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What are the best minimalist pieces to listen to for those new to the minimalist style?
Some good answers here.
There are two answers to the question.
The wrong answer (though the one I prefer) is: what are some not very minimalist pieces, which I will enjoy listening to as someone unfamiliar with the style?
The answer to that includes some of my favourite 20th century pieces:
- Most things John Adams did in the 1980s, up to Nixon in China, which was his farewell to minimalism
- Philip Glass’ Akhnaten
- Steve Reich’s Tehilim
The problem with that is, you’re not really learning minimalism that way.
The right answer is to do what I did in my early 20s. Strap yourself in a chair, put on a true minimalist piece, and DO NOT MOVE until you get into it. The ones I used were:
- Steve Reich’s Violin Phase
- Philip Glass’ Einstein On The Beach
Even more basic than that, Steve Reich’s Clapping.
Noone here’s mentioning the Holy Minimalists, Pärt and Tavener. That’s probably right.
EDIT: No, Pärt’s been mentioned…
Does Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor sound better in other transcriptions than the original composition on violin?
IMO no. Part of the emotional point of the Chaconne for me is that it sounds hard to play. Keyboard versions in particular don’t register with me. (No, I haven’t heard the Busoni yet.) I’m a bit more ok with Lute/Guitar versions, they sound more idiomatic.
Classical Music: Does everyone play the same notes in the orchestra while playing a symphony, or do composers write different notes for each instrument in the orchestra while creating their music?
Almost always different notes. Even Unison passages mean that different instruments play the same note in different octaves.
Exceptions are so rare that this is the only one I can think of (though there are bound to be others). In Berg’s opera Wozzeck, right after Wozzeck kills Marie, Berg has an “Invention on a Single Note”. This has the note B played twice. The second time is in unison, with every instrument playing it in different octaves, in a long, terrifying crescendo.
The first time is usually played shorter, but I consider it even scarier. It is every instrument, one joining in after the other, playing the same note at the same pitch, B under middle C.
What should I look out for when migrating to Australia, specifically Melbourne?
So. You here yet? [EDIT: two weeks time, I see. Do please let us know how you find things!]
Things to look out for:
a touch of Dutch cafe , in Berwick. Outskirts of Melbourne, but they have a bunch of Dutch food and books, should you feel homesick.
I may have accidentally translated Het Wilhelmus into Klingon for the owners…
I can’t better the comprehensive responses from my betters, that you got to see in time for your planning. There would have been an extra culture shock for your girlfriend if she’d spent more time in NZ—Australia is just that bit bigger and brasher for her to be taken aback; but if she left at 5, she’s culturally Dutch. (And no shortage of Kiwis here, anyway.)
EDIT: Ah, just remembered the biggest downside for my German friends that have moved here.
Melbourne has a bedtime. Exceedingly hard to find anyplace open past 11, other than a few nightclubs and bars you don’t want to be in. It has not really had an all-night culture, although there are active moves to remedy that (including all-night public transport.)
What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree?
My story is common to that of many people who did a PhD out of hope and idealism, and got crushed by reality. This is not to discourage you to do linguistics as such, but to keep your eyes open. And read people like Rebecca Schuman at Slate.
So.
I was always interested in languages, and learned quite a few in high school. But I was in science stream, and my undergrad was in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. (Computer Science, because I am that old.) I did the degree because it had the highest entrance score in the state, so all the geeks in school did it; and because I liked maths.
Engineering managed to destroy my love of maths, thanks to its charming “shut up and learn the formula” approach to Fourier transforms. I never particularly cared about Engineering, and forgot everything I learned the day after the exam. Computer Science on the other hand gave me some good theoretical grounding, and ultimately my day jobs.
Towards the end of my undergrad degrees, I met a girl at a party, who was doing linguistics. I was intrigued by what she was saying about historical linguistics, and started showing up to her lectures.
I grinned throughout the lectures, because the lecturer was doing historical linguistics by fiat, instead of trying to prove the plausibility of what he was saying. (That’s why I get annoyed by circular reasoning in linguistics.) But by the end I was hooked, and I did enough linguistics as electives that they let me do a PhD. (The Australian system is rather less rigorous than the American.)
- What was your deciding factor? Unlike Computer Science and Engineering, it was something I felt passionate about.
- It gave me a sense of community (in my fellow students), and probably the first real friendships in my life.
- It gave me a sense of empowerment: I could (and did) make myself a world expert in something.
- It gave me a sense of purpose—indeed, a mission: by the time I was fifty, I decided, I was going to write the reference grammar of Mediaeval Greek.
