music

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

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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.

Spohr’s string quartets 11-19 1

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This is the second installment in my overview of Louis Spohr’s string quartets. I’ll update this post to link to the other parts as I post them. Here I talk about the ones numbered 11 through 19.

Just how many quartets Spohr wrote is an interesting question. I came across a discussion of the quartets’ numbering while trying to find information on the missing opus numbers. According to the article, Spohr published 34 quartets with opus numbers, and there are two quartets in the WoO section of the catalogue, both of which Spohr numbered 34. Both of the WoO quartets exist in two different versions. That makes 36 distinct quartets. I’ll look at the last ones more closely when I get there.

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Spohr’s string quartets 1-10 5

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Louis Spohr wrote 36 string quartets, more than Mozart or Beethoven, and none of them are very well known. Fortunately, all are available for listening, thanks to a complete set from Marco Polo recorded by several different groups. I’ve started listening to them in numerical order, with plans to write a little about each one. As far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s no such overview on the public Web. Probably someone has written a graduate thesis on the quartets, but I can’t find anything.

While I’m not a professional musician, I’m one of the more activate Spohr fans on the Internet, so I’m giving it a try. The scores on IMSLP and Clive Brown’s Louis Spohr: A Critical Biography have been very helpful.

This post covers the first ten quartets, published between 1807 and 1814.
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