Mathematics at the MFA

Well, not mathematics, exactly, but the collection of a very wealthy man who knows some math and is on the board of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Horace Brock has a mathematical theory of good design:

Brock's theory, which is clearly laid out in a succinct and fascinating essay included in the show's catalog, comes with a two-page appendix, replete with a graph, equations, and multiple axioms.

"The thing about beautiful design is you don't need me to explain it. You just sense it. That's how it's supposed to be," he reassures me. "But some of us have the job of trying to find out what's going on."

What about this theory, then?

In truth, it's satisfyingly simple. Designed objects, Brock writes, can be broken down into "themes" and "transformations." A theme is a motif, such as an S-curve; a transformation might see that curve appear elsewhere in the design, but stretched, rotated 90 degrees, mirrored, or otherwise reworked.

Aesthetic satisfaction comes from an apprehension of how those themes and transformations relate to each other, or of what Brock calls their "relative complexity." Basically - and this is the nub of it - "if the theme is simple, then we are most satisfied when its echoes are complex . . . and vice versa."

I can't speak to the theory – I haven't seen the details – but Melanie and I have seen this exhibition and thought it quite splendid. Definitely worth taking a look at.

Rusalka

Friday evening Melanie and I attended the Boston Lyric Opera's production of Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka. Melanie is the chief opera lover in the family, but I'm slowly learning to enjoy it, too. We've generally been quite impressed with the quality of the BLO. We're not connoisseurs yet, but we do have some prior experience against which to compare our local company. (Melanie has been to opera after opera as a student in Germany, but I've only seen opera in Santa Fe — which has a fantastic amphitheater that presents a majestic view over a canyon at sunset — and Milan.) In Boston, we've seen L'elisir d'amore and Les contes d'Hoffmann, both of which were spectacular. If you have any interest in opera, or are willing to risk developing an interest, we can unreservedly recommend the BLO.

That being said, our Rusalka experience was not quite the bees knees. We ate at the Rock Bottom Brewery beforehand, which was filling but unexceptional. It's a fun place to go with friends for some beer and potato-based grub, but you pay for the proximity to the theater. Melanie had a Lumpy Dog Lager, and I tried the Munich Gold. Both were so light as to be weightless, an illusion belied by the carb count and the incrementally increasing bulge of my belly. Though ephemeral, the beers were not exactly watery, but in toto they amounted to little. There is better beer to be had for less elsewhere, and the same goes without saying of the burgers. But as a pre-theatrical repast it served its purpose.

We had bought opera tickets (for this performance, balcony level) at half-price several months ago; there is a special day in September or October when the BLO sells tickets at a discount to the under-40 set. As we climbed the stairs, we were swarmed by a busload of high school students on a field trip to Boston; their chaperones had the brilliant idea that a bunch of hormone-imbalanced adolescents in the throes of Wii-withdrawal would enjoy a refined night out at the opera. How foolish.

They filled in the rows behind us in the balcony, chatting, messaging, groaning, squealing, sighing, and swinging their legs over the seat backs, filling the space normally reserved for polite silence with their juvenile frivolity.

But to the opera itself: The musical score was superb; I'm convinced that Dvorak ranks among my favorite composers (my classical music collection is so paltry, this is not necessarily an encomium of much significance). I'm partial to the Slavonic Dances, and I like the Symphony No. 9; Rusalka's music is stylistically reminiscent, but at some points more dramatic, to the point of being slightly melodramatic, but I don't mind. I'd buy the CD, even though as a rule I don't like hearing opera music without the accompanying visual spectacle unfolding on stage before me. The performance of the music I can't judge so well; my impression is that the BLO musicians are not on par with the BSO, but I would be unsurprised to find some BSO musicians moonlighting for the opera.

The singing was also very good. I'm unfamiliar with the singers, except one who had sung in Les contes d'Hoffmann. A fair number were locally grown and raised; Boston seems to possess quite a lot of musical talent.

The story was a bit boring: woodland sprite falls in love with human prince; sprite becomes human to join with the prince, but is cursed to be mute; prince turns away from sprite; sprite returns to forest, cursed for having once been human; prince's attempt to regain sprite proves fatal. Parts reminded me of The Little Mermaid. The pot-bellied, bulbous-nosed, Rapunzel-coifed witch came straight from Central European fairy tale central casting, and was quite amusing. But she was the only character to catch the eye. The others were rather plain, and the set design was subdued and uninspiring. (The prince's castle hewed to the proudly unimaginative precepts of the Concrete Monumentalist school of architecture, whose prime exemplars are found in the former East Bloc and Boston's Government Center.)

The opera is sung in Czech, which would be interesting to learn but which is hardly as aurally pleasing as French or Italian. The music had to make up for the libretto's apparent lack of poetry (hard to tell, it could just have been a coarse translation), the plainness of the set and the static stage directions (there were many scenes with little movement, just two characters singing to each other from opposite sides of the stage.) Dvorak was probably up to the task, but we lost interest by the third movement (we were also pretty tired, beyond being tired of the high schoolers), and we went home early. This was hardly a vote against the opera or the BLO, simply an indication that this particular production was not the most exciting we've seen. But no matter — we will definitely be back for more nights at the opera!

Welcome!

Welcome to the Tuesday Dinner Club. This is (going to be) a group blog about cultural experiences that we want to share with each other — good and bad. The idea is to establish a kind of salon amongst friends. Wikipedia's definition of a salon is “a gathering of stimulating people of quality under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation and readings …”

Melanie and I often remark to one another that we have wonderful friends, people with terrific character, intriguing ideas, and interesting tastes. When we're in their company, we love the invigorating conversation, but now that we live relatively far away from most of our friends, we rarely have the chance to share their company and all of the aforementioned pleasures that come with it. We miss it! Certainly our friends constitute a collection of stimulating people of quality; I don't know that we are necessarily the most inspiring hosts, but we'd love to have a regular gathering with you all.

Hence this blog. We figure that by sharing what we're up to intellectually, artistically, and culturally, we can keep up some semblance of the community and enrichment we had in each other's company. We think it will be fun, and it should be a good place to keep up with one another, hopefully with a bit more depth than Facebook.

What to write? Eugenio Montale wrote that “True culture is what remains in a man when he has forgotten everything he has learned. This, however, presupposes an absorption, a profound penetration of his character.”

I like this quote, but this is not exactly what I mean when I say that this blog is a place to share cultural experiences. Were Montale the blog editor, the content might be rarefied, but I fear the submissions would be meager. It saps the fun from the endeavor to require us to report only those experiences so sublime or atrocious that they seep into the bone. Besides, such deep experience would take a lifetime to collect, and we don't have time for that.

This blog, therefore, has a simpler mission: to be a place to collect reports on books read, art seen, movies watched, music heard, food eaten, wine drunk, etc. And of course, your thoughts on the same! No need for a formal book or music review, just write what you've been reading, for example, whether you like it and maybe a bit about why, perhaps some pointers to reviews (written by people who get paid for this sort of thing) you agree or disagree with, and there you go. Or maybe suggest some interesting articles on the web to take a gander at. That sort of thing.

We'll get the ball rolling, and we hope you'll join in!

About the name: It's taken from the Thursday Dinners of King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski of Poland, who held regular salons of artists on Thursdays between 1770 and 1784; on Wednesdays he invited “educators, scientists, and political activists.” (And never the twain should meet? Sounds like C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures, which might be worth discussing, as might Brockman's Third Culture, at some point.) Since we straddle both groups, we decided to hold our dinners on Tuesday! (Both Wednesday and Thursday Dinner Club were already taken as blog names, too.)