Lukas & his team analysis: Sinope

Sinope Sedna: Light Sequence B Not Finishing - Diagnostic Report

#Sinope #Sedna #LightSequenceBNotFinishing

🔍 Full Report: https://www.digitalhomefaults.org/sinope/sedna/sinope-sedna-light-sequence-b-issue

@nazokiyoubinbou @wonderofscience

Of course the question is now why Pluto and Ceres were included in @Physicsj 's graphic and Eris and Sedna were not. (-:

The answer is, according to an old post, that Eris and Sedna had not yet been mapped.

https://mastodon.online/@Physicsj/109337574807973796

#astronomy #DwarfPlanets #UniversityOfReading #Eris #Sedna

Lera Auerbach on Flights of the Angakok: ‘Our life as a species depends on the heartbeat of the Arctic. If it stops, we’re done for’

For lovers of contemporary music, Lera Auerbach is certainly no stranger to the Netherlands. Her 50th birthday will be celebrated with a grand festival from Oct. 15-22 in Amare, The Hague. She herself conducts the Netherlands Chamber Choir in the world premiere of Flights of the Angakok, a plea for the preservation of the North Pole. This concert however, takes place at Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam on Oct. 12.

Artistically versatile

I got to know Lera Auerbach (Chelyabinsk, Oct. 21, 1973) in 2011, when her Serenade for a Melancholic Sea for piano and chamber orchestra had its Dutch premiere in the radio series De Vrijdag van Vredenburg. I interviewed her for the live broadcast on Radio 4 (now NPO Klassiek). She told me about her childhood in Chelyabinsk, an industrial town on the border between the Urals and Siberia, and about how during a concert trip to the United States in 1991 she decided to stay in New York, where she still lives today.

This was no easy decision, she acknowledged, but she simply felt she would have more opportunities to spread her wings in the West. She managed to get a scholarship to the renowned Juilliard School of Music, where she studied piano with Joseph Kalichstein and composition with Milton Babbit.

It was a matter of course for Auerbach that she would pursue a career in music: ‘It was never a conscious decision. My mother was a piano teacher and descended from a lineage of musicians; I have been playing the piano for as long as I can remember. As early as the age of four I started making my own pieces and my mother taught me how to capture them in notation. At the same time, I learned to write.’

Her father was a man of letters and so she was instilled with a love of literature and culture from the start. Together with her parents, she visited literary gatherings, museums and concerts, even though to her taste, cultural life in Chelyabinsk was little exciting. ‘Especially in the fields of opera and ballet, the level was not too high, but fortunately there were concerts with such luminaries as Svyatoslav Richter and Gidon Kremer.’

Given her background, it is not suprising that Auerbach would complete a master’s degree in comparative literature at Columbia University in addition to her music studies. She would hereafter develop not only as a pianist, composer and conductor, but also as a successful poet, painter and sculptor. ‘My parents had many art books and I would sometimes stare at one picture for hours, which would put me in a kind of trance; I was also always drawing myself.’ Her visual and literary work have a natural relationship to her music; many of her instrumental works bear poetic subtitles. These different aspects of her artistry are also highlighted in the Lera Auerbach Festival.

‘Music kept me whole’

In Chelyabinsk, she attended a school for gifted children, where, in addition to secondary education, she took thorough piano instruction and music theory. At seventeen she made a concert tour to America, and decided to exchange the stifling Soviet climate for the freer West. This was initially a huge culture shock: ‘I didn’t even speak English! From cramped, provincial Chelyabinsk I landed in the bustling multi-million dollar New York. Where everything imaginable was totally different from what I was used to.’ Yet she regained her balance fairly quickly: ‘I discovered that musicians, whether from the East or the West, are not essentially different in their love of music. Music kept me whole.’

Her decision to settle in the United States worked out well. In 2002 she made her debut at Carnegie Hall as a soloist in her own Suite for piano, violin and orchestra, along with Gidon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica. After this, her career took off. She performed worldwide in prestigious venues and her work was played by orchestras such as New York Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Dresden and Münchner Philharmoniker, with conductors such as Alan Gilbert, Christoph Eschenbach and Neeme Järvi. Soon Auerbach made a name for herself with large-scale works, the first highlight being the full-length ballet The Little Mermaid. She composed this for choreographer John Neubauer, commissioned by the Royal Danish Ballet. After its premiere in 2005, it was performed numerous times and also released on DVD.

