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Sheet music
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Pixabay
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sheet-music
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
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graduate-student-residents-2021
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Through the National Humanities Center summer intensive program
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Megan Kitts, 25, Philosophy Ph.D. Student
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2012
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J.C. Bach's Viola Concerto in C Minor, 2nd Movement
Description
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I was around 16 years old at the time of my humanities moment. I had been playing the viola for 7 years. As usually occurred, I became bored with practicing the first movement of J.C. Bach's Viola Concerto in C minor that my teacher had given me for an upcoming recital, so I decided to skip to the next movement. The second one was not one that my teacher ever assigned her students, so I hadn't heard it before. After a somewhat cobbled together sight-reading attempt, I decided to look up a recording.
The song was hauntingly beautiful, filled with slow, elongated melodies and fast, anxious lines. I don't know what Casadesus intended to communicate with it, but, for me, it was a song about grief. The slow passages are restrained emotion, how one might feel when they are trying to keep themselves from feeling their sadness. The piece then becomes more anxious, as if unable to stop from considering what's going on. After the climax, it wanes, as if exhausted by the full cycle of the feeling. All of this was clear to me immediately upon listening.
The piece both changed the way that I played music, but also changed the way that I considered music in my life. It was what I turned to play immediately after the passing of a loved one. I played it in my senior recital. I have returned to it over and over ever since. It encouraged me to seek out musical moments in my life, and to consider the emotional and personal significance of humanities works.
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J.C. Bach and the Exhaustion of Feeling
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J.C. Bach
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bach-exhaustion-feeling
Bach, J.C.
Classical Music
Emotional Experience
Music
Music Appreciation
Teachers & Teaching
-
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Violinist
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Pixabay
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violinist
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Tara Murray
Description
An account of the resource
My Humanities Moment happened when I realized that Art and Music actually saved my life when I needed it. I remember walking in New York City at night. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I was so depressed about how New York City is changing. I didn't see the Old New York anymore. All I see is glass building and ads everywhere.
I reached Central Park at Sunset. I saw a man playing the violin. The sound of the violin reached my soul and spirit. I had my camera at the time and used it to record the music. I stood there for hours listening to music. When the music stopped, I thanked him for everything. I was glad to hear something different and at the same time classic. I learned to cherish everything because things are changing.
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Classical Music Saved My Life
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classical-music-saved-my-life
Classical Music
New York, New York
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Tootsie's Orchid Lounge
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National Humanities Center website
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Marty Amrine, 43, Writer
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Childhood
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Classical music
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Music has always been a powerful and connective force, especially when we least expect it. My father dedicated his life to classical music. Classical was the only form of music we would hear coming from a radio or his cello as he practiced in our living room. Rock n Roll was only allowed with headphones unless my mom and I were in the car, without dad. I admit I had quite the contempt for Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky during my youth. I grew up with these old men and they didn't understand me in the early 1980s.
How did they impact me? They taught me to listen even if I didn't want to. They taught me to hear the instruments and the passion and emotion that made up each piece of music. In my own space, I listened to Metallica, The Doors, and The Rolling Stones. I found myself listening and hearing the instruments. I found myself recognizing the emotion. I remember telling my father that Metallica and Beethoven were a lot alike. Take away the electricity and a lot of the energy was the same. He didn't agree nor did he ever like Metallica, but the debate was enjoyable. Even if we didn't agree on music, it is what connected us.
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Music Connects Us
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music-connects-us
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Brahms, Johannes
Classical Music
Fathers & Sons
Marysville, Ohio
Metallica
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Music
Rock & Roll
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich
The Doors
The Rolling Stones
-
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Virginia Woolf
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National Humanities Center Board Members
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This collection includes contributions from the distinguished board of trustees of the National Humanities Center
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A Lifetime of Humanities Moments
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<p>Some years ago, I was asked to give a lecture to students enrolled in a small university’s humanities program describing the personal epiphany I experienced which led to my passion for the humanities. Try as I might, I could not think of an isolated, single experience but rather a series of moments that stretch back to my childhood and have “stuck to my ribs” over a lifetime.</p>
<p>A very early memory: perhaps at the age of six or seven, I became mesmerized by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and repeatedly played it on the phonograph (several 78 discs), deeply affected by the contrast between the brooding, dark and the happier, lighter themes.</p>
