Flitting

Being curious, I am easily distracted and flit from one brief obsession to another. Yesterday a post on Facebook from someone I didn't know caught my eye. One of a local group of naturalists, she was asking the others in the group if they could identify a bird and a flower pictured on a porcelain tea cup. Someone commented that the bird was almost certainly a bulbul, a type of song bird found in China. That set me off on a trail. I looked up the Chinese name for the bird — 白头翁 (báitóuwēng); it literally means "white-headed old man" since it has a cap of white feathers. I learned as well that it sings like a nightingale and that reminded me that I have mentioned bulbuls before in these Juxtapositions when I recorded one of my walks by West Lake in Hangzhou through the grove of trees named (in the translation for anglophone tourists) Nightingales Among The Willows; those "nightingales" were more likely bulbuls. The flower on the teacup was a peony, 牡丹 (mǔdān), a symbol of good luck. In Asia, magpies are good luck omens too (someone else commenting on the post had incorrectly identified the teacup bird as a magpie).

Today on the other hand my curiosity was not inspired by a teacup but was coffee-related. It being slippery underfoot in Ottawa, the result of freezing drizzle and freezing rain, we only went as far as a local coffee shop this morning, where they serve organic, free-trade coffee, good stuff. An original touch is the way they have decorated this place with empty coffee bean sacks as wall hangings. They were plain hessian apart from the words printed on them that included the place of origin of the coffee beans: San José de Lourdes, Peru. I looked it up. This is a community in the district of San Ignacio in the mountains near the Equadorian border. The people who work in the coffee plantations must have strong legs, because the hillsides are very steep. I heard a talk on Peruvian coffee plantations a couple of years ago. The route from the village to Lima, whence they presumably ship the beans to Montreal, would take 21 hours of non-stop driving, and the roads in the vicinity were nothing but hairpin bends.

A swan song

At a Christmas party last week we met people who'd worked with the UN refugee agency as well as some professional and ex-professional philosophers from the University, so that the conversation was not the usual kind of small talk. Socrates and Wittgenstein were mentioned, which pleased my husband no end; he has something like 20 books about Wittgenstein on his shelves. 

The party was hosted by the daughter of a friend of mine whose late husband was a Professor of Classics, an expert on Virgil's Aeneid. Having attended his memorial gathering in 2023 we recognised people we'd met on that occasion. Their reminiscences include the fun they used to have unwinding and philosophizing or comparing notes on ancient languages in a lively manner at the Royal Oak pub, most Friday evenings. We could imagine this.

My friend has three daughters, all of whose names begin with S, and one of them is a prof herself. She is a musicologist who taught at Oxford University and is now a Harvard College Professor, with expertise in the analysis of Schubert's music. Just as we were putting our boots on to leave at the end of the party we got into a distracting chat about Schubert's Lieder and one song in particular, that we didn't know, which has surprising modulations in it: Schwanengesang, Op. 23, No. 3 (nothing to do with Schubert's Schwanengesang song cycle).

Back at home Chris looked it up and found a copy online in the original key. Sure enough, the harmonies did look strange, with a welter of double flats. We took the printout to Chris' singing teacher Gavan, who didn't know it and found it intriguing. Its slow chords in the accompaniment reminded him of Der Tod und das Mädchen. 

I tried sight-reading the Swan Song myself which made the chord sequence sound even slower. Chris didn't attempt the voice part because it looked too high, but wrote out the whole thing onto the computer and transposed it down to D-minor. It thus suddenly becomes more playable. The transposition had got rid of all the double accidentals.