Auerbach has since composed an impressive number of works, ranging from large-scale solo concertos, symphonies, choral works and ballets to small-scale chamber music, including 10 string quartets. During the festival, she herself conducts the Residentie Orkest in the Dutch premiere of her Fifth Symphony; before intermission, she leads the musicians through Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 from the piano. Her Fifth Symphony bears the subtitle ‘Paradise Lost’ and consists of four movements. At the center are Eve’s Lament and Adam’s Lament, preceded by a prologue and followed by an epilogue.

The subtitle ‘Paradise Lost’ refers to John Milton’s 1667 poem of the same name, about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. Eve’s Lament sounded earlier in the Netherlands in 2019, again in the Friday series of Radio 4, as part of the theme ‘three Russian women composers’. On that occasion, Auerbach told me that the subtitle ‘O Flowers, That Never Will Grow’ – a quote from Paradise Lost – to her symbolizes the oppression of women over the centuries. Thus, in Eve’s Lament, the unearthly voice of the ondes martenot constantly threatens to be smothered by the violence of the orchestra. Piquant detail: during our conversation in 2011, Auerbach somewhat timidly expressed her reservations about being branded a ‘female composer’. These days, fortunately, she is rarely given this label.

Netherlands Chamber Choir

The Auberbach festival opens on Sunday, Oct. 15, with a performance of 24 Preludes for Cello and Piano. Auerbach plays these together with Armenian-American cellist Ani Aznavoorian, with whom she also recorded the cycle on CD. Just as Shostakovich and Bach did before her, the cycle goes through the 24 major and minor keys. The cello often sounds as ethereal as the ondes martenot in Eve’s Lament, but at other times goes wild, as if in protest against her fate. The good listener will also hear some disguised references to Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. Auerbach considers Bach a great inspiration: ‘When I’m struggling, I listen to his music, it gives me perspective. What appeals to me most is how Bach manages to strike a perfect balance between intellect and emotion, between head and heart.’

On her birthday, Saturday, Oct. 21, Auerbach will conduct the Netherlands Chamber Choir in Flights of the Angakok for choir and piano, featuring Dutch pianist Yang Yang Cai. In doing so, the composer perpetuates her close relationship with the Nederlands Kamerkoor. This began in 2016, when she wrote the full-length cycle 72 Angels, in splendore lucis, a fascinating setting of the names of 72 angels for choir and saxophone quartet. Audiences and press were deeply impressed by the varied palette of sounds with which Auerbach managed to musically forge the 72 angel names into a single whole. Three years later followed its equally well-received counterpart: Goetia 72, in umbra lucis, a setting of the names of 72 demons for chorus and string quartet.

Flights of the Angakok is the third full-length work Auerbach has composed for the choir. What draws her to this company? ‘The Netherlands Chamber Choir is comprised of highly talented individuals, who as soloists or as a group provide a canvas of endless possibilities.’

Asked whether her experiences with the singers while working on 72 Angels and Goetia 72 have influenced her new piece, she answers with a short, but powerful, ‘Each work is born anew.’ Somewhat apologetically, she adds, ‘I find talking about works I haven’t completed yet challenging, and Flights of the Angakok is still in its early stages.’

Remarkable, given that our interview took place in late July, just a few months before its world premiere. Auerbach nuances: ‘It’s not that I have yet to begin, a piece matures in my head for years and only when I have the outline completely in mind do I put it on paper.’ – She still makes her first sketches by hand, for ‘thus I have a more direct contact with my emotions’.

Voyage to Antarctica

Contrary to what some websites announced, Flights of the Angakok does not form a trilogy with the two pieces previously composed for the choir, she stresses: ‘It is much more related to ARCTICA – Symphony no. 4 for piano, choir and orchestra.’ She composed this imposing work in 2019, following a meeting with conservationist Enric Sala, explorer-in-residence at National Geographic. ‘He asked me if I knew a piece of music related to the North Pole, but I couldn’t think of one.’ Then she should write it, Sala decided, and invited her on an expedition to the North Pole. Thanks to him, the National Geographic Society became one of the patrons of the eight-movement symphony ARCTICA. – Six movements are devoted to a flight of the Angakok.

The trip made a crushing impression on Auerbach: ‘The landscape is incredibly beautiful. You can read up on it, but that bears no relation to what you experience when you’re actually there. It’s overwhelming! She gives an example: ‘People often praise the immense silence, but it is never completely quiet, there is only an absence of human-produced sound. That creates a very different sense of being present, being in the moment, you automatically start sharpening all your senses. You hear wind, cracking ice and other sounds that our ears are not accustomed to. Everything is so big and impressive, I felt very small and humble. This makes you look differently at yourself and your surroundings.’

