MAY 29 = Stravinsky Causes a RIOT 100 Years Ago Today

To all of my "Today in History" readers:

I had originally planned on posting nothing regarding today's anniversary of the Paris Premiere performance of Igor Stravinsky's revolutionary ballet "The Rite of Spring".  I had already chosen the conquest of Mt. Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as being the most important event to have taken place today, and written a posting about it.  And I think that I was right about that choice.  Nevertheless, Stravinsky's music for this ballet, and indeed the ballet itself and the sets for it.. really everything connected with "the Rite of Spring" are VERY important.  And when I was reminded by my beautiful and highly talented one-time colleague, the Scot's percussionist Lisa Nicol that today was in fact the 100'th Anniversary of this fascinating work, I just HAD to post something.  Unfortunately, I hadn't the time to write a proper posting myself.  SO I am posting this very well written article by Tom Service of the London Guardian in place of my own work... although I hope to post something of my own soon.   - B.T. Bolten, 4/29/13.

The Rite of Spring: "The work of a madman??"

It is one of the great works of the 20th century, a ballet so revolutionary it is said to have caused a riot at its premiere. But is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring all it was claimed to be? As the work's centenary is celebrated, Tom Service separates fact from fiction

Tom Service

The Guardian, Tuesday 12 February 2013 

The most influential piece of 20th-century music … a 2002 version of The Rite Of Spring by Ballet Preljocaj. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

'Mild protests against the music," wrote Stravinsky, "could be heard from the beginning." The composer was remembering the night of 29 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The event was the premiere of a new ballet called The Rite of Spring – and, if you believe all the stories about what happened that celebrated evening, not least the one about the riot that ensued, it's as if the 20th century only really got going when the audience in that gilded art-nouveau auditorium started kicking off.

If you know how Stravinsky's music begins, you may not be too surprised by the audience's reaction to The Rite, which was choreographed by the young dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and performed by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. After the strangest, highest and most terrifyingly exposed bassoon solo ever to open an orchestral work, the music becomes a sinewy braid of teeming, complex woodwind lines. "Then," Stravinsky told his biographer, "when the curtain opened on the group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down, the storm broke."

                          The ‘knock-kneed’ Lolitas of the original Rite of Spring

That was Nijinsky's choreography for the Dance of the Adolescents section, the music's first and still-shocking moment of crunching dissonance and skewed rhythm. Stravinsky said that at this point, "Cries of 'Ta gueule' [shut up] came from behind me. I left the hall in a rage. I have never again been that angry." Stravinsky spent the rest of the performance in the wings, holding on to Nijinksy's tails as the choreographer shouted out cues to his dancers over the din.

What really happened on that night of nights? Was this a genuine riot, as it is so often described – a shocked response to Stravinsky's simultaneously primitivist and modernist depiction of an ancient Russian ritual devoted to the seasons? Or was it simply a publicity stunt, a wilfully orchestrated succès de scandale that has, in the years and the retelling, grown into a great musical myth? And was The Rite really such a revolution in music, a gigantic leap of faith into a terra incognita that would inspire every subsequent composer?

There is still no more influential piece of music in the 20th century. The Rite is the work that invariably tops polls of the biggest and baddest of the last 100 years. From Elliott Carter to Pierre Boulez, from Steve Reich to Thomas Adès, other composers couldn't have done what they did without it as inspiration. Talking many years after its composition, Stravinsky claimed he had to put himself in a kind of creative trance to compose it, an echo of the fate that befalls the poor girl who dances herself to death in the ballet's climactic Sacrificial Dance: "Very little immediate tradition lies behind The Rite of Spring – and no theory. I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite passed."

      Part of Nicholas Roerich's designs for Diaghilev's 1913 production of Le Sacre du printemps

Let's deal with the riot first. For all the "heavy noises" and shouts Stravinsky says came from the auditorium, there is no evidence of mass brawling, and nobody tried to attack the dancers (although the conductor Pierre Monteux remembered that "everything available was tossed in our direction"). One critic described the whole thing as merely a "rowdy debate" between rival factions in the audience. And if the boos and hisses had been so appalling, why would Diaghilev have been as pleased as Stravinsky says he was? "After the performance," he noted, "we were excited, disgusted, and … happy. I went with Diaghilev and Nijinsky to a restaurant. Diaghilev's only comment was, 'Exactly what I wanted.' Quite probably, he had already thought about the possibility of such a scandal when I first played him the score, months before."

