text:
artists of the month august 2022: personal whale tales - true stories of surf life saving
Whale Beach Surf Life Saving Club is fortunate to have a history of dedicated people who, in their own special way, have contributed to the growth and ideals of the Club and its service to the beach-going community. This heritage will surely be carried forward by future generations of young Australians as members of this special Club.
The stories of surf life saving at Whale Beach runs as the August 2022 Artist of the Month feature and is available now in the WBSLSC online site here.
This book is dedicated to the young men and women who have become members of Whale Beach SLSC since its foundation in 1937. It is a record of their determination and dedication to community service through becoming a trained lifesaver. Many risked their lives and serious injury in undertaking the rescue of beach visitors in danger in the surf. These stories share many of these incidents in which lives were saved.
Personal Whale Tales - True stories of surf life saving, is a testament to the selflessness and courage of those volunteer lifesavers.
Rob Berry, who has organised the work, says;
''Thank you to the members who have put forward stories, and to the many others who have helped in reserach, provided photographs, and for your encouragement with this Personal Whale Tales book project.
These stories are based on the personal recollections of the lifesavers involved, documents from Whale Beach SLSC archives and newspaper clippings.''
The book is divided into three themes: Rescues, Happenings and History, and dates from 1937 records right through 2021.
This month we share three insights from the large body of works contained in Personal Whale Tales - True stories of surf life saving, that are interrelated and centred in the one family that were always on the beach - the Hendriksons who owned and ran The Whale Beach Kiosk over three generations.
Rob Berry, WBSLSC member, 2022
Whale Beach Icon gone
Whale Beach Kiosk was purchased by an enterprising man from Estonia, Alex Hendrikson at the end of WWII. With his wife Freda, Alex built a good business as the number of people visiting and living at Whale Beach grew. He was able to extend the premises to offer both a tea room and a beer garden with a barbecue.
Alex started a tradition of putting on a spit roast to celebrate Australia Day. He is fondly remembered for attending over many seasons, the AGM of the Club and addressing the members in his heavily accented English, with words of praise for the good life in Australia and the opportunity young people have in this 'great country'.
In 1952, an event to raise funds to build a clubhouse was held in the beer garden and raised what was in those times, the substantial amount of £400.
The Hendrikson's had three sons, Michael, Chris and Adrian. They joined the surf lifesaving club and were strong competitors in the surf events and in surf boat crews. Chris went on to be Club President from 1980-1986 and was later elected as a Life Member. His son Aaron Hendrikson became a Club Captain and was a professional Lifeguard for a number of seasons.
Alex passed away in 1978. His son Chris with wife Jan then took over the 'kiosk' until it was sold to a developer in 1989.
Chris has continued his father's tradition of celebrating Australia Day with a spit-roast lamb and community party.
The kiosk and what was the Hendrikson family dwelling were sold in 2019 and have now been demolished to make way for luxury dwellings.
The photo is the Whale Beach Kiosk and beer garden in 1948. From Henrikson Family Albums.
How Camping and Campers At Whale Beach Helped The Whale Beach SLSC Save Lives
Pittwater Roads II: Where The Streets Have Your Name - Whale Beach
Whale Beach Ocean Reserve: 'The Strand' - Some History On Another Great Protected Pittwater Reserve
Highly awarded heroes rescue
It was early afternoon with a strong northerly blowing. There was a medium to large swell on a falling tide with a gnarly surf. As later noted in the Incident Report by Number 9 Patrol Captain, Bryan Webster, ' We got a call that two sailboarders were in difficulty near the southern headland. With Phil driving and Chris as crew, our IRB headed out to help.'
Taking up the story, Phil Cullis describes the incident; "On reaching the first sailboarder, he said that we should help his friend who was further out to sea. We found the second bloke a good distance, way between Whaley and Avalon.
While starting to get him and his sailboard on the IRB, we got a radio call from Bryan about a fisherman washed off that southern point. We gave the sailboarder the choice to leave his board and come with us or stay there until we could get back. He chose to stay." said Phil.
Meanwhile, a man from a house above the rescue area had climbed down to the lowest point of the cliff and offered to throw his surfboard down to the fisherman's mate who said 'I can't swim!'
How often have rescuers heard this from rock fishermen?
Phil's recall continues, "We raced back to the southern point and Chris jumped in to support the fisherman and swim him away from the rocks. I brought the boat close in and we got him into the boat. He was in a fairly poor state, lapsing in and out of consciousness. We got him back to the beach and left him in the experienced hands of our beach patrol. We then went back out to look for the sailboarder. He was a bit difficult to find because he had now been blown further out to sea and further south. Chris finally spotted him and we managed to bring him and his board back to the beach. The other sailboarder had already made it to the beach."
The Branch Duty Officer reported how impressed he was with the Patrol efficiency in keeping in communications through the changing priorities of sailboarders and fisherman rescues in difficult conditions and advising the Branch, calling for ambulance and setting up a helicopter landing area.
Phil and Chris were highly acclaimed for their selflessness and aptitude when faced with the situation, and particular praise for Chris in diving into the extremely rough surf surging against the rocks.
Their bravery and the teamwork of the whole patrol was recognised with the first SLSA 'Hero-of the-Surf' Award and the Whale Beach SLSC awarded a fully equipped IRB which was named 'The Green Truck.' (Which is another great story of club life at Whaley).
A sequel to this rescue is the following weekend Mr Lee (the fisherman) arrived at the beach with a box of mangoes to express his gratitude, only to be bitten on the leg by Jamie Macnab's dog. There he was shuffling across the car park carrying a box of mangoes with one leg dragging Jamie's dog.
FOOTNOTE: At the time of this rescue in 1989, Bryan Webster, Phil Cullis and Chris Hendrickson were veteran lifesavers at 46, 46 and 47 years old and continued doing Patrols for over another decade.
The Green Truck
How come a bright red IRB was named 'The Green Truck' ?
That is quite a story as Chris Hendrickson relates:
"Back in the early 60's, our family had the Whale Beach Kiosk on the beachfront, owned and run by my Dad Alex and Mum Jan. I lived in the house there with my brothers Michael and Adrian and sister Lyn. Naturally, I had joined Whale Beach Life Saving Club, when I was just 14.
There were half-a-dozen of us cadet lifesavers at that time and we became very close buddies over the years, becoming Juniors at 16, got our Bronzes, did patrol and got into competition on boards and the surf boat.
That is when the real Green Truck came to be at Whaley.
In 1962, brother Michael was 18 and got his heavy ridged truck driving licence (Class 3). A Chevrolet Ambulance Truck from the war years was obtained at an Army Auction.
It was in the standard army olive green colour. The body that had been specially built flared out from the front wind screen to a full maximum legal width at the back of the seat, eight feet (2.4mtr). You could seat three people across the front seat quite comfortably as well as jamming another two each side against the doors if you wanted to. It was modified in the back like a camper van as the old man took us out to Lightning Ridge. I'm fairly sure that we only used the truck for camping that once and a half trip in and then it was just dumped at the back of the house.
The rig weighed in at about two and a half tons and a truck licence was needed for any vehicle that weighed more than two. This was a problem when I wanted a vehicle to drive, particularly for away Surf Carnivals. The truck was up for rego and we decided to try to get the truck under two tons. Thanks to brother Michael and his mate, everything that could be was stripped; the inside dual wheels, all shock absorbers, the inside back stripped whatever we could safety remove. With only two gallons of petrol in the tank, we got it to the legal weighbridge and scraped in under the weight limit. I paid the fees paid and the truck was registered under two tons, which was cheaper as well. I very happily also to pay for a lot more than one beer each for Michael and his mate at the 'Arms' on the way back to Whale Beach.
We never told the old man what we had done except that it was all ok for me to legally drive the truck. It was used a lot to travel many times to away Surf Carnivals and 6 or so lifesavers that travelled in the back together with a surf reel and boards and march past gear. It was great fun.
The Green Truck did great service for a number of seasons but time and the salt air finally got to the Chevy and it was scrapped. Over the following seasons, our original group of Juniors stayed together as a patrol. There was Webbie, Phil Cullis, Dave Bracey, John Fielder, Terry Collier and Smiley Blundell. All still Whaley members as I write this.
In 1980, we did a major rescue for which we were awarded the SLSA 'Hero-of-the-Surf' Award and with it came a brand new IRB for the Club. So what name should we christen it with? It had to be, 'The Green Truck".
Chris Hendrickson, 2021
Palm Beach RSL Sub-Branch representatives and Members - PBRSL Director Chris Hendrikson, PBRSL Sub Branch Vice President Bryan Webster, PBRSL Sub Branch Committee Member Bob Head PBRSL President Mark Ferguson OAM and Lynette Ferguson. All bar Bob and Lynette are WBSLSC Members over decades - Palm Beach RSL and Sub-branch provided funding for the editing and printing of this book.


Showing: 264841 to 264870 of 541816 .
This unique Police Personalized Picture Frame creatively displays any 4 lines. His/her full name (line one), a 2-line message at the bottom (line 2 and 3) and a 1-line message on the left (line 4). In your choice of 3 color combinations.
Add a soft touch to your bed, sofa or chair with the Berkshire Blanket Honeycomb PrimaLush Throw Blanket. Finished with a stitched border and a pretty hue, this throw is both beautiful, and comfortable to have in your home.
Keep your Kosher salt stored in stylish fashion with the Old Dutch International Kosher Salt Shaker. Made of stainless steel and adorned in a alluring copper finish, this useful shaker makes a great addition to any table setting.
Add designer style to your home décor with the Homestead Throw Pillow from SIScovers. This soft and attractive pillow showcases a wavy-textured look with an alternating wide and narrow stripe pattern that makes a lovely addition to your favorite chair.
