Read along with the text of the 25th Amendment online here. And get some background from the Constitution Center here, and Vox’s explainer here.
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam Has Digitized 818,000 Works of Art, Including Famous Works by Rembrandt and Vermeer
Art may seem inessential to those who make the big decisions in times of crisis. But it has never seemed more necessary to artists working in the time of COVID. So it was 360 years ago when Rembrandt painted a portrait of his son, Titus, in a monk’s robe in 1660. Eight years later, Titus was dead from plague, which had only a few years earlier killed Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt’s former housekeeper and second wife, who helped raise Titus, Rembrandt’s only child to survive into adulthood.
These unimaginable losses “contributed to the tragedy and anguish we see in Rembrandt’s late self-portraits,” writes The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. During the plague, Rembrandt also used his work as social critique.
His painting The Rat-Poison Peddler, shows, “in a sense,” the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Tom Rassieur tells the Star Tribune, “the guy who purports to be helping—the exterminator—is probably doing as much to spread the disease as anyone else. That relates to [criticism] of our leadership today.” In his last years, Rembrandt painted self-portraits of his isolation and grief that still resonate with our isolation and grief today.
Elsewhere in the Netherlands, Rembrandt’s contemporary Jan Vermeer “was no stranger to the kind of socially isolated world we now find ourselves in,” Breeze Barrington writes at CNN. “His hometown of Delft was stricken with plague several times in the artist’s lifetime. In 1635 and 1636 over 2,000 people died, and in the mid-1650s and mid-1660s hundreds more.” The qualities we most associate with Vermeer’s work, the solitude and attentive presence, were developed during time spent in isolation.
“In this time of forced isolation,” says Friso Lammertse, curator of 17th-century Dutch painting at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Vermeer’s work “can point us at the fact that extreme beauty can be found just in our room.” The Rijksmuseum hasn’t just recommended art in our current state of aloneness, but the museum has also doubled its collection of free, high resolution works online, by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and a host of other artists who used art to cope with loss and loneliness during the plagues of their times. The museum now offers 818,000 digitized images in total.
The museum has promised to “bring the museum to you,” and they have delivered not only with their extensive digital collection, free for downloading, sharing and editing with a free Rijksmuseum account, but also with informative series on their website. Art is essential in the best and worst of times, and especially now, when it shows us how to look closely at ourselves, our loved ones, and our surroundings, and treat life with more care and attention. Enter the Rijksmuseum online collections here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
How Tibetan Monks Use Meditation to Raise Their Peripheral Body Temperature 16–17 Degrees
Tibetan monks in remote regions of the Himalayas have long claimed near miraculous powers through yogic practices that resemble nothing you’ll find offered at your local gym, though they may derive from some similar Indian sources. One such meditative practice, a breathing exercise known as tummo, tum-mo, or g‑tummo, supposedly generates body heat and can raise one’s peripheral body temperature 16–17 degrees—a distinctly advantageous ability when sitting outside in the snow-capped mountains.
Perhaps a certain amount of skepticism is warranted, but in 1981, Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson was determined to take these ancient practices seriously, even though his first encounters with western practitioners of tummo produced results he deemed “fraudulent.” Not ready to toss centuries of wisdom, Benson decided instead to travel to the source after meeting the Dalai Lama and receiving permission to study tummo practitioners in Northern India.
Benson’s research became a 20-year project of studying tummo and other advanced techniques while he also taught at the Harvard Medical School and served as president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston, where he believes the study of meditation can “uncover capacities that will help us to better treat stress-related illnesses.” The claims of monks who practice tummo have been substantiated in Benson’s work, showing, he says, “what advanced forms of meditation can do to help the mind control physical processes once thought to be uncontrollable.”
In his own experimental settings, “Benson found that [Tibetan] monks possessed remarkable capacities for controlling their oxygen intake, body temperatures and even brainwaves,” notes Aeon. Another study undertaken in 2013 by Maria Kozhevnikov, cognitive neuroscientist at the National University of Singapore, “corroborated much of what Benson had observed, including practitioners’ ability to raise their body temperatures to feverish levels by combining visualization and specialized breathing.”
