Vitanuova for 2002 March 9

Saturday

I had lunch with Katy, who came by with a friendly dog.

I heard the consummately wonderful Mass in B minor at the St. Ignatius Church at USF with Leonard and Sumana. Sumana gave me a letter she'd written me.

Venturum saeculum

I noticed several effects where Bach dramatized a particular passage by making the music fit or symbolize the text. Kerman calls this "word painting":

Second, composers attempted to match their music to the meaning of the words that were being set. The term word painting is used for this musical illustration of the text. Words such as "fly" and "glitter" were set to rapid notes, "up" and "heaven" to high ones, and so on [...].

Sigh was typically set by a motive including a rest, as though the singers have been interrupted by sighing. Grief, cruel, torment, harsh, and exclamations such as alas -- words found all the time in the language of Renaissance love poetry -- prompted composers to write dissonant harmony.

[...] First developed in the sixteenth century, word painting has remained an important expressive resource of all later music. [... In] the Baroque period [...] it was especially important [...].

Gloria: loud and with trumpets (like angels announcing God's glory). Then much quieter on "et in terra pax".

"Tu solus altissimus" goes particularly high. It would be great if that passage contained the highest note in the entire Mass, but I doubt it.

"Et incarnatus" is very quiet (maybe to keep the associated mysteries secret?) and then "crucifixus etiam pro nobis" is very somber (as is common). The chorus actually looked sad as they were singing this.

"Et resurrexit" is loud and jubilant and surprising, unexpected. The musicians crept up and quietly lifted their instruments and then gave forth a great "Et resurrexit!" blast with trumpets and the whole chorus. I think someone who didn't know that the "resurrexit" came after the "crucifixus" would have felt quite a jolt of surprise; I did, even though I knew it was coming.

"Et expecto, expecto": the first "expecto" is long and drawn out, to show waiting, and then the word is repeated to show how insistent the waiting can get. There are many different kinds of waiting. You can wait skeptically or faithfully or anxiously or eagerly or "in the background", as we say in computing.

When I heard the phrase expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi, I was very deeply moved, and I started to think about what the vita venturi saeculi might be. Faithful readers of this diary will remember that I discussed that phrase in my very first vitanuova diary entry. Hearing the "expecto" this evening brought to mind every single utopian and salvationist aspiration I have ever had in my life.

In one sense, the vita venturi saeculi for me used to be having a girlfriend. That girlfriend knows that now, and if for someone reason she's thinking about it today, she's not happy about it. She wasn't prepared to be my vita nuova or my menousa polis. Sometimes I have said that maybe she was a humanist and didn't even believe in all of these wild ideas in foreign dead languages, hadn't heard about those gospels or having heard them, didn't believe in them (see "Agreeing with Paul"). (That diary entry talks about the Nicene Creed too! Go figure!)

See also: April 12, 2001 (see "Free software"). "Yes I said Yes I will Yes" and also

But it's tragic, because there was a big miscommunication about Linux, where Linux geeks said that Linux was the be-all and end-all of the operating system world at the moment (I recognize that Linux can benefit from new technology, but we could say, as they say in Hemingway, that it was "less bad"; remember what Michael Elkins says about mutt). And we said this because that was actually our experience.

But if people have totally different ideas about what they're up to or about what's virtuous and vicious, it's not completely shocking that they would not see why we said that Linux was so great; certainly Linux is very different, which wasn't emphasized enough in its full generality.

And if it's tragic when this happens with an operating system, how much more so with a whole world view or a whole account of the New Life!

Aren't all of these problems the same problem, in some sense? It's about our capacity to believe in gospels and to believe that our experience is universalizable and to wait passionately and actively, expectare vitam venturi saeculi.

I waited so well, waited long and hard, and you know "expectare" or "exspectare" and "expect" literally means "to look out for", and so to refine or focus one's perceptions, to watch, not just to pass time but to turn your perception and tune your perception and get up in the morning and look out your window and actively try to see what you are looking for.

Nowadays, the vita venturi saeculi hardly seems to involve a girlfriend, but it seems to involve arms without an injury, arms that work well and are free from pain. I would like that; that would be a new age and a new life now. That seems to be what I'm waiting for and what I'm looking out for today.

I have another diary entry which mentions the "hearing a gospel and not believing it" phenomenon -- one of my best-ever vitanuova entries, June 8, 2001 (see "Telluris theoria sacra"). This entry also mentions the Nicene Creed. Some days it just seems like all of my diary entries mention the Nicene Creed somewhere.

I suppose they all do, in a sense: as I mentioned above, and in my first entry here, I named this diary "vitanuova" in part after that very "vita venturi saeculi" we supposedly all "far within our faith" were waiting for. If I'd never heard the Nicene Creed, I surely would have chosen a very different name for my diary on the web.