Job: A Masque for Dancing
Vaughan Williams Listening Challenge, Stack of the Week
I have just one piece for you this week in the RVW listening challenge, but it’s relatively long: Job: A Masque for Dancing. Some believe this to be the composer’s greatest masterpiece, and I won’t argue (though I’m not sure I agree). It is certainly a dazzling score. He wrote it for a ballet celebrating the hundred-year anniversary of William Blake’s illustrations for the Book of Job. I’ve chosen Andrew Manze’s recent recording with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, but there are several great ones (Adrian Boult and Andrew Davis come to mind). Here is the updated playlist on Apple Music and Spotify:
RVW Challenge Playlist on Apple Music
RVW Challenge Playlist on Spotify
For a discussion of the piece, you can do no better than to watch David Hurwitz’s video on the subject, complete with sound clips:
The Stack of the Week
For this week’s stack we once again visit one of the recommendations from the early days of PCF. This week it’s Sparks from Culture by
. Subscribing to David’s newsletter is like getting a weekly lesson on the art of the personal essay. Take this past week’s essay on adjusting one’s views on marriage as an example:
Read through his archive: it’s full of insights and great writing.
Grad Student Post of the Week
This week’s featured grad student post is by
Conrey. Mariah is a first-year graduate student in creative writing, and she is also this year’s editor of our department’s literature journal, Oracle. This week she is writing about a favorite subject of ours, Treebeard!
I’ll be back later this week for the next installment in our Lord of the Rings Reading Challenge. This week our first topic will be the Palantír and surveillance.
Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet pile of notebooks to yours.
John,
Thank you.