Nick on Quora

The first four Mahler symphonies are called Wunderhorn symphonies for good reason: they all draw inspiration from songs in the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection, including quotations or rearrangements of song settings that Mahler had done.

That correlates with the structure of the Wunderhorn symphonies, contrasted with his later work: more songlike, more scene-painting, more focus on single musical ideas, more overt programmes. The later works, the 5th, 6th, and 9th, are greater (not by far), and certainly more sophisticated, but the first four are more accessible. Which makes it easier for them to tug at the heartstrings.

Mahler never wore his heart on his sleeve as much as in the Funeral March of the 1st. He probably intended nothing Klezmer about it—he thought of the band as Bohemian, rather than Jewish, and his mental picture was about a band marching in and out of earshot; but the simple melodies and violent clashes in mood have a special resonance for me, one that the Yiddishkeit of the march (from our post–Austro-Hungarian perspective) enhances.

And the bit that gets me crying without fail is the yearning for heaven in Urlicht, from the 2nd symphony. Again, because of the contrast—in particular, the contrast with the cynicism of St Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes, which precedes it, and swallows it up afterwards.

Oliver Stone’s Nixon.

It may be an eccentric choice. It may be the choice of someone who does not understand film at all. But it’s my favourite movie. Grand Shakespearean tragedy, operatic, intense, cinematic tour-de-force, encompassing the world like a Mahler symphony. And not that this matters anywhere near as much to me, but historically more accurate than you might think.

A surprise, because the biopic is justly maligned as an incoherent and/or formulaic genre; but Stone had great subject matter.

I had little time for Natural Born Killers or The Doors, so falling in love with Nixon surprised me too.

Fun fact: on my first date with my future wife, when we were in the infuriatingly cutesy stage of identifying common interests—

—What’s your favourite city?

—Vienna.

—Me too! What your favourite cake?

—Black Forest.

—Me too!

… and when it came to favourite movie:

—What’s your favourite movie?

—Nixon!

—Me too!

Only by Nixon, Tamar did not mean Oliver Stone’s Nixon. She meant Frost/Nixon (film).

And Frost/Nixon is in many ways the anti-Oliver Stone’s Nixon. It’s intimate, focussed, stagey, and somewhat conventional; a chamber piece.

We’ve watched Frost/Nixon together, and we’ve watched Oliver Stone’s Nixon. (For limited values of “we”.)

I guess we’ll always have Vienna…

Thx4A2A.

I’ve already answered a related question from a linguist’s perspective: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What makes Modern Greek an interesting language to learn, from a purely linguistic point of view?. But this question really should be about a lay description.

(But I can’t resist telling Ilir Mezini: it’s Albanian, missing half the letters, and with even more Greek words in it. 😉

Modern Greek is a historical battleground, caught between its ancient heritage, and its more recent, variegated past. Lots of texture and hidden battles in there, of which only some have been resolved, and many have been resolved only recently.

It’s a staccato, rapid fire, impassioned language—although you should listen to some regional accents; Cretan and Cypriot are pleasantly sing-song, in different ways.

And of course I will use the Cretan Muslim village of Al-Hamidiyah in Syria to illustrate. Contrast the intonation of the journo, straight outta Athens, with the locals’:

As Indo-European languages go, it has rather more grammar than you’re used to, including some entrenched randomness in the verb system (sigmatic vs asigmatic aorists), random genders, and an accusative and genitive.

Compared to Classical Greek, it is drastically simplified, and the simplifications mostly are rather sensible. Although a classicist I once asked did say it looked like a drunk Ancient Greek.

If you speak a Balkan language, as I alluded above, a lot of its syntax, idioms, and morphology will look rather familiar.

Eh, do you have to actually understand Farsi?

Thanks to http://alefbaye2om.org/tools/tra… (and we all know how reliable an online dictionary-based transliterator will be with an abjad and a millenium-old text), I have… attempted the following.

Vocaroo | Voice message

This… will be interesting.

Dexterity in playing a musical instrument is all about muscle memory, not looking at the fingerboard. After all, you’re meant to play the violin while reading a score. And the fingerboard is in a rather awkward position to be staring at all the time anyway.

