Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Very, very, very, very, VERY (!!!!) sweet…

“It is the technology that makes the music. So the search for the music begins with the technology.” Univ.Doz. Mag. Alfons Huber Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna An arc of glue on a soundboard. Three different but similar harpsichords, all with their damping boards mysteriously vanished. Metal-working tools of the sixteenth century. Early music by Haydn that uses chords your fingers can’t span on a modern keyboard. These are the kinds of clues Alfons Huber deciphers to repair and recreate ancient musical instruments for the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum’s historic collection.

A world-class expert on the 600-year history of the Austrian harpsichord, Professor Huber also creates lovely replica instruments so that museum-goers can feel their “action”–and hear the sounds that Haydn and others imagined as they composed. The differences can be subtle or striking. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata sounds amazing on a period instrument! Later, Frank got to try out Mozart’s Sonata in C Major on the Mozart-replica keyboard in this picture.

Many thanks to Professor Huber, and to harpsichordist Susanne von Laun, who led us through Hamburg’s lovely historical keyboards, for making this adventure possible! (Note to the learned: please ascribe any errors in my description to bad memory; I was much too enthralled to take any detailed notes.)

Related webpages:

• Webpage for Vienna’s historic keyboard instruments (with links to a sound file for each one.)
• Exhibition coming in May, 2006: Viennese pianofortes in the time of Mozart.
• More about the Vienna museum display

If you go: The display of ancient musical instruments is not in the Kunsthistorisches Museum itself but in the Neue Burg nearby (in the same building as the Nationalbibliothek.)

“In my pocket,” said Frank.

For more on the state of our Vienna adventure, its Flickr album now includes rocks from Mars, a lady poisoner, an Olympic discus-thrower, and a keyboard Mozart might have played.

Photos from the past two days in Vienna, much fun, and now it’s time to sleep. All best, Betsy

In 2002, about 6 months before I ever thought of blogging, Frank and I spent two-plus weeks in beautiful Vienna.

Here’s my online journal (with pictures) from that magical time. In addition to lots of practical tips on seeing Vienna, you can also find out there:

• Why Emperor Franz Joseph ate Tafelspitz every day for lunch…
• What the Freud museum has that the Beethoven museum lacks…
• Which titanic statue was censored by Maria Theresa with a very surprising extra figleaf placement….
• Why Nicholaus Dumba is buried in the St. Marxer Friedhof next to Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms…

Now we’re back in Vienna again, only four days this time–but even a month would be not enough time for Vienna and Reinhold and Renate and Diane.

We’ll say goodbye to Hamburg tomorrow, early. It’s a handsome North German city, full of good-looking industrious, fast-walking people. But rectitude hasn’t made Hamburg dull or stiff–you hear happy bursts of laughter from neighboring diners and even see an occasional jaywalker.

I did not have the stomach to visit its famous exploding toad pond, although our hotel is quite near it.

And I’m sorry I didn’t go see the Reeperbahn “shrines” where Beatles fans can remember their early days of thrilling near-starvation. Here is somebody who did, and came back with photos.

Meteorite chunks are selling for more than gold nuggets, with predictable results, says a recent Mosnews article (love their picture!): Customs officers in Dorohusk, on Poland’s border with Ukraine, have made an unusual seizure, confiscating nearly 530kg of meteorites they found hidden in a Russian-registered truck…According to the truck’s payload ledgers, its cargo was quartzite, a tough stone composed almost entirely of quartz grains, derived from sandstone.

These fragments aren’t just any old meteorite, says the Vladivostok News:

The pieces weighing a total of 529 kilograms are part of a Sikhote-Alin meteorite collection, the experts from Warsaw’s Geological Museum said. According to them, the three biggest pieces with a weight of 178, 150 and 130 kilograms, each are engraved with numbers and could belong to some museum collection.

The ferric Sikhote-Alin meteorite, ranked among the world’s ten biggest meteorites, fell in Primorye’s Ussurisky taiga in February of 1947. The weight of the fragments found on the spot amount to a total of 30 tons, the biggest one weighing 1,745 kilograms. The world’s greatest museums boast exposing this meteorite’s fragments in their collections.

No word on which boasted collection was the source of this truck’s all-too-hot meteor fragments.

Frank and I hopped off our transatlantic flight Tuesday morning at 5:15 a.m.

But I can’t go to sleep without blogging this magical afternoon, an impromptu concert in Frank’s honor by Susanne von Laun on historic keyboard instruments, from a 1540 cembalo on up to a grand piano, at Hamburg’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Arts and Crafts).

These piano-ancestors are wonderfull quirky! Built-in sound effects included glass harmonica, “oboe” ( a spooky buzz when parchment touches the strings), a drum, and a tinkling bell. Susanne von Laun used just the right touch–and just the right music choices, from pre-Baroquerie to Chopin– to bring out the special features of each instrument. And Frank got to play them too, comparing the sounds and touches of different keyboards.

We’ve spent happy hours listening to Robert Greenberg explain the trajectory of piano inventions, by composers and keyboard builders, in between Haydn and Beethoven. So it was amazing to be able to hear this ourselves.

I forgot my own camera (drat!) but here are a Yale group’s photos of some of the instruments.

Many thanks to Susasnne von Laun, and to the generosity of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, especially Dr. Bernhard Heitmann (curator of Medieval art) and Frederika Reuter (head of the Museum Friends organization) for making this magical afternoon a possibility.

And the two gingko trees? They continue their more-than-a-century of existence in a sunny courtyard created by huge museum wings now built up on all four sides of them. If you go to the cafe for tea and Apfeltorte, you can watch them existing through giant light-filled windows.

Edmund Shaftesbury was, in his day, a top guru of “personal magnetism”…or was he? According to
Marc Abraham’s weekly Guardian column…

Edmund Shaftesbury was a pen name used by Dr Everett Ralston, the Ralston of Ralston-Purina, the food company that was ingested by Nestlé four years ago.
Ralston was itself a concoction, an acronym for “regime, activity, light, strength, temperation, oxygen, nature”.
The man was actually named Webster Edgerly.

In other improbable Marc Abrahams news: Hot off the presses, just in time for this year’s IgNobel Prize ceremony….The Ig Nobel Prizes 2: An All-New Collection of the World’s Unlikeliest Research (ISBN 0525949127).

So what about jazz great Charlie Mingus and not-amused icon Queen Victoria? Each of them, for a very different reason, owned Shaftesbury’s Personal Magnetism.

A small company in southern Sweden wants to hire 20 witches, says today’s Swedish Local:

In the job ad, the company stated that “we are a young company with ancient wisdom. Customers turn to us with big or small problems. Customers are helped through tarot, runes, crystals, dreams and meditation.”

The successful applicants will work by telephone from home and will earn 210 kronor per hour of calls.

So, if you can see into the future and tell people’s fortunes, the Skåne Witchline wants you–but then again, you probably already know this.