Author Archive for peter

Page 46 of 83

Contemporary Chinese ceramics: Liu JianHua

Published by peter on 2011-04-02 in Art. 0 Comments


The image shows Container Series (2009), a ceramic installation by contemporary Chinese artist Liu JianHua, recently acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.    From the description of the work by the AGNSW:

In this beautiful celadon work ‘Container Series’ 2009, Liu acknowledges the magnificent ceramic heritage of China by re-creating traditional ritual vessel shapes such as stem cups and ‘gu’ ( wine vessel), and placing them alongside more contemporary shapes to present an impressive installation of 37 pieces of varying size and shape. The pieces are randomly arranged, in contrast to the formal presentation of temple and imperial settings of the past. Arranged as an installation they are placed as on a blank canvas. Liu has used a celadon glaze, in emulation of the classic greenwares of the Song dynasty (960-1279). All the pieces look to be filled with a red liquid, but the ceramics are in fact hollow, with a red glaze on top of each piece giving the illusion of liquid. Like the celadon, the red is another classic of the Chinese ceramic repertoire, traditionally known as ‘sang de boeuf’ or oxblood (‘langyao hong’). The way the artist has used the two colours to dramatically contrasting effect is innovative and effective. The red colour evokes blood, and the work may be a homage to those whose blood has been spilt in the pursuit of specific goals. Each piece is handmade and thrown on a wheel. They were glazed first with the celadon then the red ‘langyao hong’ glaze, after which they were fired only once in a kiln at about 1342 degrees centigrade. Most parts were made in varying numbers of editions.
Eugene Tan has noted of Liu’s work that it, ‘reflects the complex ontological relation between the production of consumer goods in China and the international art system, thereby also reflecting the recent, rapid growth of the Chinese contemporary art market.’ (Tan, undated)   As such, Liu’s work makes allusions to the present situation in China both culturally and economically.”

[Note: The commentary by Eugene Tan is dated 2009-07-02 on the web-page linked to here.]
A description of another installation of this artist can be found here.

A Rainbow Nathan

Published by peter on 2011-03-27 in Humour and Language. 0 Comments

From the Sydney Morning Herald (2011-03-26):

”Your colourful surnames reminded me of a situation we had at Maclean High School in the ’90s,” writes Steve McKenzie, a teacher, of Yamba, ”where we had Nathan Black, Nathan Grey, Nathan Green, Nathan White and Nathan Brown all in the same year. My colleague even had all the coloured Nathans in the one class.”

Bach in Sloane Square

Published by peter on 2011-03-18 in Concerts and Music. 0 Comments

Last night saw a superb performance of Bach, Purcell and Allegri by Solistes de Musique Ancienne, to about 100 very fortunate people in Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square. The concert was billed as A Celebration of Easter, and included Purcell’s Welcome to all the Pleasures, Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin (BWV 1060, in C minor), Allegri’s Miserere, and Bach’s Easter Oratorio. The performance was led by Joel Newsome, with all the orchestral parts performed by soloists.

The Purcell had some interesting harmonies, and was sung and performed well, but otherwise was not something I warmed to. The Oboe+Violin Concerto was superb, and the playing effortless, together, and unhurried. My only criticism was the placement of the soloists. The acoustics of this church – high spaces, uncovered stone columns, stone walls – meant the sound bounces around a great deal, with a long delay. Placing the soloists behind the other musicians meant that their sound was somewhat muffled by comparison with the ensemble, at least for those of us in the mid-centre of the church, even though the soloists were standing and the others were sitting. The muffling meant that we did not always hear well the oboe’s elaborations.

The Allegri took advantage of the specific features of the space, something I always applaud, with the chorus divided between the front of the church (near the altar) and the choir loft upstairs at the rear. The resulting call-and-response and echo effects were superb, and the piece provided, as the director said, an appropriate contemplative prelude to the Easter Oratorio.

The Oratorio was performed with baroque trumpets, which even leading professionals play with trepidation. Last night’s performers appeared to be using trumpets with vent holes, which certainly help secure intonation, although perhaps are not strictly historically accurate. The wobbles here were not too strong, and were in any case mostly covered by the acoustics. Personally, I am a great fan of 21st-century mash-up culture, so I celebrated the fact that modern versions of baroque trumpets were used alongside 19th century violins and bows (played with vibrato), in a room with artificial heating and decorated mostly with 19th-century British art.

The performance of the Oratorio was superb. The stillness at the end, when the audience seemed to be sitting on its hands, was because no one wanted to break the sense of having been transported elsewhere that we’d all just experienced.