It would certainly be an exaggeration to say the whole thing was engineered as a publicity stunt. But how to explain the fact that the audience was protesting right from the start about something they hadn't properly heard yet? Significantly, when the score was performed in Paris for the first time as a concert piece just a year later, there were huge ovations, with Stravinsky carried on the (above: Stravinsky, circa 1913.) shoulders of his fans in  triumph.

It was, it seems, the willful ugliness and lumpenness of Nijinsky's evocation of Russian prehistory that was really shocking to audiences – the "knock-kneed Lolitas" Stravinsky wrote of. The dance offended their sense of beauty and their vision of what a ballet should be, as much as if not more than the music. Anyway, at the premiere, the radicalism of Stravinsky's score could hardly be heard for cat-calls, although some reports suggest the boos had calmed down before the climax. Stravinsky had great praise for Monteux's cool head, calling the conductor as "impervious and as nerveless as a crocodile". He added: "It is still almost incredible to me that he actually brought the orchestra through to the end."

The paradox of the primitivism in The Rite is that it can be heard as both a horrifying vision of the pitilessness of nature – and as an expression of the inhumanity of the machine age. The fate of the "chosen one" in the Sacrificial Dance is particularly chilling. She is caught in an unstoppable rhythmic vortex from which there is only one way out: through the terrible dissonance that ends the piece, and the single chord that kills her. 

This is music that manages to sound both mechanistic and elemental, making The Rite as radical in 2013 as it was 100 years ago.

                             Above : Vaclev Nijinsky

Still, for all its modernity, for all Stravinsky's insistence that the whole thing came from "what I heard" (and for all that Puccini would later call it "the work of a madman"), The Rite is rooted in musical traditions. As Bela Bartók intuited, and as musicologist Richard Taruskin has shown, many of The Rite's melodies come from folk tunes – including that opening bassoon solo, which is actually a Lithuanian wedding song. Scholars have identified more than a dozen folk references so far, but there's an even more significant tradition behind The Rite.

The work is the apotheosis of a way of thinking about music that began in the 1830s with Mikhail Glinka, the first important Russian composer, and an inspiration to Stravinsky, whose music he loved. The way The Rite moves, with its blocks of music juxtaposed next to and on top of one another like a mosaic, is prefigured not just by Stravinsky's previous ballets for Diaghilev (The Firebird and Petrushka), but in music by his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and even Tchaikovsky. Those "new" sounds with all those dagger-like dissonances? If you look at them closely, you'll find they're all versions either of common chords stacked up on top of each other, or are built from the scales and harmonies that Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Debussy had already discovered. And all those jerky, jolting rhythms? They're derived, albeit distantly, from the way some of those folk tunes work.

So there's nothing so old as a musical revolution. But even if it's true that Stravinsky plundered traditions both ancient and modern to create The Rite, there's something that, finally, can't be explained away, something you should feel in your gut when you experience the piece. A century on, the truly shocking thing about The Rite is still with us, right there at its climax. A good performance will merely pulverize you. But a great one will make you feel that it's you – that it's all of us – being sacrificed by Stravinsky's spellbinding and savagely cruel music.

SPECIAL: Signs of Cannibalism Found at Colonial Jamestown

The following article appeared in the May 1, 2013 Edition of the New York Times. The entire article is reproduced below, but the original can be found at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/science/evidence-of-cannibalism-found-at-jamestown-site.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: May 1, 2013

Archaeologists excavating a trash pit at the Jamestown colony site in Virginia have found the first physical evidence of cannibalism among the desperate population, corroborating written accounts left behind by witnesses. Cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl show that her flesh and brain were removed, presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609.

