New music livens up Old Courthouse

The String Contingent, Old Courthouse at Gunning, 19 March 2017. Photo by Gunning Focus Group

The String Contingent, Old Courthouse at Gunning, 19th March 2017.

The String Contingent, presented by the Gunning Focus Group, arrived at our village on Sunday 19th March 2017. The trio performed to a packed crowd of more than 60 people in the Old Courthouse at Gunning. According to Mike Coley, this was a record crowd for the Gunning Focus Group, which has been bringing fine artists to Gunning since 1998.

Consisting of a double-bassist and a violin player (both graduates of the ANU School of Music) and a guitarist (from Scotland), the group have recently completed a residency where they composed a whole suite of new music. Many of the new pieces were on the ticket and the composer of each piece explained the concept and the importance of the composition before its performance. This was far from a dry affair, with bassist Holly sending the audience into fits of laughter with her antics towards her colleagues, Chris and Graham.

The String Contingent is an award-winning trio focused on original music in the developing genre of acoustic chamber/folk. One should never underestimate the aural power of a trio, and these three young musicians did not disappoint. If you are tired of the same old music, and don’t know where to look for something different, then you can check out The String Contingent at their website at http://www.thestringcontingent.com/.

The fact that you can discover new music in the village of Gunning is an added bonus. If you’d like to support ongoing musical performances in our village, you can join the Gunning Focus Group by visiting http://gunningfocusgroup.com/contact-us.

The next performance will be by Adhoc Baroque, performing at St Edmund’s Anglican Church, Biala Street, Gunning, on 23 April 2017 at 2pm.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or, If I put these here, will I watch them later?

I am fascinated by literature. When I am procrastinating, I turn to history and literature and wish I had studied something else. And then I realise I didn't study something else, and that romanticising one thing over another is a sub-optimal strategy. Especially when one's time is limited. Of course, everyone's time is limited but we don't know about the end when it happens, so it is not so obvious. But when one's limited time appears so obvious, then one's reflection turns to such matters as priorities. But the truth is I am just finding excuses to procrastinate.

Yet there is much to learn from literature, as there is from politics. In my Daily Stoic reflection today, the focus is on "Who watches the watchmen?", or, in Juvenal's Latin:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I am finding so many good things to read and watch that I am feeling the weight of the goodness. It is becoming a problem: What do I want to know? Can I know what I want to know, and worse, can I want to know what I want to know? What is clear is that if I do not make a choice, then I will not be able to focus. A lack of focus leads to the passing of time as a surprise. If this is what I want, then that is fine, but if I wake up some time in the future and think, "Where am I?", then I have missed the point.

So what rules my ruling reason?

This would seem to be a lifelong quest. But, as the adage goes, "He who fails to plan, plans to fail".

Can one ever work out what rules one's ruling reason? I suppose it is too late to turn back now.

I haven't looked at the first video, and I have only watched part of the Harold Bloom video. Bloom makes me laugh. What strikes me is how he says: "We should not be afraid of saying 'elites', we need elites". This echoes Sir Bernard Crick when I listened to him in Sydney years ago.

Book Notes: "The First Three Circles of Hell" by Dante Alighieri

The First Three Circles of Hell by Dante Alighieri

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have a slew of these abridged Penguin 60s Classics and decided to get over my aversion to abridged books and read them whenever I wanted a quick read. Dante's "Inferno", the first part of the Divine Comedy, is one of those poems one has read excerpts from, knows the key historical and philosophical (and controversial) issues concerned, but never reads the epic in its entirety. So reading the first three circles means I must go on and finish the whole thing. Despite its brevity, I must admit to learning much about philosophy and religion. I was unaware of The Apocalypse of Paul, or that there was also a Coptic Apocalypse of Paul. Dante seems to have plagiarised the ideas from 1,000 years beforehand. Nevertheless, and what I find interesting, is that Dante was a layman, and more or less an autodidact. He was well-versed in the Roman classics (he uses Virgil for his guide), but, surprisingly, also Aristotle. Why was this a surprise? Well, I wasn't sure that, at the time, the works of Aristotle were available in Latin (Plato was not translated until a couple of centuries later). Known as the "Recovery of Aristotle", Islamic scholars had kept the classics alive by translating the Ancient Greek into Arabic, which was subsequently translated into Latin, which meant that Dante had read Aristotle. My historical chronological sense was tripped up. I have spent years trying to memorise key historical events to put various elements of time (history) and space (geography) in context. After a little investigation, it turns out that Dante completed the work in 1320, and Aristotle's work was available in Florence from at least the early thirteenth century, and Thomas Aquinas had enabled Aristotle to be read without necessarily requiring the reader to be burned at the stake (that would come later as humanity supposedly advanced - a bit like what is happening now). Dante was well-read. To top it off, Dante wrote in the Italian vernacular (with the Tuscan dialect), rather than Latin. This created Italian as the dominant literary language in Western Europe for centuries (I wonder if this added to the prevalence of Italian in opera, too?). And all this without even mentioning the plot! I was a little surprised by the rationale for placing certain historical figures in the first three circles. But such an elaborate scheme to eternally torment people for misbehaving wouldn't stand a chance with neoliberalism, so it probably isn't too much to worry about these days. At least in the after-life. Hell on earth is another matter entirely.

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