In Our Time: Comets

Comets are an astronomical event/phenomenon that have exerted quite a hold on the imagination of people in the past & it’s only relatively recently that we have any understanding of what they are or why they happen. The In Our Time programme that discussed them primarily focused on the astronomy but did touch on the omens and portents side of them as well. The experts on the programme were Monica Grady (Open University), Paul Murdin (University of Cambridge) and Don Pollacco (University of Warwick).

They discussed what is known about comets and what the current theories are about where they come from etc. Comets were formed at the same time as the rest of the solar system – when the nebula that formed the sun and planets coalesced at a particular distance from the sun is what is known as the snow line, and beyond this small lumps of ice formed. These are the comets. Grady told us about the Oort cloud, which is a spherical region around the outside of the solar system where the comets orbit. When something perturbs this – gravitational changes due to the relative movements of our solar system & other parts of the galaxy, for instance – a comet might get jostled free and plunge in towards the sun. I specified that it was Grady that discussed the Oort cloud because one of the others (Pollacco, I think) was of the opinion that it wasn’t so much a sphere around the solar system, but more that this is how the spaces between the gravitational wells of different stars are filled (if that makes sense).

Once a comet is jostled free it still orbits the sun, but now the orbit is an eccentric one as compared to the planets. All the planets orbit in the same plane, in the same direction, in roughly circular orbits. But comets can be in any plane, and often move very close to the sun before returning to a much further out position. Comets are split into two classes – short-period and long-period. Murdin (I think it was) said that they’d like to be able to classify them by composition or something like that, but sadly we just don’t know enough about them to do that. So long-period comets take a long time to come back – this might be a few hundred years, or it might be forever. Some comets break up when they get close to the sun, due to the heat & gravitational pull. Some comets swing round the sun once and then go back to the Oort cloud (or whatever the true situation out there is). Short-period comets come back more often – Halley’s Comet is an example of this sort of comet.

They were saying that we only actually know the orbits & can predict 150 comets out of the many millions that there are. And Pollacco was crediting Halley’s prediction about his comet’s return as being one of the factors that helped to get the Enlightenment going. Basically he was saying that it was a very good demonstration of the power of science – Halley predicted the return of the comet despite this occurring after his death via scientific observations & mathematics, and then this prediction came true.

There is a little known about the composition of comets – due to space missions that have flown past comets and through their tails. One of those missions was named Stardust and it brought back some of the particles in a comet tail. They know that comets are lumps of ice, that are pretty small by cosmic standards – up to a few hundred kilometres across. They aren’t white like you expect when you say “ball of ice”, they’re black due to all the dust and rocky particles in them. Bragg asked what the difference was between an asteroid and a comet & the answer was partly the place you find them orbiting, and partly it’s a continuum where asteroids are icy bits of rock, but comets are rocky bits of ice. As a comet gets closer to the sun (inside the orbit of Mars) it develops a coma, which is gas that has sublimated out of the ice. A comet has two tails, both created by the effects of the sun. One of these tails is lots of bits of dust – melted out of the comet by the sun’s heat & left behind as the comet moves. The other tail is the coma being pushed back by the solar wind & radiation – this is the ion tail. The Stardust mission brought back bits of the first type of tail, and they found that these are little bits of rock much like rocks on earth – made up of silicon, plus some carbon, some nitrogen etc.

Bragg brought up Fred Hoyle’s theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space by comets – discredited some time ago – and was slapped down by Grady (politely, but firmly). Hoyle was postulating that bacteria were present on comets and this is where life came from, but at best comets may’ve brought some of the water and minerals needed for life to the Earth.

While on the subject of how astronomy is a science where you might have things you want to know but you have to live with the things you can find out, they talked about the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter. This comet was discovered in 1993, and it shortly afterwards became apparent that it had not just been captured by Jupiter’s gravity but was going to crash into Jupiter. In 1994 this happened – sadly not quite in full view of all the telescopes, but the aftermath was clearly visible. Despite the relatively small size of the comet the marks it left were spectacular – about 80% the size of Earth! The comet broke up into about 25 pieces, and these hit in turn generating a straight line of marks. As each piece hit it ploughed through the atmosphere leaving a hole behind itself, and once it had hit the lower region of the atmosphere spurted back up the hole leaving a dark mark on the surface of Jupiter. Having seen the pattern of marks astronomers looked at craters on other planets/moons, and could see other examples of a row of craters in a straight line – presumably also from being hit by comets or asteroids that fragmented before they hit.

Thinking about comets is one of those things that makes it clear just how fragile life is on this planet …

Howard Goodall’s Story of Music; The Dark Ages: An Age of Light

The third episode of Howard Goodall’s Story of Music covered about a hundred years – from 1750 to 1850. This takes us from Haydn to Chopin via Mozart, Beethoven and more. Goodall’s two themes for the period were the changing social status of the composer, and the turn to simplicity in musical structure after the complexity of Bach etc.