Other posts on music here. Some thoughts on what music is for, here.

The Matherati: Alexander d’Arblay

Published by peter on 2011-03-13 in Burney Family, Mathematics, Matherati and Religion. 0 Comments

The photo shows the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of All Saints, at the corner of Pratt and Camden Streets in Camden, London. Before becoming an Orthodox Chuch in 1948, the building was an Anglican Church, most recently All Saints Camden. The building was designed by William Inwood and his son Henry Inwood in 1822-24, who had together earlier designed St. Pancras New Church in Euston, London. Both churches borrow from ancient Greek architecture, so it is fitting that one is now filled with Greek icons and text, and used for services in (modern) Greek. All Saints has a low-set but very deep choir balcony, extending from the entrance almost one-third the length of the church; this gives the church a quite intimate feel, despite the height of the main chapel. The current cathedral also has three large, low-hanging white glass chandeliers over the main chapel, which enhances the intimacy. I was reminded of the intimacy of Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Chicago, a building which is similarly deceptive from the outside about the compactness of the space within.

When built, All Saints was called Camden Town Chapel, and its founding pastor was the Rev’d Alexander Charles Louis d’Arblay (1794-1837), son of the author Fanny Burney (1752-1840) and Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard D’Arblay (1754-1818), emigre French aristocrat and soldier, and adjutant-general to Lafayette. The Reverend d’Arblay was a poet and chess-player, and had been 10th wrangler in the Mathematics Tripos at Cambridge in 1818. He was a friend of fellow-student (but non-wrangler) Charles Babbage and of Senior Wrangler (1813) John Herschel, and a member of Babbage’s Analytical Society (forerunner of the Cambridge Philosophical Society).  Indeed, d’Arblay may have introduced Babbage to recent French mathematics. Alexander had been partly educated in France, and was aware of French trends in analysis, which in its rigour and formality was very different to the applied focus of British mathematics. From his time as an undergraduate, Babbage ran a campaign against the troglodytic British mathematics establishment, who were then opposed to rigour, formality and theory, and he sought to introduce modern analysis into mathematics teaching at Cambridge. British pure mathematics, as better mathematicians than I have argued, lost a century of progress as a result of its focus on certain types of applications at the expense of rigour.

Because of his First-Class degree, after his graduation d’Arblay was appointed a Fellow of Christ College Cambridge, which paid him a generous stipend his entire life (presumably while he remained unmarried). He had a remarkable ability to quickly learn and recite from memory long poems, and was obsessed with chess. He once missed an arranged meeting with his father when the latter was returning to France because he was engrossed in a chess game with his uncle, the admiral James Burney. d’Arblay was apparently bilingual, and wrote equally easily in English and French, and translated poetry and literary works from each language to the other. d’Arblay was ordained as a Church of England deacon in 1818, and as a priest on 11 April 1819 in St James’s Picadilly.  In the summer of 1821, he spent three months walking in Switzerland with Babbage and Herschel.

Through his mother, he was friends with the royal family and moved in high society.  For many years he was close friends with Mrs Clara Bolton (nee Clarissa Marion Verbeke) (1804-1839), who was, for a period, also a very close friend (and alleged mistress) of the young Benjamin Disraeli. She was the wife of George Buckley Bolton ( -1847), who was the Disraeli family doctor.  The evidence for the allegation that Mrs Bolton was a mistress of Disraeli does not convince me at all.

Ordained Reverend d’Arblay, d’Arblay served as minister of Camden Town Chapel from 1824-1837, and then briefly at Ely Chapel in High Holborn, London. He died of tuberculosis still unmarried, although engaged at the time of death to one Mary Anne Smith.  Thaning [1985] argues that d’Arblay was in unrequited love with Mrs Bolton, and that he proposed to her, unsuccessfully, shortly before becoming engaged to Mary Anne Smith.    The evidence Thaning presents for this claim, however, is not compelling.  Miss Smith became good friends with Madame d’Arblay, and lived with her after Alexander’s death.

Some of d’Arblay’s poetry is on the subject of chess. As the son of Fanny Burney, d’Arblay was the grandson of musician, composer and musicologist Charles Burney FRS (1726-1814), and thus from a remarkable family that included musicians, dancers, novelists, painters, historians, and an admiral.

Alongside d’Arblay, the founding organist at Camden Town Chapel was Samuel Wesley (1766-1837).

An index to posts about the Matherati is here.