Add casual style to your space with the Modern Farmhouse Sunwashed Stripes Throw Pillow from SIScovers. This pillow makes a chic addition to any sofa or easychair, and it boasts a pattern of dotted stripes in sunwashed tones for rustic appeal.
Bring the beauty of nature into your bedroom with the Botanical Garden Tailored Rod Pocket Window Curtain Panel. With a flock of birds perched on winding branches, the inviting panel dresses up your home with the essence of spring.
Bring the beauty of nature into your bedroom with the Botanical Garden Ascot Window Valance. With a garden of colorful florals, the inviting valance dresses up your home with the essence of spring.
Add casual elegance to your room with the Chantel Rod Pocket Window Curtain Panel. Showcasing a gorgeous damask print damask design in neutral hues, this curtain panel will enhance your home décor with a charming touch.
Give your windows a stylish makeover with the Damask Stripe Window Curtain Panel. Adorned with a traditional damask striped design in complementary colors, the lovely panel instantly adds a fashionable flair to any room's décor.
Showing: 264841 to 264870 of 541816 products.


text:
The Pleasures of Music
The plural is intentional. Music is all about pleasure, really. Yes, despite what many apologists for classical music say, even me in one of my deluded moments, the reason we listen to music, any music, is for the pleasure of it.
But there are many kinds of pleasure.
You could lay out different kinds of music in an array or spectrum ranging from one extreme to another. You could have the most cerebral music at one end and the most somatic or corporeal at the other. You could instead organize music along a spectrum between simple and complex or between intimate and public, between quiet and loud, between brief and lengthy.
We usually think in terms of "genre", when we think at all about different kinds of music. By genre is usually meant one of various forms or styles of music such as polka, symphony, EDM, glam rock, blues and so on. But this is rather a grab-bag of different criteria: polka is a national dance with a particular musical structure; symphony is a large orchestral work in several movements, each with its own structure; EDM, standing for electronic dance music, is as much a social event as a musical form; glam rock is a sub-variety of the genre of rock music typified perhaps as much by the costume as the music and blues is a traditional form of folk music associated with black people in certain areas of the US. So there is no real consistency in the definition of "genre". But this is how most people classify and identify music. If you like blues and they advertise an evening of the blues, then you might go.
But it all comes back to pleasure. Music can fulfill many roles from the facilitating of sexual congress to profound meditations on mortality, but it does so by giving us some form of pleasure.
This simple statement is wildly at odds with a great deal of what composers, especially composers in the 20th century, had to say about it. Here are some quotes to ponder:
"The aim of music is not to express feelings but to express music. It is not a vessel into which the composer distills his soul drop by drop, but a labyrinth with no beginning and no end, full of new paths to discover, where mystery remains eternal." --Pierre Boulez
Now there is a clever false dichotomy: he assumes that we think the aim of music is to express something and then denies it. No, the aim of music is not to express anything, but to give pleasure.
"Whether one calls oneself conservative or revolutionary, whether one composers in a conventional or progressive manner, whether one tries to imitate old styles or is destined to express new ideas - one must be convinced of the infallibility of one's own fantasy and one must believe in one's own inspiration." --Arnold Schoenberg
Again with that assumption that music is supposed to express something, but with the addition of the infallible mystery of the composer's fantasy.
"One can not too often insist that in music it is the composer's inner world of tone and rhythm which matters, and that whatever technical means he chooses in order to give it structure and coherence are subject to no a priori judgment whatever." --Roger Sessions
And the listener matters not at all.
"If it is art it is not for everybody; if it is for everybody it is not art." --Arnold Schoenberg
This is one of the most famous statements of the doctrine that there are values in art higher than those of pleasure and beauty. This is a very seductive doctrine indeed, with a long history, and one that often leads people to accuse classical musicians of elitism. Now I don't think there is anything wrong with elitism, as long as it is earned, but the real problem here is that it leads to what Richard Taruskin calls a "divergence of interests" between the composer and the listener. This is caused by discounting the pleasure of the listener in favor of the fantasy or methods of the composer, what he terms the poietic fallacy.
My view is that the fantasy and methods of the composer have as their proper end the pleasure of the listener, but again, with the understanding that there are different kinds of pleasure. In other words, I am claiming that the fantasy and methods of the composer are merely instrumental to the true and final good of the listener's pleasure.
Some music is hard to appreciate if it is severed from its social or artistic context. I'm often critical of hip hop and rap, partly because of what seem to be impoverished musical means, partly because of the crudity of the accompanying videos, but seen in context there are certainly pleasurable examples. Here is one used to accompany the opening credits of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift:
That's "Six Days" by DJ Shadow and, listened to in context, it works just fine. We have lost the context of a lot of historical music, but if you are a bit accustomed to the style, that doesn't seem to matter. The social context of the Viennese divertimento is long gone, but we can still enjoy the delight and freshness of the music. Here is Mozart's Divertimento in E flat, K. 563, for string trio:
Let's go back to what I was saying about different kinds of music and how you can categorize them other than by the usual genres. Let's take the spectrum simple to complex for example. Some music is very simple:
That is a little minuet in G major that is from the Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach, J. S. Bach's wife. It is not actually by Bach himself, but by the minor composer Christian Petzold. But is very popular nonetheless, despite its simplicity. Here is a very complex piece:
That was the Klavierstück V by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Both these pieces are for keyboard, one very simple, the other very complex. From the point of view of the composer's fantasy and methods, the Stockhausen is obviously the more important, significant, whatever adjectives you prefer. But from the point of view of the listener's pleasure, i.e. from the aesthetic point of view, the complexity or simplicity is simply not the issue. But I'm not going to make the error of simply assuming that you will enjoy the Petzold minuet more than the Stockhausen. Perhaps you hear it as trite and hackneyed and prefer to delight in the unexpected gestures of the Stockhausen. But in either case, it is not the composer's methods, nor the complexity or lack of it that is the source of aesthetic value--it is rather the pleasure you derive.
Let's pick two examples on a different spectrum, but by the same composer. Here is the Cavatina from the String Quartet in B flat, op. 130 by Beethoven:
That is a very intimate piece in many ways: it is for string quartet, meant to be played in a modest-sized room for a small audience, and it is also extremely intimate on the emotional level. Here, on the other hand, is Beethoven in a very public mode: the Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op 67 for full orchestra, meant to be played in a large hall for a large audience:
Here there is likely no question of widely different aesthetic worth--both these pieces are recognized as being pinnacles of Western music--but the pleasures they evoke are certainly very different. The Cavatina stirs depths of sorrow while the Symphony inspires feelings of strength and power.
I want to leave you with a bit of a puzzle: if it is certainly not the case that classical music has a necessarily humanizing effect (how could the jailers at Auschwitz listen to Schubert in the evening and return to the torture and slaughter in the morning?), is it possible for some music to have a dehumanizing effect?
Posted by Bryan Townsend at 7:21 AM 5 comments:
Labels: aesthetics
Concerto Guide: Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto in D major, op. 35
Three years after completing his First Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky wrote his Violin Concerto in a single month while taking a rest cure in a Swiss resort on Lake Geneva. Here is the Wikipedia article which gives some interesting details about the initial reaction to the piece.
It was this piece that was my introduction to classical music. Before hearing this, at age 17 or 18, my exposure had been very limited. Where I grew up there were no concert halls, no orchestras, just the occasional traditional musician like my mother, who was an "old-time fiddler". There were no radio stations broadcasting classical music, either. So when a friend of mine put on an LP of this piece one day, it was a complete revelation.
Listening to it now I am struck by a number of things: first of all, it is a tremendous advance over the First Piano Concerto that I discussed last week. This piece is much more coherent in its structure. The whole first movement is based on one theme and some variants of it. It is very protean, however and the variations on the theme are extensive. Oddly enough, I am reminded of a Mozart piano concerto. Like Mozart, this whole movement seems spontaneous, flowing freely. The violin dominates throughout. Indeed, we don't get much of a tutti until measure 127! There really are only three major tuttis in the movement: that one, another that sets up the violin cadenza and the coda, shared with the violin. A tutti, by the way, is when the whole orchestra is let loose. Usually, in this concerto, it is only parts of the orchestra, accompanying the violin.
The movement starts with a brief orchestral introduction before the violin enters with a lyric mini-cadenza, followed by its statement of the theme:
The second theme, which is really a variation of the first theme, is presented on the violin as follows:
Here is that first big orchestral tutti:
Here is a variation in G major for the solo violin:
And here is a variant using dotted rhythms:
One fascinating thing about this concerto as compared to the piano concerto, is how very lyrical it is, another way in which it reminds me of Mozart. Tchaikovsky is not the only one to display much more lyricism in the composition of a violin concerto as opposed to a piano concerto. We see something similar with Prokofiev, whose piano concertos are often very percussive, but whose violin concertos are very lyrical.
Let's listen to this superb performance with Itzak Perlman and Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra:
Posted by Bryan Townsend at 10:10 AM 4 comments:
Labels: concertos, Tchaikovsky
Facing the Music
I've referred to an ongoing interview series at the Guardian before, but I haven't mentioned the title of the series which is "Facing the Music". The latest installment is an interview with Carolyn Sampson. Now it is entirely likely that she is a wonderful singer and excellent musician (her debut recording, Fleurs, is just out--no reviews on Amazon yet), but it is hard to tell from the interview. Here are some excerpts (read the whole thing, at the link above):
What's your musical guilty pleasure?
Wham! (yes, the 80s English pop duo)
Is applauding between movements acceptable?Yes. Spontaneous applause is always acceptable. I think it's great to group songs, or movements, but I also think it's wonderful when there is an immediate reaction from the audience – be it a laugh, an intake of breath, or applause. It means that they're with us, and relaxed enough to respond.
What single thing would improve the format of the classical concert?
A lack of fear. As performers, we should be relaxed on stage and be aiming not at perfection but at being our best on that day, and communicating with the audience. The audience should also feel comfortable and free to respond (see above).
