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Weather: Areas of fog in the morning. Mostly cloudy. Highs in the lower 70s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Wednesday Night: Cloudy with a 20 percent chance of showers. Lows in the lower 50s. West winds around 5 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
The Bach Festival Continues: The annual Bach Festival on WKCR runs uninterrupted, commercial free, 24 hours a day, until Dec. 31 at 11:59 p.m. It is accessible online here. No app, no hassles. Just click on “Listen.” WKCR is the radio station of Columbia University. It has been producing the Bach festival since 1980, with students and guests hosting. And if 170 hours aren’t enough, the 89th Annual Bach Festival at Rollins College (it’s been going strong since 1935) begins February 2 and runs through March 3, under the artistic direction of John V. Sinclair. Concerts will include performances by the 160-voice Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra, and guest soloists. It’s presented by the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park. See every concert here, with some of them free and open to the public, but you must reserve ahead of time. See: “Putting Bach Back in Christmas.”
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
In Coming Days:
Notably: Hagia Sophia is one of the most famous places of worship in the world. It was first built in 360 by the emperor Constantius in what was not yet known as Constantinople, or Istanbul, as it’s been called for a few years. It was demolished, rebuilt, re-demolished, then came Emperor Justinian, who put up much of the building we know today as Hagia Sophia in 532, minus the minarets (Islam was not yet sprung from Arabia, but soon). Hagia Sophia as we know it was consecrated on this day, Dec. 27, 537. It stayed a Christian church until Mahomet II conquered the city in 1453 and immediately set about whitewashing the walls of Christian imprints, replacing them with Muslim imprints, but without iconography: Byzantium didn’t mind showing the face of Christ, Peter, Paul and Mary. Islam, unfortunately, did. The minarets went up, the muezzins went up, the tourists and faithfuls flocked, but in 1934 Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey and a committed secularist, turned the building into a museum, in essence restoring much of its Byzantine legacy. That lasted until 2020, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a turbaned Trumpist and one of the world’s most distasteful, authoritarian leaders, flouted UNESCO’s World Heritage Site status for the building and turned it yet again into a mosque. UNESCO cried in vain. At least Erdogan did not do to Hagia Sophia what the Taliban fuckers did to the Buddhist statues of Bamiyan did in 2001–the very place where, 600 years after the statues had been sculpted, Gengis Khan had been so outraged by the killing of his son there that he massacred every man, woman in child in Bamiyan.
—P.T.
Now this: My late mother, who died in Palm Coast 10 years ago, loved Bach’s Magnificat.
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To prove that theirs was a Turkish city, these two writers knew it was not enough to describe the skyline so beloved of western tourists and writers, or the shadows cast by its mosques and churches. Dominated as it was by Hagia Sophia, the skyline noted by every western observer from Lamartine to Le Corbusier could not serve as a “national image” for Turkish Istanbul; this sort of beauty was too cosmopolitan. Nationalist Istanbullus like Yahia Kemal and Tanpinar preferred to look to the poor, defeated, and deprived Muslim population, to prove they had not lost one bit of their identity and to satisfy their craving for a mournful beauty expressing the feelings of loss and defeat. This is why they went out on walks to poor neighborhoods in search of beautiful sights that endowed the city’s dwellers with the hüzün of the ruined past; they found it by following in the footsteps of Gautier. All his nationalist fervor notwithstanding, Tanpinar sometimes resorted to words like “picturesque” and “paysage”; to convey these neighborhoods as traditional, unspoiled, and untouched by the West, he wrote that “they were ruined, they were poor and wretched,” but they had “retained their own style and their own way of life.”
–From Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul (2003)
Pogo says
@FWIW
“Bernstein on Bach
Learning about counterpoint on network TV
By Sudip Bose | August 16, 2018…”
“…A few evenings ago, I happily settled in to watch “The Music of J. S. Bach”—the most inspiring hour I’ve spent in front of the television in ages…”
https://theamericanscholar.org/bernstein-on-bach/
As stated
https://www.keyreporter.org/articles/2023/sudip-bose-our-new-editor-at-the-american-scholar/