Le Chant Du Rossignol

I was recently talking with friends (with whom I’m rehearsing some renaissance music) about how birdsong has been represented / imitated musically throughout history. One of the most beautiful birdsong I have experienced myself is nightingales singing in crisp air, right after some good rainfall.

Youtube has some nice nightingale recording, for all those who can’t experience this first-hand.

Among the many occurrences in musical compositions, this excerpt from “Le Chant Du Rossignol” by Igor Stravinsky strikes me as particularly resembling, though that may just be my own musical / aesthetic bias showing through. (Just listen carefully to the beginning of this excerpt and compare that to the very beginning of the nightingale recording above. Isn’t that amazing ?)

There are many others, such as Olivier Messiaen’s “Chants D’Oiseau”, or even his “Quatuor pour la fin du temps”. And of course, there are many older ones, too, such as Janequin’s “Le chant des oiseaux”, which appears a little affected in comparison.

It might be interesting to build a themed concert out of this and similar material.

Syndicated 2011-09-29 19:09:07 from stefan.seefeld.name

How Fortunate the Man with None

You saw sagacious Solomon
You know what came of him,
To him complexities seemed plain.
He cursed the hour that gave birth to him
And saw that everything was vain.
How great and wise was Solomon.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It’s wisdom that had brought him to this state.
How fortunate the man with none.

You saw courageous Caesar next
You know what he became.
They deified him in his life
Then had him murdered just the same.
And as they raised the fatal knife
How loud he cried: you too my son!
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It’s courage that had brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.

You heard of honest Socrates
The man who never lied:
They weren’t so grateful as you’d think
Instead the rulers fixed to have him tried
And handed him the poisoned drink.
How honest was the people’s noble son.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It’s honesty that brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.

Here you can see respectable folk
Keeping to God’s own laws.
So far he hasn’t taken heed.
You who sit safe and warm indoors
Help to relieve our bitter need.
How virtuously we had begun.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It’s fear of god that brought us to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.

– Bertold Brecht (from “Mother Courage”)

Syndicated 2011-02-07 05:18:28 from stefan.seefeld.name

Vernal equinox

Spring is here !

Google just published the list of this year’s GSoC mentoring organizations. DocBook will participate for a first time, as will (as usual) Boost. If you are interested in any of this, don’t hesitate to get in touch !

I have also started looking into switching to CLang as Cpp/C/Cxx parsers for Synopsis. While this looks very promising, there is still quite a lot of work that needs to be done before this will be usable. Any help is highly appreciated.

Syndicated 2010-03-20 15:33:33 from stefan.seefeld.name

A matter of perspective.

“Barack Obama has given voice to what many of the world think about America - and it’s not flattering. That much of the world - composed as it is of autocrats and dictators and weak and wobbly defenders of human rights and human dignity - isn’t happy with the United States is not news.”

See, what “much of the world” isn’t happy with may not be “the United States”, but this dangerously stupid and arrogant world-view. Grow up, start to consider yourself part of the world, not above it, and things may get a little more balanced.

Syndicated 2009-10-11 14:14:11 from stefan.seefeld.name

Google Summer of Code

A too short and too rainy summer has almost passed by in a blink of an eye. I mentored two GSoC projects this year. One of them, adding Python 3 support to boost.python, was very successful, and I just merged the changes into trunk. As I don’t expect any surprises there, I’m sure the code will be ready for inclusion into the next release. Yay !

The other project wasn’t quite as successful. Not only did it require a lot more hand-holding from my part, but it didn’t result in nearly as much improvements as we had hoped for.

Neither result came as a surprise. In fact, I probably could have predicted it when reviewing the applications. But as I’m an optimist, I always hope for a better outcome, even if there are warning signs. As I will participate in this year’s GSoC Mentor Summit, I’m sure I will hear from other people what they have to suggest as to how to evaluate proposals to avoid surprises.

Syndicated 2009-09-21 15:12:35 from stefan.seefeld.name