You may think that someone does not have anything to offer. If you look closely, you will see that virtually everyone does. The simplest person can make a contribution though an observation or a quality that no one else knows or thinks to express. For example, sometimes the person whose honesty has not been suppressed is the one who will remind that community of a shared value. The act or comment is not always valuable or welcome but sometimes it is.
Human societies thrive on diversity. That is why each person’s unique contribution is important.
Real
True Narratives
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I cannot describe hands under any class or type; there is no democracy of hands. Some hands tell me that they do everything with the maximum of bustle and noise. Other hands are fidgety and unadvised, with nervous, fussy fingers which indicate a nature sensitive to the little pricks of daily life. Sometimes I recognize with foreboding the kindly but stupid hand of one who tells with many words news that is no news. I have met a bishop with a jocose hand, a humourist with a hand of leaden gravity, a man of pretentious valour with a timorous hand, and a quiet, apologetic man with a fist of iron. When I was a little girl I was taken to see a woman who was blind and paralysed. I shall never forget how she held out her small, trembling hand and pressed sympathy into mine. My eyes fill with tears as I think of her. The weariness, pain, darkness, and sweet patience were all to be felt in her thin, wasted, groping, loving hand. [Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1907), chapter II, “The Hands of Others.”] |
Technical and Analytical Readings
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
This is how Victor Hugo describes a minor character in Les Misérables. Note how the description probably distinguishes her from any other person:
Sister Simplice was white, with a waxen pallor. Beside Sister Perpétue, she was the taper beside the candle. Vincent de Paul has divinely traced the features of the Sister of Charity in these admirable words, in which he mingles as much freedom as servitude: "They shall have for their convent only the house of the sick; for cell only a hired room; for chapel only their parish church; for cloister only the streets of the town and the wards of the hospitals; for enclosure only obedience; for gratings only the fear of God; for veil only modesty." This ideal was realized in the living person of Sister Simplice: she had never been young, and it seemed as though she would never grow old. No one could have told Sister Simplice's age. She was a person--we dare not say a woman--who was gentle, austere, well-bred, cold, and who had never lied. She was so gentle that she appeared fragile; but she was more solid than granite. She touched the unhappy with fingers that were charmingly pure and fine. There was, so to speak, silence in her speech; she said just what was necessary, and she possessed a tone of voice which would have equally edified a confessional or enchanted a drawing-room. This delicacy accommodated itself to the serge gown, finding in this harsh contact a continual reminder of heaven and of God. Let us emphasize one detail. Never to have lied, never to have said, for any interest whatever, even in indifference, any single thing which was not the truth, the sacred truth, was Sister Simplice's distinctive trait; it was the accent of her virtue. She was almost renowned in the congregation for this imperturbable veracity. The Abbé Sicard speaks of Sister Simplice in a letter to the deaf-mute Massieu. However pure and sincere we may be, we all bear upon our candor the crack of the little, innocent lie. She did not. Little lie, innocent lie--does such a thing exist? To lie is the absolute form of evil. To lie a little is not possible: he who lies, lies the whole lie. To lie is the very face of the demon. Satan has two names; he is called Satan and Lying. That is what she thought; and as she thought, so she did. The result was the whiteness which we have mentioned--a whiteness which covered even her lips and her eyes with radiance. Her smile was white, her glance was white. There was not a single spider's web, not a grain of dust, on the glass window of that conscience. On entering the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, she had taken the name of Simplice by special choice. Simplice of Sicily, as we know, is the saint who preferred to allow both her breasts to be torn off rather than to say that she had been born at Segesta when she had been born at Syracuse--a lie which would have saved her. This patron saint suited this soul. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume I – Fantine; Book Seventh – The Champnathieu Affair, Chapter I, “Sister Semplice”.]
Poetry
It was the twilight of the iguana:
From a rainbowing battlement, / a tongue like a javelin / lunging in verdure; / an ant heap treading the jungle, / monastic, on musical feet; / the guanaco, oxygen-fine / in the high places swarthed with distances, / cobbling his feet into gold; / the llama of scrupulous eye / the widens his gaze on the dews / of a delicate world.
A monkey is weaving / a thread of insatiable lusts / on the margins of morning: / he topples a pollen-fall, / startles the violet-flght / of the butterfly, wings on the Muzo.
It was the night of the alligator: / snouts moving out of the slime, / in original darkness, the pullulations, / a clatter of armour, opaque / in the sleep of the bog, / turning back to the chalk of the sources.