In the short documentary film above—actually a 7‑minute trailer for Russ Pariseau’s feature-length film Advanced Tibetan Meditation: The Investigations of Herbert Benson MD—we get a brief introduction to tummo, a word that translates to “inner fire” and relates to the ferocity of a female deity. Benson explains the ideas behind the practice in concise terms that sum up a central premise of Tibetan Buddhism in general:
Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There’s another reality we can tap into that’s unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation. The heat they generate during the process is just a by-product of g Tum-mo meditation
Perhaps centuries-old non-European practices do not particularly need to be debunked, demystified, or validated by modern scientific medicine to keep working for their practitioners; but doctors have significantly benefited those in their care through an acceptance of the healing properties of, say, psilocybin or mindfulness, now serious subjects of study and clinical treatment in top Euro-American institutions. Just as this research is being popularized among both the medical establishment and general public, we may someday see a surge of interest in advanced tantric practices like tummo.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Animation Pioneer Lotte Reiniger Adapts Mozart’s The Magic Flute into an All-Silhouette Short Film (1935)
When Lotte Reiniger began making animation in the late 1910s, her work looked like nothing that had ever been shot on film. In fact, it also resembles nothing else achieved in the realm of cinema in the century since. Even the enormously budgeted and staffed productions of major studios have yet to replicate the stark, quavering charm of her silhouette animations. Those studios do know full well, however, what Reiniger realized long before: that no other medium can more vividly realize the visions of fairy tales. To believe that, one needs only watch her 1922 Cinderella or 1955 Hansel and Gretel, previously featured here on Open Culture.
It was between those productions that Reiniger made the work for which she’s now best remembered: the 1926 One Thousand and One Nights pastiche The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the very first feature in animation history. Nine years later, she turned to source material closer at hand, culturally speaking, and adapted a section of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.
You can watch the result, the ten-minute Papageno, at the top of the post. A bird-catcher, the title character finds one day that all the avians around him have become tiny human females. Though none of them stick around, an ostrich later delivers him a full-size maiden, only for a giant snake to drive her away. Will Papageno defeat the serpent and reclaim his beloved, or submit to despair?
“The magic of the fairy tale has always been her greatest fascination, yet her own interpretations attain a unique quality,” says the narrator of the 1970 documentary short just above, in which Reiniger re-enacts the thoroughly analog and highly labor-intensive making of Papageno. “The figures she cuts out and constructs were originally inspired by the puppets used in traditional Eastern shadow theaters, of which the silhouette form is the logical conclusion.” This hybridization of venerable narrative material from Western lands like Germany with an even more venerable aesthetic from Eastern lands like Indonesia has assured only part of her work’s enduring appeal. “Ms. Reiniger will continue to have a strange affection for each of her figures,” the narrator notes. This is “an understandable affection, for in their flexibility they have almost human characteristics of movement.” It’s an affection anyone with an interest in animation, fairy tales, or Mozart will share.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
When Iggy Pop Published an Essay, “Caesar Lives,” in an Academic Journal about His Love for Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1995)
Purveyors of the shocking, primal idiocy of pure rock and roll can in many cases be some of the most intelligent people in pop. Or at least that’s the case with the king of shocking, primal idiocy, Iggy Pop. He has interpreted Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” and delivered the John Peel Lecture for BBC Music, becoming “a visiting professor from the School of Punk Rock Hard Knocks,” writes Rolling Stone and bringing an elder statesman’s perspective informed not only by his years in the bowels of the music industry but also by his avocation as a scholar of the Roman Empire….
Yes, that’s right, Iggy Pop is not only an adroit stylist of some of the most brilliantly stupid garage rock ever made, but he’s also a serious reader and thinker who once published a brief reflection on his relationship with Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the academic journal Ireland Classics.
“Iggy Pop, like Bob Dylan,” writes E.J. Hutchinson, “has an avid interest in Roman antiquity and its genetic connection to contemporary life.” He may also be the sharpest, wiliest embodiment of post-industrial American decline—his entire musical personality a punch in the collective face of the nation’s delusions.
In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin).
The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude.
Hutchinson gives us a finely wrought analysis of Pop’s “tour de force of classical Gibbonian English prose, a scrap of Ciceronian periodicity.” (Gibbon did, indeed, look like a heavy dude.) Pop’s reading of Gibbon, “with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels,” absorbed him in its “clash of beliefs, personalities and values,” he writes, “played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypal characters.” All of this appealed to him, he writes, given his own role in “a political business… the music business, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of religion-rental.”
