The Sanity Project

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

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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

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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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Bobo the clown

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary and tagged censorship Harvard on by

Harvard University has long been a center of controversy. Often it’s an embarrassment to the university. But the Dean of Social Science there, somebody called Lawrence D. Bobo, has come up with a brilliant solution: Make the faculty shut up. Bobo’s babble just has to be read to be believed:

Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?

Yes it is and yes it does.

A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs.

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