Scribal Terror

Monday, Monday

Thanks, Scott

Ode to a Ford

Via GAS

Duran Duran as Gregorian chant

Via the Anchoress

And now, "Angels We Have Heard on High," played on broccoli

This guy has lots of vegetables to play with. See the carrot pan flute at Kuromi

That'll be the day

Just BECAUSE

Dvorak's American vision

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a fascinating article on Antonin Dvorak's prescient statement to the  New York Herald in May 1893: "In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music." Contemporary responses to Dvorak's statement called on the horrific eugenic theories of the time  even to the point of characterizing his own "Slavic" classical music as "racially" inferior (thus rendering his judgment of American culture flawed):

In the 1890s — the decade of Dvorak in America — music reviews in the Boston daily press routinely employed the adjectives "barbarian" and "primitive" in "scientific" assessments of compositions by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, and other "Slavs" (in contradistinction to "Anglo-Saxon" masters occupying a higher evolutionary rung). Dvorak was viewed in Boston as an unwanted interloper. His view that "red" and "black" Americans could be considered emblematic or representative was thought naïve at best.

The entire article is well worth reading and studying.

Name that tune

Via Neatorama

Leva's Polka

Performed by Finnish folk music group Loituma.

Hallelujah!

Via Neatorama (Those aren't real nuns, by the way . . . , but they're very talented.)

It can't be New Year's Eve without the bat