At the start of the period composers were effectively servants – you found a rich patron and wrote him the music he wished. I’d guess it wasn’t that simple in reality, but that was the social status of the composer. Over this time period composers began to work freelance, and so their revenue stream also began to depend on the tastes of the paying audience. But it increased their social status, brought them above the salt so’s to speak.

The complexity of Bach’s fugues, and the moral uprightness of his & Handel’s work gave way in this era to the simpler forms of symphonies, and an emphasis on pleasant & entertaining music (having not much to do with the turbulent political times, that included the French & American Revolutions). Goodall talked about how the music became simpler both in overall structure and in harmonic structure. Simple is not being used as a value judgement here, incidentally. So in terms of overall structure he was saying that a lot of symphonies can be summed up as – take a short theme, repeat the same note pattern starting on a different note, finish with a phrase as long as the first two put together that brings us back to a satisfying conclusion. Then do it again. Which leaves a lot of room for different sorts of phrases and themes, and satisfying conclusions, but still gives an overall simple structure that the piece is constructed around.

In terms of harmonic structure he was saying that the numbers of different chords used in a single piece of music narrowed considerably – most of a piece of music now would be constructed on the first, third and fifth chords (for the key the music was in). He demonstrated with a couple of examples that this could be the sole chords used for about three quarters of a piece of music – all the other possibilities now only took up a relatively small proportion of the music. And then they had a short segment of a string quartet & singer all dressed up in 18th Century style playing what sounded like chamber music of the time, and then you realised the words the woman was singing were the words for Rockin’ All Over the World … which lead into a joke about how these three chords are “still the status quo in much music of today” *groan* 🙂

Goodall also talked about how Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony inspired other composers to use their music to paint pictures in sound (Mendelssohn was his example of one of these composers). And he talked about the single voice & piano songs of composers like Schubert – and compared them with the novels of Jane Austen with which they’re approximately contemporary, and pointed out that Schubert’s emotional maturity etc come off rather poorly compared to Austen. This was another point where the long-lasting nature of the music of this period was pointed out – we first had a man singing a Schubert love song, which was juxtaposed with a clip of Adele singing Someone Like You. Definitely felt like they were both a part of the same tradition.

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Waldemar Januszczak moved on to discuss the art of Islam in the third episode of his series about the art of the Dark Ages.

And somehow I haven’t ended up with much to say about this one. I’m not sure why – I think I ended up approaching it as more “look at the pretty things” than anything else.

Januszczak visited several places where you find Islamic art (mostly but not all mosques), and discussed not just the beauty of the mosaics, buildings etc but also the religious symbolism behind some of it. (And hopefully got it right – a lot was stuff I hadn’t heard before). Throughout the programme he also placed quite a strong emphasis on how modern more fundamentalist traditions of Islamic art aren’t the only ones – there was figurative art from early on, not just “decadent princes” decorating palaces with things they shouldn’t, but also in art that was intended to represent paradise and to have religious worth.

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Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind (British Museum Exihibition)

The British Museum’s current large exhibition is about Ice Age Art, and we went to see it earlier this month (just before we went away on holiday in fact, which is why the delay in writing about it 🙂 ).

Context

Modern humans (ie Homo sapiens) migrated out of Africa from around 70,000 years ago, and have inhabited Europe since at least 40,000 years ago. At that time the world was in a warmer phase of the Ice Age (tho still colder than today), and the ice sheets left lots of space in Europe for people to live. By around 20,000 years ago the world had cooled down more, and the ice sheets advanced down into Europe before retreating again (and the Ice Age “ended” about 10,000 years ago). The exhibition is about the art that has been found in Europe from that time period, which is the oldest art known from Europe.

The Exhibition

The exhibition is arranged chronologically – so you start with some of the oldest pieces dating from nearly 40,000 years ago, and move to things that are a mere 10-15,000 years old and date back to only a short time before agriculture & civilisation start. It is also grouped by type in many cases, so you see several small statues of abstract women together or several small animal sculptures together. There’s a strong emphasis on how these things are made by people, just like us – I thought they did a good job of conveying that particularly by putting in some pieces of modern art in the same room. Like a sculpture by Henry Moore that’s got a similar feel & aesthetic to the curves of the 30,000 year old small female nudes.

One thing that’s very striking about the objects in the exhibition is that they are so well made – these are not “cave people banging rocks together”. These are for the most part the works of artists who are skilled at creating the carvings, and as good at representational or abstract art as any artist today. Human figures seem to’ve been mostly represented in an abstract or generalised fashion rather than being portraits, but the animal carvings tended to be representational and look very like the thing they were representing. Which is interesting because art seems to have arrived fully fledged – even the oldest pieces (like the 35,000 year old lion man statue for instance) are well made. Maybe this is sampling bias – obviously very little actually survives from such a long ago time, but do we also discard the “banging rocks together” level of experimentation because we don’t see it as art when we see it? The lion man, or the female figurines, or the horses etc etc are very obviously created and created as art so we know what we’re looking at when it’s found.

