post-plague Bach project

Plague Year(s) Bach Project, 3-year anniversary

Three years after starting the Plague Year Bach Project, I'm not convinced that the pandemic is over, but I do realise that in the absence of lockdowns I'm not making much progress with memorising the suites. With everything else going on (and my shoulder still playing up sometimes), one movement per month (or two months) has turned into half a movement in four months, so I guess it's time to make a new plan.

I now have six movements that I can play from memory, so I'll keep these on the revision cycle to make sure they stay in my memory. They tend to survive my occasional 10-day trips abroad, but I would forget them if I stopped playing on the timescale of months.

memory list:
1.3 Courante
1.4 Sarabande
1.5 Minuet I&II- VIDEO
1.6 Gigue
2.5 Minuet I&II
3.5 Bourree I&II - VIDEO

And the other part of my daily Bach practice / meditation will be sight-reading of one of the six movements I had (partially) memorised before, just keeping the vague familiarity, without keeping the notes in my head. Making more regular use of sight-reading should also be beneficial for my orchestral adventures and chamber music ambitions.

reading list:
2.4 Sarabande
2.6 Gigue
3.4 Sarabande
3.6. Gigue
4.3. Courante
4.5. Bourree I & II

I still haven't got much patience for these two, but might retry them once in a while (would be nice to be able to play the entire first suite):
1.1. Prelude
1.2 Allemande

A Westbury cello I spotted in a charity shop earlier this month and considered buying (as old Heinrich will at some point run off with the young cellist). I played some fragments of Bach suites in the shop. It did sound lovely and looked unused, which is a bit of a tragedy. After some consideration, I think I'll hold out for an old and battered instrument that needs rescuing. I am also making progress with the old family fiddle (blog entry coming up tomorrow), so if and when I end up without a cello in the house I still have some strings to scratch with a bow.

PS In these last 3 years of daily cello practice I have also managed to use up the first new bow hair that we put on Heinrich's old bow back in 2009. As the young cellist uses a different bow, this is exclusively my work - and I will have a go at replacing it myself.

a flamboyance of flamingos

Flamingos are eternal favourites of visitors in zoos everywhere and have been held in captivity for centuries. Surprisingly, it still isn't all that easy to breed them successfully, and only a few zoos have succeeded on that front. A recent review of reproductive success or lack thereof using the ZIMS (Zoological Information Management System) database of life history information gathered in zoos around the world has led to new recommendations. More generally, the findings highlight the issue that, if zoos are to act as a refuge for endangered species, we have to make sure we understand their life histories well enough. Other recent zoo stories covered include the longevity of parrots, cancer risks in mammals, and rewilding of sea otters.

If you always wondered how to breed flamingos (or how to rewild sea otters), here are some answers:

Learning lessons at the zoo

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 4, 27. February 2023, Pages R123-R126

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

Flamingos use their characteristically bent beaks upside down for filter feeding on plankton. This is a P. jamesi in Bolivia. (Photo: Murray Foubister/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

PS 6.3.2023 Speaking of zoos, here's the director of London Zoo on their new offer of £ 3 tickets for ppl on benefits. (I was a bit shocked that the regular price is 10 times more, but then again I haven't been at a zoo in decades.)

deep down

The February issue of C & I contains two deep-sea related items from me, namely my feature on the likely beginning of commercial seafloor mining:

Plumbing new depths

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 2, February 2023, Pages 18-21

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

... and my long essay review of the short and unusual memoir "My life in sea creatures" by Sabrina Imbler.

A diverse life

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 2, January 2023, Page 35

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

Blackwells

young Frieda

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 24.

Frieda the pianist was born 1902 and thus grew up just before people had their own cameras and documented their everyday lives, so all we have from her childhood are professional studio portraits of her as a baby and as a teenage debutante, plus half a dozen tiny cutouts from school photos.

So, looking at the early childhood only, here comes the cute baby Frieda:

followed by a few cutouts from school photos (maybe she didn't like her class mates all that much?):

I'll do the teenage pics in a separate entry some time ...

