical actions, constructions, or artifacts continue to have significance for people today. It's the context-providing period. Unless you propose an unusually short modernity, comprehending the great corpus of its attendant relevant culture is an incredibly imposing task. Even with a shorter period, the rate of cultural production today is so high that breadth of information could easily overwhelm an intent observer.

The magnitude of accumulated culture is problematic because context is necessary for words and actions to have meaning. A precision of meaning may only be gained when both the communicator and the observer have a coextensive knowledge of the appropriate or intended context. Laminated layers of meaning can reinforce each other in conveying the communicator's message. A threefold cord is not quickly broken, but a failure of shared context can fray it. Context-dependence touches and concerns every cultural unit:  every person, every word, every deed.  The problem is that the summation of plausible contexts is really, really big.

The burden of culture for an observer is to understand the cultural basis for the acts of the communicator. This is no simple task, unless the communicator takes pains to be perfect in his clarity, as in a good textbook or other academic or legal writing. Where the communicator fails to disclose her sources, or hides the ball in any other way, the observer is challenged to make whatever mental connections are necessary to make it make sense. If you don't get the joke, or if you laugh at an inappropriate moment, you've made the wrong connection. More often, we simply fail to see the precedents from which undercurrents of modified meaning should flow. The observer's burden to know cultural precedents is made weighty not only by the details required, but also by the sheer volume of those precedents which may be relevant in the multitude of situations in which he will have to interpret information from another. The possible incorporation of elements from other languages and cultures makes it even more difficult. Only a Jeopardy champion has a chance.

The burden of culture for a communicator or actor is to act in a way that is comprehensible to the intended observer. This means going explicit, working in from broad topics to narrow, and providing references to precedent. It requires knowing the observer and what basis for understanding is shared between them. Sometimes it means going back and trying again. We learn to do all this by instinct, but practice can help you reach toward near-universal intelligibility when desired.

The burden of culture for a professional or conscious producer of culture is even higher. A casual communicator can conceivably carry on with only the quantum of cultural connection strictly necessary for communication. Producers must place their performance in the panoply of culture with piercing particularity.  They depend on successfully evoking (and also evading or repudiating) exactly the right combination of cultural strands to achieve the desired effect. They have to manipulate context and cultural citation to make themselves understood at some level (e.g., be understood as a "writer", "artist", or "musician"), but also differentiated. Most great cultural production stems from the highly skilled manipulation of themes and specific references gathered from the outside world.

He beat Mozart at his own game.

To me, this is most clearly demonstrated in contemporary classical music. Composers know that their core audience is familiar with the major works of the Western canon, at least from Monteverdi to Britten or so. If a modern composer writes like Mozart, everyone but his mother will just go listen to Mozart instead. If he interprets Mozart through a lens of minimalist serialism with baroque-style fugal episodes, and it somehow doesn't sound like silverware in the disposal, we might have something. But getting to that level requires an extraordinary mastery of the craft and awareness of those who have gone before.

The result of these burdens is a struggle between knowledge and performance; between understanding and action. It's somewhat akin to the production possibility frontier of macro-econ 101 (but with some significant wrinkles discussed in Part II):  we can have some combination of perception and participation, but the total is limited by our time and faculties. We cannot undertake more than that of which we are capable. So we optimize the tradeoff:  how much of the world do I want to understand, and how many systems will I let slip through my fingers?  Will I assembly my bouquet from the flowers of a hundred gardens, but leave my plot untilled? Will I paint in a flat modern acrylic, or punch holes through history with layers of oil?  How much available meaning have I missed today already? What have I failed to convey because I was too concerned with finessing the end of this sentence?


(If the previous paragraph sounds either drastically overstated, or just plain wrong, I agree. The most obvious counter-point is that much of learning is from experience. I have two responses:  1. I'm more focused on professional producers of culture, rather than those who are simply de facto cultural participants due to their presence in society; and 2. Come back for Part II.)

Now let's return to the title:  "The Burden of Culture."  Some readers may recognize that my use of the term "culture" in the title and this post generally is wholly incorrect, at least per one classic exposition, which I have not yet finished reading after all these years. What I have called culture here is closer to what Spengler would have called civilization: essentially the massive decaying exoskeleton of a dead culture, consumed with itself and slowly surrendering to the living cultures around it (and occasionally in it). It ceased to be a culture and became a civilization when expressions of culture ceased to be natural outpourings of its members' shared way of life and became cosmopolitan and self-critical. In the terminology of this post, culture dies when its burden on producers and observers becomes overwhelming.