Most of the objects in the exhibition are small sculptures or tools – physical & three dimensional objects. Obviously we know of two dimensional art from the era, from cave paintings, but you can’t pick them up and move them to a museum. They did have a room with an audiovisual display of some of the cave art, which was a good addition – although I wasn’t keen on the way it was set up as you walked in from a door under the projection so you ended up facing the people watching it and it felt like to find a seat or place to stand you had to walk across people’s view. There was also some indication of other forms of art – like music. One of the objects on display was a small flute made from the rib of a bird (I think it was a vulture) – again it’s sophisticated, in that the holes have clearly been measured (there are faint orientation marks) and precisely placed. The exhibition suggested that the overall bias to small portable things is also probably a true reflection of the time. People during the Ice Age lived a nomadic lifestyle, so you needed to be able to pack up your belongings and move them with you. So even if some of your art is designed to stay in one place the more personal stuff needs to be small.

One striking thing through the whole exhibition was that the vast majority of the human representations were of women – I can only remember a couple that weren’t. In the earlier Ice Age these are nude figures of older women who’ve had children or who are pregnant, with breasts, stomachs & hips/bottom emphasised. Not in a sexualised way, but fertility is clearly part of it. The more recent ones (ie ~20,000 years ago) are also of younger more obviously “sexy” women. There’s an interesting video clip on the museum’s page about the exhibition where the curator & an artist discuss how these figurines seem to represent more the female gaze than the male gaze we’re more accustomed to think about female nudes via. Less “look at the tits & ass on that” and more about the physical experiences of being pregnant or whatever. Their conclusion is that possibly these figurines were made by women and were something to do with rites of passage (puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood etc) of women. But obviously we’ll never know.

Which last sentence neatly segues into the next thing I wanted to mention – I really liked the way the labelling was so clear about “we think this may’ve been used for that purpose but we don’t know”. Because we don’t, and can’t. The best we can do is to remember that these people were people just like us, and to think about how we’d use such things or what we’d make such things for. Some things must’ve been significant – like the lion man statue which would take ~800 hours to make with the tools of the time. That’s a major investment of time, so maybe it had some religious or spiritual importance. Or maybe this is one person’s life’s work of art that they did an hour at a time because they were an artist and that was what they felt a need to create? Other items looked less well made, some tools had pictures of animals etched into the surface by a less practiced & less artistic hand – was this someone making their spear straightener look more elegant/prettier/more their own by decorating it themself? Or was this important in a magical sense – that you drew your own bison on your own spear straightener because then you‘d catch bison with the spears you made? We don’t know & we can’t know, we can just guess because these were people.

This was a fascinating exhibition which both managed to remind you how old these things were, and how like us these people were. These objects come from a long period – three or four times the length of civilisation itself (not just our civilisation, but everything from the agricultural revolution onwards). And that’s mind-boggling. We think of a couple of hundred years ago as “history”, recent maybe, but history even so – people were different then, the past is a different country etc. We think of the Greeks & Romans as a long time ago, the Ancient Egyptians as longer still. But that’s all the last little bit of humankind – these pieces of Ice Age art are the representatives of the majority of human art in terms of time. And yet for all their age these people and their art are still recognisable – they just grew up in a different time and place.

The exhibition’s on till 26th May, and I’d definitely recommend a visit.

Other Stuff

Retail: Bought the book already (and definitely on my list to read). They had some very cool looking stuff, in particular a mug with a painting of a deer on it that became 3D to make the handle out of its head. We didn’t buy anything though.

Other Exhibits: Only a brief trot through the Egyptian rooms, with Ellen & Ady after we’d met up with them.

Other Things: As mentioned above, met Ellen in the museum by design, Ady by accident (well, we didn’t know for sure he was coming to the gig let alone where he’d meet us) and then Paul after we came out. Then off to a gig (about which more another time) via dinner at a place called Pasta Brown, which was rather nice even if they did take rather a long time to bring the bill when we were done.

Howard Goodall’s Story of Music; The Dark Ages: An Age of Light

In the second episode of Howard Goodall’s Story of Music he covered a couple of hundred years or so from just after Monteverdi’s first opera (early 1600s) through to Bach & Handel (mid-1700s). He categorised this as a time of innovation, comparing the various developments in music to the advances in science at the time – which came across a little oddly to me, but then when he was talking about Bach it almost made sense.

The first half of the programme was mostly about Italian composers, like Vivaldi, and their development of the symphony & the concerto. He told us how the original symphonies, and even the start of the modern orchestra, grew out of the instrumental overtures to ballets performed at the French court at this time. The violin was a new instrument at the time (developed out of the folk violin) and instead of having just one playing there would be several of them. And this is obviously the way orchestras are set up. He also talked about how concertos are about the contrast between a large group of players and another smaller one, which I don’t think I actually knew before.