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada
4. off to Australia
5. a very romantic poet
6. fireman August
7. 50 hundredweight of coffee
8. mysterious Minden people
9. horses for Hedwig
10. guessing the great-grandmothers
11. cousin Charlotte
12. three sisters
13. travelling saleswoman
14. family portrait
15. dancing chemist
16. games time
17. desperately searching Wilhelm
18. the third Hedwig
19. patchwork portraits
20. missing brothers
21. the oberlehrer's family
22. a double wedding
23. mystery solved
24. young Frieda

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

words lost and found

Some thoughts on

The dictionary of lost words
Pip Williams
Vintage Paperback 2022

Shortly after reading and reviewing The looking-glass house, I spotted this paperback at The Works and was attracted to the idiosyncratic title and the map of Victorian Oxford included at the front. Always fun to wander the streets of Victorian Oxford in fiction, as it is instantly recognisable but also interestingly different.

The focus of the book is a place I actually cycled and walked past many times. Of course I have read the blue plaque on the Banbury Road which enlightens us that the first Oxford English Dictionary was born in a garden shed on this site. It was the shed grandiosely named the “Scriptorium” in the garden of the first editor, James Murray, where staff collected words and crafted definitions for decades.

The story is well documented and reported, of course, but what Pip Williams does is to analyse how the words and definitions were biased by the fact that all editors on site were men of a very similar social background. To this end, she introduces a fictional girl, Esme, growing up in the circle and becoming a lexicographer herself, and uses her to interrogate why words such as bondmaid and cunt aren’t included in the dictionary. Funnily enough the latter just got underlined in red as isn’t in the dictionary of my word processing software either – looks like the Victorian times never ended.

The novel spans the story of Esme’s entire life, which is heartwarming throughout. In spite of the various troubles in the world (including the Great War and the suffragists movement) and in her life, the warm glow never fades. There is no real evil in her world, which one could perhaps criticise as naïve, but I think it reflects in a way the ivory tower perspective that you get when you’re fully immersed in a major academic project such as the dictionary. Implausibly vast and extremely slow moving, this kind of work will only have been tolerated by people who cared about it to an obsessive degree, so the normal rules of competitive capitalism wouldn’t apply.

There is also something Carrollean in the way Esme explores the weird and wonderful worlds of Oxford and lexicography. Born in the early 1880s, fictional Esme is a generation younger than real life Alice Liddell, so it makes sense to read this after The looking-glass house.

So, it may be a fairy tale for adults, but I would highly recommend it as an escape from today’s harsh reality and news cycle. Also as an introduction to Oxford – the place hasn’t changed all that much, even the map is still useful today.

Blackwells

PS 25.4.2023 The author's second novel, out in the UK on July 6, will also focus on books being produced in Oxford: The bookbinder of Jericho See her interview in the Guardian.

mystery solved

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 23.

In the old album from which I scanned two of the photos of Gertrud Gross last week I also found a possible solution to a mystery that had troubled me for a whole year, so here's a little detective story.

A year ago I discovered a huge frame with a photo from around 1900 showing a large group of people posing outdoors, on the edge of a forest. Only trouble is I had no idea who these people were or why my grandparents had kept this photo apparently showing random people of their grandparents' generation (at the very least it is quite obviously not a family gathering). As their combined eight grandparents come from five different geographic areas spanning the entire East-West width of the German Empire as it was before 1914, this photo could come from just about anywhere.

Here it is (in a hurried 12 megapixel snap, I need to get a better scan of it some time, if I can find a big scanner):

In my desperate quest for clues, I even posted the photo on Flickr where it attracted lots of views, but other than the amusing suggestion that the uniformed guy might be Hindenburg, I had no luck there either.