The remains were excavated by archaeologists led by William Kelso of Preservation Virginia, a private nonprofit group, and analyzed by Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The skull bears tentative cuts to the forehead, followed by four strikes to the back of the head, one of which split the skull open, according to an article in Smithsonian magazine, where the find was reported Wednesday.
 

It is unclear how the girl died, but she was almost certainly dead and buried before her remains were butchered. According to a letter written in 1625 by George Percy, president of Jamestown during the starvation period, the famine was so intense “thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe (Above: a facial reconstruction of girl) the those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them.” Five other historical accounts refer to cannibalism during the Jamestown siege.

The girl’s remains were discovered last summer in a refuse dump containing horse and dog bones. From the state of her molars, she is judged to have been 14 years old. Isotopes in her bones indicate that she had eaten a high-protein diet, so she was probably not a maidservant but the daughter of a gentleman.

Dr. Owsley said in an interview that he could tell she was English because of his familiarity with English skeletal remains of the 17th century and from scientific tests. The ratio of oxygen isotopes in her bones indicated that she had grown up in the southern coastal regions of England, Dr. Owsley said, and the 
(above: A microscopic image shows sharp cuts to her jaw) 
carbon isotopes pointed to a diet that included English rye and barley.

James Horn, a historian with the colonial Williamsburg Foundation, said at a news conference on Wednesday that the young woman probably had arrived on one of the six surviving ships from a supply fleet that sailed from Plymouth, England in early June of 1609. A week short of its destination, the fleet was scattered by a hurricane. The flagship, named the Sea Venture, which carried the expedition’s leaders, was driven onto reefs at Bermuda, an event that became the inspiration for Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest,” Dr. Horn said.

In mid-August, six of the ships eventually reached Jamestown. But their arrival, with little food and many extra mouths, did not bring relief or comfort. The settlers’ insistent demands for food antagonized the Powhatan Indians, who at first had welcomed and provisioned them. In October or early November, with about 300 colonists crowded into the narrow confines of the James fort, the Powhatans launched a full-scale attack and siege, cutting off any hope of outside relief.

People began eating leather from their clothes and boots and killing their horses, cats and dogs. Those who ventured into the woods in search of roots were killed by Indians. “Only in the most desperate of circumstances would the English have turned to cannibalism,” Dr. Horn said.

The colony was saved in May 1610 by the arrival of the settlers who had been marooned in Bermuda. They found the 60 survivors as thin as skeletons. In June 1610, another relief fleet arrived, commanded by Lord De La Warr, who would later lend his name to the state of Delaware. De La Warr’s men swept the grisly remains of the siege — dog and horse bones and those of at least one person — into the refuse pile that Dr. Kelso and his colleagues have just begun to excavate.

The Jamestown site was long thought to have eroded into the James River but was rediscovered by Dr. Kelso and other archaeologists, who began excavations in 1994. The site was selected for colonization in 1607 by the Virginia Company of London because no Indians lived there, but — as it turned out — the reason the land was uninhabited was that it was swampy and unsuitable for agriculture.   

Bernard Bailyn, a Harvard historian and an expert on colonial history, said the new report of cannibalism was very interesting.  "It's part of the disaster the company faced and the terrible problems they had at the beginning," Dr. Bailyn said.  As to the reasons the Virginia Company failed to provide adequate support to its colony, he said, "Whose fault it was is very difficult to say."  

A version of this article appeared in print on May 2, 2013, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Girl’s Bones Bear Signs of Cannibalism by Starving Virginia Colonists.

SPECIAL = Time Capsule is Opened After 100 Years

At the web address below, you will find a fascinating report which I just read on "Yahoo" News about the opening of a time capsule buried beneath an Oklahoma church for 100 years.........

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/100-years-later-time-capsule-opened-185852550.html?vp=1

The First Lutheran Church of Oklahoma City dug up and opened its Century Chest, a time capsule that was buried under the church 100 years ago.

The artifacts inside the copper chest were remarkably well intact. Credit for that goes to the church's Ladies Aide Society, the group that buried the capsule a century ago. The group buried the chest in double concrete walls and under 12 inches of concrete, according Fox News. It also left guidelines on how to unearth the capsule.