<p>Quite obviously, I was drawn to classical music. Some five or six years later, I had my heart set to hear Rudolph Serkin perform Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. An ear infection, quite painful, almost prevented the experience. Against doctor’s orders, my aunt took me. I clearly recall how thrilled I was by the crescendo-decrescendo passage in the last movement—leaving the concert hall pain-free with the infection gone!</p>
<p>During these early years, I was somewhat of a bookworm, transported to different times and places by books which provided delight, wonderment and a number of deeply poignant moments. Initially, adventure stories such as James Fennimore Cooper’s <em>The Deerslayer</em> and <em>The Last of the Mohicans</em>, Alexander Dumas’ <em>The Three Musketeers</em> and Jules Verne’s <em>The Mysterious Island</em> were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s <em>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</em>, <em>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court</em> and <em>Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc</em> and Willa Cather’s evocative novels <em>My Antonia</em> and <em>O Pioneers!</em></p>
<p>I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in <em>How Green Was My Valley</em>, Walter Hampton in <em>The Patriots</em> and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, <em>Cyrano de Bergerac</em>. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s <em>Anthony and Cleopatra</em> and George Bernard Shaw’s <em>Caesar and Cleopatra</em>. I was bowled over by Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra as the young, adoring female in awe of Julius Caesar in the Shaw play and her brilliantly played, contrasting characterization as a mature and majestic woman facing her demise in Shakespeare.</p>
<p>A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—<em>Henry V</em>, <em>Macbeth</em>, <em>Hamlet</em>, <em>Merchant of Venice</em>, <em>Midsummer Night’s Dream</em>, <em>Othello</em> and <em>King Lear</em>—have been at the core. Perhaps one of my most memorable nights of theater-going was a performance by the great husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s <em>The Visit</em>—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.</p>
<p>The visual arts, particularly painting, was an important part of my childhood, which continues to be nurtured by museum-going in my own city and around the world. Collecting has also been a joyous endeavor, centered on prints with a focus on Ukiyo-e. Two most memorable moments were encountering Goya’s paintings and prints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. These works riveted me, and I spent a whole day with them alone. Some years apart on a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I found myself in a small gallery, just five paintings by Rembrandt—four self-portraits and one of his mother. I was overcome and could not contain tears—they spoke so deeply of the human condition.</p>
<p>Coming back to adolescent years and literature, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, O’Henry, Herman Hesse, again Twain, were sources of adventure and insights to the human condition and heart. College years introduced me to Homer, the Greek playwrights, and the Roman poets, particularly Virgil, Horace and Catullus. A lifetime of reading followed—English and American novelists and essayists, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Russian authors, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Pages and pages of humanities moments!!</p>
<ul>
<li>Who can forget Hector’s farewell to his infant son in the <em>Iliad</em>?</li>
<li>Or be struck by George Elliott observing in <em>Middlemarch</em>, “No age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.” Or, “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our mortality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”</li>
<li>Who can forget Huck Finn introducing himself on the opening page of the eponymous novel and then later wrestling with his conscience and eschatology whether to report Jim as a runaway slave?</li>
<li>Of a different nature but just as memorable are the exquisite and subtle emotions experienced and described by Virginia Wolff in <em>Mrs. Dalloway</em> and <em>To the Lighthouse</em>.</li>
<li>And, most recently for me, the moment in Proust’s last volume, <em>Le Temps Retrouvé of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu</em> where he describes his epiphany that enables him to be a writer and thus realize his literary ambitions.</li>
<li>Finally, mention must be made of poignant moments so touching to me in Japanese literary gems. To read Shikibu Murasaki’s masterpiece <em>Genji Monogatari</em> is to be transported to another time (11th century), another world (medieval Japan) and sensibilities to be treasured. Love poems two centuries earlier capture the mood and the feeling. Consider these two gems by Ono no Komachi:<br />
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="border-bottom: none;"><em>Did he appear<br />because I fell asleep<br />thinking of him?<br />If only I’d known I was dreaming,<br />I’d never have wakened.</em></td>
<td style="border-bottom: none;"><em>I thought to pick<br />the flower of forgetting<br />for myself,<br />but I found it<br />already growing in his heart.</em></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s <em>Apology</em> and <em>Phaedo</em>? Socrates’ acceptance of the Athenian Assembly’s death sentence and later his refusal to delay drinking the hemlock spoke to me of transcendent self-possession and wisdom.</p>
<p>These stoic strains were fully developed over the ensuing five hundred years and come full-blown with the appearance of the stoic philosophers—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. How can one forget the admonishment in the <em>Enchiridion</em> of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his <em>Meditations</em> advising, “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” These words speak deeply to such as myself who has been so greatly privileged. I went on to major in philosophy and have continued my interest over a lifetime, initially with special focus on Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in later life centered on political and moral questions.</p>
<p>As can be surmised, music—orchestral, chamber, vocal and opera—has been my greatest passion. As I entered my adolescent years, my musical horizons were expanding, particularly with my introduction to Baroque music—J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and Telemann. Handel’s <em>Messiah</em> was an early favorite, and the joy I felt on hearing the aria and chorus “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” is indescribable. This lead to Bach cantatas, his Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Christmas Oratorio with its joyful and triumphant opening chorus. No Christmas is complete without that ringing in my ears, and who cannot be moved by the opening aria, “Ich habe Genug” from the Cantata of the same name.</p>
