Let your lil' light Shimer

Recently TNY featured a cartoon of a Wash DC building with a stone heading: "Bureau of Connecting The Dots." I hope my readers will "connect" with this Bureau soon as it may help you to make sense of this blog--but I doubt it.

On a musical note (ta-da!!!) some friends and I got together to make up a recorder trio. Many of you know Winifred Hoffman and the other person is a band director from Earlville HS whose name I have not yet fully filed upstairs. When I first started playing music in public I was with a group called The Old Town Renaissance Consort and it was exactly as advertised; we played instruments of the period. Playing a Renaissance recorder is a little bit difficult because they had not developed the smaller holes at the bottom of the recorder and the range was more limited; it was frankly a more primitive instrument. However there are a number of brass instruments whose ancestry go back to such instruments as sakbuts and krumhorns. As I say, they are not the most convenient instruments to play well. The Baroque instruments are pretty much all that I use now but we rarely played Baroque music in this consort.

However, although I have played in many groups since then, more off than on, I have found some attraction to Renaissance music largely because of its complex rhythms. Renaissance writers of music seemed to delight in dashing conventional expectations about rhythm and in some instances tonality. In many ways it is extremely modern and reminds me of some forms of modern jazz. So I have quite a large collection.

However here is the problem: no one wants to play it. To most people even professional musicians it just doesn't sound right and coordinating even two people with these back- and- forth polyrhythms just does not appeal to very many people which includes listeners. It is frankly not very listenable: there are of course exceptions.

Therefore the music I had been saving up was a flop. Also some arrangements by Benjamin Britten based on traditional tunes did better but still became tiresome for the group. Eventually I brought out some Water Music by Handel and Winifred said, "Oh you've been hiding the good stuff from us!"

Now here is where you get to connect the dots:

I realized recently, upon getting some promotional material from Shimer College, that the Great Books upon which the program is based is, perhaps increasingly, a very selective bunch of tomes which tend to be from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. There is for example, a Montaigne essay contest that seems to be somewhat of a flagship enterprise in terms of outreach. In retrospect, there was certainly a dearth of authors from the Reformation, or the Counterreformation; and there was in particular very little from the Roman Catholic tradition either. Late Greek and Roman philosophy was very well represented in particular of course Aristotle and Plato. What I learned about the Reformation I basically learned from the Karnowski family and numerous other sources well outside the influence of Shimer College.

This would explain, in retrospect, why I was a persona non grata by the time I graduated. Ironically I have found this to be true time and time again. Whenever I would present myself as a sort of a "Renaissance Man," I would find acceptance in, for instance, my residency programs or other para-academic groups-- but I would find rejection by the majority as soon as I started to transition from, for instance the mindset of Montaigne to the mindset of, say, Pascal.

Now compare the music of the Renaissance to the music of the Reformation. Notice any difference?

Interesting sidelight: Shimer College is now recruiting homeschoolers. Very prominently. Better late than never I suppose. They had better recruit from somewhere! More later.

teaser-- how many of you are familiar with the 3 1/2 hour French film, "The Mother and the Whore"? If so -- I'm talking to you Dennis -- what do you remember about it? It would be interesting to compare notes. I saw this in Chicago when it was new and it sure didn't seem like 3 1/2 hours. But then again, I loved, "My Dinner with Andre".