The chest was full of treasures. Among the finds: a newspaper from the day the capsule was buried (April 22, 1913); a dress; a telephone; a flag; a pen used by President William McKinley; a camera; and a pair of women's shoes that still had their shine. Perhaps most remarkable was a phonograph record featuring voices of citizens from the era.

The Oklahoma Gazette reported that the project was the brainchild of Virginia Sohlberg. Her great-granddaughter, Virginia Eason Weinmann, was especially moved by a book that contained family photos and poetry.

Experts from the Oklahoma Historical Society worked with the church to make sure the objects were handled with care. All of the items will be displayed at the Oklahoma History Center.

All of this was written by: By Mike Krumboltz in "The Sideshow" = His Blog on "Yahoo" News.

SPECIAL = The "Titanic" Violin?

(Above: Wallace Hartley plays to the last in the 1997 film "Titanic")

"Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!
 E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,
 Still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee.
Refrain:
 Nearer, my God, to Thee,
 Nearer to Thee!"

This is the tune which many of the survivors of the sinking of the R.M.S. "Titanic" recall being played by the ships "Band" as that ill-fated luxury liner sunk beneath the icy waves of the North Atlantic Ocean that night, April 15 in 1912.  And recently news reports stated that the very violin upon which Band Leader Wallace Hartley lead his fellow musicians in that final, sorrowful selection  had in fact surfaced, been authenticated, and was soon to be auctioned.  As I was busy with other things when this story was first reported on March 15 (and because my computer was being serviced at that time), I was unable to make this Special Posting at that time.  So now that I have my computer back, I sat down to write out the story for you. all of my "Today in History" readers. But this just goes to demonstrate that History is constantly alive, constantly being revised, rewritten, and re-hashed. Because no sooner had I "Googled" in search of an account of this story than I found myself looking at an article calling the whole thing into question.  So, in order to update you on the situation, here is the relevant portion of an article on the find in the New York Post :

"The instrument was found inside a leather valise, engraved with Hartley’s initials, that was strapped to his body.  The violin, an engagement gift from Hartley’s fiancée, Maria Robinson, was submerged in the salt water for 10 days, until his body was recovered.  After Robinson died, her sister donated the valise, with the violin and Hartley’s cigarette case and gold ring, to the Salvation Army.  From there, it was given to a music teacher, who then gave it to another amateur musician, the mother of the current seller.  Her son — the current, anonymous owner — found the cracked violin in her attic in 2006.Philadelphia lawyer Craig Sopin, 55, who owns the largest collection of Titanic memorabilia, said he’s interested in buying the relic.“I am satisfied that it is the violin that was on the deck of the Titanic,” he said."

Here now is the relevant portion of an article by Norman Lebrecht on his Blog "Slipped Disc" :

"The Titanic in Lancashire Museum has poured a bucket of iced water on widespread claims that Wallace Hartley’s violin was saved from the Titanic, an assertion made by British auctioneers and repeated by much of the world’s press.

Nigel Hampson, curator of the Colne museum, says: ‘The historical record does not show that Wallace was recovered with his violin strapped to his body – it actually proves the opposite. The inventory of items recovered on Wallace’s body makes no mention whatsoever of a violin or music case or anything similar being found with him.’ "

The article by Mr. Lebrecht goes on to discuss the fact that no violin was listed among the personal effects found with Mr. Hartley's remains.  And a look at that listing does indeed lack any listing of a  violin: http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-victim/wallace-hartley.html ; one can see the jewelry, the cigarette case, the coins.. even the clothes right down to the socks.  But no violin is listed. Nevertheless, Andrew Aldridge spent seven years researching the violin, and indeed has a leather case in which the violin was carried, which was then said to have been strapped to Wallace Hartley, and which is said to have been recovered with Mr. Hartley's remains.  And the leather (pictured above) case has Hartley's initials on it.

Questions About the Violin.....

