Death Masks of Dante, Nietzsche, Joyce, Beethoven and Other Greats

in Life, Literature, Philosophy | November 9th, 2011

Dante.deathmask

Death masks — they have been around since the days of King Tut in Ancient Egypt, and (per­haps) Agamem­non and Cas­san­dra in Ancient Greece. A way to remem­ber the char­ac­ter and expres­sions of the dead, this memo­r­i­al prac­tice con­tin­ued right down through the Mid­dle Ages when wax and plas­ter became the mate­ri­als of choice.

nietzsche death mask

Today, we’re left with facial imprints of impor­tant his­tor­i­cal lead­ers (Cromwell, Napoleon, Peter the Great); cul­tur­al giants (Dante up top, Shake­speare, Voltaire, New­ton, Beethoven, James Joyce, Niet­zsche); and some recent­ly more depart­ed icons (Hitch­cock and Tim­o­thy Leary).

joyce death mask

Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty hosts online a fair­ly large col­lec­tion of Life and Death Masks, and the good folks at Bib­liok­lept high­light masks of the intel­li­gent, pow­er­ful and famous on an ongo­ing basis. Unfor­tu­nate­ly these col­lec­tions skew almost entire­ly male — a sign of the times that came before us.

Above, you can see the masks of Niet­zsche, Dante, and Joyce mov­ing from top to bot­tom.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Yo-Yo Ma & The Goat Rodeo Sessions

in Music | November 9th, 2011

Cel­list Yo-Yo Ma is famous for his eclec­ti­cism. From Baroque cham­ber music to tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese melodies, Ma delights in dis­solv­ing bar­ri­ers. His lat­est genre-hop­ping project is The Goat Rodeo Ses­sions, an inven­tive blue­grass col­lab­o­ra­tion with bassist Edgar Mey­er, fid­dler Stu­art Dun­can and Man­dolin­ist Chris Thile. Vocal­ist Aoife O’Dono­van joins the group on two songs. The expres­sion “goat rodeo” refers to a chaot­ic sit­u­a­tion where a group of peo­ple with dif­fer­ing view­points have to work togeth­er to avert dis­as­ter. When the group showed up recent­ly at Google’s New York offices for a brief per­for­mance and dis­cus­sion (see above), Ma com­pared The Goat Rodeo Ses­sions to the eco­log­i­cal “Edge Effect,” where con­trast­ing eco-sys­tems come togeth­er. “You have the least den­si­ty of life forms, but you actu­al­ly have the most vari­ety of new life forms,” explained Ma. “I think we all prob­a­bly, as a group, enjoy going to the edge because it’s thrilling to dis­cov­er new life forms. It’s thrilling to take from what you know and try some­thing that real­ly has­n’t quite hap­pened in the same way before.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Col­lab­o­ra­tions: Spike Jonze, Yo-Yo Ma, and Lil Buck

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

David Crosby & Graham Nash at Occupy Wall Street; Echoes of Woodstock

in Current Affairs, Music | November 9th, 2011

First came Willie Nel­son, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie, and now Cros­by & Nash (sans Stills). Play­ing yes­ter­day at Occu­py Wall Street, their short set includ­ed Mil­i­tary Mad­ness, What Are Their Names, They Want It All, Teach Your Chil­dren (above), and Long Time Gone, which they sang dur­ing their hey­day at Wood­stock more than 40 years ago. A long time gone, indeed.

All of this pro­vides a good excuse to post anoth­er favorite video of ours — CSN’s one-time band­mate Neil Young play­ing Ohio, a now canon­i­cal song from the protest move­ment song­book. The haunt­ing clip was record­ed live at Massey Hall in 1971, and appears on one of the fin­er acoustic gui­tar LPs.

More Occu­py Videos:

Noam Chom­sky at Occu­py Boston

Slavoj Zizek Takes the Stage at Occu­py Wall Street

Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig at Occu­py Wall Street

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Visualizing Bach: Alexander Chen’s Impossible Harp

in Animation, Math, Music | November 8th, 2011

“Music,” Got­tfried Leib­niz famous­ly said, “is the plea­sure the human mind expe­ri­ences from count­ing with­out being aware that it is count­ing.” Com­put­er artist Alexan­der Chen makes this plea­sure vis­i­ble with Baroque.Me, his geo­met­ric com­put­er ani­ma­tion of the Pre­lude to Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s Cel­lo Suite No. 1 in G major.

Chen visu­al­ized the piece by imag­in­ing a harp with strings that would auto­mat­i­cal­ly morph into dif­fer­ent lengths accord­ing to the prin­ci­ples of Pythagore­an tun­ing. “It’s math based on the frac­tion 2/3,” writes Chen on his blog. “I start­ed with the longest string, set­ting it to a sym­bol­ic length of pix­els. When cut to 2/3 length, it goes up a fifth. Cut its length by 1/2 and it goes up an octave. 3/4 length, one fourth. From these sim­ple num­bers I cal­cu­lat­ed the rel­a­tive string lengths of all the notes in the piece.” He used eight strings because the Pre­lude’s phras­ing is in groups of eight notes. The strings are “plucked” by two sym­met­ri­cal pairs of nodes that revolve at a uni­form rate, rather like a dig­i­tal music box.

