Well, perhaps Wagner’s Parsifal and Tannhäuser might qualify as “a transforming spiritual experience.”
Laurel Loflund - 16 October 2008 11:13 PM
Opera is magnificent musical theatre. I won’t say it is a transforming spiritual experience; indeed, many of the plots and characters sound like they belong on the Jerry Springer Show rather than the Metropolitan’s stage.
I do like those videos of the children playing organs. Well, remember piano pedals effect the way the action of piano plays the notes, they do not play notes. Organ pedals act as an extra keyboard. The girl is playing a large church organ, but a less complex organ than some. Take a look at this organ, it has four keyboards, a pedal-board, and what seems like hundreds of stop switches on the console, to control I think some 20,000 pipes.
The Canterbury Bayeux Tapestry A short video about the Bayeux Tapestry and its possible connections with the City of Canterbury, England. Stones thought to have been part of the original Catherdral in Canterbury show remarkable..
I have only seen the Siegfried Funeral linked, but the Parsifal Prelude is to me, the most moving piece of Wagner’s ouvre. I don’t care if he used religion in a merely symbolic way. God used him in spite of himself to bring the European transcendental music.
We ought to be uploading all of these great finds to http://www.wntube.net if they don’t already have it. Also when you have a free account on WNTube there is built in support for grabbing youTube videos.
While I am not mad for the song, the singer is also one fine fiddler, and there is something very European about this, the winning performance at Eurovision 2009.
Here is the Icelandic singer who was first runner-up:
While watching these, I was struck by a simple fact…there are no non-Whites in the bands or backup singers of these two performers. I’m so used to seeing gyrating non-Whites in the background of American singers performing, it took me a minute to identify what was different here.