What was the first ever record or CD you bought?A Boney M album. On record
Do you enjoy musicals? Do you have a favourite?Yes, I do. I enjoy most things. I'm a very good audience!Starlight Express made a big impression on me as a child. It was such a spectacle. I had a tape of the songs, to which I sang along with passion.
How many recordings of the Beethoven Symphonies do you own? Do you have a favourite?
Hmmm … I think I once had some of the Beethoven Symphonies recorded by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music. But I'm not really sure!
Which non-classical musician would you love to work with?Those who know me won't be surprised that my answer is George Michael! He has a beautiful voice and is a great musician.
Imagine you're a festival director here in London with unlimited resources. What would you programme – or commission – for your opening event
An event in which I get to duet with George Michael.
What do you sing in the shower?
Whatever I'm currently learning. Or Hey Mickey, by Toni Basil.
I think I have included all the relevant responses. So my question is, is there anything there that would lead you to think that she has had an adequate musical education? Is she familiar with the classical repertoire? Does she have the depth of aesthetic and cultural understanding to interpret great works of music? She might well have. But the impression you get from the interview is that she has all the cultural depth and musical understanding of the mythical 14 year old girl from Cleveland. Would I rush out to hear her sing Schubert? Not bloody likely! George Michael, indeed!
So this is the problem with the watering down of classical music and bowing down to the gods of pop music: it drives away those people who really do appreciate classical music. Now there's a winning strategy for ya!
Let's give Carolyn Sampson a chance to show what sort of singer she is. On YouTube, most of the selections are early music: Purcell, Bach and Handel. Here she is singing a wonderful song by Caccini: Amarilli mia bella:
Great job. So I guess the point of the interview and the new album with its repertoire of Britten, Debussy, Poulenc and others, is to move her career from the early music ghetto to wider acceptability. But again, trying to sell yourself as some kind of pop artist who happens to sing classical music seems, well, counterproductive.
Labels: popularizing classical music
Bach: Mass in B minor
This is not part of any series of posts--I just suddenly realised that while I have mentioned it from time to time and put up clips of parts of it, I have never devoted an entire post to one of the greatest pieces of music in history, the Mass in B minor by J. S. Bach.
This piece would have to be part of any list of the ten (or five, or two!) greatest pieces ever written, yet it is strangely anomalous. The composition formed no part of Bach's normal musical duties. It is a setting of the Catholic mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. These are the unvarying parts of the Eucharistic liturgy. The odd thing is that Bach was not Catholic, but a devout Lutheran and spent much of his life writing music for the Lutheran church. But this piece, finished at the end of his life, is a kind of apotheosis of the long tradition of the Catholic mass. Parts of the work come from previous religious music, but the completion of it, setting those parts of the Catholic liturgy that Lutherans did not use, was one of the last compositions of his life.
The work was not performed during his lifetime--in fact, the first documented complete performance was not until 1859, more than a hundred years later. For more historical details and for a discussion of the difficulties of determining Bach's original text (his son, C. P. E. Bach, who inherited the manuscript, made a number of changes and additions), read the Wikipedia article I linked above.
This is a very large piece of music, though considerably shorter than either of the extant passions that Bach composed. It is in twenty-seven movements (compare to the typical symphony in three to five movements) with a total duration of about two hours. The only symphonies that compare in sheer length are some by Bruckner and Mahler. Now the St. Matthew Passion is longer with 68 movements and a duration of about three hours. But bear in mind that most of those movements are recitative and therefore comparatively lightweight, musically. The Mass in B minor is nothing but choruses and arias. It begins with a ten or twelve minute fugue for chorus and orchestra on Kyrie eleison ("Lord have mercy", the only part of the mass in Greek, not Latin):
The next movement, Christe eleison, is a duet for two sopranos with obbligato violins:
And this first section ends with another Kyrie, a briefer four-part chorus:
One part of the mass, and to my mind the most sublime, is repeated. The "Gratias animus tibia" chorus in the Gloria returns at the very end setting the "Dona nobis pacem":
Woody Allen once said that the finale of Mozart's Symphony No. 41 was the proof of the existence of God. For me, this is even more so. If it is possible for mere music to transport you to heaven, then this is the piece.
Another remarkable setting is the Crucifixus, which is a four-part chorus in passacaglia form, which means that the bass line repeats. In fact, it appears exactly 13 times. You might interpret this as a symbolic reference to Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus who was the 13th member at the Last Supper. Here is that bass line:
Some have speculated that there is a great deal more number symbolism in the mass, but we can simply listen to it as great, very great, music. Here is the complete Mass in B minor by J. S. Bach, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe:
Labels: J. S. Bach, religious music
How Music Can Improve Schools
There are a lot of disquieting trends in education these days--at least if you read the stories in the American press. The amount of spending keeps increasing inexorably while the educational results seem either frozen or in decline. Here is a graph of the numbers for Wisconsin that illustrates this:
A lot of solutions have been proposed, most of them, extremely ironically, arguing for increased spending! Of course increased spending benefits all the stakeholders in the system, teachers, administrators, textbook publishers, creators of educational software, food service companies and anyone else supplying goods and services. The only people left out, it seems, are the students. They are obviously not seeing any benefits here. For them, school remains, as Dawn so memorably averred in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a "big square building full of boredom and despair."
Therefore, it was with extreme interest that I read this story from Germany about how an underperforming school in a poor neighborhood was transformed due to the mere presence of classical musicians. Here is the story in a nutshell:
Eight years ago, one of Europe's best-known orchestras moved their rehearsal rooms to a secondary school on this housing estate and pupils from Tenever found themselves sharing their corridors and lunch tables with professional musicians.
Since then the school's results have improved, its drop-out rates have fallen to less than 1% and the atmosphere in the wider neighbourhood has been "transformed", according to Joachim Barloschky, a local official
No, the orchestral members are not engaged in teaching the students, but they interact on a daily basis:
what makes the partnership unique is the sheer volume of interactions between musicians and pupils. Whenever they are not playing, the musicians are based in the school.
They sit with pupils over lunch and talk to them about their lives. Pupils are allowed to watch the orchestra rehearse, sitting between the musicians rather than in front of them as an audience.
Stephan Schrader, a cellist, says:
"We do not try to be music teachers, but we let them see that we are normal people," says Mr Schrader. "I ask students about their families and tell them about mine.
"When they have a problem, I know about it. I am not the one who will find the solution, but I am one more adult person they have contact with."
I imagine this story might be puzzling to many people, especially those involved with education. What exactly is going on here? Obviously the orchestral musicians have had a powerful positive influence on the school even though they are not professionally involved as teachers. So how does this work? I suspect that the best way to understand this is through the ancient concept of virtue. Virtue ethics, ultimately deriving from Aristotle, has seen a great revival in recent decades, but it is still far from being widely understood. The basic idea is that humans should lead a virtuous life which means to flourish according to their nature. Excelling at something, if it is a human good, is virtuous. Classical musicians then, with their combination of strict discipline and aesthetic sensitivity (all of which insulates them from shallow narcissism) are particularly good models of virtue. We learn virtue from people who exhibit it.
So it is entirely unsurprising to me that just being around orchestral musicians would exert a surprisingly large positive influence on schoolchildren. If they are constantly observing people working together in disciplined ways to achieve aesthetic goals, how can this not be positive? On the other hand, watching television, with its modeling of irrational, Dionysian excess will have the opposite effect, will it not? The classroom environment can also be positive or negative from a virtue ethics point of view.
Here is the orchestra in question, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, conducted by Paavo Jarvi:
Labels: music education
Friday Miscellanea
Philip Glass has won the $100,000 (Canadian) Glenn Gould prize. I think that reviewing the list of the jury will reveal why he was picked instead of someone else:
Actress-filmmaker Sarah Polley, singer Petula Clark and author Michael Ondaatje were among the jury members for this year's award. Music producer Bob Ezrin chaired the panel, which also included former governor general Adrienne Clarkson and soprano Deborah Voigt. The jury was rounded out by tenor Jay Hunter Morris, Princess Julie of Luxembourg, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, and film and TV producer Martin Katz.
I count two (2) classical musicians, both singers, on the panel and a whole lot of "cultural figures". And not one composer. I rather like some of the music of Philip Glass, but the idea of him receiving the Glenn Gould prize rather boggles the mind, doesn't it?
Slipped Disc has a collection of photos of composers smoking, which reminds me of this photo, one of only two existing, of Robert Johnson:
One publisher of transcriptions of his songs thought that the photo would have a bad influence in these times so they airbrushed out the cigarette! Which prompted one reviewer to remark, "hey, Robert Johnson quit smoking!"
As a follow-up to my post on musician interviews, here is a new one with Lang Lang using the same questions. Interestingly, he is so well-known that he doesn't seem to feel the pressure to conform exactly to expectations. The question about working with non-classical musicians is a trap for many artists, but not for Lang Lang. He's already there!
Which non-classical musician would you love to work with?
I like interesting experiments, such as my recent ones with Metallica and Pharrell Williams. These type of collaborations mostly happen relatively spontaneously, so I am curious myself as to with whom from the nonclassical world I will work with next!
Today's example of shoddy research into music comes from the University of Southern Denmark and examines rivalries between 19th century composers. I say "shoddy" because of examples like these:
The researchers say their results are supported by the biographies of composers.
Wagner, for example, complains that his opera rival, Berlioz, neither encouraged nor discouraged him. The researchers say that Berlioz, for most of his life, withheld from Wagner the recognition that he craved.
Maurice Ravel was diagnosed with neurasthenia after the failure of his ballet 'Daphnis et Chloe', because, say the researchers, the performance had been overshadowed by a concert 10 days earlier of Debussy's 'Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun'.