He also talked about the chord changes & sequences in both the music of composers like Vivaldi & in modern pop music, and played some examples of contrasting pieces with the same chord sequence. And I was struck (again) by the realisation that this is not how I listen to music. One of the things I always found hardest about music exams (for flute) was the aural section where I had to do things like identify intervals, or later on identify chord sequences. When I listen to music I hear the melody line and lyrics & the rhythm, even after a lot of practice I still struggled to identify a particular chord sequence (it always felt like guessing, just my guesses got better with practice).

The programme then moved on to the German composers who came after those Italians – Bach & Handel being the featured examples. Goodall talked about (and demonstrated) the complexity of Bach’s fugues & how they’re made by taking a theme and then transforming it in strict ways (different tempo, different key, not just any different notes). And then playing these transformations at the same time as the original, or offset a bit (in some regular fashion, again). And then the whole thing weaves together into a coherent and beautiful whole. Bach could not just write these, but could improvise them as well, which is an astonishing feat. (This segment of the programme made me want to re-read “Gödel, Escher, Bach” again … which I think is the third time I’ve thought that in 6 months, I must bump it up the non-fiction list 🙂 )

In talking about Handel Goodall discussed the oratorio form – which effectively was born because the Pope disapproved of opera. I’m writing this about 2 weeks after watching the programme (I have brief notes) so I may be confused, but obviously the Pope’s opinion didn’t hold much sway in Protestant England nor for the Protestant Handel but I think what Goodall was saying was that Handel still saw an opportunity to occupy a niche in the music production business & so brought it to England as a music form. And it went down well with the English because it was choral/vocal music without the melodramatic acting.

Something else the programme talked about was that during this time period the notes of the scale were standardised. I knew that how we (the Western World) subdivide the scale isn’t the only way to do it – after all we’re arbitrarily drawing lines on a continuous spectrum & saying this is one note, and this is another. But I hadn’t realised that it was so recent in terms of Western music that the scale was narrowed down to the 12 notes we use today – Goodall was saying that previously notes like C♯ and D♭ were actually different, which I suppose I’d always figured was true sometime but hadn’t thought through.

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The second episode of Januszczak’s series about art in the Dark Ages was all about “the barbarians”. As I said in passing above – I’m finishing writing this nearly 2 weeks after we watched the programmes so I’ve undoubtedly forgotten stuff. In this programme he basically covered the art of the various Germanic/Slavic tribes that we lump together these days as “the barbarians that toppled the Roman Empire” and his point was that actually they had art and culture of their own, they weren’t just the stereotype of thuggish murderous brutes ripping down the pretty things from a better civilisation.

He started with the Huns, who actually had a fairly big empire to the north-east of the Roman Empire. They get a pretty bad press, and one of their leaders (Attila) gets even worse press, but Januszczak showed us a lot of beautiful golden objects made by these people. And also showed us the reconstruction someone is planning of the palace of Attila the Hun, which looks rather splendid (and probably highly inaccurate). And I had the somewhat belated realisation that Hun and Hungarian is likely not a coincidence. But how did the Huns get their gold to make their beautiful objects? By running protection rackets on other cultures! Effectively they’d show up with their pointy swords & arrows, and after a bit of striking fear into the hearts of the townsfolk they’d suggest sending tribute of gold & such would help peaceful relations.

And then we moved onto the Vandals – all the way through the programme Januszczak was making the points that the names of these tribes have picked up perjorative meanings that we use to this day. The Vandals were pushed out of the north east by the Huns, and moved into Spain … then pushed out of Spain by the Visigoths into Africa. Where they conquered Carthage from the Romans. And Januszcak’s point here was that from the art you can’t really tell when they did this. There’s mosaics of much the same styles before & after, for instance. And there are things like documentation that the Vandal rulers actually repaired the public baths after they’d fallen into disrepair under the last of the Roman rulers. So not at all the reputation that goes with the later use of the word.

And he also discussed the Goths … which provided a lot of (possibly unintended) amusement. For starters, wtf with all the references to modern goths & satanic symbols? Personally I guess I associate that more with metal, not with goths. And what’s with a man who dresses in black and wears a massive gold ring decorated with a skull doing talking dismissively of “camden town goths”? He doesn’t look a million miles from some edges of that scene 😉 Mind you, I wasn’t quite sure if it was tongue in cheek here, or real dismissiveness – my amusement may’ve been the sort of reaction he was going for. He also made me giggle when he was talking about “barbarian bling” after all the artful shots of that skull ring of his, and I’m pretty sure that was intentional 🙂

Anyway, the point he was making with his discussion of modern goths was to compare these back to the real Goths and say that actually the real ones were Christians and were rather cheerful. The Ostrogoths (the eastern ones) are the ones that sacked Rome in the end – they made beautiful mosaic art in their churches. And from the Roman point of view the problem wasn’t that they were pagan (they weren’t) it was that they were heretics – Arian Christians. The Visigoths (the western ones) drove the Vandals out of Spain, and you see beautiful horseshoe arches in their church architecture. And this gave him a neat segue into the subject of the next episode – the art of Islam – as you see these horseshoe type arches in mosques in Spain.

