Visitors to the Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in Budapest are greeted by a perpetual book with leaves of water.
See Stairs of Knowledge.
Art
An Early IMAX
In 1827, visitors to London could get a titan’s view of the city by visiting Regent’s Park. There surveyor Thomas Hornor had built a colosseum housing the largest painting in the world, a panorama seven stories tall and 130 feet in diameter. A spiral staircase rose to a large gallery from which visitors could view London as seen from the ball atop St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Estimates of the painting’s size vary from 24,000 to 44,000 square feet; flyers called it “nearly an acre of canvas.” Half a million people visited the Colosseum in 1829, but Hornor’s backer left for Paris and he was quickly broke. New owners reopened the attraction in 1845, though, and it stood as a fixture for 30 years, renowned for the clarity of its vista. “The ascent is easy, the sky is fine and bright, the atmosphere is clear,” wrote one visitor. “We can command constant sunshine.”
More Silent Music
The “In futurum” section of Erwin Schulhoff’s 1919 Fünf Pittoresken (starting here at 8:08) consists entirely of rests.
The direction tutto il canzone con espressione e sentimento ad libitum, sempre, sin al fine means “the whole piece with free expression and feeling, always, until the end.”
Prestissimo
In 18 years and 5 months (May 1810 to October 1828), Franz Schubert composed more than 1,000 works. And that’s counting complex pieces, such as operas, suites of dances for piano or orchestra, and song cycles numbering up to 24 individual items, as single compositions. From Harold Schonberg’s Lives of the Great Composers:
[Leopold von] Sonnleithner reports that ‘at Fräulein Fröhlich’s request, Franz Grillparzer had written for the occasion the beautiful poem Ständchen, and this she gave to Schubert, asking him to set it to music as a serenade for her sister Josefine (mezzo-soprano) and women’s chorus. Schubert took the poem, went into an alcove by the window, read it through carefully a few times and then said with a smile, “I’ve got it already, it’s done, and it’s going to be quite good.”‘ [Joseph von] Spaun tells of the composition of the Erlkönig. He and [Johann] Mayrhofer visited Schubert and found him reading the poem. ‘He paced up and down several times with the book, suddenly he sat down, and in no time at all (just as quickly as you can write) there was the glorious ballad finished on the paper. We ran with it to the Seminary, for there was no piano at Schubert’s, and there, on the very same evening, the Erlkönig was sung and enthusiastically received.’
When he worked, he worked feverishly. The poet Franz von Schober said, “If you go to see him during the day, he says ‘Hello, how are you? — Good!’ and goes on working, whereupon you go away.”
Nothing Doing
In John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33”, the performer is instructed not to play his instrument.
American music critic Kyle Gann discovered this 1932 cartoon in The Etude, a magazine for pianists.
The cartoonist’s name, remarkably, is Hy Cage.
A Bird’s-Eye View
In 1548 engraver Conrad Morant rendered the city of Strasbourg — as viewed from the spire of its cathedral.
Anatomy
The transept of the Cathedral of Milan features a 1562 statue of the flayed Christian martyr Saint Bartholomew wearing his own skin as a robe.
It’s inscribed I was made not by Praxiteles but by Marco d’Agrate.
A Closer Look
Michael Snow’s 1967 experimental film Wavelength consists essentially of an extraordinarily slow 45-minute zoom on a photograph on the wall of a room. William C. Wees of McGill University points out that this raises a philosophical question: What visual event does this zoom create? In a tracking shot, the camera moves physically forward, and its viewpoint changes as a person’s would as she advanced toward the photo. In Wavelength (or any zoom) the camera doesn’t move, and yet something is taking place, something with no analogue in ordinary experience.
“If I actually walk toward a photograph pinned on a wall, I find that the photograph does, indeed, get larger in my visual field, and that things around it slip out of view at the peripheries of my vision. The zoom produces equivalent effects, hence the tendency to describe it as ‘moving forward.’ But I am really imitating a tracking shot, not a zoom. … I think it is safe to say that no perceptual experience in the every-day world can prepare us for the kind of vision produced by the zoom.”
“What, in a word, happens during a viewing of that forty-five minute zoom? And what does it mean?”
(From Nick Hall, The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever, 2018.)
Turn, Turn, Turn
In 1930 French architect Emilio Terry offered a model of a spiral house that he called en colimaçon (“snail-style”), illustrating his view that architecture expressed a “dream to be realized.”
It looks odd, but the interior is relatively conventional. “Although the snail shape has been imposed on the exterior,” writes Ulrich Conrads in The Architecture of Fantasy, “no advantage is derived from it, either regarding the total volume or the interrelationship of the spatial sections.”
Emphasis
In 1920, after Lenin delivered a speech in Petrograd to troops departing to fight in the Soviet-Polish war, Russian artist El Lissitzky challenged his architecture students to design a speaker’s platform on a public square. The result was the Lenin Tribune, a rostrum that can bear its speaker aloft to address a crowd of any size. In a letter to the art historian and critic Adolf Behne, Lissitzky wrote:
I have now received some sketches of former works and have reconstructed the design. Therefore I do not sign it as my personal work, but as a workshop production. The diagonally-standing structure of iron latticework supports the movable and collapsible balconies: the upper one for the speaker, the lower one for guests. An elevator takes care of transportation. On top there is a panel intended for slogans during the day and as a projection screen at night. The gesture of the entire speaker’s platform is supposed to enhance the motions of the speaker. (The figure is Lenin.)
Here the message reads PROLETARIAT. Lissitzky later said he regretted not publishing the design when Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International was attracting attention, so that the two might have competed against one another.