In Part II, I intend to write about the consequences and practical choices arising from these observations. So, you know, come back and see what happens. FYI, it probably won't be until after the Bar.

Things I Love

What do you love?  That was the icebreaker question we settled on for the first night of a bible study I co-led in my junior year at Penn.  We made it a tradition, because it turns out to be a fast and a joyful way to get  to know someone at an intimate level. The answers often go to the heart of who a person is, what they hope for, and what they see as good in life. One young woman who frequently gave answers related to babies is now expecting her second. My answers often went to music or nature. When serially asked of you, without allowing precisely repeated answers or mere likes, the question forces you to search your heart and brings a fresh appreciation for every fine and beautiful thing. I might make a habit of putting up small posts here about things I love. Several of them may cross over with things that float.

I love the beauty of the sky, and the way lighting at different times of day can transform the earth. The golden time before sunset and the blue time just after it are among my favorites. They give me an inexplicable feeling of warmth and contentedness. They make everything feel right in the world. I thank God for the beauty of the earth and sky. Lately I've noticed the way the sky around sunsets fades from light blue into platinum just above the horizon on a cloudless summer evening. What a serene color!  It seems a tender, rarified thing, so that I hesitate to look at it for fear it will sooner fade to black. Yet I sometimes have the opportunity to revel in it for half an hour or more as I make my long evening drive to or from the lake. That's what I love today.  I'm not enough of a photographer to capture it on film, so you'll just have to watch for yourself. Or imagine it over the grand canyon.

It has seen many sunsets.

Let me ask you now:  What do you love?

External Processing, the Grand Canyon, and Other Procedural Notes

It occurred to me that before I get too far with this, I might do well to lay down some expectations for myself and for any unfortunate denizen of the intertubes who should happen to stumble into this thing.  My readership has expanded exponentially in the past several days (up to double digit cumulative page views! oh boy!). Maybe it's time to get this out of the way; or maybe I just feel the need to plan and control something, and this happens to be the most available object. One way or another, I'm going to take a few paragraphs to speculate haphazardly regarding the future content and operation of this blog. Mmmm, tasty content.

My purpose here is twofold, though I anticipate several likely ancillary benefits. Purpose of the first part:  to amuse and entertain ya'll and myself with whatever little morsels I manage to scrape off my shoes at night. It should be fun or interesting or educating; if not for you, then at least for me.

That leads me to the purpose of the second part:  to gain perspective through the outward expression of my thoughts. Introversion was never a clean cut for me. Certainly it's there, but it's not the whole story. [I'm reminded of the time I took a Meyers-Briggs test at summer camp and somehow came up strongly extroverted. Going through each trait, they split the group into its constituent halves to explain the meaning of each term assigned. When the introvert-extrovert split came, I was one of maybe two or three people standing quietly on the extrovert side waiting for everyone there to chill out, while the introvert side just looked plaintively at the leaders. That was confusing.] At any rate, lately I've found myself with more to share than I have places to share it. Losing a wife will do that, as it turns out. The second purpose of this blog, then, is to be a site of external processing for my own benefit. It has all the comforts of home, but ends up being turned loose on the world.

That's what I'm trying to do here.  In the meantime, I expect that it will give me a chance to practice writing in a creative, non-academic, non-technical fashion. I think proficiency in different styles of writing is mutually reinforcing, and my career is likely to involve a lot of writing. Furthermore, writing about a topic forces me to think it through more closely than if I just read or spoke about it. On the other hand, it's also just plain nice to write something other than a contract once in a while. To the extent I do end up writing about serious matters, I may also add a few drops to the ocean of human knowledge, or at least spread it around a little bit. That's not my express goal, but in the unlikely event it happens, there will be no complaints. Finally, I think there is some community benefit to be had in the act of telling. Openness begets openness, thought begets thought, and friendships are made or strengthened in the process. That's good too.

I've given some thought to the question of what I will post. Consistent with my two goals here, I've made the very easy decision to post whatever the heck I feel like, and in whatever tone suits my fancy. I'll mix it up. I would expect economics, music, religion, politics, nature, art, things that float, and probably some dime-store legal analysis. I make no promises on content, except that I will not let it become a blawg. I know you were worried. It might get personal, either in passing or in substantial parts. This is, after all, a personal blog, not a commercial website. I am aware that this is a theoretically semi-public space; anything I put out there is fair game.