And overall this programme reminded me I don’t know much about these various “barbarians”.

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In Our Time: Le Morte d’Arthur

The form of the Arthurian legend that was written by Thomas Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur was the first English language prose form of this legend, written around the 1460s & it had a lot of influence on later stories about Arthur. Discussing it on In Our Time were Helen Cooper (University of Cambridge), Helen Fulton (University of York) and Laura Ashe (University of Oxford).

They opened the programme by setting Malory in context – Cooper told us a little about the times he lived in, which was the end of the Hundred Years War and the start of the Wars of the Roses. This meant that he lived through unsettled times in a political sense. He himself wasn’t a very nice man – Cooper said that even by the standards of the time he was a thug, and he spent at least 15 years imprisoned for crimes ranging from cattle rustling to rape (the latter might’ve been consensual adultery – a husband could bring charges of rape under such circumstances). Being as he was a gentleman he was under house arrest rather than shackled in a dungeon, and he must’ve had access to a library during this time as his imprisonment is the period when he wrote Le Morte d’Arthur.

The Arthurian legend already existed in various forms by the 1460s. One of these forms was a pseudo-historical Arthur – crowbarred into the time between the end of the Roman Empire (in Britain) and the Anglo-Saxons, a mythical King who was British not Roman or Anglo-Saxon and who lead armies into battles & nearly defeated the Roman Empire. I think they were saying these English sources were in poetic form. There were also various French prose romances which were about Arthur & the Knights of the Round Table and their deeds, and chivalrous exploits. Malory’s tale took both these Arthurs and wrote one coherent book which both had elements of the pseudo-history and elements of the chivalrous romance. And was an English prose work, which was also new.

One of the experts (I forget who :/ ) made the point that Malory’s work was ground-breaking for romances of the time. His prose style was a lot more direct than the French sources he drew upon, which was a refreshing change (or so she was saying). And his focus on the characters and their stories was fairly new in English prose literature of the time – and is a part of what’s made this work last and influence more modern literature.

They also spent some time discussing the content of Le Morte d’Arthur – the theme they talked about that’s stuck with me is how the tragedy of the Arthurian Court is built into the premise. Arthur isn’t one of the Knights, he’s the King who sends out his Knights on their quests etc. Lancelot is the “best Knight” (although not the most spiritually pure Knight, he doesn’t get to find the Holy Grail after all) – and who should the “best Knight” be with but the “best Lady”, and that’s the Queen. And the downfall is brought about because other Knights are jealous of Lancelot, and so bring the whole thing out into the open where it can’t be ignored. So it’s that Lancelot is best that’s what brings about the tragic end. (The experts were also all saying that Lancelot seemed to be Malory’s favourite character.)

After Malory’s death the manuscript was printed (and edited) by Caxton and two forms of that have survived to the modern day. A while after the publication the book fell out of favour, but in Victorian times it was revived – chivalry as a concept was part of the cultural attempt to deal with having an Empire, and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur as a chivalrous romance became popular again. And spawned more Arthurian stories & re-tellings from then through to the modern day.

Howard Goodall’s Story of Music; The Dark Ages: An Age of Light

We started watching two new series this week – both picked from the selection we have recorded because they’re in HD and our PVR is filling up! So we began with the first episode of Howard Goodall’s Story of Music. The format of the show is just a little different from what I’m used to with documentaries – instead of Goodall going out on location somewhere he’s in a studio and the programme cuts between location footage, singers in a studio/on location and Goodall. Sometimes he has a keyboard to play, sometimes there’s other bits of graphics to illustrate what he’s saying, but a lot of the shots of him are him standing there. Which makes for quite a different feel – which I rather like, variety is good.

In the introductory segment he pointed out that there are many ways to tell the story of music, but this one is his – and I think it was a good idea for him to be so upfront about that, because his biases were very apparent in this particular episode. He opened with a brief trot through pre-history and ancient history – the theme for this segment was that there’s evidence of music throughout the time that there’s been people, but we don’t know what it sounded like because there was no musical notation. In some cases we have discovered instruments (like Lurs from Denmark – curly horns, hence Lurpak Butter and their logo of two curly horns), but this only tells us the sorts of noises they could use to make music not what the music was like. And then he was on to his main subject – which was really the development and styles of Western music. And possibly only some of that, I’m not sure I believe that there was no popular or secular music before the troubadours in the 12th Century.