In the ensuing discussion on Mr. Lebrecht's Blog, several very interesting points are raised, including one that had occurred to me: wouldn't a violin that had been soaked in water for ten days (the amount of time it took after the disaster to recover Mr. Hartley's remains), have fallen apart?  Stringed instruments are afterall held together by water soluble glue.  But perhaps the freezing temperature of the water counter-acted this.  I suppose that I would have to read Mr. Aldredge's report to have these questions answered.  

But in researching this posting right here on my computer I ran across a whole lot of information about the working conditions under which the "Band" played, such as the fact that they were listed as second class passengers, and given third class accommodations.  Also that the families of the musicians had little success in acquiring death benefits for their loved ones.. in fact they received a bill for their uniforms which they lost along with their lives when "Titanic" went down!! These and other details of the musicians life aboard the "Titanic" are included in an excellent article by Holy Mulcahy which along with the other articles quoted in this posting can be found in their entirety at the web addresses listed in the "Sources' below.  

In the End, Does It Really Matter?

(Wallace Hartley, pictured right) Ms. Mulcahy raises an excellent point in the discussion which follows Mr. Lebrecht's Blog. And this is that the actual facts add far more poignancy to the musician's part of the "Titanic" tragedy than can be found in movies or myth.  As I myself said in my posting of April 15, 2012, the centennial of the disaster:

"My guess, as a musician is that they were aware that women and children were being taken off the ship first, that they were unlikely to find a spot for themselves.  And they therefore elected to spend what were clearly going to be their last hours on earth playing rather than in a panic about their inescapable fate.  Frankly, I've often thought that had I been Mr. Clarke, I may have given some thought to making my Double Bass into a floatational device.  But Fred Clarke (I've read his name listed that way in at least one source) evidently decided to help his fellow musicians in the selfless task of calming their fellow passengers in their final moments.  Every survivor's account testifies to the fact that the orchestra played throughout the final crisis; clearly they were made of sterner stuff than I can imagine finding in myself."

Sources:

New York Post article, "Musician's salt-stained violin emerges as the most important relic from the Titanic":
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/meeting_violin_end_r0pTqHYvi77Ro1Qjw3iYzM


Norman Lebrecht's Blog "Slipped Disc":
http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/03/serious-doubts-emerge-about-titanic-violin-would-a-modern-case-have-saved-it.html

Holy Mulcahy's Article,   "It’s Black and White; the hidden effects of cutting corners" :
http://www.insidethearts.com/neoclassical/2010/04/its-black-and-white-the-hidden-effects-of-cutting-corners/

Brian T. Bolten's Blog, "Today in History", "R.M.S. Titanic Sinks":
http://historysstory.blogspot.com/2013/04/april-15-rms-titanic-sinks.html

SPECIAL POSTING = LIBYA... AGAIN!!!

(Above: the U.S. Marines storm the shores of Tripoli!!)

"Eaton by this time had returned to Washington, and began pushing a scheme which he had been developing for what was effectively a plan for regime change in Tripoli. While in Tunis in June of 1801, he had met Ahmad Quarmanli, the deposed Pasha of Tripoli, and the older brother of Yusuf Quarmanli, the reigning Pasha. Eaton proposed that the US take Ahmad under their wing, assemble an army of various locals, under Ahmad’s banner, and then by giving them the necessary logistical support with the US Naval vessels then in the Mediterranean, effectively back their challenge to the regime in Tripoli."

SO.. once again we have attacks against U.S. personnel in the nation of Libya. Alleged infidels in the Muslim world coming under attack for representing an "alien" regime. Even now in September of 2012, over TWO HUNDRED YEARS later we're still at war with certain elements of the Muslim world.

Is any of this beginning to sound familiar? Providing logistical support to a rag-tag band of rebels in an attempt to bring about regime change… in TRIPOLI!! Of course this attempt in 1804-05 was made without any sort of international backing. And while the US involvement of last year was made in an attempt to stop a dictator from massacring his own people,  we were still engaged in essentially the same endeavor: trying to back an indigenous attempt to remove a hostile regime in order to replace it with one which was more moderate and less injurious to US interests in the region.

