May God bless America!

There was a little Michael Moore-ish grandstanding, like when he got tossed out of the Vatican for barging in with a camera and wanting to talk to the Pope, but those moments were mostly tongue-in-cheek side jokes (unlike a Moore film, where they carry the weight of the whole polemic). And the über-trendy canted camera angles, like it’s some MTV special where the host is so cool that we’re presumed to want to see camera shots of him talking to some other camera, were just jarring and dumb.

But there’s enough meat there to overshadow the sparse bits of egotism and amateurism. He’ll give subtitles exposing the lies of the opulently dressed megachurch megapastor as the guy speaks; he’ll interview Catholic priests (including the Vatican astronomer) who giggle at the idea of hell and Creation and all the stuff their flock is goaded into taking literally; he’ll get the Senator to equivocate on evolution, he’ll hammer at the Jesus actor, past all the “God-sized hole in your heart” rhetoric, until the guy pulls out Pascal’s Wager; he’ll show you the salesman for the crazy kosher workless wheelchair—and he’ll do it with that affable, I’m-on-your-side schtick that disarms his opponent.

He delivers the goods, and he’s honest enough to speak directly to his target audience at the end, telling you to get off the fence and actively oppose superstition if you’re smart enough to find the preceding hour and a half disturbing. The film is clever enough, and chooses its targets well enough, to be funny even to someone who’s already an atheist and well-versed in the issues and the players in the debate, while still summarizing those issues and players concisely for a moderately intelligent but apathetic fence-sitter. It’s the Michael Moore populist-polemic-documentary genre done right—which really shouldn’t be too hard, when your targets are this pathetically easy to pick apart. I’m glad he did it.

Me, I’ve always loved sacred choral music in the Western tradition. I was in school choirs from the age of ten; in high school, our mixed concert choir was given a variety of styles, and “classical” sacred works were often among them. One year (my junior year, I think), we, like lots of other high school choirs everywhere, did Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. It’s a short (only 46 measures) motet setting the hymn—part of the magic cracker sacrament—to a fairly chromatic melody, with accompaniment:
 

I wish I could credit the performers, but the info on the YouTube clip doesn’t say; it does, though, sound suspiciously like this performance of the Wiener Sängerknaben, the Chorus Viennensis, and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2006.

It’s a strange death cult of a religion, but it gave rise to (or perhaps just latched itself onto) some beautiful emotional expressions. I love how in this piece, Mozart is able to throw in accidentals, and use big leaps sparingly, to evoke this feeling that’s warm and joyous, but not romantically so—it’s a reverent and distant kind of joy.

I’ll find some other sacred music that I’ve enjoyed in church services and in choir, and post it on following Sundays.

People consider starlings pests, but I don’t. The avifauna around here would be poorer for having no enormous roadside flocks of shimmery black beauties swarming in the evening. (See this previous post for an example of the enormous proportions this phenomenon reaches in Europe.) And they can talk.

AUDUBON SOCIETY: Eagles are rebounding from the brink of extinction, but many other birds continue to experience serious declines. Audubon data shows even bird species we consider common today are losing ground, falling as much as 68 percent in the past 40 years. How would you use laws like the Endangered Species Act, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and Clean Water Act to reverse this trend?

(The entire set of questions and answers is available in the September-October issue of Audubon magazine, pp. 58-61).

Obama’s answer at least indicates support for current wildlife-protection laws and acknowledges the Bizarro World of Bush-administration science policy. Less genericness would have been nice, though, like maybe actually using the word “bird.”

McCain’s answer scares the shit out of me. Beneath the progressive-sounding veneer is a contempt for federal regulation in general, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in particular. The Act has been a cornerstone of our country’s efforts to protect native bird species from disappearing forever since 1918. Signed by the U.S. and Canada (actually, at the time, Great Britain signed for Canada), it’s what makes it illegal for you to go out and shoot, capture, or molest any bird you like. It currently protects about 800 species from unregulated killing and entrapment, and forbids tampering with their nesting sites. I don’t want the spirit of this law maintained, I want this law. Further, a lack of “cooperation” with the private sector is hardly the current administration’s problem. Regulators are supposed to enforce the law; I expect them to do their jobs.