So we started the story proper with Gregorian Chant – plainsong initially, which is just one vocal line and all the voices singing that in unison. Then he talked us through the adding of harmonies – first adding boys to the choirs got you two lines an octave apart, then they thought about 5ths & 4ths. Then more interesting intervals (like thirds), and more lines (so you can do triads of root-third-fifth, for instance). And the different lines not just singing the same thing in parallel always the same distance apart, so chord progressions were developed.

In parallel he also talked about the development of the system for writing music down from its beginnings as a mnemonic scribbled above the words to a developed system that lets you know which note, for how long etc. And discussed the addition and development of instruments (and this showed his biases as well, because some of these came from the Arabic world so clearly the rest of the world is doing its own musical development, he’s just not telling us about it). Other developments included the change of which line holds the melody (originally the tenor line did – hence “tenor” because that’s derived from the latin for “to hold”), and changing how the tunes went with the words. By that last I mean that it became more important for the words to be understood (he used an example of a Savonarola prayer set to music where the words were a political statement, and also of hymns for the congregation or opera where the words tell you the story) – so the composers made them have fewer notes per syllable so you could more easily hear what’s going on.

And we finished up with Monteverdi’s first opera being performed in 1607 – which Goodall held up as the point at which all the pieces of the Western musical tradition were in place. The general rules of harmony, the instrumental accompaniment and so on.

While I enjoyed watching this programme I am not sure he’s always on the right side of the line between clear jargon-free explanations & patronising explanations – for instance calling the note representations for early music writing “squiggles” didn’t quite sit right with me (he did say they were properly called “neumes” but then continued to say “squiggles” instead). But maybe I’m being over-sensitive here 🙂

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Next we started watching The Dark Ages: An Age of Light which is a recent series about the art of the Early Medieval period – from the latter part of the Roman Empire up through to the time of the Norman Conquest. (He started with orientation dates! I approve 😉 ). This period has been characterised in the past as a time when civilisation ceased & people reverted to being barbarians – I don’t think anyone really thinks that any more but just in case you do this series aims to demonstrate that it’s a false idea. Over the series Januszczak is going to look at the art of various different groups of peoples, this first episode looks at the Christians – with an emphasis on the third & fourth centuries AD. I guess to partly start us with the familiar.

So first we looked at very early Christian art – the stuff you find in the early burials in the catacombs under Rome and (possibly) in Pompeii. This is mostly symbols rather than representations of Christ or other people. The fish, the anchor, the ☧ (Chi-Rho, from which we derive “xmas” for Christmas). Jonah being swallowed by the whale (or regurgitated by) as a symbol for Christ’s resurrection. The sort of thing that doesn’t jump up and shout “I’m a Christian” while waving its arms around, but does let other Christians know that & keeps it all more low key. Januszczak did make the point that the persecution of Christians wasn’t as complete as later tales suggest, but this use of symbolic art does suggest people were keeping it hidden as a matter of course.

I said “(possibly) in Pompeii” above – and I said this because there’s a reasonably long segment of the programme where he discusses the ROTAS squares found in Pompeii (so dating from AD79 or earlier) as a Christian symbol. A ROTAS square is inscribed like this:

R O T A S
O P E R A
T E N E T
A R E P O
S A T O R

And if you take all the letters and re-organise them you can make them into a cross constructed of two PATERNOSTER (crossing at the N) with A & O spare (twice). So that’s a cross, two Our Father’s and two lots of Α & Ω (or the beginning and the end). Which all sounds pretty Christian, and that’s how he was presenting it on the programme – a secret Christian symbol. But as Mary Beard discussed on her blog shortly after this programme aired, these days it’s thought not to be a Christian symbol – the argument is that it’s too early for the cross & the Α and Ω to be Christian symbols, they aren’t seen as such till the 3rd Century by which time Pompeii’s been under ash for over a hundred years. Also early Christians were much more likely to be using Greek letters rather than Latin ones. There’s no other evidence for Christians in Pompeii so it’s more likely that this is a Jewish symbol, as there’s plenty of evidence for Jews in Pompeii – and Our Father and Α and Ω show up in Jewish prayers & Jewish cultural contexts at this time.

So that’s a bit of a shame. J and I were also wincing at some of the description of the Egyptian goddess Isis later on in the programme, which taken together makes me concerned in general that whenever Januszczak says something I didn’t know before that perhaps that’s because it’s wrong. A programme to watch for the broad sweep of things & to look at the art, but not to learn the details.

Moving on, he started to talk about the earliest representations of Christ – these are not much like the later art, Christ is a boyish almost feminine figure with curly blonde hair & carries a staff or wand (with which he performs his miracles). Januszczak seemed to be both arguing that this was more likely to be realistic than the later bearded Jesus figures (being earlier, and showing the Turin Shroud to be fake as it has a typical medieval style Jesus face), and that it was based on the god Apollo. Obviously both are unlikely to be true – and actually I think I’d like to’ve seen him look at some of the Eastern Christian art of the same time period. Do they have Apollo-like Jesus figures? Or if not, what?