Gibbon’s massive saga, a monumental example of sweeping Enlightenment historiography, so captivated Pop that a decade later, it inspired “an extemporaneous soliloquy” he called “Caesar,” the closing track on 1993’s “overlooked masterpiece” American Caesar. The spoken word piece “made me laugh my ass off,” he writes, “because it was so true. America is Rome. Of course, why shouldn’t it be? All of Western life and institutions today are traceable to the Romans and their world. We are all Roman children for better or worse.”
But there was much more to Pop’s reading of Gibbon—which he eventually enjoyed in a “beautiful edition in three volumes of the magnificent original unabridged”—than a possibly facile comparison between one failing empire and another. Much more, indeed. Reading Gibbon, he writes (sounding very much like another proponent of the classics, Italo Calvino), taught him how to think about the present, and how to think, humbly, about himself. He ends his essay with a numbered list of “just some of the ways I benefit”:
- I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day.
- I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins — military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial — are all there to be scrutinized in their infancy. I have gained perspective.
- The language in which the book is written is rich and complete, as the language of today is not.
- I find out how little I know.
- I am inspired by the will and erudition which enabled Gibbon to complete a work of twenty-odd years. The guy stuck with things. I urge anyone who wants life on earth to really come alive for them to enjoy the beautiful ancestral ancient world.
Read Pop’s full 1995 Ireland Classics essay on Jstor or Medium.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s Little-Known and Hand-Illustrated Children’s Book, Mr. Bliss
His were usually humorous stories, full of magic, and very often, they contained a connection to the children’s lives, because it was primarily for them that he invented them.
–Sarah Zama
The fact that “much of the inspiration of the Lord of the Rings came from [J.R.R. Tolkien’s] family,” Danielle Burgos writes at Bustle, has become an oft-repeated piece of trivia, especially thanks to such popular treatments of the author’s life as Humphrey Carter’s authorized biography, the Nicholas Hoult-starring biopic, Tolkien, and the Catherine McIlwaine-edited collection Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth. As much as Tolkien drew on his extensive knowledge of Norse, Germanic, and other mythologies and linguistic histories, and from his harrowing experiences in WWI, his career as a legendary fantasy author may never have come about without his children.
“In just one example,” notes Burgos, a collection of Tolkien’s letters shows that the character of Tom Bombadil “was based on son Michael’s wooden toy doll.” Tolkien’s oldest son John remarked before the release of the first Peter Jackson adaptation, “It’s quite incredible. When I think when we were growing up these were just stories that we were told.”
Tolkien strenuously resisted the label of children’s author; he “firmly believed,” Maria Popova points out, “that there is no such thing as writing for children.” But the degree to which his storytelling and characterization developed from his desire to entertain and educate his kids can’t be overstated in the development of his early fiction.
We see this in a small way in the little-known children’s book Mr. Bliss, written and illustrated by Tolkien sometime in the 1930s, kept in a drawer until 1957, and only published posthumously in 1982. The story itself “was inspired by his first car, which he purchased in 1932.” As evidence of its importance to the larger Tolkien canon, Popova writes, the author “went on to use two of the character names from the book, Gaffer Gamgee and Boffin, in The Lord of the Rings.” In other respects, however, Mr. Bliss is very unlike the medieval fantasies that surrounded its composition.
The book, affectionately handwritten and illustrated by Tolkien himself — who, also unbeknownst to many, was a dedicated artist — tells the story of Mr. Bliss, a lovable eccentric known for his exceptionally tall hats and his “girabbits,” the giraffe-headed, rabbit-bodied creatures that live in his backyard. One day, Mr. Bliss decides to buy his very first motor car[.] But his first drive en route to a friend’s house soon turns into a Rube Goldberg machine of disaster as he collides with nearly everything imaginable, then gets kidnapped by three bears.
Tolkien submitted the book for publication after the runaway success of The Hobbit created a market demand he had no particular desire to meet, telling his publisher that the story was complete. But Mr. Bliss was rejected, ostensibly because its illustrations were too expensive to reproduce. In truth, however, the public wanted more hobbits, elves, dwarves, wizards, and poetry and song in beautiful invented languages.