POSTSCRIPT 1 [2011-12-24]: I have now seen d’Arblay’s poem, “Caissa Rediviva”, published anonymously in 1836. This is a long poem about a chess game. If there were any doubts about d’Arblay’s membership of the Matherati, this publication would allay them: The frontispiece to the poem poses a non-standard chess problem, which only someone with a subtle and agile mathmind could imagine: Given a particular chess board-configuration, find the precise sequence of 59 moves by White, each of which forces a single move by Black, and which ends with Black check-mating White with a particular move.

POSTSCRIPT 2 [2012-02-18]: Apparently, the Reverend d’Arblay suffered severely from depression for most of his adult life. Peter Sabor, in a recent talk at a conference in depression in the 18th century argues that d’Arblay’s depression may have arisen from his combination of great (and unrealistic) ambition and great indolence. But, of course, his apparent indolence may have been the result, not the cause, of his depression.

POSTSCRIPT 3 [2012-02-18]: d’Arblay was not the last member of the Matherati to become engrossed in intellectual pursuits. The most recent Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, Sean Eberhard (Tripos 2011), is described by his fellow collegians as, “most likely to neglect children to do crossword”.

POSTSCRIPT 4 [2017-11-11]: Clara Bolton is briefly mentioned (pages 68 and 78, footnote 61) as a friend and possible mistress of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) by St. George [1995] in his fascinating history of the law firm, Norton Rose (now Norton Rose Fulbright).  However, St. George seems to have conflated Mrs Bolton with another close friend and possible mistress of Disraeli, Henrietta, Lady Sykes (c.1801-1846), wife of Sir Francis Sykes (1799-1843), third Baronet of Basildon.

References:

An Amateur at Chess [Alexander C. L. d’Arblay] [1836]: Caissa Rediviva: Or the Muzio Gambit. London, UK: Sampson Low.

Peter Sabor [2008]: Frances Burney and Alexander d’Arblay: Creative and Uncreative Gloom. Invited Lecture at: Conference on Before Depression: 1600 – 1800.

Andrew St. George [1995]: A History of Norton Rose. London, UK: Granta Editions.

Kaj Thaning [1985]: Hvem var Clara? Grundtvig Studier, 37 (1).

Autonomic beliefs

Published by peter on 2011-03-09 in Religion. 0 Comments

Thanks to Norm, I learn about an attempt to brand religious belief and religious worship immoral, by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse.    It is apparently immoral to believe propositions for which one does not have evidence.   My first reaction is to infer that neither author is an entrepreneur, famously people who strongly believe things (for example, that they will be successful) for which the evidence is usually absent or if not absent, then mostly contrary.    And neither author must be a pure mathematician or an artist, people who pursue dreams or visions while only having vague intuitions or intimations of their truth.   Mathematics (and hence most of modern science and technology) would come to a sudden, shuddering halt if mathematicians could only cogitate or publish on that which they could first prove.    Mathematicians even have a name for results they suspect are true but cannot yet prove:  conjectures.
Of course, the greatest defence against this attack on religion is that most religious believers DO indeed have evidence for their beliefs, as I have repeatedly argued before.   Of course, this evidence is usually not independently verifiable or replicable, which makes it inappropriate for use in the social activity we call science.   But that fact does not alone disqualify its use as a basis for deciding personal beliefs or personal actions.  The state of being in love is also not independently verifiable or replicable (at least not yet), but most of us do not therefore not use it as a basis for personal decision-making, and nor should we.
The ignorance Aikin and Talisse demonstrate about religion is shown also in their argument about worship:  Not all believers in or practitioners of religious ideas are engaged in the worship of divine entities.   One could make a very strong case that worship plays no part at all in Buddhism or in Taoism, or in the mystic strains of other religions, such as Sufism or the Kabbala.    These traditions seek to commune with the divine, not worship it.    Perhaps this distinction is lost on people without personal experience of non-material realms, but most pure mathematicians would get it, since they commune with, but do not worship, mathematical entities.
Aikin and Talisse reject religious worship as being demeaning to the dignity of an autonomous human person.  Why so concerned with human autonomy in this aspect, while striving  a few paragraphs earlier to prevent humans autonomously choosing what to believe? Like Richard Dawkins they not only want to think for themselves, but also want to think for everyone else too. As an autonomous human, I disdain and reject their attempt at mental colonization.
Given such a weak case, one wonders why they make it with such stridency.

Rythmica ps

Published by peter on 2011-02-27 in Jazz and Music. 0 Comments

LondonJazz has a review of Rhythmica’s recent concert at the QEH here.  And links to some videos are here on Rhythmica’s pages.  Be delighted, be very delighted!
Next concert on the Rhythmica Wake-up-the-Nation tour is in Cambridge on 13 March 2011 at  Clare Jazz, Clare Cellars, Memorial Court,  Queen’s Road, Cambridge CB3 9AJ.