The later depictions of Jesus (by which I mean 4th Century here, after Constantine) shift to a more mature-looking man – one that wouldn’t be out of place as a senior member of Roman society. Which mirrors the shift from a small hidden cult to the imperial religion. The femininity of his form is also lost because that role has been taken on by Mary – her cult within Christianity starts up later than Christianity itself. This segment included the bit that we were wincing at – he discussed the Egyptian goddess Isis and was wrong in most of the details. However he might’ve been talking about the Isis cult within the Roman Empire (and neither of us know much about the details of that, or how it differs from the parent religion in Egypt). Anyway, the imagery of the Madonna and Child is so similar to that of Isis suckling Horus that it’s suggested that the one was modelled on the other as a way of bringing in a feminine side to the religion where there wasn’t before.

In parallel to looking at the paintings Januszczak also discussed the architecture of Christianity – the first churches were converted from rooms in people’s houses, and you wouldn’t know they were there from the outside. But as Christianity became the imperial religion it needed imperial style buildings both to show how important it was and to hold the larger numbers of worshippers. These were based on Roman basilicas, which were large halls in which public meetings were held. Christian basilicas moved the entrance to one of the narrow ends so that you walked in to face the altar in the apse at the other end (re-purposed from the place where a magistrate would sit). This left a large hall for the worshippers to congregate in and the priests to process through. Other Christian architecture of the time was smaller round buildings, built around a tomb. These were places for contemplation, as opposed to the larger & noisier basilicas. But over time the two forms were merged – the apse that the altar sat in in a basilica became larger and domed like a mausoleum at the end of the basilica. These grand buildings were decorated with fine art – including the more mature and senator-like Jesus images.

As with most programmes about art it’s worth watching just to see the various artworks, but I do wish I was more convinced that he was always getting the details right.

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February 2013 in Review

This is an index and summary of the things I’ve talked about over the last month. Links for multi-post subjects go to the first post (even if it’s before this month), you can follow the internal navigation links from there.

Books

Fiction

“Before the Golden Age 2” ed. Isaac Asimov. Part of Read All the Fiction, short stories from 1933& 1934 plus autobiography of Asimov during those years. Boxed up.

“Book of Shadows” Paula Brackston. Historical fantasy, framing story set in 2007 with flashbacks through the life of a witch born in the 17th Century. Library book.

Total: 2

Non-Fiction

“China: The World’s Oldest Civilisation Revealed” John Makeham. Part of Chapter-by-Chapter, an overview of the sweep of Chinese history from the Paleolithic through to the death of the last Emperor in the 20th Century (started reading in January).

Total: 1

Films

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Total: 1

Photos

Bracken.

A Gap in the Clouds.

Lights.

Louvre, Day 2 – a batch of photos from our trip to Paris in 2011.

Total: 4

Radio

Bertrand Russell. In Our Time episode about the life & work of Bertrand Russell.

Crystallography. In Our Time episode about x-ray crystallography.

The Cult of Mithras. In Our Time episode about the Roman cult of Mithras.

South Sea Bubble. In Our Time episode about the South Sea Bubble.

Total: 4

Talks

“Man in a Cretan Cloak: JDS Pendlebury at Amarna” Rosalind Janssen. Talk given at the EEG meeting in February, about the life & death of the archaeologist J. D. S. Pendlebury.

Total: 1

Television

Non-Fiction

Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special. One off show presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon linked to the Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum.

In Search of Medieval Britain. Alixe Bovey following a medieval map of Britain (link goes to only episode watched in this year).

Lost Kingdoms of South America. The history & archaeology of four cultures in South America (started in January).

Richard III: The King in the Car Park. Documentary following the excavation & analysis of Richard III’s remains.

Rome: A History of the Eternal City. History of Rome from the perspective of religion, presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

Rome’s Lost Empire. Using satellite imagery to find previously unknown Roman sites to excavate.

Total: 6

“Before the Golden Age 2” ed. Isaac Asimov

This is the middle volume of Isaac Asimov’s autobiographical look at the science fiction stories from the 1930s that influenced him. No absolute shockers here and I enjoyed reading all of the stories – they still suffer from the various -isms of the time but the sins are more of omission than commission which is a step in the right direction. I think my favourite would be “Sidewise in Time”.

1933

“The Man Who Awoke” Laurence Manning

Man invents a method of hibernation and goes to sleep so he can wake up 3000 years in the future & see the wondrous progress. It turns out not to be as simple as that – there’s been progress, but there’s also been a bewildering (to our protagonist) shift in attitudes to consumption. The biology of hibernation is very 1930s, but the future society which now lives in forests using mostly renewable resources, and carefully manages itself not to use up its resources feels a lot more of modern concept. As Asimov says in his afterword this wasn’t yet a fashionable thing to worry about. It’s still a very 1930s story tho, not only in narrative style but also – women, what are they? On the plus side the inhabitants of the future are brown-skinned yet have both good people and bad people and are treated just like people by the narrative.