One problem here is that Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" was premiered in December 1894, nearly eighteen years before Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe" which was premiered in June, 1912. As for the Wagner example, this seems to reveal more about Wagner's arrogance than anything else. Also, a lot of these composers died of things like syphilis, for which there was no cure at the time. I suspect that the research was driven by deep-seated ideological biases, rather than objective research. For example, you could equally argue that concentrations of composers leads to more educated and appreciative audiences, which surely must lead to greater mental health for the composers? You could argue this from many angles, but the one taken here seems particularly suspect.
I've long been of the opinion that music has no place in the workplace: unless your workplace is a symphony orchestra, music school or opera house, that is. You, or at least I, can't think if there is music playing, let alone do productive work. Ann Althouse is of the same opinion in this post. Having to listen to music seems like one of the worst aspects of the "open office". But no, I don't think even the seamless ennui of Brian Eno is acceptable as a musical background.
Here is an interesting link: "Inspiring Workspaces of the Famously Creative." Alas, none of them, except for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, are musicians. Here is John in their workspace:
I wish we had a collection of images of composer's workspaces. I do know that Mahler worked in a tiny little shack about 10' by 10' on the shore of a lake in Austria. Stravinsky wrote the Rite of Spring in a little room 8' by 8' in Switzerland and Elliot Carter wrote his String Quartet No. 1 in a little hut in the Sonoran desert. We do have a photo of the exterior of Mahler's "composing hut", but not the interior and nothing of the others. Here is Mahler's:
So the ideal for composers seems to be, just room enough for a piano, maybe a little desk, and a chair. Anything else is superfluous. Of course, these days, this is more likely what a composer's workstation looks like:
We seem to have evolved...
As a followup to Alan Gilbert's London talk on the new role of the symphony orchestra, here is a link to a review in the Guardian of a concert by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Gilbert, in London. Uh, doesn't it seem to you that what they have really succeeded in doing is turning a masterpiece of 20th century music into an episode of a children's show? The Muppets do Stravinsky?
The players become a rather naughty group of participants at the ballet's Shrovetide fair, as Fitch's cameras glide round the orchestra, homing in on percussionists surreptitiously swigging vodka, or the double bass section peering at a peep show. We're encouraged to clap along and scream in terror at a dancing bear. Music director Alan Gilbert, sporting a spangled blue coat, plays the Magician himself, his extravagant gestures bringing both puppets and music to life.
And that gives us our envoi: Petrushka by Stravinsky. Here is Andris Nelsons conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra:
Posted by Bryan Townsend at 7:47 AM No comments:
Labels: miscellanea
A Footnote on Music Criticism
Music criticism is an interesting nexus of debate these days, and I have been contributing the occasional piece here. There are lots of reasons why music criticism is in decline and I have taken up some of them before: diminishing levels of education in audiences and readers is probably the main one. But another that I have talked about less often is how music criticism is often attacked by people "in the business" who are supposedly on the right side. Sometimes I want to say, heaven protect us from our defenders!
Here is an example: there was a recent review in The Strad of a performance of Sibelius' Symphony No. 4 by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle. Here is one critical statement from the review:
Rattle's interpretation of the Fourth Symphony was closer to Karajan's than to contemporary ideas of the piece as a bleak pencil sketch occasionally shot through with mirages of colour and optimism. Does that mean Rattle has to cast Sibelius's Fourth as a vast Mahlerian wallow upholstered by luscious strings, its Largo bestowed with a huge unmarked rallentando? Does he have to transform it into something wholly removed from the sparseness and abruptness of Sibelius's pencil-sketch original?
This seems to me to be acceptable as music criticism if it is indeed what the reviewer thought about what he heard. But Norman Lebrecht holds this review up for particular scorn over at Slipped Disc:
A RIGHT WAY TO PLAY SIBELIUS? OH, FFFFF'S SAKE.
A London critic didn't like the Berlin Philharmonic performances of the Sibelius symphonies because they're not what he's used to. So he concludes they cannot be right.
Then the critic equivocates a bit before deciding that the performances paid 'little heed to the spirit of a score.'
As if that can spirit be defined, bottled and marketed as authentic.
Music in print is an approximation of an imagined sound. Interpreters exist to make sense of it, according to their own lights – northern or otherwise.
Some of the commentators pushed back effectively:
He explains why. He has his opinion, you have yours. What's the problem for heaven's sake?
The problem is that, for Norman Lebrecht and many others in the business, aesthetics and the ability to debate aesthetic issues is a closed book. Discussion of "better" or "worse" is simply verboten. For "fffff's sake." You see, you benighted commoners, it has been decreed that aesthetics, like ethics is completely and utterly relative. There is no right and wrong, there is only your personal opinion and my personal opinion. But, if your personal opinion is different from mine, then you are an idiot! Wow, hard to miss that little logical contradiction. I suspect that what set Mr. Lebrecht off in this instance was the claim that Mahler wallows, which he does, and that Sibelius is better off NOT played as if he were Mahler or Bruckner, which is true.
Since this is the Music Salon, the home of aesthetic objectivity, let's do our own comparison. Here is the trailer for a complete performance of the Sibelius 4th with Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. Not sure if this is enough to give us an idea, but it is all that is available on YouTube:
Now let's compare that with a performance conducted by a Finn. Here is Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Swedish Radio Orchestra:
What I hear with the Rattle/Berlin performance is that they seem to think it is a delightful romp with occasional spicy notes. The Salonen/Swedish performance is much darker and starker. I think that I very much see the point of the review, though I would certainly want to hear a complete performance by Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic before coming to any conclusion.
It is dispiriting to realize that many orchestras, for economic reasons and out of sheer aesthetic dunderheadedness may be turning profound and weighty pieces of music into "delightful romps" for their ever more ill-informed and ill-prepared audiences.
Labels: Jean Sibelius, music criticism
Concerto Guide: Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor
The Piano Concerto No. 1 by Tchaikovsky was completed in 1875, though it underwent some revisions later on. A recent recording of it returns to the original version, but we usually hear the revised one. If you recall, the 18th century concerto always began with the orchestra stating the main theme with the entry of the soloist delayed until this was complete. Mozart broke with this on occasion, having the solo piano interrupt the orchestra, and Beethoven began a couple of concertos with the piano soloist. But it was Robert Schumann who laid out a new model for the Romantic concerto, giving the orchestra a single chord and having the solo piano present the opening theme. A number of composers we have looked at, including Grieg and Liszt, used this kind of opening while Brahms returned to the earlier format of delaying the entry of the soloist.
Tchaikovsky, in his first piano concerto, does something different. As the piano is now so powerful an instrument, both physically and culturally, it no longer has to assert itself so starkly. In an interesting turnabout, the orchestra is given the opening theme, but the piano accompanies them, all of them, with a huge chordal figure before taking over the theme itself. Here is how that looks:
After a brief four-measure introduction in the brass, the melody is given to the first violins and cellos--one of Tchaikovsky's great tunes. But this unusual effect, a single instrument accompanying a whole, large orchestra with huge arpeggiated chords (arpeggiated in large clumps, mind you) is a unique effect and makes for a powerful beginning. Then, as I said, the piano takes over the theme:
The Wikipedia article on the concerto says that "One of the most prominent differences between the original and final versions is that in the opening section, the octave chords played by the pianist, over which the orchestra plays the famous theme, were originally written as arpeggios." But didn't I just say that this version, the revised one, has huge arpeggiated chords at the beginning? Of course, there are lots of different kinds of arpeggios. The term is derived from the Italian word for harp, who typically has these kinds of textures:
This example is for piano, but harp arpeggios look just the same. However, to a theorist, prolonging a harmony by spreading it out in different octaves is also an arpeggiation and I was using the word in that sense. Playing the notes of a B-flat minor chord individually, as on a harp or guitar, or in solid groups of six or seven notes, and extending this harmony over one or more octaves for several measures is an arpeggiation to a theorist. Performers think of it differently, though and contrast what they call arpeggios with "solid chords", which is what the piano is playing here. This is because, to a performer, they present different problems of execution. Theorists aren't interested in execution, but they are interested in what the listener hears.
Even from the very first performance, in Boston in 1875 with Hans von Bülow as soloist, the work was a big success. At the premiere, the audience response was so enthusiastic that they had to repeat the finale! I witnessed a response like this myself on one occasion. In Toronto in the late 1970s, John Williams premiered a guitar concerto by Leo Brouwer with the composer conducting and the audience, composed largely of guitarists attending a festival, were ecstatic and delivered a five minute standing ovation. Finally, after having returned to the stage often enough to have shaken the hand of every single member of the orchestra, Williams and Brouwer decided to play the slow movement again. So yes, these things happen. Just not very often!
Without going into further analysis of the piece (for a non-technical one you might look here), let's listen to it. Here is a classic performance with a young Martha Argerich and Charles Dutoit conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in 1975:
Posted by Bryan Townsend at 12:15 PM 6 comments:
Labels: piano concertos, Tchaikovsky
Neglecting Boulez
Pierre Boulez is one of the few remaining iconic figures of 20th century modernism. My most recent post on him is here, where I talk about his list of ten important pieces of 20th century music. Boulez' stance is that of high modernism, which I have also talked about a lot. While recognizing that some great music, like the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Bartók, has been written in this style, my sense is that things went rather astray after the Second World War when "progressive" music took rather a radical turn with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Possibly the most influential composer of this generation was and is Pierre Boulez, who celebrates his 90th birthday this year.
One of the acts that gave him considerable notoriety in his early career was an essay he wrote titled "Schoenberg est mort" ("Schoenberg is dead") published in 1952, just a year after his death. You can find a summary of its main points here. For Boulez, Schoenberg was just not radical enough, and retained too many features of pre-serial music. Anton Webern instead was to be the model for post-war composers. It is very tempting, of course, to wait for the suitable moment and then write an essay titled "Boulez est mort", but two wrongs don't make a right! Notice that it was as much for his polemics as for his compositions that Boulez became known. Later on he was better-known to the general public in his role as conductor than as composer. Indeed, he expiated his sins regarding Schoenberg (and Bartók, about whom he also was rather unkind, and for the same reasons) by making definitive recordings of much of their music. If you want really outstanding and accurate recordings of Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky, Debussy and others, those of Pierre Boulez are the ones to look for. Many of these have been reissued in inexpensive boxes (that devoted to Schoenberg has eleven CDs) quite recently.
