The Sanity Project

Spohr’s string quartets 20-30

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

The year was 1826. Beethoven was revolutionizing the string quartet. Spohr was no musical revolutionary, and he much preferred Beethoven’s Opus 18 quartets to the late ones. His quartets improved in quality and offered some surprises, but he never ventured far from Haydn’s model. This doesn’t mean they aren’t worth listening to; it was a long time before any major composer matched Beethoven’s level of experimentation. Jan Swafford’s biography of Brahms says, “By mid-century the string quartet like the symphony appeared a moribund genre despite the dozens of composers writing them.”

This is the third installment in my blog series on Spohr’s 36 string quartets. Just as a reminder, I’m only a musically literate amateur, and these are my opinions usually based on one or two hearings. Each day I try to listen to one and add some comments on it to this draft, so my mood from day to day can affect my reactions. It’s a tour, not an in-depth analysis.
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Silent film: A Message from Mars

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged music science fiction silent movies on by

The silent film era had quite a few movies about Martians. It’s fun to look at how filmmakers of the early 20th century envisioned them. I’ve uploaded the 1913 film A Message from Mars to YouTube, with my improvised accompaniment.

The film, based on a stage play, concerns a man whom the Martians have dubbed “the most selfish of mortals.” He’s a middle-aged man named Horace who likes being left alone and is stingy with his money. One of the Martians, as penance for an unspecified crime, is sent to Earth to reform Horace. His technique consists of bullying him into having a sudden, inexplicable change of character. A 1903 short film with the same title may have been the earliest movie to feature Martians; it’s currently assumed lost.
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The Lost World can be found again

This entry was posted in Movies and tagged copyright music silent movies on by

My counterclaim against the takedown of the public domain film The Lost World, was successful. The video is back up on YouTube.

I’m inclined to let sleeping dogs lie, so I won’t say much more. I hope that someday a court ruling will clearly establish that restoring an out-of-copyright film to its original state doesn’t create a new copyright on it, but I’m not the person to pursue the fight.

The Democratic Party has abandoned America 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged law liberty New Hampshire on by

I am furious at the Democrats. They are cowards who won’t stand up to a president grabbing as much power as he can. To a man who has literally portrayed himself as king and pope. To a man who says he doesn’t know if he needs to uphold the Constitution.

To be precise, I mean the office holders and leaders in the party. Voters have to choose a party if they want to vote in primaries, and they choose where they think they’ll have a positive effect. They don’t necessarily like what the leaders are doing. But I have utter contempt for nearly all the Democrats in Congress.

The Republicans in Congress are despicable, with rare exceptions like Rand Paul. They’re actively collaborating with Trump to enable abductions of people and maintain a fake “emergency” so he can impose ruinous taxes on us. But that’s not the topic here. The Democrats are supposed to fight this. They don’t feel like it.
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