Cocktails with Rhythmica

Published by peter on 2011-02-11 in Concerts, Jazz, Music and Reviews. 0 Comments

Another superb gig from Rhythmica, this time in the Cafe of Foyle’s Bookshop in London.   After last weekend’s wake-up call in Southport, tonight’s gig was at a more civilized hour.   But the pace and the musical skill and the serious intent were just the same – anyone expecting easy-listening, cocktail-bar music was in for a shock!
With about 75 people present, it was standing room only.    Standing at the back, I found Peter Edwards’ piano hard to hear – maybe it was not amplified, or not sufficiently.   I enjoyed again bass Peter Randall’s solo in Parallel, a solo which seemed to have more coherence tonight, or perhaps I understood the motifs and their development better this time round.   Andy Chapman on drums provided solid support for the odd time signatures, and I noticed again the frequent rhythmic coupling and tripling he did with Randall’s bass and Edwards’ piano.
I was also impressed by Mark Crown’s superfast bop trumpet solo on Herbie Hancock’s The Sorcerer. But the man of the match tonight was undoubtedly stand-in tenor sax player, Binker Golding, whose blistering, vein-popping solo on the same number had the audience up in a standing ovation when he ended.    Even the two Dutch women near me who talked through the entire set were quiet for this, although they still didn’t look at the stage.
As best I recall, the order of songs was:

  • Time Machine (Audu)
  • Anthem (Edwards)
  • Parallel (Joe Harriott)
  • Turner’s Dream (Crown)
  • Triple Threat (Edwards)
  • The Sorcerer (Hancock)
  • Blind Man’s Stomp (Golding).

Can’t wait to hear these guys again!
UPDATE (2011-02-18): A video of Binker’s blistering solo is here, and photos of the gig here.

Honeywell International Inter-varsity Debating Festival 1978

Published by peter on 2011-02-05 in Rhetoric. 0 Comments

On 17 July 1978, the ABC TV current affairs programme, Monday Conference, held a Parliamentary Debate at Sydney University with participants from the Honeywell International Inter-varsity Debating Festival, then being held in Sydney: universities represented included Auckland, Cambridge, Canterbury (NZ), Columbia, Glasgow, Harvard, Nairobi, Oregon, Oxford and eight Australian universities.  Particularly memorable performances were given by Nicholas O’Shaughnessy (age 26) from Oxford and David Pash (age 19) from Harvard.  Pash, speaking of O’Shaughnessy’s speeches, remarked:

They fall into three categories:  the witty, the stirring, and the vast majority.”

Pash also said:

Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Or, in Latin, Nil combustio sic profumo.“

Pash is now an attorney in LA, and O’Shaughnessy Professor of Communication at Queen Mary, University of London. Ewan Sutherland, a participant from Glasgow and now a telecommunications consultant, has a short report of the Debating Festival here.
Following the Festival, the student newspaper of the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Woroni, reported on a visit to ANU by the Oxford University Union Debating Team (issue of 1 August 1978).   This report (with obvious typing errors corrected, one ellipsis added, and one misplaced line – shown by [ ] – re-inserted appropriately) is here:

Complete with jokes generously supplied by the FitWilliam [sic] Museum of Antiquities in Cambridge, the  Oxford University Union Debating Team visited Canberra for four days at the beginning of second semester.  The team was in Australia along with teams from Cambridge, Glasgow, Harvard, Columbia, Oregon, Auckland, Canterbury and several Australian universities including ANU for the first Honeywell International Inter-varsity Debating Festival in Sydney.
Despite the fact that all four members of the team are part of Margaret Thatcher’s shock troops (she was described by one of them as Attila the Hen), they were almost human.  Nicholas O’Shaughnessy wants to be Viceroy of India and developed an accent to match.  John Harrison . . . found solace in the company of Greg Carman.  Marie-Louise Rossi replaced at 4 hours notice a past president of the Oxford Union, Vivienne Dinham.  Mark Sterling, in between drams, managed to defeat the cream sherry of ANU Law School mooting talent, Tom Faunce and Lee Aitken.
There were two debates in Canberra.  The first, on 19th July, was against ANU, ably represented by Andrew Byrnes, Steve Bartos and Vivienne Bath.  The subject was ‘That Only God can Save the Queen‘, which Oxford negated.  By any standards it was a good piece of comedy, though not perhaps describable as a debate.  Oxford were rather the worse for wear, having staggered off a plane from North Queensland just 1.5 hours before the debate began.
On 20th July there was a highly successful debate in the Albert Hall against a team from parliament.   It proved very difficult to get any MPs at all.  Most of the  ALP were overseas on their compulsory annual junkets.  Many Liberals were [  ] discreetly elsewhere on the date of the debate.  No member of the National Party could be found who could string more than about three words together before collapsing in exhaustion.  In the end we found Michael Baume, Jim Carlton and Michael Hodgman, who turned on a very entertaining performance.  They admirably proved that talent is in inverse proportion to one’s chances of becoming a minister.
On July 21 the Law School staged a moot and lost.  Oxford left for Melbourne on July 22, having only managed [to see Canberra  in the wet.  Every time] that a trip was planned, the heavens opened.
On a marginally more serious  note, the success of the Oxford visit has prompted the Union to try and re-establish Union Night Debates on a regular weekly basis.  These debates are an established and popular feature of many English and Australian universities, and were common here until a few years ago.  If anyone wants to help on the Union Debates Committee, go and talk to someone in the Union Office.