<p>Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:</p>
<ul>
<li>Cherobino’s incomparable profession of adolescent love “Non so pia cosa son” and the Contessa’s “Dove sono I bei momenti” lamenting her lost love—both from Mozart’s <em>Le Nozze di Figaro</em></li>
<li>Wotan’s “Farewell” bringing to a close <em>Die Valkyrie</em>, the second opera of Wagner’s <em>Der Ring des Nibelungen</em></li>
<li>Hans Sachs “Wahn, wahn” monologue from this same composer’s <em>Die Meistersinger</em></li>
<li>Iago’s great aria “Credo in un Dio crudel” from the second act of Verdi’s <em>Otello</em></li>
<li>Schaunard, the philosopher, bidding farewell to his cloak in order to purchase medicines for the dying Mimi in Puccini’s <em>La Bohème</em></li>
<li>The transcendent trio sung by the Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie in the last act of Richard Strauss’s <em>Der Rosenkavalier</em>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally, in my more adult years, I am blessed to hear and play (violin) chamber music—string quartets, piano trios, various combinations of strings, winds and keyboard. The list of profound and touching moments is endless. I have only to mention Mozart’s Viola Quintets K.415 & 416, Beethoven’s late string quartets Op. 127-135; and Schubert’s quintessential Cello Quintet in C major as examples.</p>
<p>How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!</p>
Contributor
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Peter A. Benoliel, Chairman Emeritus, Quaker Chemical Corporation
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benoliel-lifetime-humanities-moments
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Antony and Cleopatra
Aurelius, Marcus
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Books & Reading
Business Leaders
Caesar and Cleopatra
Cather, Willa
Classical Music
Cooper, James Fenimore
Corelli, Arcangelo
Cyrano de Bergerac
Dickens, Charles
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Drama
Dumas, Alexandre
Dürrenmatt, Freidrich
Eliot, George
Epictetus
Film
Goya, Francisco
Handel, George Frideric
Hesse, Herman
Homer, Virgil
Horace, Catullus
How Green Was My Valley
In Search of Lost Time
Literature
Melville, Herman
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life
Modern Painting
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Mrs. Dalloway
Murasaki, Shikibu
My Ántonia
O Pioneers!
Performing Arts
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte
Philosophy
Piano Concerto no. 5
Plato
Poetry
Proust, Marcel
Schubert, Franz Peter
Shakespeare, William
Shaw, George Bernard
Socrates
Symphony no. 8 in B Minor
Telemann, Georg Philipp
Thackeray, William Makepeace
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Deerslayer, or the First War-path
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757
The Mysterious Island
The Patriots
The Tale of Genji
The Three Musketeers
The Visit
To the Lighthouse
Tolstoy, Leo
Twain, Mark
Verne, Jules
Vivaldi, Antonio Lucio
Woolf, Virginia
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Mstislav Rostropovich
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Dvořák’s cello concerto
Description
An account of the resource
It was our first real date. His blind date had backed out and I volunteered to hear Rostropovich’s debut in Washington to play the Dvořák. It was not only a memorable concert but a few years later I married my date. We had a wonderful marriage lasting almost 40 years until he passed away. This experience listening to the concerto was the real start of my love for classical music.<br /><br />This concerto will always be “our song.”
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Dvořák’s Cello concerto
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Antonín Dvořák
Date
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1967
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Yolande Frommer, 78, retired Travel Agent
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dvorak-cello-concerto
Cello Concerto in B Minor
Classical Music
Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C.
Courtship
Dvorák, Antonín
Marriage
Music
Rostropovich, Mstislav
Travel Agents
-
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David Denby, author, journalist, film critic
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David Denby
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This collection includes contributors by the author, journalist and film critic David Denby.
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david-denby-humanities-moments
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<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/273367200" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
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Losing and Regaining the Metaphysical
Description
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Have we lost the metaphysical? And how do we regain it?
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David Denby, author, journalist, film critic
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david-denby-losing-regaining-metaphysical
Classical Music
Metaphysics
Modernity
Music
Philosophy
Religion
Writers
-
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94c4dbd5200c4266cfb814cb02cf4ac8
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Herbert von Karajan
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David Denby
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This collection includes contributors by the author, journalist and film critic David Denby.
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david-denby-humanities-moments
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<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/273367340" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
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The Berlin Philharmonic Plays Mahler
Description
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David Denby discusses hearing Herbert von Karajan conducting a performance of Mahler’s 9th Symphony—a moment which made him realize the power of music as a universal language.
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David Denby, author, journalist, film critic
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david-denby-berlin-philharmonic-plays-mahler
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The Berlin Philharmonic's performance of Symphony No. 9 by Gustav Mahler
Antisemitism
Berlin Philharmonic
Carnegie Hall
Classical Music
Mahler, Gustav
Music
Nazi Persecution
New York, New York
Symphony No. 9
von Karajan, Herbert
Writers