Cover-a-Week #35: "Seasons of Love" from Rent

It's 2014, and I haven't posted fifty-two covers yet... so I figured I'd just keep making these videos! This one's belatedly holiday-themed...


http://youtu.be/eHQxDfC39BY

Also, given the previous post, I thought it rather appropriate. :-)

La Bohème at the Met Opera!

A few friends and I got rush tickets to the Metropolitan Opera's production of La Bohème yesterday. I've never seen it live before (even though I have three different recordings on my computer). It was absolutely worth the experience; the show was spectacular. I can't believe what I've been missing. (Rodolfo's character, especially, tugs at my heartstrings.)

It's always interesting listening to music with lyrics in a language I don't know, because so much more of my understanding depends on the vocalists' interpretations of their parts. (The Met Opera has electronic panels on the back of each seat displaying translations of the lyrics, but I tried not to rely on that, because watching the staging of the production is a huge part of the experience.) You can always get a rudimentary understanding of what's going on, because there's enough overlap between the various Romance languages (though that leaves German lyrics nigh impossible), but the nuances are really up to the vocalists, in their facial and body language down to the minute inflections of their lines. For instance, in this production, the audience could tell in the first act the exact moment when Benoît loses control of the situation at Rodolfo's apartment -- you could tell by his posture and the vocals of the other characters how inebriated he was getting.

Another element I've noticed: it's hard for any stage performance to adequately develop character, because it's constrained to about two hours, and there's only so much of each character that the audience gets to see. I do like how -- other than the marketplace scene -- Puccini doesn't include any group or choral numbers. The opera focuses narrowly on the lives of the six central characters -- and really only three or four of them are developed at any depth; the small cast lends it a sense of intimacy that you don't often see in some of the larger, more traditionally theatrical operas in the repertoire. It would be a good choice for an indie opera house -- I'm not surprised that Rent (a very creative update on La Bohème where everyone dies of AIDS instead of tuberculosis) remained an Off-Broadway production despite its success.

Now I really must see Rent. I missed both the original production, which closed when I was in high school, and the revival, which went dark quite recently. (I have the soundtrack to that, as well, and I do like how Jonathan Larson includes so many nods to Puccini.) I've heard mixed reviews of the film, but one of these same friends is organizing a screening of the original production -- I'm super excited! :-)

Free Will and Nuclear Winter

I've been thinking, lately, about free will -- and I recalled this article that I read last year. It's a good, concise analysis of causality (particularly the bits about levels of complexity), and addresses some of the fallacies of breaking down human behavior into ever-smaller constituent components:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/09/free_will_debate_what_does_free_will_mean_and_how_did_it_evolve.html

The question is a version of "are we more than the sum of our parts?" Many people attempt to derive an answer from religion, espousing a concept of "soul," a metaphysical quantity that science is -- by definition -- unable to prove or disprove. But in the absence of such a belief, are we not just collections of atoms? Isn't each of our thought processes a mere chemical reaction in our neurons? It's a chilling way to think about ourselves; the idea that there is only one possible course of events because our actions are governed by a set immutable physical laws, that each circumstance leads logically into a specific next circumstance, is essentially a secular version of the idea of fate or predestination.

But there's a scientific argument against fate: the multiverse. If there is an infinite number of possible universes, infinitely many points at which one universe becomes multiple, then there isn't one logical state for the universe at any given point in time. The possibility of parallel universes implies, if not conscious choice at all times, then at least many possible outcomes, none of which are certain to happen. Quantum physics likewise deals with uncertainty -- with thought experiments such as Schroedinger's Cat, in which a situation manifests both possible outcomes simultaneously. Science, it appears, disproves fate.

Then, there are situations like this one, in which one person's choice, a split-second decision in a situation of incomplete information, may have prevented all-out nuclear destruction:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24280831

Given a circumstance like this, it's hard not to believe in free will. I'm sure that there's a parallel universe out there in which the world ended on September 26, 1983.