Tolkien would, of course, eventually deliver a “New Hobbit,” in the form of the The Lord of the Rings trilogy—books that weren’t specifically “written for his children,” Sarah Zama writes, but in which “the story he had indeed created for his children weighed heavily.” See several more Tolkien-illustrated pages from one of the trilogy’s whimsical early ancestors, Mr. Bliss, at Brain Pickings and purchase a copy of the book here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Rome’s Colosseum Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times
Rome wasn’t built in a day. But one of its most renowned attractions could be returned to its first-century glory in just two years — or at least, part of one of its most famous attractions could be. In our time, the Colosseum has long been a major Roman tourist destination–one that lacks even a proper floor. Visitors today see right through to its underground hypogeum, an impressive mechanical labyrinth used to convey gladiators into the arena, as well as a variety of other performers, willing and unwilling, human and otherwise. “Eyewitnesses describe how animals appeared suddenly from below, as if by magic, sometimes apparently launched high into the air,” writes Smithsonian’s Tom Mueller.
“The hypogeum allowed the organizers of the games to create surprises and build suspense,” the German Archaeological Institute in Rome’s Heinz-Jürgen Beste tells Mueller. “A hunter in the arena wouldn’t know where the next lion would appear, or whether two or three lions might emerge instead of just one.”
Now, the Italian government has announced plans to return the element of surprise to the Colosseum with a restoration of its elaborate “retractable floor.” This has drawn the attention of media concerned with history and travel, but also the world of architecture and design. With €10 million already pledged by the state, the worldwide call is out for architectural proposals, due by February 1 of this year for a tentative completion date of 2023.
The Colosseum, which once seated 50,000 spectators, hasn’t put on a battle since the fifth century. The hypogeum’s long exposure to the elements means that any architectural firm eager to take on this project will have its work cut out for it. Few restorations could demand the striking of a trickier balance between historical faithfulness and modern functionality. Whatever design gets selected, its trap doors and hidden elevators will be employed for rather different entertainments than, say, the death matches between slaves and beasts to which so many ancient Romans thrilled. The Italian government intends to use the Colosseum’s new floor to put on theater productions and concerts – which should turn it into an even more popular attraction when we can all once again go to the theater, concerts, and indeed Italy.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Discover Tokyo’s Museum Dedicated to Parasites: A Unique and Disturbing Institution
Photo by Guilhem Vellut
Weary as we are of hearing about not just the coronavirus but viruses in general, shall we we turn our attention to parasites instead? The Meguro Parasitological Museum has been concentrating its intellectual and educational energies in that direction since 1953. Located in the eponymous neighborhood of Tokyo, it houses more than 60,000 species of parasite, with more than 300 on display at any given time. “On the first floor we present the ‘Diversity of Parasites’ displaying various types of parasite specimens with accompanying educational movies,” write directors Midori Kamegai and Kazuo Ogawa. “The second floor exhibits are ‘Human and Zoonotic Parasites’ showing parasite life cycles and the symptoms they cause during human infection.”
Photo by Guilhem Vellut
We’ve here included a few choice pictures from the museum, but as Culture Trip’s India Irving warns, “the real-life specimens are far worse than the photographs; some of the displays present preserved parasites actually popping out of their animal hosts.”
She names as “the most repulsive item on view” a tapeworm “roughly the size of a London bus — it is the longest tapeworm in world and is exhibited alongside a rope of the same length so visitors can get a physical feel for just how enormous it actually was.” What other parasitological museum could hope to compete with that? Not that any have tried: the Meguro Parasitological Museum proudly describes itself as the only such institution in the world.
Photo by Guilhem Vellut
“Some of the displays are merely disturbing, while others are slightly more ghastly,” writes Mental Floss’ Jake Rossen. “If you’ve ever wanted to see a photo of a tropical bug prompting a human testicle to swell to the size of a gym bag, this is the place for you.” Like many other museums, it did shut down for a time earlier in the pandemic, but has been open again since June. (If you happen not to be a Japanese speaker, guides in English and other languages are available in both text and app form.) If current conditions have nevertheless kept Japan itself out of your reach, you can have a look at the Meguro Parasitological Museum’s unique offerings through this Flickr gallery — which gets many of us as close to these organisms as we care to be.
via Mental Floss
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Dial-a-Poem: The Groundbreaking Phone Service That Let People Hear Poems Read by Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg & More (1968)
Thanks for allowing me to be a poet. A noble effort, doomed, but the only choice. —John Giorno, Thanx for Nothing
Dialing a poem today, I’m connected to Joe Brainard, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1994, reading an excerpt of “I Remember.” He stumbles over some words. It’s exciting. There’s a feeling of immediacy. When the reading ends in an old-fashioned dial tone, I immediately think of a half-dozen friends I’d like to call (assuming they respond to something that’s not a tag or text).
