The ‘Day of Wrath’ as Musico-Political Statement in Dallapiccola's Canti di Prigionia
One of the most interesting modern ‘borrowings’ of the famous ‘Dies irae’ chant comes within the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola's Canti di Prigionia of 1938–1941. Written at a time of extreme political tension, the Canti were—from the composer's own testimony—a protest against Mussolini's introduction of the infamous racial laws in 1938. But while the composer's own hermeneutic proposes the ‘Dies irae’ as a symbolic representation of oppression overlaid onto a ‘purely’ dodecaphonic work, one senses that this will not do: politically, this viewpoint is problematic, and musically, it is simply not borne out by analysis. In this article, I offer a new reading of this work as a ‘confessional’ piece, and in interrogating the relationship between the very old (plainchant) and the very new (a natal serialism), suggest that the Canti evince a sophisticated type of musical ‘paradox’.
The goldfish bowl.
Thought wanders unconfined peaceful over the white page but once it was not so. When I was little I saw the world from behind glass and thought lived detached in the goldfish bowl of my mind. When I grew bigger I discovered Plato and learnt about Shadows and Forms and things not being real and so I settled for the idea that the goldfish bowl was the way things were. Then one day I stood in a church and watched rays of sunlight melting through the soft rich colours of stained glass and falling in pools of glowing red and orange on tombs in the stoneflagged floor. And I knew there was something behind the glass trying to get through and that it was love The love was pouring through the window onto the tombs but the glass was in between. Later I found what Plato never knew that the love is God that love is life and that the life is mine and I swam out of the goldfish bowl.
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.