YEP!!! We've been down this road before... in 1804-05 the U.S. was engaged in a struggle with another piratical regime in Tripoli, and yes... we were supporting a dubious group of local rebels about whom we didn't know very much in order to replace the regime which was

presently on the throne, and causing no end of trouble for us!! NO... it wasn't our old friend Muammar, but it was another.. "shaggy beast" as our man William Eaton would refer to him. You probably don't know much about this... the one and only fragment of it that has remained down to the present day as a part of our popular memory is the phrase from the Marine Hymn: "To the shores of Tripoli....". Well log onto the following web addresses:

http://suite101.com/article/regime-change-in-tripoli--part-one-a385921

AND ........

http://suite101.com/article/regime-change-in-tripoli--part-two-a386139


And read this fascinating and exciting tale of America's first attempt at regime change in Tripoli!! Over TWO CENTURIES AGO!!!!!! They are both a part of  MY collection of articles to be found on "Suite101.com"!!

+ 35, originally posted on 8/27/11.

SHERLOCK HOLMES IS BACK!!!

In cinemas across America tomorrow, December 16, 2011, audiences will be seeing the second installment in the new Sherlock Holmes movie franchise established by actor Robert Downey Jr. just two years ago with his action-packed suspense thriller "Sherlock Holmes." The Holmes given to us by the sublimely talented Downey Jr. as directed by Guy Ritchie and co-starring Jude Law as Watson was an action hero as he had never been portrayed before. This was a Holmes who was not at all the type of man to sit and solve mysteries with his intellect, and occasionally get involved in a bit of running around and sometimes a fight or two with the bad guys as we

had come to expect him. No, no, this was a Holmes who, along with Watson was very much in the thick of the action, and fighting his antagonists, tooth and nail. When this Holmes premiered in 2009, I wrote an article for Suite 101 in which I compared Robert Downey Jr.'s Holmes with a similarly off-beat and highly controversial view of the great sleuth that was directed in 1970 by the great Hollywood director, Billy Wilder, "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes". Both films dealt with some of the more, shall we say delicate facets of Holmes nature, or at least facets of the character that had to be handled gingerly when the character was first conceived in Victorian England of the 1890's. These were Holmes

use of illicit drugs, and his attitude towards women. Before you go to see "Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows", or after you've seen it, take a few minutes to read or re-read what I said about Downey, Wilder and the original Holmes back in 2009. And be bllloooown away, once again!!

Either cut and paste this address into your toolbar, or if it's highlighted, just click it on:

http://suite101.com/article/robert-downeys-private-life-of-sherlock-holmes-a186985






READERS!! If you would like to comment on this, or any "Today in History" posting, I would love to hear from you!!  You can either sign up to be a member of this blog and post a comment in the space provided below, or you can simply e-mail me directly at:  krustybassist@gmail.com  I seem to be getting hits on this site all over the world, so please do write and let me know how you like what I'm writing (or not!)!!

"The Great New York Blizzard of 1888" is on "Suite 101".

“It’s death out there,,,, people are dying everywhere. I saw bodies sticking in the snow. I was almost in their number.”

So spoke the infamous New York City political boss Roscoe Conkling after he barely escaped with his life from the ravages of the blizzard which gripped the North Eastern United States between March 11 and 14 in 1888. “The Great White Hurricane” as it was called in some quarters, or simply “The Great Blizzard of ‘88” as it was known to the New Yorkers who bore the brunt of it, was a MAJOR freezeball! Yeah, sure it's been cold here in Cincinnati. A couple of inches, maybe four last week. Oh, yeeeeah so dey had a couple of feet in Flatbush yesterday. Oh, yeah, and uh
20 inches over dere in Joisey!! BIIIIIIIG DEEEAL! Now, uh... dis hear in 1888! Now DAT was a
major stooooorm!

Read the incredible truth of the FIFTY inches of snow which Mother Nature dumped upon the Big Apple back in the day in Brian's latest tome on "Suite 101"!



Read more at Suite101: The Great Blizzard of 1888.: A huge snow storm hits the American Northeast in late March, '88 . http://americanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/the-great-blizzard-of-1888#ixzz0fGJOawDo