When her trip with National Geographic came to an end, Auerbach decided to explore further on her own: ‘While the expedition was very fascinating, everything is focused on facts and scientific observations. I missed the human, emotional side of the story.’ Thanks to a friend married to an Inuk in Greenland, she was able to learn about the Inuit language and culture. ‘The first thing you notice is that the Inuit speak very quietly and softly. That’s because they really listen to each other. If a conflict does arise, they do not fight it out with violence or through a lawsuit, but come together to find a solution together. Each of the parties involved portrays and ridicules the problem by singing, dancing and drumming, to make the others laugh. The party that portrays the dispute the funniest “wins”; there is no judge, criminal attorney or lawyer involved. Not even the shaman interferes. It was a life-changing experience for me.’

Heart of the world

Another thing that struck her were the fairy tales and myths of arctic culture: ‘In the West it is invariably about good versus bad, but with arctic peoples it is always about the relationship with nature, and how you yourself are part of it. Thus animals and humans are on an equal level. It teems with stories in which people become animals or vice versa.’

Through her contact with the Inuit, she realized how vulnerable these communities are: ‘The cultures of Arctic peoples have evolved over thousands of years and have been shaped by the need to adapt to the unique challenges of living in extreme conditions. Modern, global developments pose a great threat to them.’

Auerbach explains why: ‘These indigenous communities have built deeply symbiotic relationships with the land, the sea and the cyclical rhythms of the seasons. But with climate change dramatically affecting the arctic landscape, these societies are at risk. Thinning sea ice, changing migration patterns of vital species and rising sea levels are compromising their traditional hunting, fishing and animal herding practices. In addition, the growing presence of industrial activity is disrupting the natural environment. Mining, drilling and other industrial activities can cause these communities to be displaced. This simultaneous ecological and sociocultural disruption jeopardizes their survival; it reinforces their inherent vulnerability.’

In an earlier interview, she called the Arctic the ‘heart of the world’. What does she mean by this? ‘Like the heart in our bodies, the North Pole is a vital organ for the planet. Here begins the heartbeat of our world, the rhythm of climate and seasons. The heart beats, contracts and expands – just like the polar ice. The ebb and flow of the ice, melting and refreezing, forms the pulse of the earth, the rhythm of life on our planet. It echoes in the migration patterns of birds, the hibernation cycles, and even in the broader climate patterns that affect what crops we grow and when they are harvested. When the heart falters, the whole body suffers. Similarly, if the rhythm of the Arctic is disrupted, the effects will be global.’

Her publisher positions Flights of the Angakok as a climate activist work, but Auerbach nuances: ‘We may think we can save nature, but it is actually important to realize that our life as a species depends on the heartbeat of the Arctic. If that stops, we are finished; nature will survive even without us.’

Art offers solution

As she did for ARCTICA, Auerbach writes the libretto for Flights of the Angakok herself. She uses texts from various Inuit languages and dialects and draws on the wealth of stories about Sedna in Inuit mythology. She is particularly drawn to the latter part of the Sedna myth, which emphasizes the importance of art: ‘Sedna is considered the mother of the oceans and ruler of the animals. She was so powerful that even the shamans (Angakok in Inuit) were afraid of her. Human civilization is threatened by Sedna and the Angakok must try to persuade her to spare the earth. But no matter what he does, Sedna will not be swayed. When the Angakok realizes he cannot convince her, he sings one last song, to himself, about the beauty of life.’

‘For only art offers relief – and even that not always.’

This article first appeared in Dutch in De Nieuwe Muze nr. 5, Sept/Oct 2023

#FlightsOfTheAngakok #LeraAuerbach #NetherlandsChamberChoir #NorthPole #Sedna

Astronomen vinden potentiële dwergplaneet voorbij Pluto

Het verre object, Ammoniet gedoopt, werpt twijfels op over het bestaan van de onvindbare Planeet Negen.

Artist impressie van Ammoniet. Ying-Tung Chen (ASIAA)

Astronomen in Japan hebben een verafgelegen object gevonden dat ver voorbij Nept

https://www.kuuke.nl/astronomen-vinden-potentiele-dwergplaneet-voorbij-pluto/

#ammoniet #dwergplaneet #neptunus #PlaneetNegen #pluto #sedna #SubaruTelescoop #TransNeptuniaansObject