“Tumithak in Shawm” Charles R. Tanner

Sequel to “Tumithak of the Corridors” which is in the first volume of this anthology. Tumithak now leads an army from his corridors to do battle with the alien shelk – through various twists & turns of the plot they join forces with another subterranean band of people (under Tumithak’s leadership, of course) and win the first real battles against the shelk! I particularly liked the way that Tumithak & co react believably to being out on the surface for the first time (and being the first generation to see the sun in 2000 years), and the way that they aren’t just obviously victorious from the beginning – we know the end because of the framing story of how Tumithak is a legendary hero, but there’s still tension and still mistakes and bad decisions. In looking to see if Tanner wrote any more I’ve discovered that all his published stories are freely available (on what looks like a legitimate website) so at some point I should read a few of the others.

1934

“Colossus” Donald Wandrei

Man travels & grows to burst through to a bigger universe where our whole universe is one of the atoms. This suffers somewhat from poor science even for the time (although as handwaves go, breaking the speed of light by drawing on “intra-spatial emanations and radiations” is right up there with reversing the polarity of the whatever). I think I might’ve preferred this story if it had explored the vaguely dystopian future-on-the-brink-of-war more, rather than had our hero go off on his journey. And if the girl had lived – she had an actual personality, a shame to have her killed off halfway through to make our hero sad & lonely as he travelled. It was nice that the aliens in the larger world actually seemed fairly alien in some of their attitudes & appealing to (effectively) their humanity didn’t work.

“Born of the Sun” Jack Williamson

What if the planets weren’t balls of rock or gas? What if they were actually eggs? A mix of horror (I want to say “Lovecraftian horror” but I haven’t actually read any Lovecraft) and science fiction – our hero learns the Awful Truth just in time and builds himself a spaceship. Reminded me a bit of a (science fiction) book I read several years ago based on Velikovsky‘s ideas, but only in that it takes “completely nutty science fantasy idea” and runs with it in a science fiction type of way. However, I didn’t like the romance subplot here – particularly not the patronising way the protagonist thinks of his fiancée, and could’ve done without the racist elements too (lots of exoticising stuff about the Oriental mind, and evil Chinese antagonists). And to modern eyes the ending looks less hopeful than I think was intended.

“Sidewise in Time” Murray Leinster

Some cosmic event happens & the world becomes a tapestry of scrambled pieces of different alternate histories for a time, before mostly descrambling itself – many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics suddenly made real. One man (Professor Minott) has figured out from the initial harbingers of the event that triggers it what’s about to happen and we get his story as he tries to lead a party of undergraduates to a land where he can rule the world, interspersed with vignettes of other events across the world. It’s also a take on a wish-fulfillment story for Minott, only his wishes don’t end up fulfilled – he’s just a maths lecturer at a tiny university, and he sees his chance to gain power & get the girl of his dreams, but in the end he’s not the swashbuckling hero he thinks he will be. In the hands of Meek (who wrote the dreadfully racist stories in the previous volume) this would’ve turned into White Man Reigns Supreme, but this story is much more nuanced and good – White Man gets his comeuppance and isn’t as clever or superior as he thinks he is. My favourites of the vignettes were where the nasty, mean-minded & abusive farmer gets eaten by a dinosaur & we’re very much expected to cheer as his wife realises that she might have gone mad (she’s not) but she’s free. And the Roman army (from a land where the Romans lasted into the 20th Century & conquered the Americas) descend upon a car and kill it because they think it’s a weapon, efficiently brutal. Oh, and a sad one where three diplodocuses (or some dinosaur of that general sort) get killed when they’ve wandered into a town – they’re just confused, poor things, they didn’t even mean to destroy anything 🙁

This made me think of Fred Hoyle’s “October the First is Too Late”, except there the scrambled Earth is in different time periods rather than different alternate universes. It’s been probably 20 years or more since I last read that book – it’s one that my parents own – and I can’t remember much about it except for the premise and the fact I liked it. Even the title and author took a bit of creative googling to figure out. Now I just need to remember by the next time I’m in Oxford that I want to re-read it! 🙂

“Old Faithful” Raymond Z. Gallun

Intelligent life on Mars communicating with Earth people. Told mostly from the perspective of the Martian – who is convincingly alien. He thinks differently, perceives differently, has a different sort of society, looks different, tolerates different atmospheric conditions. But despite all these differences the alien is a sympathetic character. And after 9 years of communication the understanding on both sides is still pretty fuzzy, it’s built up from the beginnings of the basics of arithmetic but they still don’t truely understand each other. Which is refreshing after all these stories where the aliens or whatever are human-ish and understanding is perfect after some minor stumbles.

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