sadness and strength

Plague Year(s) Bach Project, 12th month

Ariana Kashefi recently played the D minor suite in a lockdown livestream and explained that it represents sadness and grief with an underlying sense of strength and courage. So I guess it's perfect for lockdown number three and the beginning of plague year number two. And to properly wallow in the sadness bit, I'm now moving on to the Sarabande.

Some helpful links:

I'm starting with Inbal Segev's musings, as always, and I found a few recordings of the whole D minor suite, (with timestamps for the sarabande in the link to take you there directly) from:
Ariana Kashefi
Eva Lymenstull
Misha Maisky
Laurens Price-Nowak

I'm also adding these videos to my youtube playlist "cello repertoire".

In January, I learned the second minuet of the D minor suite (there were some scary chords that put me off the first minuet). It took me just over 21 days to memorise its 24 bars, which inspired me to check if the rate of 1 bar per day of practice is typical and indeed it is: since March 15 2020 I have clocked up 300 days of practice and managed to memorise 311 bars. I should check how many bars the six suites have overall, but I suspect three years won't be enough to learn them all.

I spent the rest of the month memorising what was left of the Gigue in C, and learning to play the Bourrees in time with a metronome, so with all these improvements, the list now looks like this:

1) movements I've studied for a month, then put aside for now
1.1. Prelude
1.2 Allemande

2) movements memorised in a significant part
1.3 Courante (2/3)
2.5 Minuet I&II (1/2)
3.4 Sarabande (1/3)

3) movements memorised in their entirety
1.4 Sarabande
1.5 Minuet I&II
1.6 Gigue
3.6. Gigue

4) movements memorised and synchronised with metronome
3.5 Bourree I&II

Heinrich at last September's socially distanced slow session in Florence Park.

PS: predictably, I couldn't resist doing the maths, I think the total is 1933 bars, so learning all at one bar per day would take five years, three months and two weeks. Realistically though, I've spotted quite a few bars in suites 5 and 6 that I definitely won't be able to get into my head.

entering plague year 2

The novel coronavirus started spreading in the UK around this time last year, so we're now entering the second year. And we've passed 100,000 deaths even by the most conservative metrics used by the government. And with the new vaccines and the new variants, the second year will be a completely different game, although I'm not confident the UK government will handle it much better than the first one.

Oh and my new feature on the development of the vaccines that are now being used is out as a preprint, free access here, the regular publication date will be Monday Feb 8th. I'll do a proper blog post for it then.

Might be a good time to round up the Covid-related contributions from the first year:

Features

• Pandemic genomics (21.12.)
• Communicating science in a crisis (6.7.)
• Finding comfort in nature (20.4.)
• Virus outbreak crosses boundaries (9.3.)

Blog entries

• the first 40,000 (6.6.)
• numbers crunched (17.5.)
• maths for dummies (9.5.)
• stuck inside (26.4.)
• chronicle of a disaster foretold (19.4.)
• mind your exponentials (27.3.)
• stay home save lives (22.3.)

I'm a great fan of the Corona cover art of Der Spiegel, this is issue 03 of 2021.

Links

This Guardian editorial concludes: "the story of Britain’s pandemic will long serve as a monument to bad government."

See also the very depressing video summary from Led by donkeys.

marine marvels

It has almost become a January tradition (since Fantastic species and where to find them in 2017) that I start the year writing a light-hearted feature on the wonders of the natural world. So this years it's all about sponges:

Magical mysteries of marine sponges

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 2, 25 January 2021, Pages R51-R54

FREE access to full text and PDF download

Many sponges have hidden mineral skeletons, but glass sponges have their glass structures on display, like this Venus’ flower basket (Euplectella aspergillum) found in deep waters of the Pacific. (Photo: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program, Gulf of Mexico 2012 Expedition (CC BY 2.0).)

PS Last year's "fantastic" feature was about evolutionary lineages losing or gaining legs when they change their way of locomotion:

Step changes in evolution

It is now in the open archives.

Where you'll also find the first feature of last year, about life after the anthropocene.

gemstone town

#lostcities episode 8: Idar-Oberstein

Fun fact: All four of my grandparents lived at Idar-Oberstein for some time, although never more than three of them simultaneously. By the time I was born, however, two had died and the other two moved to the countryside, 30 km away from the town. Which is why it pops up in my list of cities that we lost touch with.

