Tag: Smiles

George Bernard Shaw wasn’t shy in sounding off on classical music

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The famed English playwright was also an esteemed music critic, though he wrote under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, 1888 to 1889, before moving on to a more respectable newspaper for four years. There, he signed his reviews G.B.S.

For perspective, he was an ardent advocate of Richard Wagner, which put him in opposition to Johannes Brahms.

Here are some sharp notes.

  1. “Hell is full of musical amateurs.”
  2. “A man who can tolerate Bach and Scarlatti on a modern piano can tolerate anything.” (He was the first converts to the original instruments camp of early music.)
  3. “Nine times out of ten, when a prima donna thinks that I am being thrilled by her vibrant tones, I am simply wrestling with an impulse to spring on stage and say ‘My dear young lady, pray don’t. Your voice is not a nail, to be driven into my head.’”
  4. “There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.”
  5. He did concede some points. “Mind, I do not deny that the Requiem is a solid piece of music manufacture. You feel at once that it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker.”
  6. He redefined the scope of the job, saying “I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was refined and academic to the point of being unreadable and often nonsensical,” or more to the point, “I believed that I could make musical criticism readable even by the deaf.” To wit:
  7. “Handel is not a mere composer in England: he is an institution. What is more, he is a sacred institution. … Every three years there is a Handel Festival, at which his oratorios are performed by four thousand executants, collected from all the choirs in England. The effect is horrible; and everyone declares it sublime. … If I were a member of the House of Commons, I would propose a law making it a capital offence to perform an oratorio by Handel with more than 80 performers in the chorus and orchestra, allowing 48 singers and 32 instrumentalists.” He was way ahead of his time on the size issue.
  8. Many of the musical affectations of the time drew his fire. Regarding one imposed on a Mozart aria, he commented, “The effect of this suburban grace can be realized by anyone who will take the trouble to whistle ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ with the last note displaced an octave.”
  9. To him, a “poor performance was a personal insult to be treated accordingly.”
  10. Still, stridently avoiding pale cliché, he did praise those who surpassed his standards. Describing one singer, he wrote, “I was consoled by a human caress after an angelic discourse.”

We do have some striking place names around the Bold Coast

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t noticed, I can be entranced by place names. So for ten around here, let’s go.

  1. Bailey’s Mistake. Did they really land and then settle in the wrong spot?
  2. Boot Head. Try picturing that.
  3. Cutler. It even has a song about drilling into the bottom of barrels of wine confiscated during the Prohibition. And there’s a plank of wood as evidence.
  4. Destiny Bay. Also at Cutler, but what a name.
  5. Machias. Even as something-or-other disgusting kind of falls in the Native name.
  6. Magurrewock Mountain in the Moosehorn National Wildlife Preserve. At a modest 377-elevation, it still deserves attention, even if you can’t pronounce it.
  7. Meddybemps. It’s a town and a huge lake, but still, try repeating it three times.
  8. Moosehorn National Wildlife Preservation. Moose don’t have horns but antlers, despite the naming of a small river.
  9. Pope’s Folly. The small island just off the Old Friar monolith of Campobello Island, New Brunswick, seems to elude historic explanation. I’m not convinced it’s entirely religious.
  10. Treat Island. Named for an early settler, no matter the consequences, it’s still part of Eastport. And a fine IPA brew exists in its honor.

Ten things Baskerville, so do come along

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As I’ve related in other posts here, ours is widely known around town as the Anna M. Baskerville house.

For a writer and editor like me, though, Baskerville was also an important typeface in the advancement of printing.

It was the body type of the first newspaper I edited, the Belmont Hilltopper. Yup, back in high school. Our headlines were mostly Bodoni, another classic that’s mostly vanished in the internet era.

Here’s an introduction to its founder and a bit more.

So here goes for this week’s dive into arcane wonders.