I also hope to maintain some standard of quality here. I promised myself to proofread. And to use pictures to keep things interesting. E.g., Figure 1, below (depicting my standard nonsense visual aid).

Fig. 1. The scrappy ones are my favourites.

You see, in high school I gave a "persuasive"-style speech on vegetarianism. More accurately, it was on why we should eat steak. I researched my topic over the course of several weeks, put together my notecards, rehearsed, and went to bed confident the night before (also, confidently. I have lots of experience with going to bed.). When I woke up, I remembered that part of the assignment was to bring a visual aid. I had completely forgotten about that requirement. Crap! What do you use to demonstrate vegetarianism anyway? I looked around my bedroom, and all I had that looked remotely presentable was a poster of the Grand Canyon that I got when I visited my family in Arizona the previous year. So I took it in, stuck it up on the white board, and snuck in little references to the Grand Canyon wherever I could. I survived, though I didn't get a good grade on that part of the class. Today, I again commit to giving you visual aids or other integrated media, but I will make no representations as to their relevance.

With that silly thing out of the way, let's get blogging!  As a wise blogger once said, comments are gravy!

Freedom Without Content

Independence Day is a favorite holiday of mine. Usually it means a long weekend at the lake, rice krispie bars with M&M's, and of course, fireworks. This time, it means more time to study for the bar. Oh well.

For me, this raises an interesting and timely question:  what value does freedom have without content?  This is a rephrasing of an issue that has become classic fodder for those who have just graduated from their terminal degree without a clear next step. See, e.g., The Graduate. My freedom under the Constitution and the law is vast, so long as I pay my debts and take care not to injure others or unduly interfere with their freedoms. Furthermore, I am at one of those unusual points in life where my ties to any particular location and direction are at their lowest ebb on a number of dimensions. That is to say, I have substantial freedom now to go most anywhere, and do most anything. I just lack a reason to do so.


I see two forms of freedom at work here, both of which sound hollow when knocked. First is my freedom of personal direction; that is, the present large set of substantive choices available to me. This freedom comes directly at the expense of content. It diminishes to the extent I am involved and attached in the place I am and the activities I pursue. To say I am free in this sense just cuts with the other side of the knife. If I were doing something worthwhile, and if I knew the purpose of my work, I wouldn't care about the freedom to do something else.


Second is the freedom from excessive external societal restraints, enshrined in law, which is a huge part of what we celebrate today, along with getting through that little tiff with England, I suppose. As a (pragmatic federalist) libertarian, maximum personal freedom along every dimension is at the core of my political beliefs. As applied for me today, however, these freedoms are a virtual nullity.  Yes, I'll be using my 14th Amendment privileges and immunities of citizenship when I travel to Philadelphia later this month. When I do make it to the lake, the government can't take my skis (let alone the cabin) for a non-public purpose, nor without just compensation. Even this blog post is 1st Amendment protected speech. 


Fine. I'm under a big constitutional umbrella, but it's not raining. Not on me, anyway. My point is that the freedoms from external restraint are only important when you are trying to do something worthwhile.  I have no use for 14th Amendment fundamental privacy rights; I'm not married.  I have no use for 4th Amendment security in my papers and effects; I have nothing worth hiding. I have little use for the Article IV privileges and immunities of citizenship; I don't know what I want to do when I grow up (that is, on August 16th, when I return from post-bar travel (including to bars in other places, no doubt)). The great constitutional freedoms don't keep me safe, they just keep me from being hassled. For me, there is no content of significance at the moment, and therefore nothing gained by protecting it.


Today, I'm just in a holding pattern, with maximum freedom and minimum use for it. My Independence Day resolution is to make my civil freedoms matter again.

Why not try something new?

Because there is nothing new under the sun. People have always found a way to share thoughts and stories, sounds, images, and whatever other detritus of experience they manage to drag back to the campfire. This time, however, the tribes are scattered, and I am lost. It's time to build a better campfire. Good thing I'm an eagle scout.

Content and design will be forthcoming as I find time. I'm a little pinned down at the moment, what with the Minnesota Bar exam coming up in a few weeks. If I have a spastic start, let's all just wink and blame the law. That works well enough in most of my livelihood.  For design, I'm thinking maybe backwoods. For content, I make no guarantees. Something will happen here, and that's the best I can say for it.