However, in this even-numbered birthday year, Alex Ross notes that, in America at least, the music of Boulez is oddly neglected:
Mark Swed, in the LA Times, recently noted a shortage of American orchestral tributes to Pierre Boulez in his ninetieth-birthday year. The New York Philharmonic, Boulez's former base, programmed nothing by him this season; likewise the LA Phil. Instead, as Swed observed, on Boulez's birthday both orchestras were playing works by John Adams.
Ouch! Mind you, the neglect is not total:
this Sunday in New York, David Robertson and the Juilliard Orchestra will perform Boulez's Rituel and the Originel from "…explosante-fixe…," alongside Debussy's Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun" and Stravinsky's Symphonies of Winds.
That looks like an interesting program; one I would like to attend. Let's try and recreate it here with the aid of YouTube. First, Rituel, a hommage to Bruno Maderna:
Next, Originel from explosante-fixe:
A good piece to pair with that might be the Debussy, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. Here is Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra:
And finally, that very unusual piece by Stravinsky, the Symphonies of Winds. Here is Boulez conducting a 1985 live performance:
I have to admit that I am of two minds here. Obviously the long-term influence of Boulez and evaluation of his music is still very much up in the air. Perhaps a hundred years from now the 20th century can be weighed more judiciously, just as the 19th century is in the process of being weighed today. But it seems clear that, in the short term, the lighter-weight minimalism of John Adams, John Luther Adams, Philip Glass and Steve Reich has a much higher profile in the classical music world--even though the last two of these had to put together their own ensembles to play their music in the early days.
Boulez has accused more traditional composers, like Shostakovich, of "playing with clichés" because of their use of tonality and rhythmic and melodic gestures that resemble those of tonal music. But he does not seem to realize that the rhythmic and melodic gestures that we often find in his music, take for example the flute solo at the beginning of Originel, also can start to sound like clichés--clichés of high modernism. The rapid flurries of arpeggiations ending with a mid-range trill, the jerky rhythms, the leaping from one end of the range to another, all these things are heard over and over again in the music of Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Ferneyhough and others of that generation. Are they not now, along with the continuing dissonance, a cliché? Certainly to my ears, which is one reason why I find it hard to love that music. But maybe we just need another hundred years...
Labels: Pierre Boulez
Aesthetic vs Economic Value
I just read a blog post in which the writer is discussing the difficulties in trying to reprogram a young person who has been miseducated into believing all sorts of nonsense about economics. The author writes:
Anything: good, labor, service, all it's worth is what someone else will pay for it. If you want your good, labor or service to be worth more, then it's up to you to make it worth more. That's a fact of human existence as immutable as gravity is in the physical world. Any philosophy, political or sociological, that denies that simple truth is destined to fail, utterly and catastrophically.
Which is a nicely uncompromising statement of fundamental economic truth. The only problem is, he bills this theory as a theory of "value" tout simple. All value. OK, if the value of something is what someone will pay for it, nothing more, then what is the value of the Bach B minor Mass? The Herreweghe recording is available on Amazon for $24.43. Is that the value of the work? Well, no, because, for one thing, the ontological status of a piece of music means that it includes the totality of all presentations of the piece including the original score and all subsequent performances and arrangements of it. That's pretty hard to calculate. But it still doesn't actually deal with what I consider the most important aspect of the value of the piece: its aesthetic value. What is aesthetic, as opposed to economic value? There is also another kind of value that is left out of the above argument: moral value. I don't think that anyone, even those who would question the very existence of aesthetic value, would deny that moral value exists. Well, some might, which tempts me to go over to their place and steal their car. Hey, there is no such thing as right and wrong!
Economic value can be measured in units of currency, but how can we measure aesthetic or moral value? I suppose that the justice system, when it is functioning properly, is a mechanism for weighing moral value, at least as defined by laws. If you are bit bad, you get fined, if you are very bad, you go to jail for a certain amount of time. But this mechanism is about measuring degrees of badness. The civil justice system weighs both goodness and badness, I suppose, as it tries to determine between two or more disputing sides which one has more right on their side.
But aesthetic value is very, very tricky. If we return to my original question, what is the aesthetic value of the Bach B Minor Mass, we would be puzzled to offer an answer. For one thing, we don't seen to have any units available. There is a whole panoply of awards for composers today, such as the Pulitzer Prize in music, awarded to John Luther Adams in 2014 for his Become Ocean, or the Glenn Gould Prize, just awarded to Philip Glass, or the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition given to Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2011 for his Violin Concerto. If these awards are a proxy for aesthetic quality, then we could add up how many awards a composer has received and take that as a measure of aesthetic quality. That is certainly how the current musical world seems to operate. There are prizes for performers as well.
I hope that makes you as uncomfortable as it makes me! One artist, opposed to these kinds of prizes, said that a musician is not a race-horse. There are lots of reasons why we should be suspicious of these awards. Sometimes they seem to be given for superficial reasons. One suspects that Adams got the Pulitzer for writing a politically-correct work. You would certainly be denied awards if your music was conspicuously politically incorrect. The award is really only as good as the quality of the jurors who made the decision. If they are composers, then ideological rivalries will play a role. If they are "cultural figures" as in the jury for the Glenn Gould prize, then they will tend to pick someone who has a name and is considered cool, like Philip Glass. The Grawemeyer Award goes through three stages: (quoting from Wikipedia)
The first is a panel of faculty from the University of Louisville, who hosts and maintains the perpetuity of the award. The second is a panel of music professionals, often involving conductors, performers, and composers (most frequently the previous winner). The final decision is made by a lay committee of new music enthusiasts who are highly knowledgeable about the state of new music. This final committee of amateurs makes the final prize determination because Grawemeyer insisted that great ideas are not exclusively the domain of academic experts.
Which seems to me to be the best system of the ones I know. You will not win the prize unless you can appeal to all three: academics, professional musicians and enthusiastic listeners.
I am reminded of the dilemma Plato presents in the Euthyphro: is murder wrong because God (or the gods) condemn it, or do the gods condemn it because it is wrong? Applied to the aesthetic question, is the music of prize-winning composers good because they won prizes or did they win prizes because their music is good? The answer I think is correct is that aesthetic value transcends whatever prizes the composer may have won. In fact, if you win a lot of prizes it may just mean that you are writing exactly what the jurors are looking for, i.e. something fashionable.
I lean to the view that while we can, at any given moment, have better or worse aesthetic judgements, depending on how well they are founded, our knowledge is always imperfect and it can take quite some time for the more balanced judgment of posterity to become clear.
A very important process crucial to the formation of well-founded aesthetic valuations is the role of music critics. They are the ones who should be digging up important information, passing over unimportant information, weighing the reception of the music and coming up with evaluations that may well evolve over time. Alas, this whole field of activity seems denatured these days with the disappearance of many music critics and the lowering in quality of many of those who are left. Too many writers on music have little or no understanding of music and merely pass on their biases to their readers.
We might, just a tad frivolously, measure aesthetic value according to a scale derived from Bach. A new piece for voices and orchestra, such as Thomas Adès' Totentanz, might, after suitable examination and reflection be awarded a value such as 0.01 B Minor Masses. Not enough? OK, how about .02 B minor Masses? In other words, it would take 50 Totentanzes to equal one B minor Mass. Seems about right...
Let's have a listen to Herreweghe's B minor Mass:
Labels: aesthetics, music and economics
A Canadian Music Critic
It must be a Montreal thing, but in my very informal survey of current music criticism I had a look at some pieces by Arthur Kaptainis, the occasional music critic for the Montreal Gazette and found some excellent writing--which of course means that his opinions and mine concur (I was long a resident of Montreal). Here is the link to a piece in two parts. The first is about the recent Valentina Lisitsa controversy and the second is about John Luther Adams' award-winning piece Become Ocean, which Mr. Kaptainis doesn't like very much:
It is my sad duty to report that this monumental exercise in nothingness for full orchestra goes on for 42 minutes in this fashion. You might upbraid me for my uncoolness and explain earnestly that for nothing to happen on a vast scale is the aesthetic point of this score and others like it. My response is that the point, if this is indeed the point, is pointless. I could make the same point in less time with fewer forces, or more time with more.
The acclaim that has greeted this silly exercise (as performed by the Seattle Symphony under Ludovic Morlot, not that this really matters) is a sad comment on the state of both American music and American music criticism.
Not that we are expected to approach the piece solely as music. Adams (a former environmental officer from Alaska who is not to be confused with his compatriot John Adams of The Death of Klinghoffer fame) has supplied a pretentious "environmental" program having to do with rising sea levels, which both adds spurious relevance to his music while buttressing it against the assaults of the linear-minded fuddy-duddies who expect music of any style or genre to do something. Hey, man, glaciers don't melt fast. Nor is it particularly edifying to watch them melt.