“Take down this number,” I’d say. “641–793-8122. Don’t ask questions. Just call it. You’ll love it.”
And they probably would, though they wouldn’t hear the same recording I did.
As Dial-A-Poem’s founder, the late John Giorno, remarked in a 2012 interview:
A person asked me the other day: “What happens if I listen to a poem and I want to tell a friend to listen to it?” I told him: “Well, she can’t.” [laughs] That’s the point. What happens is, when things are really successful, you create desire that is unfulfillable. That’s what makes something work.
Giorno established Dial-A-Poem in 1968, placing ten landlines connected to reel-to-reel answering machines in a room in New York City’s Architectural League:
I sort of stumbled on [the concept] by chance… I was talking to someone on the telephone one morning, and it was so boring. I probably had a hangover and was probably crashing, and I got irritable and said to myself at that moment, “Why can’t this be a poem?” That’s how the idea came to me. And we got a quarter of a page in The New York Times with the telephone number you could dial.
In its first four-and-a-half months of operation, Dial-A-Poem logged 1,112,237 incoming calls, including some from listeners overseas. (The original phone number was 212–628-0400.) The hours of heaviest traffic suggested that a lot of bored office workers were sneaking a little poetry into their 9‑to‑5 day.
Dial-A-Poem reconceived of the telephone as a new media device:
Before Dial-A-Poem, the telephone was used one-to-one. Dial-A-Poem’s success gave rise to a Dial-A-Something industry: from Dial-A-Joke, Dial-A-Horoscope, Dial-A-Stock Quotation, Dial Sports, to the 900 number paying for a call, to phone sex, and ever more extraordinary technology. Dial-A-Poem, by chance, ushered in a new era in telecommunications.
Featured poets included such heavy hitters as William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, and Frank O’Hara (who “only liked you if you wrote like him”).
The content was risqué, political, a direct response to the Vietnam War, the political climate, and social conservatism. No one bothered with rhymes, and inspiration was not necessarily the goal.
Unlike Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and other career-minded artists who he hung out with (and bedded), Giorno never made a secret of his homosexuality. Sexually explicit and queer content had a home at Dial-a-Poem.
Meanwhile, Dial-a-Poem was featured in Junior Scholastic Magazine, and dialing in became a homework assignment for many New York City Public School students.
Two twelve-year-old boys nearly scuppered the project when one of their mothers caught them giggling over the Jim Carroll poem, above, and raised a ruckus with the Board of Ed, who in turn put pressure on the telephone company to discontinue service. The New York State Council on the Arts’ lawyers intervened, a win for horny middle schoolers… and poetry!
For anyone interested, an album called You’re A Hook: The 15 Year Anniversary Of Dial-A-Poem (1968–1983) was released in 1983. Vinyl copies are still floating around.
If you dial 641.793.8122, you can still access recordings from an archive of poetry, notes SFMoMA.
via Messy Nessy
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Did Beethoven Use a Broken Metronome When Composing His String Quartets? Scientists & Musicians Try to Solve the Centuries-Old Mystery
When it comes to classical composers, Beethoven was pretty metal. But was he writing some kind of classical thrash? Hardcore orchestrations too fast for the average musician to play? 66 out of 135 of Beethoven’s tempo markings made with his new metronome in the early 1800s seem “absurdly fast and thus possibly wrong,” researchers write in a recent American Mathematical Society article titled “Was Something Wrong with Beethoven’s Metronome?” Indeed, the authors go on, “many if not most of Beethoven’s markings have been ignored by latter day conductors and recording artists” because of their incredible speed.
Since the late 19th century and into the age of recorded music, conductors have slowed Beethoven’s quartets down, so that we have all internalized them at a slower pace than he presumably meant them to be played. “These pieces have throughout the years entered the subconscious of professional musicians, amateurs and audiences, and the tradition,” writes the Beethoven Project, “handed down by the great quartets of yesteryear.” Slower tempos have “become a norm against which all subsequent performances are judged.”
Eybler Quartet violist Patrick Jordan found out just how deeply musicians and audiences have internalized slower tempi when he became interested in playing and recording at Beethoven’s indicated speeds in the mid-80s. “Finding a group of people who were prepared to actually take [Beethoven’s metronome marks] seriously—that was a 30-year wait,” he tells CBC. “A huge amount of our labour required that we un-learn those things; that we get notions of what we’ve heard recorded and played in concerts many times out of our heads and try to put in what Beethoven, at least at some point in his life, believed and thought highly enough to make a note of and publish.”