The bit about wetlands is encouraging; it may be a sop to the hunting enthusiasts among his base. I agree with hunters that wetlands must be managed properly and conserved to protect waterfowl populations (I respect their right to their hunt for food, although I find the glee with which some waterfowl hunters approach killing repulsive), and it’s good that private organizations of them are committed to that cause. But that management must be done under competent, objective, rational federal control, something that his party’s behavior has put in jeopardy.

“That’s not the sort of thing you pick if you want to get chosen for Fort Wayne.”

Context: This year the Philharmonic is auditioning eight candidates for the Music Director’s position, to replace Edvard Tchivzhel. Each gets to conduct two concerts, one with a full orchestra and one with a chamber orchestra. The opener, and the Unplugged concert at IPFW, were conducted by Tito Muñoz, currently Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. Muñoz, who’s only 25 and has a good rapport with the audience and, from a layman’s perspective at least, seems to with the musicians as well, led the orchestra in the opener in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (yes, it’s really called that).

Now, the Rachmaninoff concerto is a showpiece for a virtuoso pianist, and the guest pianist that the Philharmonic brought in, 20-year-old Yuja Wang from Beijing, was phenomenal. The piece is delicate (even to the extreme of being a little weepy) and Romantic and, in 20th-century terms at least, doesn’t take a lot of risks. The (heavily elderly) audience had no problem leaping to their feet for a standing ovation.

But the Bartók piece which followed went over rather differently. Béla Bartók fled the Nazis and his native Hungary’s pro-German government during World War II and emigrated to the United States, where he lived only a few years before dying of chronic myeloid leukemia. The Concerto for Orchestra was his penultimate major orchestral piece; he composed it during the war while waiting to die of the disease, appearing at the premiere less than a year before his death. While it’s still a traditional orchestral work in structure, it exemplifies a lot of the nontraditional elements of the twentieth century: there’s dissonant fourths all over the place, weird rhythms and irreverent nonmelodious sounds being passed back and forth during the middle movements, a parody and shouting down of a Shostakovich symphony in the lighthearted fourth-movement Intermezzo, and a couple descents into Bartók’s characteristic Night Music, described by Amherst College music prof David Schneider as “eerie dissonances providing a backdrop to sounds of nature and lonely melodies.” (Bartók sometimes emulated birdsong, using, for example, the song of the Wood Thrush—a close relative of the familiar and somewhat similarly sounding American Robin—in his Piano Concerto No. 3.)

The elderly audience was amusingly reluctant to stand for the ovation after that one, despite that being the end of the show. As we were shuffling out, I overheard the above contemptuous comment as the people behind me were discussing their belief that the guest conductors were allowed to select the pieces they would perform. So apparently, in Fort Wayne, encouraging your audience to step outside their comfort zone—to the extent of exposing them to something that was experimental sixty years ago—runs a significant risk of being met with fear and contemptuous church-lady glares.

 
Corvids are known from other observations and experiments to be smart, so this level of problem-solving wouldn’t seem to be beyond them, but it’s always good to maintain a bit of skepticism. There may be confirmation bias at work here: there’s a population of crows in this city in Japan, dropping nuts at various places, and we notice and marvel at the ones that happen to do so at intersections, and not so much at the others. A quick search of recent journal articles didn’t reveal anything about it (well, I did find one book, but it just cited the Attenborough special); still, if the behavior here is observed repeatedly, and if, as some reports have it, they’ve been observed moving the nuts to a different location if the cars miss them, it’s probably reasonable to conclude that the purported learning is real.

The PBS companion site to the Attenborough special has a good introduction to this and other commonly known examples of avian intelligence.