Heh! I wish I had said that. I hope that he has given Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer equally stiff treatment as he has an environmental schtick as well. I guess we really need to put up a performance of Become Ocean, don't we? But we can't because it isn't on YouTube. We can however listen to the rather similar exercise, Dark Waves:
Posted by Bryan Townsend at 1:05 PM 4 comments:
Labels: aesthetics, music criticism
Music Critics and Criticism
Yesterday in the Friday Miscellanea I included this bit on writing about music:
I've been reading Monroe Beardsley's Aesthetics recently with great interest. One point he makes is that there are two basic categories of comments one can make about an artwork. He labels them "external" and "internal" according to whether they are about things external to or internal to the piece. For example, mentioning that Beethoven died in a thunderstorm, or sued his sister in law for custody of his nephew, or complained about Haydn's way of teaching counterpoint is to discuss externals as none of these things are internal to the artworks themselves. Mentioning that Beethoven liked the music of Handel, or worked on themes for months or years in his sketchbooks, or struggled with coming up with definitive metronome markings are, however, internal to the music itself (or could be argued so). All external comments are irrelevant, even if they shed light on the composer's intentions because the composer's intentions are also irrelevant. Now, ask yourself, how much of the liner notes, program notes and reviews you have read recently are actually relevant? 50%? Or maybe more like 5%?
The unfortunate truth is that a great deal, probably most, of what we read written about music is misleading and misdirecting. It does not help us understand the music, but rather leads us to misunderstand the music. In this category we would most definitely include all those biographical details beloved of program note writers who want to "humanize" the composer.
This, and some other posts and comments this week about some less-than-stellar music criticism leads me to want to evaluate some of the most active music critics writing in English. Let's start with the chief music critic for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini. Here is an excerpt from a recent review of a recording:
Fans of Tchaikovsky's beloved First Piano Concerto will notice something different at the start of this exciting new recording, featuring the formidable pianist Kirill Gerstein. When the soaring main theme breaks out in the orchestra, the accompanying piano chords are rolled, not played in solid blocks of steely sound; and the rising three-chord pattern spans just four octaves, not five. Mr. Gerstein and the conductor James Gaffigan use the 1879 version of the piece, the one Tchaikovsky settled on after making some alternations to the score after the work's 1875 premiere. But the concerto is known today from an 1894 version, published after Tchaikovsky's death, which includes tweaks and cuts the composer had never sanctioned, as Mr. Gerstein explains in his information liner notes. The changes, though not extensive, tend to tame and make more conventional some of Tchaikovsky bolder flights.
I haven't heard this recording, but that doesn't matter, because I just want to look at what Tommasini wrote to see if it qualifies as music criticism. The answer is yes. He discusses only those things inherent to the aesthetic object in question, namely the new Tchaikovsky recording, and he does so in clear, unambiguous language that is neither too technical, nor too avoiding of appropriate technical terms. I don't know if his comments are correct and exact, but they are appropriate. Let's look at another example. Here is a review of a concert of music by Purcell:
The concert began with excerpts from "The Fairy Queen," adapted from Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The players of Les Violons du Roy, based in Quebec City, brought Baroque-style focused sound and appealing swing to an orchestral Air and Rondeau, which led into a scene for a drunken poet. The bass-baritone Stephen Hegedus was delightful as the poet, slurping his delivery, sometimes bellowing his lines. A chorus of spirits mocked him for his "dogrel rhymes" and prodded two fairies to "pinch him for his crimes" in music that walked a blissful line between gentle joking and intense needling.
Again, the focus is on the music and the performance. Nowhere else in the review does he wander into irrelevancies. Let's look at one more example. Here is a paragraph from a recent review of a concert by the New York Philharmonic:
I could devote a whole report to the wrenching, blazing and vehement account of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 in E minor that Mr. Gilbert conducted after intermission. The composer completed this hourlong symphony months after the death of Stalin. How explicitly it was intended as bitter commentary on Stalinist repression is a topic of debate. Whatever one's take, Mr. Gilbert led a commanding performance, especially the spacious gravity he summoned during the expansive opening movement and the intensity bordering on sheer terror of the short Allegro.
Again, nothing out of place here. Tommasini mentions the controversy over the "meaning" of some of the symphonies of Shostakovich, but doesn't force an opinion on us, commenting rather on how the music was delivered.
Now let's take a look at another very prominent critic, Alex Ross who is the chief music critic for the New Yorker. I've kicked Mr. Ross around quite a bit recently, largely because of a piece he wrote titled "Listen to the Future". Here is one bit I haven't previously quoted:
Can tradition-minded classical listeners ever be made to grasp the crippling contradictions inherent in their hostility toward contemporary music?
I think this encapsulates rather well the central problem of Mr. Ross' criticism: he really does want to tell us what to think and he really does think that we must be made to think certain things. In the case of this quote, we must be "made to grasp" that we are just wrong, wrong, wrong to dismiss some contemporary music, because our hostility is based on "crippling contradictions". That kind of totalitarian pomposity is exactly why I intensely dislike Alex Ross' criticism. Let us seek further representative examples, however. Here is description of a recent piece by Thomas Adès:
Adès's latest creations are anything but circumspect: they are wilder, stranger, and bolder than the intricate, insolent scores with which he first made his name, in the nineteen-nineties. The opening bars of "Totentanz" give us winds shrieking in their upper registers, hectoring brass, whistles and whipcracks from the percussion section, and a splattered G-major chord that lands like a dissonance. It is a sound at once grand and gaudy, majestic and mordant.
This is reasonably apt writing, though I am a bit uncomfortable with the "intricate, insolent" characterization which is thinly-disguised propaganda for two of the essential elements in high modernism: that it be maximally complex and that it "épater les bourgeoisie" (insult the middle-class). The "splattered G-major chord that lands like a dissonance" seems oddly uninformative. Mr. Ross always seems to have agendas other than the music itself, though he is quite skilled at making us think otherwise. Here is an excerpt from a piece about singer-composers:
Significantly, this is the first classical genre to be dominated by women. The musicologist Susan McClary notes that "women have rarely been permitted agency in art, but, instead, have been restricted to enacting—upon and through their bodies—the theatrical, musical, cinematic, and dance scenarios concocted by male artists." When women employ their own voices as vessels for musical thought, they are amending history: the expressivity of the female voice speaks, at last, for female ideas, rather than for male ideas about female ideas. And, whatever the gender of the composer, there is an uncanny charge in seeing someone sing a score that he or she has constructed. The sensual immediacy of the voice merges with abstractions of the mind, until, as in the Wallace Stevens poem, the composer becomes the "single artificer of the world in which she sang."
The feminist dogma quoted from Susan McClary is pretty blatant, of course. The questions that spring immediately to mind are "how can you define 'agency' so that it omits the agency of female performers?" Also, it is an illegitimate smear to refer to artworks by men as being "concocted". The mere fact of women singing does not, of course, "amend history". However would you manage to define "female" ideas as opposed to "male" ideas? There are only ideas--and idiocies, of which this is an example. Mr. Ross' biases come to the fore in many ways. Here is another example:
"Kinder! macht Neues!" Richard Wagner once scowled—"Children! Make something new!" He was berating fellow composers for reworking old pieces instead of delivering fresh creations. One can only imagine how Wagner would have been exasperated by the contemporary classical world, with its sclerotic fear of the new.
I'm sure that he in no way sees his view of the classical music world as being anything like a bias. For him it is simply true that disagreement with modernism, of which Wagner was one of the founders, is simply an error. For Ross, "the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream." The only march is the march into the future. Tradition, indeed, aesthetics itself, is really just a sclerosis of the culture. This is the pure propaganda of high modernism and Mr. Ross wants us to accept it as a given.
It's not, of course. This is Tabula Rasa by Arvo Pärt, which came about as a result of his long meditation on history and tradition:
Posted by Bryan Townsend at 10:08 AM 16 comments:
And I know just how she feels: "Woman Stabs Roommate for Refusing to Stop Listening to The Eagles." Hey, we've all been there.
It's unclear which of the band's songs drove Bader over the edge, but police have narrowed down the possible suspects to "Witchy Woman," "Take It Easy," "Peaceful Easy Feeling," "Take It to the Limit," "One of These Nights," "Tequila Sunrise," and "Hotel California" on repeat.
Oh, for sure:
Alan Gilbert, just stepping down as music director of the New York Philharmonic, recently gave a lecture on the future of the orchestra. You know what I think: the only problem with orchestras and classical music generally is that we need better audiences! But of course you cannot say that sort of thing in public. What must instead be said is some version of the Received Wisdom: classical music must change and fit into the Brave New World of the 21st Century, by performing in Unconventional Spaces and attracting New, Younger Audiences. Blah, blah, blah. Let's see how Gilbert finesses that:
What orchestras can be for their audiences is changing, and that actually presents a wonderful opportunity for us to grow. The new generation of emerging orchestra musicians and conductors can approach things with an optimism that is unburdened by any sense of historical limitation. Music has an eternal power to move us, and increasingly, schools and professional music groups are embracing the new role that musicians can fill in touching people's lives both in and out of the concert hall.
What is asked and expected of musicians is constantly evolving. Outstanding musicians in today's orchestras are only doing their jobs fully when they understand and invest in their expanded portfolio that is demanded by the wider definition of what an orchestra is. I want to see orchestra musicians held up as heroes in their communities – both for their brilliance as musicians, but also for how they use that talent to touch the lives of those around them through music. People must get used to seeing musicians as the crucial agents of change in communities, as teachers, leaders and role-models.
Oh dear... One wonders, what with all this touching of people's lives outside the concert hall and being heroes in the community, when will musicians ever have time to actually give a concert, not to mention practice and rehearse? But he says a lot of things in the lecture and it is worth having a look.
I rarely run across music criticism that is as, well, "full-blooded" as that on offer here at the Music Salon, but occasionally... One such example is a rather unbuttoned take on the contemporary music scene by Simon Heffer from last November titled, "A Raspberry for Emetic Music".
I wonder whether it is a coincidence that when when composers relied on private patronage they wrote music that was, and remains, wonderful, but now all sorts of orchestras and public bodies channel money to them from the pockets of taxpayers, they write music that is, and will remain, crap? I think not. If it hardly matters to a composer whether people come to hear his work, or buy downloads of it in the event it is recorded, because the state-funded cheque turns up whatever, he can indulge himself to the point of exhaustion in writing what Kathleen Ferrier once memorably termed "three farts and a raspberry, orchestrated". These nonentities pose as being of the people, yet write music that only the smallest handful, and those having been in receipt of one of the most elitist educations imaginable, can even pretend to understand. And even many of them would never go as far as saying they "like" it, because much of it is profoundly unlikeable.