Much like Wuppertal, but on a ten-fold smaller scale, Idar-Oberstein is the result of a merger of two towns squeezed together in a river valley. The merger of Idar and Oberstein occurred soon after that of Barmen and Elberfeld, in October 1933, producing a new town of just over 32,000 residents, on the river Nahe (semi-famous for its vineyards). The little creek separating the two parts is the Göttenbach, and a high school serving both towns was located near that boundary and called the Göttenbach-Gymnasium. Which is what brought my paternal grandparents there in 1951. They lived in Hauptstraße, literally just across the road from school (which was in the building now occupied by the municipal administration, which you can see here).

Postcard: Hauptstraße Idar Oberstein, 1953, looking towards a well camouflaged Felsenkirche. It is more conpicuous in recent photos where it is painted white. This is the street where my paternal grandparents lived until 1960, although it is the other end, quite far away from their home.
Source

The maternal grandparents came there from Aachen in 1940, which looks like a strange move for a customs officer, but I am told my grandfather was transferred to a department involved in policing alcohol duties, so that sounds fun. Unfortunately, he was then called up for the war and didn’t come back. My grandmother died in Idar-Oberstein in 1962, less than two years after the other grandparents had moved to the sticks.

Idar-Oberstein in the post-war years was under French occupation control. I read that the authorities weren’t all that keen on prosecuting Nazi criminals. Instead, the Grande Nation relied on its cultural charms, with French being taught at the high school and French culture being supplied in abundance. I hear Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir stayed there for a night in 1948 and watched an opera performance.

Desperate to create more space for cars, the town planners made the river Nahe disappear under a lid in the 1980s – they should have taken up the idea of Wuppertal and built a suspension railway above the river! Since the Nahe has disappeared, the remaining attractions of the town are now the Felsenkirche, a tiny church implausibly popping out of a vertical cliff face, where various people got married, and the museum of gems and minerals celebrating the long tradition of gemstone processing and trading. Links with Brazil are particularly strong, as many migrants from the region went there and sent minerals back. So you get to see lots of massive agates and amethysts hailing from Brazil but handled in Idar-Oberstein.

UPDATE 10.3.2024. In June 2023 I finally got round to revisiting the town - although I had visited shops etc on the outskirts, I hadn't been in the town centre since my childhood. Some photos now on flickr. And I found out that Hauptstrasse is several kilometres long and my grandparents lived at the opposite end to the one that leads up to the Felsenkirche, so their house doesn't appear in the postcard above.

#lostcities series so far:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935-1945
7. Aachen 1936-1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940-1962

post-truth is pre-fascism

Four years ago, ahead of the inauguration of a certain US president, I warned of the dangers of a post-truth world. After the November 2020 election that voted him out I wondered what we have to do to get some sense of truth back, after the world has become used to being flooded with toxic lies. Conspiracy theories not only disturb political process, they may also jeopardise the response to the Covid crisis.

I wrote a feature about this in the first week of December, writing about the strange beliefs of Republicans in the past tense, half hoping they might get bored of crazy conspiracies by the time the article comes out. Unfortunately, the opposite has happened and they decided it might be a good idea to storm the Capitol and try to prevent the completion of the official election process. A very good analysis of what happened, with just the right amount of references to Weimar Germany, is in this essay by Yale historian Timothy Snyder - from which I borrowed the title of this blogpost. Snyder makes the point that, on top of all the small and medium sized lies, the big lie that Trump won the 2020 election and had the presidency stolen from him could continue to bind his fanbase in their perceived victimhood and serve a future fascist coup like the Dolchstoss-Legende about the end of worldwar I served the Nazis. Trump might be too incompetent to lead that coup himself, but somebody else now patiently waiting in the wings could take over his devoted fanbase and use it for a successful putsch.

Now I'm somewhat less optimistic that the problem can still be fixed in the US, and if it can't the fallout will be catastrophic for the rest of the world as well, if only because raving lunatics around the world will feel encouraged to try the same. But to feed the small hopes we still have here are some thoughts on how to bring back a bit of reason.

