One of my favorite books is “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz, “a nagual (master) from the Eagle Night lineage” of the Toltec in Southern Mexico. The Toltec were “scientists and artists” who managed the spiritual knowledge and practices of the “ancient ones.”

In “The Four Agreements,” Don Miguel Ruiz describes our life as, among others, a wakeful dream state where we create many, many agreements within ourselves as our basis for relating to God, to ourselves and to other life forms. “We have many agreements that come from fear, deplete our energy, and diminish our self-worth.” On the other hand, in the enlightened state, there are only four BASIC agreements.

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I will be participating in the first World Listening Day, which happens on Sunday, July 18, 2010.   I will record my personal, home soundscape and post it here.

And you, yes, YOU are also invited.

The purposes of World Listening Day are:

• to celebrate the practice of listening as it relates to the world around us, environmental awareness, and acoustic ecology;
• to raise awareness about issues related to the World Soundscape Project, World Listening Project, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, and individual and group efforts to creatively explore phonography;
• and to design and implement educational initiatives which explore these concepts and practices.

World Listening Day is being organized by the World Listening Project, in partnership with the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. July 18 was chosen as the date for World Listening Day because it is the birthday of the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who is one of the founders of the Acoustic Ecology movement.  The World Soundscape Project, which Schafer directed, is an important organization which has inspired a lot of activity in this field, and his book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World helped to define many of the terms and background behind the acoustic ecology movement.

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I say without hesitation that J.S. Bach was the greatest composer of choral music.

I say that as someone who is familiar with the oratorios of Handel as well as a large number of great works of the Renaissance composers, whose pure vocal style is at times quite beautiful. Handel composed a large amount of great choral music, much of it of extraordinary quality. Telemann and Vivaldi each composed a large amount of good choral music. Mozart’s C-minor Mass and Requiem Mass are both great, yet he didn’t finish either one of them. Beethoven’s Mass in D-major is a great work, but not without its flaws. Handel is the only one who comes close to Bach in composing a large amount of great choral music.

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My beloved Geejay gave me some DVDs for Christmas. I felt compelled to watch the one first that has a performance of the “St John Passion” by J.S. Bach.

Most scholars agree that Bach’s “St Mathew Passion” is a greater masterpiece than his “St John Passion”, but both contain stunningly beautiful music. After its premiere, Bach spent ten years revising and perfecting his “St Mathew Passion” and had gotten underway doing the same thing to his “St John Passion” before death intervened. Continue reading this post…

Harvey Cox of Boston Globe wrote a great article entitled “Why fundamentalism will fail: A seemingly unstoppable force is being undone from the inside” (November 8, 2009) .

His premise is that beneath their squawking–abetted and further legitimized by a media who loves violence and paranoid individuals flooding the internet and television with warnings of religious-inspired doomsdays–fundamentalist groups, incapable of providing real solutions to poverty, spiritual thirst, and nationalist or tribal sentiments, will soon perish in the hands of reason and the rising sense of global multiculturalism.

And here below, I list some of the observations and reflections I have of my own country in relation to his thesis:

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Dogs came from wolves many thousands of years ago, and branched off from the wolf population due to human intervention. Subsequently many different breeds were created from the original dog. The evolution of the dog is a perfect example of what you might call “guided selection,” or “artificial selection.” The guiding force behind the selection has been the hand of humankind. The evolution from the wolf to the dog took place very quickly compared to what usually happens in nature, and amazingly, most of the breeds alive today were created in a very short time, less than two centuries. Consider this; from the few breeds of dogs alive a couple of thousand years ago, we end up with Great Danes and Chihuahuas! Such a huge difference in two subspecies (breeds) in such a short time is truly amazing. Continue reading this post…

The three composers, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, are considered the triumvirate of composers of music in the classical style. Indeed, these three men gave us what is by far, the greatest music of their time. Schubert is sometimes added to these three names, though I won’t discuss him here for the following reasons. Schubert composed mostly in the new Romantic style, rather than the classical style, until the last few years of his very short life. He left us with some great large-scale masterpieces, though not nearly as many as the other three composers named above.

I want to focus mainly on the differences between the three composers, but first I should briefly discuss the similarities. The classical style is a style in which form plays a more important part than earlier or later styles. The us of sonata form is almost the defining characteristic of the style .(See my blog on sonata form). Sonata form was so pervasive that it invaded every genre of music of the time, even opera and church music. The three composers under discussion here each created works that are a hybrid of other forms and sonata form. Rondo form and variation form were often blended with sonata form.

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A couple of days ago I decided to listen to Haydn’s so-called Oxford Symphony, having not heard it in a few years. I had almost forgotten what a delightful symphony it is. Haydn’s symphony no. 92, became known as the Oxford Symphony because he had it performed while he was at Oxford, receiving his honorary degree. But the symphony had actually been composed  several years earlier for a concert in Paris. Continue reading this post…