I think I have said something very like this at times. But if you are going to criticise something so severely, then you ought to at least name names.
From time to time, one wonders what 20th century music is the most popular. One indicator is this list of the top eight parts rentals from Boosey and Hawkes. These are all works still under copyright (the Mussorgsky because it is the Ravel arrangement), but none of them dates from after 1960:
1. Bernstein: Symphonic Dances From "West Side Story"
2. Bernstein: Overture to "Candide"
3. Mussorgsky/Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition
4. Britten: The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra
5. Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2
6. Britten: Four Sea Interludes
7. Copland: Appalachian Spring Suite
8. Copland: Clarinet Concerto
Looking at that list, it is almost certain that it is just within the US. How would European rentals look, one wonders?
Not a terribly lengthy miscellanea today. I assemble the various bits over the course of the week, and for part of the week, I didn't have Internet access. Let's end with the popular Appalachian Spring Suite by Copland.
Concerto Guide: Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto in D ...
Concerto Guide: Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1 ...
Apologies for the Hiatus
The Problem with Talking About Music
Concerto Guide: Saint-Saëns, Cello Concerto No. 1 ...
Our Finest Music Critic
Music Interviews: Turning the Tables
Composition and Risk
Words Without Music
Valentina Lisitsa and the Toronto Symphony
Concerto Guide: Brahms, Piano Concerto No. 1 in D...
Songwriters Sing the Blues
Philosophical Symphonies
Music and Causality
10 Great Pieces for Piano

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
You are here: Home / About us / Nathan Sparling
Nathan Sparling
Nathan is the Chief Executive of HIV Scotland, a national policy, advocacy and campaigning organisation that aims to prevent new HIV transmissions and ensure that everyone living with HIV can live long, healthy and happy lives.
He has been involved in policy and public affairs for over 10 years, having held roles in the Scottish and UK Parliaments advising on social policy. He returned to Edinburgh to take up the role of Head of Policy & Campaigning at HIV Scotland in July 2017, and was appointed Chief Executive on 1st November 2018. He is responsible for the overall strategic direction of the organisation. He sits on the HIV Clinical Leads Group for Scotland, and the National PrEP Co-ordination Group. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, and a Member of the Institute of Directors.
About VHS


text:
Home • Resources • Spotlights • Cybersecurity Spotlight – CIS Controls
Cybersecurity Spotlight – CIS Controls
The CIS Controls™ are a prioritized set of actions that collectively form a defense-in-depth set of best practices that mitigate the most common attacks against systems and networks. The CIS Controls are developed by a consensus-based community of cybersecurity experts who apply their first-hand experience as cyber defenders to create these globally accepted security best practices. Within each of the 20 CIS Controls is a set of Sub-Controls focused on specific asset types and security functions. There are a total of 171 Sub-Controls. The CIS Controls fall into three categories:
Basic - Contains controls that help an organization assess its current security and take simple steps to improve it.
Foundational - Contains more advanced guidance to improve an organization's security.
Organizational - Contains controls that make changes to an organization's policies to improve and maintain their cybersecurity.
While these three categories provide a rough ordering of the best risk mitigations as an organization matures, resource limitations may make some of Sub-Controls in the Basic category infeasible for an organization. To address this CIS introduced the concept of Implementation Groups (IGs) into v7.1, which was released on April 4, 2019. IGs provide a simple and accessible way for an organization to prioritize implementation of the Sub-Controls for specific types of risk profiles and available resources. CIS also refers to IG1 as basic cyber hygiene.
There are three IGs, each building upon the previous one, that identify which Sub-Controls are reasonable for an organization to implement if, for instance, they hold critical or sensitive data. By following the IG methodology guide and IG classifications, an organization can narrow down the CIS Sub-Controls that are most prudent to their cyber defenses. This ensures that the CIS Controls are viable for organizations of all sizes and implemented in the most effective manner possible.
Why does it matter
The CIS Controls are an effective tool for prioritizing risk-based cybersecurity. They provide effective approaches to mitigating risk, in contrast to tools like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), which focuses on assessing an organization's risk posture without directly providing mitigations for those risks. The Controls are aligned to NIST (see the NIST CSF to CIS Controls mapping) and several other common cybersecurity frameworks to help organizations document their compliance with whichever larger framework they have adopted. The CIS resource, A Handbook for Elections Infrastructure Security, maps to the CIS Controls and can help election officials address the CIS Controls in an applied manner that considers the different ways elections infrastructure components are connected to each other and the internet. Election officials can use the 88 best practices as a vetted profile of the Controls to mitigate the risks and vulnerabilities to election infrastructure.
Election officials should meet with their IT staff to review the CIS Controls and Implementation Groups to gain a better understanding and identify the risks and mitigations applicable to their organization. Implementation is a phased, step-by-step process that will take time and should be revisited regularly to address changes in the threat environment. CIS provides a number of tools to help organizations implement the Controls and assess their maturity. The Election Infrastructure Assessment Tool (EIAT), is a web-based platform geared towards the elections community that directly addresses the best practices outlined in A Handbook for Elections Infrastructure Security. Election officials can use the EIAT to identify opportunities to mitigate additional risk and prioritize next steps.
The EI-ISAC Cybersecurity Spotlight is a practical explanation of a common cybersecurity concept, event, or practice and its application to Elections Infrastructure security. It is intended to provide EI-ISAC members with a working understanding of common technical topics in the cybersecurity industry. If you would like to request a specific term or practice that may be of interest to the elections community, please contact elections@cisecurity.org.


text:
How Fort Bend EDC & Our Economic Development Partners Can Help
The Fort Bend Economic Development Council and our economic development partners work collaboratively, and are dedicated to supporting business development, relocation, and expansion in Fort Bend County, Texas. Our services, include, but are not limited to:
Information on available real estate and business facilities within county.
Assistance with workforce training and recruitment.
Assistance with application for available incentive packages.
Liaison with the cities and county government officials throughout the process.
Expertise on Fort Bend County's business community and key industries within the county.
Introduction to key strategic partners and community and government leaders.
Fort Bend County ranks No. 4 for incoming investment in the United States, No. 2 in Texas, and No. 1 in Greater Houston. SmartAsset, 2018.
An Educated Workforce
Fort Bend understands a talented, well-educated and highly trained workforce is a significant factor when selecting where to located your business. With a talented, educated workforce, high quality of life, impressive economic growth, and healthy housing market, Fort Bend County leads the region in every major significant category and is the place to start or relocate your business.
The region's talent pool is educated, skilled, multidisciplinary and growing.
Out of 787,858 residents, 89.7 percent are high school graduates or higher, 45.7 percent are college educated, and 82 percent are families.
The workforce itself numbers 388,642 people on average in 2019, with a total of 3.4 million in the Greater Houston region.
This dynamic workforce has attracted numerous new industries to the area such as software developers, engineers, and other high-tech businesses, keeping opportunity fresh and growth strong.
Click Video To View "Learn Here, Work Here" Highlighting Workforce Training In Fort Bend.
The business community of Fort Bend has access to a highly trained, educated workforce, with training and advancement programs available right here in the county.
Working with specific companies within the Fort Bend community to determine work force needs and gaps, the school districts and the technical training institutions in Fort Bend, working collaboratively, offer high school students the opportunity to take prerequisite training in skill specific certification programs while still in high school.
Brazos ISD
Fort Bend ISD
Katy ISD
Lamar Consolidated ISD
Needville ISD
Stafford MSD
Click Video To Learn More About Fort Bend's Public Schools
Specialized Training Programs
The Texas State Technical College campus in Fort Bend County, open in the fall of 2016, offers technical degree programs chosen specifically to meet the industry needs of the region. There are 10 programs now being offered including Diesel Equipment Technology, Precision Machining Technology, Cyber Security, Welding Technology, Robotics Technology and Electrical Lineworker Technology. Two state-of-the-art buildings with a combined square footage of almost 200,000, the Industrial Technology Center and Brazos Center, are now situated on the 80-acre campus. Expansion plans for the next decade will allow TSTC to grow with the community and ultimately serve more than five thousand students.
HCC's Advanced Manufacturing Center of Excellence in opened in October 2016 focuses on training qualified professionals in high-demand occupations within the manufacturing sector.
The Center includes programs in Manufacturing Engineering Technology and Machining Technology and will offer state-of-the-art industrial technology laboratories, CNC machines, robotics, mechatronics, a maker spacefilled with 3D printers and machining tools. In addition, short-term certificate programs and incumbent upskill worker training will be offered in the areas of: electrical, plumbing, welding, Pipefitting, and Industrial Maintenance.
The University of Houston has two campuses in Fort Bend County, offering more than 20 degree programs to meet the needs of working students. The University of Houston Sugar Land is a tier one university campus, and is completing the new building for the University of Houston College of Technology in Sugar Land. The University of Houston Victoria in Katy has recently expanded into a new, larger campus off Interstate 10 and the Grand Parkway.
Wharton County Junior College and Houston Community College work with the University of Houston to offer a smooth transfer process as well as offer certification programs to transfer directly into the Fort Bend workforce. The community colleges also work in tandem with the business community, offering continuing education and work skills training to meet the specific needs of the business.
University of Houston Sugar Land
University of Houston Victoria-Katy
Wharton County Junior College
Click Video To Learn More About UH Sugar Land
Workforce Solutions (Texas Workforce Commission)
Career and skills assessment testing
The University of Houston College of Nursing boasts a 100% first time national certification pass rate for Family Nurse Practitioner graduates (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). www.uh.edu/nursing
Port Access
Fort Bend County is served by the Ports of Houston and Freeport.
