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Pastimes : Favorite Quotes -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mr.mark who wrote (3122)	3/12/1999 6:20:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13018

I'm impressed! And I don't really believe this next, but it seemed to follow--- Why are women...so much more interesting to men than men are to women? - Virginia Woolf

To: mr.mark who wrote (3122)	3/12/1999 8:22:00 PM
From: Volsi Mimir	Respond to of 13018

The Strange Loop: study these pictures: "Metamorphosis II" "Drawing Hands" "Ascending and Descending" of M.C. Esher listen intently to J.S. Bach's: Endlessly Rising Canon: 'Canon per Tonos' from Musical Offering read these: "All Cretans are liars" Epimenidas "All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions." Kurt Gödel--The Incompleteness Theory and you will understand. Douglas R Hofstadter Gödel, Escher,Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid 1979 excerpt from Introduction: [after Bach improvised and played an impromptu six-part fugue for King Frederick and later sending a copy of that to the King] To give an idea of how extraordinary a six-part fugue is, in the entire Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, containing forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, only two have as many as five parts, and nowhere is there a six part fugue! One could probably liken the task of improvising a six-part fugue to the playing of sixty simultaneous blindfolds games of chess,and winning them all........ In the copy which Bach sent to King Frederick, on the page preceding The first sheet of music, was the following inscription: Regis Iusfu Canto Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Refolula (At the King's Command, the Song and the Remainder Resolved with Canonic Art) Here Bach is punning on the word "canonic", since it means not only "with canons" but also "in the possible way". The initials of the inscription are: .................R I C E R C A R -an Italian word, meaning "to seek". And certainly there is a great deal to seek in the Musical Offering. It consists of one three-part fugue, one six-part fugue, ten canons, and a trio sonata. Musical scholars have concluded that the three-part fugue must be, in essence, identical with the one which Bach improvised for King Frederick. The six-part fugue is one of Bach's most complex creations, and its theme is, of course, the Royal Theme. That theme ia a very complex one, rhythmically irregular and highly chromatic (that is, filled with tones which do not belong to the key it is in). To write a decent fugue of even two voices based on it would not be easy for the average musician! Both of the fugues are inscribed "Ricercar", rather than "Fuga". This is another meaning of the word; "ricercar" was, in fact, the original name for the musical form now known as "fugue". By Bach's time, the word "fugue" (or fuga, in Latin or Italian) had become standard, but the term "ricercar" had survived, and now designated an erudite kind of fugue, perhaps too austerely intellectual for the common ear. A similar usage survives in English today: the word "recherché" means, literally, "sought out", but carries the kind of implication, namely of esoteric or high-brow cleverness. [FYI]