Ovid is a little more relevant than I thought!

As you may have gathered from my "currently reading" list to the right, my Medieval literature class is currently discussing Beowulf. The experience is a somewhat awkward balance between students who have no interest in the epic whatsoever, a [very small] handful who actually legitimately enjoy the subject matter, and a professor who tries to sympathize with the people who hate it and leaves her own opinions largely up to one's imagination.

This awkwardness may have been caused in high school, where famously bad english teachers pound classic literature into bored young minds, or it may have been due to a cultural stigma against classic literature in general and particularly epic poetry. Or maybe not. I don't pretend to know why so many people dislike the dying genre. I know that the movie "Troy," did well in the box office, but whether this is due to a massive interest in ancient Greek city-states and the accompanying mythos, politics and history, a culture that has been overly desensitized to blood and violence, or just because Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and Diane Kruger are all really, really hot is something that is beyond my resources and capability to find out.

Or maybe nobody dislikes it.

This weekend, Chad and I went to Barnes and Noble to explore the shelves and tack more titles and authors onto our growing lists and shrinking budgets, when a bright red hardcover display caught our eyes. (Now, I don't care what anyone else tells you or what the old saying is, packaging and design sell books. This particular one is eye-catching in the best way.)



Anyway, despite that, packaging isn't everything, and when we flipped the book over, I swear that one of the quotes said that the author was "the best thing since Ovid," or something like that. Now, Chad shares this belief with me, that there is definitely such a thing as over complimenting, and it IS detrimental to my opinion of a book. In other words, don't tell me Joe Smith is the next William Shakespeare. I won't believe you.

In this circumstance, however, I may have been mistaken. I'm ALSO a firm believer that one of the best ways to test an author's skill at writing is to read the first page. So imagine my surprise when we opened it and saw... epic poetry. I'm not kidding. Apparantly the Ovid reference wasn't as inane as I thought! That's what I get for being cynical and snobby, I guess.

Anyway, I haven't read the book yet and I can't tell you if his poetry measures up to "The Metamorphoses," but just because this guy tried, I'll read it. You try it, too, and we'll compare notes later.

Introduction!

Last night was our first Chant Schola rehearsal of the semester. (This is the first thing you will learn about me. I join geeky clubs that eat up all of my time.) Chant Schola at our school was formed for two reasons: first, our concert last year was horrifying in its lack of material, and second, because our director had been looking for an excuse to do it anyway. He picked five people with solid musical backgrounds and the ability to learn music really quickly, handed us music and recordings, and said "Go!" Anyway, it just so happened that, because of our musical training and background, we were able to reproduce the dark, hollow sound that boy choirs often make and it turned out quite well. A Schola was born.

As was mentioned above, I'm also in choir. Here is the second instance of why I'm a geek: I have a (probably annoying) tendency to foist my musical tastes upon the director and the rest of the choir. (Read: Please, please, pleeease can we sing the Kyrie from Mozart's Requiem?) This extends to chant, and I spent all of last semester begging our director to choose Dies Irae. He was hesitant... he thought it was too dark and too depressing. Well, I won. Not only are we chanting Dies Irae, but we're ALSO singing Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem.

(Here is where I give props to Margot Lorena on YouTube. Really, her channel is amazing. More people should upload that many good songs AND the sheet music.)

Anyway, we were rehearsing Dies Irae, and the director pointed out the sort of "up-down" quality of stresses and attributed it to the application of the Solesmes Method, which was a somewhat controversial method of chant notation and interpretation that involved imposing phrasing and lengthening notes that had not been there prior to their editing. It's still in use today, at least to some degree. I pointed out that, "Actually, the rhythm is there naturally in the text; the lyrics are written in trochaic tetrameter, and in tercets!" Trochaic tetrameter, for the poetically challenged, is a pattern of four "Stressed-unstressed" feet per line. Trochees are the opposite of iambs, which are the ones you'll find in Shakespeare. Tercets are three line stanzas, as in the Divine Comedy.

That was when Becca turned to me and said, "You should blog about this kind of thing!" Music, poetry, et cetera. I thought to myself that I certainly have more to say about neumes and meter than I do about Britney Spears, and then I remembered an episode in my friend's car when she said, "Whenever I put this [Vivaldi's Four Seasons] on, everyone always says it's the diamond commercial!" And then there was the episode of Boy Meets World where Eric accompanied Mr. Feeney to see The Barber of Seville and only started enjoying himself when he heard Bugs Bunny.

So now I'm here to save the humanity from certain doom, and hopefully turn a few more people into culture snobs like me.