(You’ll notice that my name is not listed on the staff in Greek Grammar to fill the gap. The reference grammar’s homepage is offline too. That’s what happens when grants runs out…)
- What jobs have you worked? Tangential ones.
- My job at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae is a combination of linguistics and programming, but it’s not linguistics research as linguists understand it; computational linguistics is much more an engineering job in general, and the Greek morphology recognition work is much more philology than linguistic research.
- I’ve done some other odds and ends in computational linguistics over the years, but the same caveats apply.
- I lectured as a casual for a couple of years. They may well have been the happiest of my life, but I decided I could not put up with the famine-or-feast or the flattery and fashionmongering that academia requires to get ahead. Especially as I had no interest in pursuing an employable subject area, as opposed to an area I was passionate about. (And noone hires Europeanist historical linguists in this country.)
- Linguistics gave me great analytical and communications skills which I’ve applied to my subsequent jobs, in IT policy and standards. Ontologies are something linguists naturally take to. But the formal semantics and discrete maths that would make ontologies second nature are usually in the too hard basket for linguistics departments. Right next to historical linguistics.
- Where did you hope the degree will take you? To being a tenured academic, lecturing with adoring audiences at my feet, writing 20 papers a year, and living the dream.
- Did you run into any unexpected issues? Apart from the fact that you can’t become a tenured academic without
- stepping on corpses
- selling out and doing research in fashionable areas
- coming to view both research and teaching as drudgery
- having your career contingent on grants funding
- having no free time, let alone time for research, because you spent half your life applying for grants, half doing admin, and the other half marking?
- Geez, bitter much? Yeah, actually. It took me years to find something I was passionate about, and years to reconcile with giving up on it. But my self-respect was ultimately worth more to me.
- Is there anything you would have done differently looking back? Despite this rant… no.
- It’s better to have loved and lost than to have gone straight out from Uni into programming. (Besides, how many Business Analysts start out as Business Analysts?)
- It’s good to have become a world expert; and it’s part of the reason why I’ve taken to Quora—I love communicating on it, and fora like Quora allow me to still be a linguist.
- It’s good to have honed your mind as a theoretician; they are transferrable skills, and you might as well have fun while acquiring them.
- If anything, I wish I had more humanities as an undergrad, so I could have had a more rounded education in linguistics.
And it’s good to have worked in a field whose native format is paragraphs and not dot points. As you can tell, I no longer work in such a field…
Answered 2016-02-19 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
What things do people from Australia miss most when they go abroad?
I lived in Orange County, CA, 1999–2002. Tell you what I missed. Yes, this will overlap with Vadim Berman.
- Food. Vadim begged not to get started, I will. Yes, it’s my fault for not cooking; I did myself permanent damage through three years of US takeout. In particular:
- Lamb
- Subtle pasta sauces
- Human-sized portions
- Coke that tastes like acid instead of cough syrup
- Obscure food
- Tim Tams
- To counter these: Australian ice cream was crap 15 years ago, and you can’t get decent Mexican in Australia. Taco Bill’s does not count.
- Come to think of it, getting decent Mexican was too much of a challenge in Orange County too.
- Rudeness. Yes, people in Australia are relatively relaxed and carefree. They are also far more British than they realise, reserved, and do not talk to randoms. (Foreigners coming here diagnose this as cliqueishness.) So no, we do not like it when people assume we do.
- I was heartily sick of being told “Hey How Ya Doin'” by randoms any time I ventured out the door. I dreaded going into the SuperShuttle and being chatted to by Americans. Do I know you? No? Then leave me alone already.
- Which is why, two years in, visiting New York was an epiphany. Finally, a place where I can be shoved by passers-by in the street!
- Absence of religion in the public sphere.
- Absence of flags in the public sphere. (Tony Abbott was in my future at that point.)
- Non-toxic politics and unnoticeable culture wars. (Tony Abbott was in my future at that point.)
- Having Australian accents on the TV not sound weird.
- Seeing people walk around to go to places.
- Human sized shopping malls.
- Weather. At all. (I was in SoCal.)
- Public transport. At all. (I was in SoCal. SoCal buses do not count.)
- Australian humour.
Why was the Columbo series so successful?
When I told a colleague years ago that I loved Columbo, his response was a snort: “Columbo. He’s all shtick.”
And yes, that’s why Columbo was so successful. Not because of the innovative inverted story telling; that’s just a convention. Not because of the cleverness of the crimes: the cleverness was variable, and much of the time too clever by half. Not because of trying to work out the incriminating evidence: you’d never convict on Columbo’s evidence much of the time, if it wasn’t for the culprits’ relief in confessing.