But did he? The subject of Beethoven’s metronome has been a source of controversy for some time. A few historians have theorized that the inventor of the metronome, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, “something of a mechanical wizard,” Smithsonian writes, and also something of a disreputable character, sabotaged the device he presented to the composer in 1815 as a peace offering after he sued Beethoven for the rights to a composition. (Mälzel actually stole the metronome’s design from a Dutch mechanic named Dietrich Winkel.) But most musicologists and historians have dismissed the theory of deliberate trickery.
Still, the problem of too-fast tempi persists. “The literature on the subject is enormous,” admit the authors of the American Mathematical Society study. Their research suggests that Beethoven’s metronome was simply broken and he didn’t notice. Likewise data scientists at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have theorized that the composer, one of the very first to use the device, misread the machine, a case of musical misprision in his reaction against what he called in 1817 “these nonsensical terms allegro, andante, adagio, presto….”
Theorists may find the tempi hard to believe, but the Toronto-based Eybler Quartet was undeterred by their skepticism. “I don’t think there’s any evidence to suggest that the mechanism itself was [faulty],” says Jordan, “and we know from [Beethoven’s] correspondence and contemporaneous accounts that he was very concerned that his metronome stay in good working order and he had it recalibrated frequently so it was accurate.” Jordan instead credits the punishing speeds to Romanticism’s passionate individualism, and to the fact that “Beethoven was not always so very nice.” Maybe, instead of soothing his audiences, he wanted to shock them and set their hearts racing.
Who are we to believe? Questions of tempo can be fraught in classical circles (witness the reactions to Glenn Gould’s absurdly slow versions of Bach.) The metronome was supposed to solve problems of rhythmic imprecision. Instead, at least in Beethoven’s case, it reinscribed them in compositions that boldly challenge ideas of what a classical quartet is supposed to sound like, which makes me think he knew exactly what he was doing.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2021: The Great Gatsby & Mrs. Dalloway, Music by Irving Berlin & Duke Ellington, Comedies by Buster Keaton, and More
“The year 1925 was a golden moment in literary history,” writes the BBC’s Jane Ciabattari. “Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were all published that year. As were Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, among others.” In that year, adds Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain Jennifer Jenkins, “the stylistic innovations produced by books such as Gatsby, or The Trial, or Mrs. Dalloway marked a change in both the tone and the substance of our literary culture, a broadening of the range of possibilities available to writers.”
In the year 2021, no matter what area of culture we inhabit, we now find our own range of possibilities broadened. Works from 1925 have entered the public domain in the United States, and Duke University’s post rounds up more than a few notable examples. These include, in addition to the aforementioned titles, books like W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil and Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s A Daughter of the Samurai; films like The Freshman and Go West, by silent-comedy masters Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton; and music like Irving Berlin’s “Always” and several compositions by Duke Ellington, including “Jig Walk” and “With You.”
These works’ public-domain status means that, among many other benefits to all of us, the Internet Archive can easily add them to its online library. In addition, writes Jenkins, “HathiTrust will make tens of thousands of titles from 1925 available in its digital repository. Google Books will offer the full text of books from that year, instead of showing only snippet views or authorized previews. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can afford to publicly perform, or rearrange, the music.” And the creators of today “can legally build on the past — reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs.”
Does any newly public-domained work of 2021 hold out as obvious a promise in that regard as Fitzgerald’s great American novel? Any of us can now make The Great Gatsby “into a film, or opera, or musical,” retell it “from the perspective of Myrtle or Jordan, or make prequels and sequels,” writes Jenkins. “In fact, novelist Michael Farris Smith is slated to release Nick, a Gatsby prequel telling the story of Nick Carraway’s life before he moves to West Egg, on January 5, 2021.” Whatever results, it will further prove what Ciabattari calls the “continuing resonance” of not just Jay Gatsby but all the other major characters created by the novelists of 1925, inhabitants as well as embodiments of a “transformative time” who are “still enthralling generations of new readers” — and writers, or for that matter, creators of all kinds.
Related Content:
Free: The Great Gatsby & Other Major Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black, Starring a 19-Year-old Billie Holiday
18 (Free) Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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