In an old album compiled by either Heinrich the cellist or his only child Richard in an attempt at visual family history, I found the possible answer. The album starts with photos of Heinrich's parents, Johann Friedrich Richard Groß (*1852 in Breslau) and Maria Louise Mentzel (*1844 Skronskau). On the first page we have young Heinrich as a schoolboy in 1892, and then this:

which strikes me as a similar if slightly smaller grouping of nature lovers. In a barely legible marking (dark blue on black cardboard) we are informed that railway man Richard is the guy on the left (looks consistent with the very few other pictures I had from him so far, see these pics from Tangermünde), while his wife Maria is the central figure on the top of the rock. Going back to the big mystery picture with this new reference point, I would suggest that Richard is this guy, just right of centre (which I define by the mirror symmetry of the two men reclining on the ground):

Still not sure if his wife Maria is also in the big picture. Come to think of it, one of the younger women could be Gertrud. May have to go back to it, get it out of the frame and do a proper scan.

And we still don't know who everybody else is and what the group activity was. Maybe a Wanderverein (ramblers' association)? There were many such associations in Kaiser Wilhelm's empire, see this wikipedia entry (in German) for a bit of history. What is today the Deutscher Wanderverband counted 60 local associations and 165,000 members on its 25th anniversary in 1908.

The "Wandervogel" movement also happened around that time, but that was all about young people, while here we clearly have a more middle-aged gathering. Richard and Maria lived at Tangermünde / Stendal, which isn't all that far away from the Harz mountain range, a classical Wanderer territory.

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada
4. off to Australia
5. a very romantic poet
6. fireman August
7. 50 hundredweight of coffee
8. mysterious Minden people
9. horses for Hedwig
10. guessing the great-grandmothers
11. cousin Charlotte
12. three sisters
13. travelling saleswoman
14. family portrait
15. dancing chemist
16. games time
17. desperately searching Wilhelm
18. the third Hedwig
19. patchwork portraits
20. missing brothers
21. the oberlehrer's family
22. a double wedding
23. mystery solved

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

a double wedding

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 22.

Heinrich our old cellist and previously young poet married Maria Pfersching in the lovely cathedral of Tangermünde in a double wedding ceremony, together with his sister Gertrud who married Robert Goetzky (from Magdeburg I think, at least that's where they settled). Gertrud appeared in a family portrait here. I'm afraid we don't have a photo of both couples together nor of the guests, but here is Gertrud getting engaged in 1906:

the book she holds doesn't have any deeper meaning, I zoomed in to check and it appears to be some kind of holiday brochure:

Worth paying attention though, as the book alerted me to the fact that I have two different photos - the couple very much in the same posture but the book held differently:

And here is a younger Gertrud (marked as ca. 1900 in the album where I found it):

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

1. could be a cousin
2. two weddings in Silesia
3. off to Canada
4. off to Australia
5. a very romantic poet
6. fireman August
7. 50 hundredweight of coffee
8. mysterious Minden people
9. horses for Hedwig
10. guessing the great-grandmothers
11. cousin Charlotte
12. three sisters
13. travelling saleswoman
14. family portrait
15. dancing chemist
16. games time
17. desperately searching Wilhelm
18. the third Hedwig
19. patchwork portraits
20. missing brothers
21. the oberlehrer's family
22. a double wedding

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

save our sharks

Humans vs sharks is a topic I have covered a couple of times before, but it bears repeating that the murderous monster is actually us, and the innocent victim the sharks. Nearly half a century after Jaws, cartilagenous fish are one of the most endangered groups of vertebrates, so I've rounded up some recent conservation news on sharks and rays, complete with an almost apology from Steven Spielberg. The feature is out today:

Sharks face the jaws of extinction

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 3, 06. February 2023, Pages R85-R87

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2023.

Bull sharks (Carcharhinus leucas) in a Florida lagoon are exposed to toxins that are passed on through the food web. (Photo: amanderson2/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

PSA: I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

people move

In one of the most important books of recent years, Gaia Vince managed to knit together two big issues of our time, climate catastrophe and migration, into a coherent argument that even manages to squeeze some hope out of the mess we're in. Whereas politicians and media too often tend to exaggerate migration problems while ignoring or playing down climate problems, Vince argues that migration is not only a normal part of being human but also a necessary part of the solution to the problems we're facing including climate catastrophe.

Nomad Century
by Gaia Vince
Allen Lane 2022

The book has already been widely reviewed and recommended, so to add my voice to the choir, here's my long essay review out now in C&I:

Moving times

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 1, January 2023, Page 36

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

Blackwells