The article was accompanied by a photo of the 19 July debate participants, showing seated (left-to-right) under a portrait of the Queen and a British and an Australian flag: John Harrison, Marie-Louise Rossi (1956-2014), Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, Greg Carman (MC), Vivienne Bath, Steven Bartos and Andrew Byrnes. I attended the debate on 19 July 1978.

Breakfast with Rhythmica

Published by peter on 2011-02-05 in Concerts, Jazz, Music and Reviews. 0 Comments

Earlier today I caught a rainy, late morning gig by Rhythmica as part of the Southport Jazz on a Winter’s Weekend Festival.  The quintet comprises Mark Crown on trumpet, Peter Edwards piano, Peter Randall double bass, Andy Chapman drums, and Zem Audu on sax.  Audu was absent today, his place taken by Binker Golding on tenor sax.   There were perhaps 150 people in the audience, with only a handful looking younger than 50.   Maybe everyone younger was still asleep.
What a way to wake up!  From the first three bars of the first number – Time Machine – you knew these guys were serious – they were people to be reckoned with.  The piece was in 11/4 (or perhaps one bar in 3 beats to every two bars in 4), and they were extremely together!  Piano and bass were in close unison for an ostinato bass line, trumpet and tenor sax together in similar unison for the melody.    And everyone – all 5 – in very tight formation.    The close co-ordination was evident throughout the morning, with the players grouping mostly as for Time Machine.
The use of trumpet and sax together, sometimes in unison, sometimes playing seconds and thirds (especially at the ends of unison phrases), with the piano riffing between phrases,  as if commenting from the sidelines on the melody, is a feature of Wynton Marsalis’ compositions, and before him, of Wayne Shorter and others in the early 60s.   This produces what I find is a very attractive sound, and Rhythmica did it very well.  Anthem was in this vein.   Sometimes also the bass and drums would double (as in Mr JJ), and just once we also heard trumpet, sax and piano play unison/thirds choruses together, in the aptly named Triple Threat.   And for the final chorus of Solace, Crown’s trumpet played long-held falling fifths underneath everyone else’s bop gyrations; these were just sublime.
In a lineup of excellent performers, the standout for me was bass player Peter Randall – he was fast, agile, and with lots of interesting walking lines – and using all five fingers to stop strings in the high registers.   But we only heard him solo once (in Parallel) –  it would be good to hear more of him.

As best I recall, the order of songs was as follows:
Set 1:

  • Time Machine (written by Audu)
  • Anthem (Edwards)
  • Delfeayo’s Dilemma (Wynton Marsalis)
  • Turner’s Dream (Crown)
  • Mr JJ (Jeff “Tain” Watts)

Set 2:

  • Triple Threat – The Bridge (Edwards)
  • Parallel (Joe Harriott)
  • Solace (Edwards)
  • The Sorcerer (Herbie Hancock)
  • Blind Man Stomp (Golding).

The last number was a great New Orleans stomp written by Binker Golding, which the crowd loved – perhaps showing their real preference would have been for something more traditional.   Myself, I was happier with what came before.  Counting 11 to the bar certainly woke me up PDQ!

UPDATE (2011-02-06): I have now listened to their debut CD.  Confirms my view that these guys are not people you’d want to mess with.  They have some serious intent and the strong musical skills to achieve it.  This is great music.
UPDATE #2 (2011-02-08): The band’s next outing is in a bookshop!   First, pre-dawn Saturday morning gigs, then playing  in libraries!  What next?  An appearance on The Archers?  Or music to accompany a TV cooking program?