Month / March 2017

by Robert Gerst

Anna Karenia Reading Group

“Imagine! One can hear and see the grass growing!” Levin said to himself, noticing a wet, slate-colored aspen leaf moving beside a blade of young grass. He stood, listened, and gazed sometimes down at the wet mossy ground, sometimes at Laska listening all alert, sometimes at the sea of bare tree tops that stretched on the slope below him, sometimes at the darkening sky, covered with white streaks of cloud.

Anna Karenia, Chapter 15

 

Next meetings are April 7th, April 21st, May 5th, and May 19th.  Join us.

by Robert Gerst

To A Chimp, It’s all the same if it’s Beethoven or Bieber

Primate biologists reported today that chimpanzees are utterly indifferent to human music. It’s all the same to a chimp if it’s Beethoven or Justin Bieber.

 

“Of course,” says Professor of Jazz Peter Kenagy. He writes:

Humans have been doing musical and creative things that set them apart from others for about 50,000 years. So it’s no surprise that only humans appreciate human music. Each of the more intelligent animals (dolphins, whales, primates, birds) communicates with some kind of speech, often tonal, that sounds sort of musical. While they may not understand our music, we don’t really understand and appreciate their sound forms either.

Whipoorwill

I think it’s sort of presumptuous to assume other animals should appreciate our music, since music is not simply sound waves. Music exists in a social context. Music makes
meaning within our human experience. The hope that animals would appreciate our music says that we are proud of our humanity, and we want other “lesser” animals to get it. In us, Bach lights up the human brain in neuroscience studies in ways that go beyond other music. But animals, who may not respond to Bach in any way we can discern, nevertheless live more in tune with the sound world than we do. In ways humans no longer do, animals rely on sound and hearing to survive.
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by Robert Gerst

Reading Anna Karenina


Writes Professor Robert Gerst:

The first time I read Anna Karenina it was snowing. It was Buffalo. It snowed for forty straight days and I read Anna Karenina for forty straight days. There are are islands in time when the sea around you turns preternaturally visible. Reading this novel that way was such an island for me.

March 31st, Friday, 2-4 PM, Professor Leon Steinmetz will be introducing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to our Liberal Arts Department Anna Karenina discussion group. Leon suggests that we read the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, available in paperback from Penguin.

We’re meeting Friday afternoons from 2 to 4, in Lin Haire-Sargeant’s office 533-B (or in an adjoining classroom) March 31st, April 7th, April 21th, May 5th, and May 19th. Join us.