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In Rebecca West's novel, The Fountain Overflows, a child is taking piano lessons from her mother, a concert pianist. They are working on Beethoven's Sonata in D Major (opus 10). The mother is frustrated with her daughter because she insists on playing the piece as it is written and the mother tells her, "Rose, you are a musical halfwit...you must supply the high F sharp there though it is not written. Beethoven didn't write it because it was not in the compass of the piano as he knew it, but he heard it, he heard it inside his head."
Jane Austen, born five years later than Beethoven on this day in 1775 wrote the orginal "chick lit.". Her books were so far ahead of their time that Pride and Prejudice reads more like a screen play than a novel. And even today, some people will lump them as silly books to read and toss, whereas they are poison pen satires as pertinent today as when they were written during the Napoleonic Wars.
I've written quite a bit about the fact that Frank Lloyd Wright's houses were leaky sieves. I don't know why that was. Maybe like Beethoven, he was working in his head with a material that was not in the "compass" of building materials currently invented. Another puzzling thing is that although many of his roofs leaked and cantilevers failed, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo survived the great earthquake of 1923, one of the few buildings to do so. So, I'm thinking he knew engineering, he knew structure and he knew that materials were going to be designed that would help his roofs not leak.
Happy Birthday Mistress Austen and Maestro
Our youngest sibling and I were at Borders yesterday and saw something that makes you wonder just how do people's brains really work? Two books propped up on the buy one and get one for 50% off table--Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters with a drawing of a lovely 18th century maiden standing next to some sort of tentacled half human thing--and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with a cover drawing of a lovely 18th century maiden with no lips and a skeletal smile.
ReplyDeleteIf you are a diehard Jane Austen fan they really came close to being a travesty of some sort.
But again, who thinks of this stuff??? Maybe the same people who can imagine F# even when it's not possible to physically produce it and people who envision a function and can anticipate the eventual creation of the product that will fulfill that function.
One thing I know for sure--I'm not either one of those people. Except that in the second grade I did balk at having to learn cursive because I was sure that we would all be using typewriters in the future.
Hey, maybe I am one of those people.
BB
I actually spent some time and read a good bit of the zombie book. The only good parts were the ones that Jane had written. Whenever they veered off into Zombieland, it was just terrible.
ReplyDeleteI know that I think of things that would make my life easier and a little bit of research on the web lets me know that someone else has already thought of it and made the money...