Recovering a sense of reality

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 1, 11 January 2021, Pages R1-R3

FREE access to full text and PDF download

The denialists in the photos we had available in December looked comparatively sane compared to the photos from last week! Demonstration of denialists protesting against Covid restrictions in Leipzig, Germany. (Photo: Roy Zuo/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

service announcement: starting a new twitter thread with the features of 2021, adding them as they convert to open access.

a city on the border

#lostcities episode 7: Aachen

Aachen is still there, physically, just lost to my family who left it behind. Today a city with 250,000 residents, it is doing quite well out of its technical university and the historic sites linked to Charlemagne who was crowned emperor there on Christmas Day 800. Located close to the point where the borderlines between Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium meet, it is also terrifically well connected with the high speed trains from Frankfurt and Cologne stopping there on their way to Paris or Brussels.

Aachen Hauptbahnhof in 1938, with the Haus Grenzwacht (which ironically never was the customs office although its name seems to suggest some sort of border protection function, but I think it refers only to it being an unusually high tower block for its time and close to the national border, so I suspect from the top you could probably see Belgium and the Netherlands. The Hauptzollamt is behind the viewer's back.
Source.

My grandfather worked at the customs office, and got moved around frequently, typically being relocated to a new city each time he got promoted. By the time he was posted to Aachen in January 1936, he had an official car and more than 100 people to boss around so it was kind of a last hurrah before the war from which he didn’t return.

When you step outside the main station, the former main customs office (Hauptzollamt) is on your left, it is now a listed building and looking very well kept, although I couldn’t find a postcard of it. Instead, the one above shows what may very well have been the view from his office window. The family lived in Mariabrunnstraße, just a block away from the Hauptzollamt and still close to the railway line. The street is a cul de sac for cars but has a footpath passing under the rails.

Although I have stayed at Aachen a couple of times and visited the sites mentioned, I haven't formed much of an attachment. One issue I have with the place is that I am missing the structure provided by a decent river. There is some water flowing from the Elisenbrunnen in the city centre and the area around that is ok, and the cathedral is an UNESCO World Heritage Site of course. I am also slightly spooked by the fact that the relevant time frame falls entirely into the Nazi era, so one can imagine the spirit prevailing in the main customs office, which by then would have been cleared of anybody who didn't go with the flow.

A modern photo of the Hauptzollamt (2014).
Source: Wikipedia

#lostcities series so far:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935-1945
7. Aachen 1936-1940

new year, new minuets

I would say happy new year everyone, but I guess last year's data show that the wishes don't really work, so let's just get on with it.

For the eleventh month of my Plague Year Bach Project, I have been bold and moved into a new key, choosing the Minuets from the second suite, which is in D minor. Thus, the first of the minuets is in D minor and the second in D major. After a quick go at sight reading both, I am now slightly scared by the awkward chords in the first minuet, so I'll start with the second, which looks quite a bit easier.

Some helpful links:

I'm starting with Inbal Segev's musings, as always, and I found recordings from:
Eva Lymenstull (that's the whole D minor suite, but I've included the timestamp for the minuets in the link to take you there directly).
Misha Maisky (ditto)
Laurens Price-Nowak (ditto)

I'm also adding these videos to my youtube playlist "cello repertoire".

In December, I didn't tackle a new movement but completed memorising the Bourrees from the third suite and also started playing the first bourree with a metronome. Also making progress with memorising the Gigue in C, only a couple of lines left to learn of this movement which is quite long. I've made a ranking of the movements in tiers last month (inspired by the covid tiers), but it now occurred to me that it would be more constructive to have a system where rising numbers mark progress (as in grade exams) rather than crisis levels. So, flipped upside down and with the bourrees promoted by a grade, my revision list now looks like this:

1) movements I've studied for a month, then put aside for now
1.1. Prelude
1.2 Allemande

2) movements memorised in a significant part
1.3 Courante (2/3)
3.4 Sarabande (1/3)
3.6. Gigue (4/5)

3) movements memorised in their entirety
1.4 Sarabande
1.5 Minuet I&II
1.6 Gigue
3.5 Bourree I&II

Future levels with higher numbers may include: able to play with a metronome at a reasonable speed, able to perform, actually performed.

Did I mention that Old Heinrich has a very beautiful backside?