Yearly Archives: 2024

Yet another Hugo Award scandal

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged conventions fandom science fiction on by

Someone tried to buy a Hugo Award by buying a bunch of Glasgow Worldcon memberships and having them vote. Fortunately, the attempt was brain-dead stupid and the Hugo administration team caught it. Details are on File 770.

The stupidity consisted of using obviously fake names for the fake members. “These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.” 377 votes out of 3,813 were disqualified. The nominee that was being pushed did not win, and the Glasgow committee says there’s no reason to believe that the nominee was responsible for the campaign.
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Spohr’s “Das heimliche Lied,” Opus 103, No. 5

This entry was posted in Music and tagged music spohr on by

In this post I’m looking at a single song by Spohr, “Das heimliche Lied” (the secret song). It’s part of a set of “Six German Songs,” Opus 103, where the singer is accompanied by a piano and a clarinet. The combination is unusual, but the clarinet is one of my favorite instruments, and he uses it effectively. The Spohr Society has a discussion of the Six German Songs, with information on the people who wrote the texts. Ernst Koch, the author of “Das heimliche Lied” and a contemporary of Spohr, is obscure today but not forgotten.

Right at the start, there’s a question about the song’s title. Most of the sources I’ve found give “Das heimliche Lied,” but the Spohr Society article gives it as “Das heimliche Leid” (the secret suffering). The latter is a more literal description of the poem’s contents, but “secret song” has a poetic feeling that fits. Neither word occurs in the text. It turns out that Koch’s title for the poem was actually “Relique eines Verschollenen” (relic of a missing person), but nobody uses that title for Spohr’s setting. The poem is about emotions that aren’t expressed or perceived, so we don’t know what they are, making the text broadly applicable. We all have feelings we hide from others.
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YouTube copyright nonsense

This entry was posted in Movies on by

The showing of The Golem went pretty well. I got a notification of a copyright claim, though. It’s from “A Kidnapping Scandal: The Florence Cassez Affair,” which is a Netflix series I’d never heard of. It can’t make a legitimate copyright claim on any part of The Golem, obviously. Maybe I played four or five notes in sequence that were similar to the theme music from the show? Or maybe the show includes some footage of the old movie, and YouTube’s robots decided that the makers of that series now hold copyright to the old movie. Who knows? Fortunately it’s “not a copyright strike,” since the copyright holder allows usage of the alleged copyrighted content. It could affect my monetizing the show, but I don’t expect to try. I get the impression that challenging a spurious copyright claim on YouTube can get you into worse trouble than ignoring it, so I’ll leave it alone.

Spohr’s 6th Symphony

This entry was posted in Music and tagged music spohr on by

The Sixth Symphony by Louis Spohr isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s fascinating to write about. It’s known as the “Historical” Symphony, and it presents an overview of musical styles from the Baroque to Spohr’s era. The movements are:

  1. Bach-Handel period, 1720
  2. Haydn-Mozart period, 1780
  3. Beethoven period, 1810
  4. Very latest, 1840

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