  1. The typeface was designed in the mid-1750s by John Baskerville in Birmingham, England, as an intermediary between older styles, including one of my favorites by William Caslon.
  2. Baskerville increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes, making the serif faces sharper and more tapered, and shifted the axis of rounded letters to a more vertical position. Maybe you take that for granted, but it does enhance readability. Trust me.
  3. He was a wealthy industrialist who started his career as a teacher of calligraphy and a carver of gravestones before making a fortune as a manufacturer of varnished lacquer goods. You never know where you’ll encounter a true inventor or artist.
  4. In 1758, he was appointed University Printer to the Cambridge University Press, where in 1763 he published his master work, a folio-size Bible. Glory be!
  5. On his death his widow Sarah eventually sold his material to a Paris literary society, placing them out of reach of British printing, not that the move stopped imitations. The French, on the other hand, seem to have loved his openings.
  6. Oh, my, the technical discussions lead to a true rabbit hole of fine distinctions. I’m not going there, though some of you readers definitely should.
  7. John Baskerville is also noted for inventing a wove paper, smoother than laid paper that allowed for better printing impressions. One advance can definitely lead to another.
  8. Even as an avowed atheist, he was appointed printer to the University of Cambridge where he printed The Book of Common Prayer in in 1762 and a splendid Bible in 1763.
  9. By the way, you won’t find a town named Baskerville on a map. There is, though, a Baskerville Hall in Wales.
  10. A more likely place to find Baskerville is in the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the most popular novels ever.

How many types of boats under sail do you recognize?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Living around big waters, as I do now, means hearing a number of new terms to identify boats big and small. When you merely read about them, say in a history book, you can usually skim over the word and move on.

Not so when you’re trying to describe what you just saw.

Today we won’t attempt to get into the array of mostly motorized vessels. Not even a Bayliner versus a Boston Whaler. Naval ships alone would require a long list.

Instead, let’s look at a general overview of boats originally powered by the wind. (Admittedly, today many of them will have an internal engine for additional power.) These can range from small sailboats to majestic tall ships.

  1. Sloop. The most common type of sailing vessel, it has a single mast, usually with one triangular mainsail (in what’s called Bermuda rigging) and, in the front, a triangular headsail, usually a jib. These can range from small, single-person fun boats to larger racing boats manned by trained crews.
  2. Cat. Or catboat. Has a single mast rising from the front of the boat and a large, single sail on a long boom. A second beam of wood, called a gaff, runs along the top of the sail, turning it into a four-sided sheet of hexagonal shape rather than the triangle. They were popular New England workboats around the early 1900s, short (typically ) 20 to 30 feet long and wide, highly stable, and have made a comeback today.
  3. Cutter. A single-masted vessel resembling a sloop, but often having a gaff-rigged mainsail and an extended spar called a long bowsprit extending from the bow, which allows a second headsail (a staysail, or “staysul.”)
  4. Schooner. Two or more masts, with the largest sail (the mainsail) at the aft, plus a foresail (resembling the mainsail) on the mast ahead of it as well as a jib and staysail at the bowsprit. They may also have one or more topsails and a small sail called a mizzen aft of the mainsail. With their complex rigging, they can be fast and undeniably majestic. And, yes, my favorite.
  5. Ketch. Resembles a schooner but has an extra mast behind the mainsail.
  6. Yawl. This term has several different meanings, the first regarding rigs with one or two fully equipped masts plus a mizzen mast aft. It can also refer to a double-ended hull boat that could be worked from the beaches, not that I’m finding any reference to sailing in what would be the equivalent of reverse gear. Some of them, if you’re a bettor, may have been the fastest-sailing open boats ever built. And it even seems to be a kind of dinghy. Just so you get an idea of how loose some of these terms can be.
  7. Brig. This two-masted ship introduces us to square-rigging with sails arrayed on horizontal spars perpendicular to the keel and masts – that is, “squared.” The spars, called yards, present the sails to face the wind from behind. The foremast of a brig is always square-rigged, but some varieties may have a gaff or lateen sail on the mainmast. (Lateen is an ancient arrangement I won’t get into unless you’re going to Egypt.) “Square,” as far as masts go, means more or less perpendicular to the hull, unlike the ones more or less parallel to the hull. Trust me on this.
  8. Barquentine. Its foremast was square-rigged, with gaff-rigged masts behind. But let’s skip ahead.
  9. Barque (or bark). A three- to five-masted square-rigged ship consisting of a foremast, mainmast, and a smaller, often gaff-rigged mizzen mast at the aft for steering stability. Far and away the most numerous of the square-rigged vessels. Enough of the finer points. Let’s turn to the most glorious.
  10. Tall (or full-rigged) ship. Three or more masts, all fully square-rigged, one sail above another, often five or six on a mast, with a hull often much longer than a schooner. The individual sails were smaller than a schooner’s and less likely to rip out in a storm, but the number of them provided more overall sail surface, allowing for maximum speed. The downside was that crews of 30 or more sailors were required for handling those sheets. Still, seeing one of them is exciting. It’s what you really picture first, after all. Now, for all of the subcategories, such as a frigate.