Ranked 26th in the US in foreign tonnage and 40 miles from the heart of Fort Bend County, the Port of Freeport, with its deep water access and connection to rail services and Highway 36 which runs through Fort Bend County, is a major entryway for large vessels moving goods in and out of the United States. Learn More
The Port of Houston, 25 miles from the heart of Fort Bend County, is Texas' largest port, ranked first in the US in foreign waterborne tonnage, 1st in US imports, 1st in US export tonnage, 2nd in the US in total tonnage. Learn More
Fort Bend County is fortunate to have three rail lines, Kansas City Southern (KSC), Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF), and Union Pacific (UP) run throughout the county. The rail lines currently run parallel to both developed and undeveloped land, offering opportunities for rail services to businesses who need land to build as well as those who seek access to business parks and other developed properties.
Fort Bend County has two potential Intermodal sites within the county. Working closely with the Port Freeport, the rail companies, and our partner cities, a comprehensive intermodal program will bolster international trade and access to markets, moving goods around the globe, through Fort Bend County, and into the US and North America as a whole.
Municipal Utility and Levee Districts
A large county with a vast geography, Fort Bend County has comprehensive municipal utility and levy improvement districts systems to aid in development and quality of life. With the implementation of MUDs, corporate and residential developments may take advantage of the available land in the unincorporated areas of the county, assuring water and sewer services are available. Additionally, LIDs provide flood protection and storm water management services, protecting communities through responsible drainage systems enacted by the district. This flexible and utilitarian approach speeds up development and encourages greater access to available land for developers and industries seeking larger parcels of property.
To learn more about MUDs, please visit the Quality Community Alliance of Texas
Highway Systems
Fort Bend County has a comprehensive highway system intersecting throughout the county, improving mobility within the county and to the rest of the Greater Houston region as a whole. Major highways include:
The Grand Parkway is a proposed 180-mile circumferential highway encircling the Greater Houston region.
Highway 36A, initiating in Freeport with access to the Port of Freeport, is a major transportation corridor from the Port which runs through Fort Bend County and could potentially connect with Interstate 10. Expansions and extensions are planned.
The West Park Tollway creates an east-west corridor to Houston's major commerce centers with access to Greater Houston's financial districts, SH 6, the Sam Houston Tollway/Beltway 8, US 59, and the Galleria.
FM 1093 is currently being expanded to mobility on the West side of the county.
Fort Bend Toll Road, in south Fort Bend County, provides improved access to Houston's business and medical centers, with major interchanges at Highway 6, Lake Olympia Parkway, FM 2234 / McHard Road, Beltway 8 and US-90A.
Interstate 69, a 1,660 mile highway, connects 31.8 miles of Fort Bend County, a five mile stretch currently expanding to six (or eight) lanes (depending upon location).
Fort Bend County is home to two regional airports and easily accessible to Houston's two major airports.
Sugar Land Municipal Airport is the fourth largest airport in the Greater Houston area, providing on-site US Custom services to accommodate both regional and international corporate executives. 100 Fortune 500 companies utilize this airport, conveniently located in Fort Bend County. Learn More
Houston Southwest Airport is located in Southeast Fort Bend County provides airline rentals, charters, parking hangers, maintenance, and aviation fuel. Learn More
George Bush Intercontinental Airport is approximately 25 miles from the center of Fort Bend county, currently ranked 5th among US airports. Learn More
William P. Hobby Airport, located 20 miles from Sugar Land, serves millions of passengers each year, now offering both domestic and international flights. Learn More
Cities of Fort Bend County
The cities of Fort Bend County are aggressively engaged in the development process, offering a range of services, programs, and incentives to meet the needs of businesses looking to expand or relocate to Fort Bend. With a can-do attitude and a spirit of cooperation, the cities of Fort Bend County are the business owner, broker, or site selector's best resource for information on the respective communities.
Fort Bend County Marketing Program Municipal Partners
Other Cities In Fort Bend County
Technology Companies Thrive In Fort Bend
Technology companies find a home in Fort Bend County, tagged, "The best kept secret in the tech world," by Tom Webb, VP of Strategic Initiatives & Customer Relations with HCSS, a construction software company in Fort Bend.
With the infrastructure necessary to move goods, people, and services around, a quality of life that is second to none, a diverse and educated population (most diverse and highest educated in the Houston MSA), and a government that will work with you to find common sense solutions to new and emerging technologies and the concerns that come with innovation, Fort Bend County is the perfect landing spot for technology-based companies.
#TechReady
See Our Videos! Hear the stories from leaders in the the industry on why Fort Bend is #TechReady
Building An Innovation Ecosystem For Entrepreneurs
Fort Bend County understands the value of supporting and nurturing aspiring technologies, innovation, and entrepreneurs. Building coalitions, partnerships, and a collaborative nexus between industry, government, education, and entrepreneurs, Fort Bend is committed to developing an intentional, impactful, and strategic approach to stimulate entrepreneurial infrastructure.
StatsAmerica, a data tool of The U.S. Economic Development Organization, shared data showing Fort Bend County has an Innovation Index (an algorithm that quantifies a region's potential and capacity for innovation), of 123.8, a score that ranked 21st out of over 3,100 counties across the country.
View the county's Strategic Report for Developing a Network of Innovation Hubs In Fort Bend County conducted by The Cannon.
Five Key Areas of Focus
Alignment, awareness, and accessibility of entrepreneurial efforts.
Develop educational programs focused on new entrepreneurs and early stage business development.
Provide programs and partners that help locally-focused companies and
their intrapreneurs to innovate and scale.
Create integrations with local education programs to augment their
activities and create synergy between business and academia.
Develop curriculum and programs for potential investors and for businesses seeking capital.
Fort Bend County maintains a responsible tax rate that encourages development and creates jobs. Combined with no state income tax and a lower than average cost of living, Fort Bend County is a desirable location for business development.
Fort Bend County General: 0.444700
Fort Bend Drainage: 0.015300
For complete list of Fort Bend County taxing entities and 2019 tax rates.
To access the Fort Bend County Central Appraisal District
To view Houston MSA county property 2019 tax rates (coming soon)
Businesses may take advantage of potential incentives such as:
Fort Bend County Designated Opportunity Zones
Value Added Tax Abatement
Freeport Tax Exemption
Click here for more information on business incentive packages considered in Fort Bend County.
Fort Bend County is home to many small businesses because the county's business climate supports entrepreneurial initiative and small business development. To assist small business owners with the process of doing business in Fort Bend, the economic development team of professionals within the county and the Fort Bend EDC worked with the Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce to develop the Fort Bend Chamber's Small Business Guide. The Guide provides contact information to city and county departments as well helpful information on how to start a new venture.
There's a lot to know about Fort Bend County. From top-ranked cities to an amazing education systems to a hardworking population, it can be hard to know where to start. Here are some handy tools to help you explore all of the things that make Fort Bend County great.
GIS Data and Maps
Web GIS and Business AnalystTM are uniquely designed to locate and research potential sites in Fort Bend County.
View commercial properties in the area.
Fort Bend County Business Parks
Check out the community of Fort Bend business parks .
New Projects & Featured Properties


In addition, two further 1-week courses focus on the analysis of test data. Week 1 concentrates on the role of descriptive and inferential statistics in classical test theory while week 2 offers an introduction to modern test theory.
The deadline for applications is 20th May 2017.


In keeping with the tradition "Good design is good business" as quoted by Florence Knoll, HumanSpace recently announced their partnership with Knoll Furniture as part of their modern product portfolio expansion in Dubai.
Long admired by the Design industry the iconic brand is known for its contemporary designs, clean lines and bright bursting colors. Not confined to just the office, Knoll Studio carries a wide range of contemporary designs for your home and office. As intended, Knoll products are functional, practical and chic.
Introduced in 1966, the Planter Dining Table and Arm Chair, for example, is versatile can be used in both the home and office. The sculpted feel of this sleek wire design, comes with a multitude of Knoll textiles and colors. For further information on the Knoll product range please visit www.HumanSpace.com or contact mirza.m@humanspace.com, 971 4 357-4393.


text:
ACCEPTED

#### According to
The Catalogue of Life, 3rd January 2011

#### Published in
Linnaea 24: 129 (1851)

#### Original name
Cordana Preuss

### Remarks
null

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Plan your trip and pay in installments! Enjoy 0% interest installment plans for flight and hotel bookings of SAR 1,000 or more!
Installment plans (AQSAT) allow you to pay for services in fixed amounts over specified intervals.
How does this installment plan work?
Book your flight through the Altayyar online app or website.
Contact your bank within 48 hours with your transaction ID and request to convert your payment to installments.
Check your account statement for the transaction corresponding to your Altayyar online booking.
To avail offer, customers need to contact the bank within 48 hours and convert the transaction to an installment plan at the monthly rate.
Minimum transaction value is SAR 1,000.
Offer valid only for customers of the SABB banks.
Payment plans is for 3 months with 0% interest rate.
Offer valid on all flights and hotel bookings.
Other flight and hotel terms and conditions apply.
The bank at their sole discretion reserves the right to approve or reject the installment application to convert bookings on Altayyar online.
Altayyar online reserves the right to amend or cancel this offer at its sole discretion.


Harold has composed 158 studies of which so far 90 studies were awarded.
He won 31 prizes including 13 (shared) first prizes, 39 honourable mentions and 20 commendations.
He is Fide Master of the FIDE for chess composition since 2012.
He is International Judge of the FIDE for chess compositions since 2001.
He is most famous of his excellent database which has more than 86.000 endgame studies, which is used worldwide to enjoy and check studies.
He has been collecting studies (digitally) since the late 1980-s.
He is chief editor of the famous magazine EG, he is FIDE-judge.
He has written books about endgame studies.
He wrote this Arves book with theme: Pawn Promotion.