But because of the mischievous mind games that Columbo’s shtick involved, and the not too subtle class struggle they embodied.
Seeing a gruff, yelling Columbo with a pressed suit in the pilot is quite the shock…
Are Northern Italians really as “German-like” as they are portrayed?
My experiences when I was actually in Italy did not quite fit the stereotypes. We were embraced by the owners of a Florentine trattoria the way I would have expected in Sicily; and the Passeggiata in Desenzano del Garda was pretty much the volta I remember from my upbringing in Greece. Taormina, on the other hand, was stuck up enough to be in Tuscany (modulo the rustic beauticians).
Then again, as a colleague from Palermo pointed out to me a week later, “You were not in Sicily. You were in Taormina.”
On the other hand, my experience of Italian jazz fit the stereotype beautifully.
Maybe a decade ago, I attended an Italian Jazz festival, right here in Melbourne town. There were two acts in the Italian Jazz festival.
The first act was a second-generation local boy and his trio. He was from down south. Like most Italians here, because it was the poor Italians that felt they needed to migrate. The exception are the Italians from the Veneto. Because they too were poor.
The first act made sure you knew he was from down south. He was voluble and emotional and casual, and he was having a lot of fun with his act. His last number was a Tarantella, for God’s sake. A Tarantella. In a Jazz festival.
Then the second act came on.
The second act were from Trieste.
The second act looked like Dieter and the Sprockets (Saturday Night Live).
They also pretty much sounded like it.
They introduced their set with:
Ve play vot ve used to call Northern. Italian. Jazz. Ve now prefer to call it Central. European. Jazz.
And I’ll tell you, that’s exactly what they played. No Tarantellas in their set.
Other than that: what everyone else here said.
How did your parents decide on your name?
Boutros’ Nick, as the villagers called him: Ο Νικολής του Πούτρου. But in the papers of the state and church, he was set down as Nicholas Hadjimarcou. With a c and a dj, because the state was British Cyprus, which acknowledged that the Cypriots pronounces their j’s. The Greek alphabet doesn’t, so Νικόλαος Χατζημάρκου.
Boutros’ Nick married Maria Haralambidou, and they had nine pregnancies, eight births, and seven children who made it to adulthood. George, Helen, Chris, Stavros, Dora, Andrew, and Marc-Anthony. Or at least, Marc-Anthony is what the state knows him as, because the godfather insisted on it. Boutros’ Nick preferred Savva, and Savvakis is what he goes by to this day.
Savvakis is also the only male child who stayed in Cyprus, and the only one who kept Boutros’ Nick’s surname.
The other four boys, George, Chris, Stavros and Andrew, all migrated to Australia, between 1947 and 1970. Chris had switched his surname to his patronymic before leaving; Christodoulos, son of Nicholas, Hadjimarcou (Χριστόδουλος Νικολάου Χατζημάρκου), thus became Chris Nicholas (Χρίστος Νικολάου). Cypriots do this, though I don’t know how frequently.
George came to Australia way before Chris had switched his surname—Chris would have been just 15; but George landed in Sale, Victoria in 1947, at a time when noone particularly felt like deciphering Hadjimarcou. So he found the surname switch expedient. The other two siblings moved two decades later, and they too found the switch expedient—the more so because they all ended up in Launceston, Tasmania, and didn’t want to go by separate surnames.
Now it is the firm custom among Greeks that their firstborn children take their grandparents’ names. Families used to go to war over less: not giving your parent’s name to your child was a grave insult, and that sentiment is only loosening now. It certainly hadn’t loosened in the ’60s and ’70s in the Tasmanian Greek community.
Four Nicholas brothers had four firstborn sons. It was thus an inevitability that there be four Nick Nicholas’s. I’m Stavros’.
And no, my parents thought nothing of it. They were at least merciful enough not to put down my given name in the birth certificate as Nicholas.
Btw. My father went by Nicholas, but he only changed it by deed poll to Nicholas when we were about to leave for Greece. He used Nicholas so he wouldn’t go by a different surname to his brothers; he changed it officially so he wouldn’t go by a different surname to his children.
.i mi ckire do doi filip niuton lenu do cpedu lenu mi spuda .i ku’i pe’i do pujeca djuno ledu’u mi se cmene mu’i dakau
Who was considered history’s greatest villain before WW2?
Brandon Li’s answer of Pharaoh is excellent, but given the Judaeo-Christian context of Pharaoh, I’d argue that a bigger villain in that culture was Judas Iscariot. Tony Wright has argued that for pre-Hitler Australian politics, but I’m sure Judas was invoked much more widely than that: From Judas to Goebbels: when political insult risks dying of shame