So, if there is no score around to be read, having your eyes open or closed doesn’t make any difference to how you play; and having your eyes closed helps with concentration, and figuring out what you’ll do next.

Well, this will be an odd response.

Clarinet Concerto (Nielsen). Which is a companion piece, to my mind, to Symphony No. 5 (Nielsen).

McKayla has already responded that she is not, to her knowledge, related to one John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne.

To which I submit the evidence I tabled the last time this issue came up:

https://www.quora.com/What-diffe…

And someone thinks she looks like Ozzy.

*Goes to McKayla’s profile page*

*Stares at enlarged profile pic*

*Stares some more*

*Looks for very, very young Ozzy pic*

… Not… as absurd as you might think…

This has already been answered by Mark Blanchard in the negative, in: Mark Blanchard’s answer to Do any credible scholars consider the speech given at the end of the “Great Dictator” to be one of the best in history?

I put The Great Dictator on Hulu last night, with high expectations: I’d known of the film since childhood, particularly the dancing with the globe scene, and my childhood in Greece had been fed on a steady diet of Charlot. (And it will always be spelled Σαρλώ with an omega, dammit!)

Reluctantly, I must agree with Mark.

Pros of the film:

• The Jews are portrayed as just regular folk, and not exoticised.
• There is indeed Esperanto on those shopfronts.
• Given the Hays code wilderness of American film in 1940, the film is daring in its satirical content.
• Paulette Goddard is easy on the eyes. (And I thought she was easier on the eyes before she scrubbed up; but then, I haven’t seen Modern Times (film), where she’d played the same character.)
• I was going to say Paulette Goddard did not look plausibly Jewish; good thing I checked Wikipedia (her father was Jewish).
• I was also going to say there’s no way it was believable that the visibly 50 year old Barber could be going out with Paulette’s Hannah. Oops: Chaplin and Goddard were married at the time.

Cons of the film:

• It’s not that funny. I have laughed out loud at several films from the 30s; this was not one of them.
• It is sloppily plotted; the similarity of the Barber to Hynkel and the deus ex at the end is an afterthought, the scenes are incoherently strung together.
• The mix of satire, slapstick, and political advocacy is not inspired, it is incoherent.
• The satire is pretty dumb. Not for making light of concentration camps, something Chaplin can’t be blamed for when noone knew what concentration camps were like, and years before the Final Solution. But because it’s not particularly pointed or perceptive.
• The music, unlike the acting, does exoticise the Jews.
• Esperanto in Fraktur… does not look recognisably like Esperanto.

• The final speech… like Mark (again) says in Mark Blanchard’s answer to United Nations: Should The Great Dictator’s final speech be made at the opening of every UN session ? .

Maudlin, over-long, preachy rather than persuasive.

Much better in the YouTube version with modern visuals and EDM tinkling in the background, than in the original.

No.

Nice to see the koppa though: Ϟ. And if I didn’t know any IPA, I’d have congratulated you on the phi too: φ.

For the same reason we don’t attribute the Atomic theory to Democritus (or Jain cosmology), but to John Dalton.

Democritus came up with a theory that there are indivisible atoms of matter. Heraclitus that fire was the first principle of all things, and Thales that it was water. These philosophers were philosophising; what they were not doing was science as we understand it. They were throwing up ideas and seeing what might stick, but without what we would consider empirical evidence. If Democritus and not Thales turns out to have been right, it was entirely by accident.

Same with Aristarchus and Copernicus. Even if Copernicus had read up on Aristarchus (e.g. Aristarchus and Copernicus; see also Gingerich, O. “Did Copernicus Owe a Debt to Aristarchus?” Journal for the History of Astronomy, Vol.16, NO.1/FEB, P. 37, 1985, cited in Wikipedia), Copernicus based his work on observational data (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium). The real work cementing it all, as Wade Schmaltz points out, came later with Galileo and Kepler; yet even what Copernicus did was in a different paradigm from the idle ideations of the ancients.