The jaguar touches the leaves / with his phosphorous absence, / the puma speeds to his covert / in the blaze of his hungers, / his eyeballs, a jungle of alcohol, / burn in his head.
[Pablo Neruda, “Some Beasts”]
I marvel how Nature could ever find space
For so many strange contrasts in one human face:
There's thought and no thought, and there's paleness and bloom
And bustle and sluggishness, pleasure and gloom.
There's weakness, and strength both redundant and vain;
Such strength as, if ever affliction and pain
Could pierce through a temper that's soft to disease,
Would be rational peace--a philosopher's ease.
There's indifference, alike when he fails or succeeds,
And attention full ten times as much as there needs;
Pride where there's no envy, there's so much of joy;
And mildness, and spirit both forward and coy.
There's freedom, and sometimes a diffident stare
Of shame scarcely seeming to know that she's there,
There's virtue, the title it surely may claim,
Yet wants heaven knows what to be worthy the name.
This picture from nature may seem to depart,
Yet the Man would at once run away with your heart;
And I for five centuries right gladly would be
Such an odd such a kind happy creature as he.
[William Wordsworth, “A Character”]
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Luciano Berio, Sequenzas (1958-2004) (approx. 157-182’) is a series of fourteen musical monologues, each for a solo instrument. Similar to each other in style and theme, these distinctly twentieth-century musical vignettes demonstrate the unique voice and character of each featured instrument. (You won’t be humming any tunes.) Excellent recorded performances are by Ensemble InterContemporain in 1998; and by various artists on the Naxos label in 2006.
Similar to Berio’s Sequenzas are Claudio Santoro’s Fantasias Sul América (1983) (approx. 58’), for various solo instruments, and Kalevi Aho’s solos for various instruments (1975-2018) (approx. 78’).
Other compositions:
- Lou Harrison was a modern composer who left us with a collection of works for three relatively ancient instruments: harpsichord, tack piano, and fortepiano. No other composer has taken quite that approach.
- Kurt Atterberg, String Quartet No. 2 in B minor, Op. 11 (1916) (approx. 18-20’) “was dedicated to ‘The Splinter’, a reference to those composers who had broken away from the Chamber Music Society of Stockholm and had tried unsuccessfully to start another rival association. The impetus for the work came when his friend and fellow composer Natanael Berg suggested that they each write a quartet of less than 16 minutes duration as an act of defiance toward the stodgy Chamber Music Society.”
- Leonardo Balada, Concerto for Four Guitars & Orchestra (1976) (approx. 23’) may be the only work of its kind.
Yat-Kha “was founded in Moscow in 1991, as a collaborative project between Albert Kuvezin (. . . formerly of Huun-Huur-Tu) and Russian avant-garde, electronic composer Ivan Sokolovsky. The project blended traditional Tuvan folk music with post-modern rhythms and electronic effects.” The group has released more than a half-dozen albums.
Albums:
- Joshua Gerowitz, “Dark Forest Theory” (2019) (47’): “Uniqueness and individuality rule in this recording . . . with vocalists generating unusual sounds as individuals and as a group and also joining the horns in various ensemble passages . . .” (Don Lerman, Cadence magazine annual edition 2020.)
- James Falzone & The Renga Ensemble, “The Room Is” (2015) (71’): Each clarinetist makes a noticeably unique contribution.
- Professor Longhair, “Crawfish Fiesta” (1979) (46’)
- Duo Diagonal, “Anytime” (2021) (67’): cembalo, harpsichord and a ten-year old girl singer – they are a married couple and their daughter. Quirky as it sounds, they are excellent musicians.
- Yarn/Wire Percussion Piano Quartet, “Tonband” (2021) (65’), features works of Enno Poppe and Wolfgang Heiniger: “Maybe you’ve heard real-time spectral disintegration of an air raid siren? What about purposeful deformation of the natural order of sound itself?”
- Anat Cohen (clarinet) & Marcello Gonçalves (guitar), a fun and interesting pairing of instruments, “Reconvexo” (2021) (42’)
- Mark Viner, “Alkan: Character Pieces and Grotesqueries” (2023) (78’)
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Beethoven (composer), Für Elise, Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor, WoO 59, is a bagatelle with a sense of mystery, probably composed in homage to a woman Beethoven knew.
- Pearl Jam, "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" (lyrics)
- Bruce Springsteen, "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" (lyrics)
- Plain White T's, "Hey There Delilah" (lyrics)