jmcgready’s misc universe

Mozart: Requiem, Exsultate jubilate

Editorial Review:

Amazon.com:
This 1978 reading of Mozart’s glorious Requiem has lost none of its luster. Carlo Maria Giulini refuses to approach the work as a romantic blood-and-thunder event (unlike, say Karajan’s 1975 account); rather, his approach is classical, devotional, and transparent–time and again one hears the orchestra’s inner voices more clearly than usual. This Requiem ’sings’ like few others, and while it is highly meditative, its drama, from section to section, is never lost. Bass Robert Lloyd is particularly good, coming through with a ‘Tuba mirum’ in which he challenges the sound of the trombone. The other soloists are good. As a bonus, EMI has given us a chirpy, agile performance of Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate, with Erika Koth, a light soprano whose repertoire included the Queen of the Night. A fine disc.
–Robert Levine

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Prospect - The Mythless Society - article_details

If society is cracked, however, then science has not fulfilled its promise, and fiction as currently construed isn’t going to provide any more solace than a new reality television series. If society is cracked then we desperately need myth again. Yet, as the history of myth makes clear, not any old telling will do. Canongate has proclaimed that its Myths series, featuring books by Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson, Donna Tartt and David Grossman, Victor Pelevin and Milton Hatoum, will be “the most ambitious simultaneous worldwide publication ever undertaken.” Far more significant, though, and far more challenging, will be the effort to make myth mythic again.

“Our modern alienation from myth is unprecedented,” Armstrong persuasively argues in her Short History. After several hundred years of disuse, myth has lost its entire context. We encounter myth in the way that we encounter any other archaeological artefact, as point of reference to a remote time and place.

But the problem goes even deeper than that. Our culture is not only mythless, but antagonistic to myth. We believe, falsely, that myth is a primitive worldview, a predecessor to science. In truth, scientific reasoning always coexisted with mythic belief, each serving a separate purpose: learning to hone a spear was an empirical process, but psychological preparation for the hunt was accomplished by the ritual enactment of myth. Crucially, stories of gods and goddesses were taken as true, but not factual. “A game of sacred make-believe,” Armstrong calls it, elegantly capturing a degree of sophistication common even in the Palaeolithic age that we’ve now lost: nobody knew quantum theory 10,000 years ago, but even a caveman could have told you that the uncertainty principle wouldn’t help you to reckon with death.

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Full Story Link - Sify.com

US outsourcing prayers to India
Tuesday, 15 June , 2004, 12:04
New York: Following the outsourcing of software and other technological work in recent years, Western nations have now begun “offshoring” of Christian prayers to India.

“With Roman Catholic clergy in short supply in the United States, Indian priests are picking up some of their work, saying Mass for special intentions, in a sacred if unusual version of outsourcing,” The New York Times reported.

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