The Mahler Hammer

The last movement of Mahler’s sixth symphony calls for the sound of a hammer, which the composer indicated should be “brief and mighty, but dull in resonance and with a non-metallic character (like the fall of an axe).” (The two blows represent the death of Mahler’s daughter Maria and the diagnosis of his heart condition.)

Because no recognized instrument exists to fulfill this function, symphonies have had to devise their own solutions, often striking a wooden box or bass drum with a mallet or sledgehammer. Houston Symphony percussionist Brian Del Signore built a 22-pound custom hammer and a wooden box to receive the blow.

| Art · Technology

Family Plan

Given names of the 11 children of Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Russell of Vinton, Ohio, 1972:

  • Noel Leon
  • Novel Levon
  • Norwood Doowron
  • Nerol Loren
  • Leron Norel
  • Noble Elbon
  • Lledo Odell
  • Laur Rual
  • Loneva Avenol
  • Lebanna Annabel
  • Leah Hael

“Mother did it, but I don’t know why,” Laur told UPI. “She would take names from the Bible and other books and compare them until they came out that way.”

Bonus palindrome item: Volume 1, Issue 5 of Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, titled “Fearful Symmetry,” is a deliberately contrived visual palindrome, not just in structure but often within individual panels (designed by artist Dave Gibbons). Pedro Ribeiro shows the correspondences here.

| Art · Language · Oddities

Piecework

Austrian artist Thomas Medicus’ 2014 anamorphic sculpture Emulsifier arranges 160 hand-painted glass strips to present each of four different images, depending on the viewer’s perspective.

Head Instructor, below, uses the same technique. More at his website.

| Art

Studies

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bologna,_Museo_internazionale_e_biblioteca_della_musica_(2).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

This bookcase, in Bologna’s International Music Museum and Library, is itself a work of art — the doors are paintings depicting shelves of music books, rendered by Baroque artist Giuseppe Crespi.

Below: In 2014, designer József Páhy devised this bookish façade for a housing estate in Kazincbarcika, Northern Hungary. That’s a teddy bear on the bottom shelf.

Image: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kazincbarcika,_Nagy_Lajos_%C3%BAt_14-18..JPG">Wikimedia Commons</a>
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kazincbarcika,_Nagy_Lajos_%C3%BAt_14-18..JPG
| Art

A Medieval Mystery

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Adoration_of_the_Christ_Child_Follower_of_Jan_Joest_of_Kalkar.jpg

In this 1515 painting, The Adoration of the Christ Child, the angel immediately to Mary’s left appears to bear the characteristic facial features of Down syndrome (click to enlarge). This would make the painting one of the earliest representations of the syndrome in Western art.

Unfortunately, little is known about it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns it, has identified the painter only as a “follower of Jan Joest of Kalkar.” Researchers Andrew Levitas and Cheryl Reid have suggested that the painting may indicate that individuals with Down syndrome were not regarded as disabled in medieval society. But so little is known about the work or its creator that it’s hard to establish a reliable conclusion.

“After all the speculations, we are left with a haunting late-medieval image of a person with apparent Down syndrome with all the accouterments of divinity. It is impossible to know whether any disability had been recognized or whether it simply was not relevant in that time and place.”

(Andrew S. Levitas and Cheryl S. Reid, “An Angel With Down Syndrome in a Sixteenth Century Flemish Nativity Painting,” American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 116:4 [2003], 399-405.) (Thanks, Serge.)

| Art · History · Society

Note Taking

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ut_Queant_Laxis_MT.png

Where did the familiar syllables of solfège (do, re, mi) come from? Eleventh-century music theorist Guido of Arezzo collected the first syllable of each line in the Latin hymn “Ut queant laxis,” the “Hymn to St. John the Baptist.” Because the hymn’s lines begin on successive scale degrees, each of these initial syllables is sung with its namesake note:

Ut queant laxīs
resonāre fibrīs
Mīra gestōrum
famulī tuōrum,
Solve pollūti
labiī reātum,
Sancte Iohannēs.

Ut was changed to do in the 17th century, and the seventh note, ti, was added later to complete the scale.

| Art · History · Language

Double Duty

https://archive.org/details/StrandVolume22/page/n789/mode/2up?view=theater

From the Strand, December 1901, “one of Sir John Stainer’s musical jokes, two hymns in one — in B flat or G major, according to the manner in which it is read, upside up or upside down. It was written as an autograph for a friend of his son’s.”

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