Chen, 30, lives in Brook­lyn, NY, and works in the Google Cre­ative Lab. One of his most pop­u­lar pieces for Google was the Les Paul Doo­dle, which allows users to dig­i­tal­ly strum the gui­tar strings. Chen grew up learn­ing music and com­put­er pro­gram­ming in par­al­lel. He plays the clas­si­cal vio­la, but with the Bach ani­ma­tion he want­ed to remove the per­former’s inter­pre­tive ele­ment from the music. “It’s a piece that I’ve heard a lot since I was a kid,” Chen told the BBC recent­ly. (See the “Math­e­mat­i­cal Music” pod­cast, Nov. 3.) “Peo­ple always bring dif­fer­ent lev­els of expres­sion to it. Peo­ple play to dif­fer­ent tem­pos and they add a lot of dynam­ics, or less dynam­ics. But what I want­ed to let the com­put­er do was just kind of to play in a real­ly neu­tral way, because what I real­ly want­ed to express was how much emo­tion and inten­si­ty is just in the data of the notes them­selves. I think that’s real­ly where the beau­ty of the piece at its core is.”

To hear the Pre­lude with the inter­pre­tive ele­ment back in, you can watch this video of Pablo Casals per­form­ing it in 1954:

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Social Media in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution

in History, Stanford, Technology | November 8th, 2011

As the French like to say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Before there was Twit­ter, Face­book and Google+ (click to fol­low us), Euro­peans liv­ing in the sev­en­teenth and eigh­teenth cen­turies had to deal with their own ver­sion of infor­ma­tion over­load. Emerg­ing postal sys­tems, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of short let­ters called bil­lets, and the birth of news­pa­pers and pam­phlets all pumped unprece­dent­ed amounts of infor­ma­tion — valu­able infor­ma­tion, gos­sip, chat­ter and the rest — through new­ly-emerg­ing social net­works, which even­tu­al­ly played a crit­i­cal role in the French Rev­o­lu­tion, much like Twit­ter and Face­book proved instru­men­tal in orga­niz­ing the Arab Spring.

These his­tor­i­cal social net­works are being care­ful­ly mapped out by schol­ars at Stan­ford. Above, we have Anaïs Saint-Jude paint­ing the his­tor­i­cal pic­ture for us. Below Dan Edel­stein gives you a clos­er look at Stan­ford’s Map­ping the Repub­lic of Let­ters project.

via Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty News

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Alfred Hitchcock Reveals The Secret Sauce for Creating Suspense

in Film | November 8th, 2011

Speak­ing at an AFI Sem­i­nar in 1970, Alfred Hitch­cock revealed the essen­tial ingre­di­ents that went into mak­ing his films. When he stripped every­thing away, what Hitch­cock real­ly cared about was cre­at­ing sus­pense films (not mys­tery films) and get­ting the sus­pense ele­ment right. In the famous clip above, the direc­tor explains why sus­pense­ful scenes have to sim­mer for a time and then cool down prop­er­ly. Things can’t be brought to a rapid boil and then be quick­ly tak­en off the stove. Hitch­cock once made that mis­take in his 1936 film, Sab­o­tage. (Watch the offend­ing scene right below or find the full film here.)

Of course, Hitch­cock learned from his mis­take, and there­after shot count­less scenes where the sus­pense builds in the right way. But we par­tic­u­lar­ly want­ed to find one scene that pulls off the bomb sce­nario, and so here it goes. From 1957 to 1959, Hitch­cock pro­duced Sus­pi­cion, a tele­vi­sion series for NBC, and he per­son­al­ly direct­ed one episode called “Four O’Clock”. It fea­tures a watch­mak­er who sus­pects his wife of hav­ing an affair, and so, filled with jeal­ousy, he decides to mur­der her with a bomb made by his own hands. Things take an unex­pect­ed turn, how­ev­er, when two bur­glars tie him up in the base­ment with the tick­ing bomb. We leave you with the final, cli­mac­tic scene.

You can watch the full episode here. Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Alfred Hitch­cock Explains the Plot Device He Called the ‘MacGuf­fin’

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Open Culture Now on Google +

in Google | November 7th, 2011

Just a very quick fyi: Today, we launched an offi­cial Google+ page for Open Cul­ture. It’s anoth­er way to get intel­li­gent media deliv­ered to your dig­i­tal doorstep each day, and to share it with friends. If you don’t have a Google+ account, you can cre­ate one here, and Wired has a nice lit­tle primer on using the ser­vice here.

Beyond Google+, we also have an active pres­ence on Face­book and par­tic­u­lar­ly Twit­ter. So if you want a dou­ble dose of Open Cul­ture, you now know where to find it…

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

in Music | November 7th, 2011

1959. It was a piv­otal year for jazz. Musi­cians start­ed break­ing away from bebop, explor­ing new, exper­i­men­tal forms. And four absolute­ly canon­i­cal LPs were record­ed that year: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis; Time Out by Dave Brubeck; Min­gus Ah Um by Charles Min­gus; and The Shape of Jazz to Come by Ornette Cole­man. 1959 also found Amer­i­ca on the cusp of great social and polit­i­cal upheaval. Inte­gra­tion, Viet­nam, the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis — they were all com­ing around the bend, and some­times fig­ures like Min­gus and Cole­man com­ment­ed musi­cal­ly on these events.

This trans­for­ma­tive peri­od gets nice­ly cov­ered by the recent BBC doc­u­men­tary, 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz. The out­take above focus­es on Ornette Cole­man and his inno­v­a­tive work as a free jazz musi­cian. If it whets your appetite, you can dive into the full pro­gram on YouTube. The doc­u­men­tary fea­tur­ing inter­views with Brubeck, Cole­man, Lou Reed, and Her­bie Han­cock is avail­able runs rough­ly 60 min­utes.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

Dis­cov­er the Church of St. John Coltrane, Found­ed on the Divine Music of A Love Supreme

Sun Ra’s Full Lec­ture & Read­ing List From His 1971 UC Berke­ley Course, “The Black Man in the Cos­mos”

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.