perfidy

Yesterday, I was perusing the DC Metro Blogmap for the first time in months if not years. I discovered there Dappled Things a local (to me) blog run by Jim Tucker, a Catholic Priest in the Diocese of Arlington. And on that blog, I found this link to a piece in the Post about some canny Swedes attempting to reverse engineer the genius of Stradivarius using computer modeling technology.

"The violin is easy to measure geometrically," said structural engineer Mats Tinnsten in a telephone interview from Mid Sweden University. "Then you can measure how it vibrates, look at the frequencies and other parameters. You excite it with a loudspeaker, knock on it with your knuckles. We can do this as well."

But after that it gets tricky. Violins are made of wood, and no two pieces of wood are exactly alike. Each violin, whether built by Stradivari or Tinnsten, is unique, and the challenge is to sculpt the wood -- delicately shaving the top and the back -- to "optimize" the acoustical qualities. Stradivari, working in a pre-industrial age, did this by ear and hand with unsurpassed consistency and artistry.

Tinnsten said his team can do it, too. "Violin-makers reduce the thickness of the wood with a knife, and do it in different places until they are satisfied," he said. "We use the same method, but in the computer. We take an electronic blank and carve it."

That's a bold claim. But if he pulls it off, he'll be in the long green making a new generation of Strad-level violins.

I also found this little bit of history interesting:

Stradivari, better known by the Latinized version of his name, Stradivarius, learned his trade from the Amati family of Cremona, near Milan. Beginning with the Amatis, continuing with Stradivari and finishing with Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu, the Cremonese instrument-makers dominated the violin trade from around 1560 to 1750.

Stradivari, who was born in 1644 and died in 1737, was perhaps the most fascinating of the maestri. The Amatis, Sparks said, "knew how to teach violin-making," while Guarneri was a tinkerer and a genius "who made a dozen violins that could outplay any Strad," but he couldn't manage it on a regular basis.

"Stradivari is the most consistent artist, with good sound, good looks and good coloration," Sparks said. "Stradivari could consciously alter an instrument to obtain a desired result. I believe if you knocked on his door today, he could tell you exactly how he did it."

I hadn't realized that there were violins better than a Stradivarius. Of course, my musical knowledge is cursory at best.

I also found a wicked cool video of an octopus killing a shark.

By this time, you are probably wondering, what sort of site is this priest running? Where's all the god stuff? Well, there's plenty, including his sermons. One item that I found interesting was his link to a lengthy (Clueless lengthy) essay on the prospects of reconciliation between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, "Catholic Ecumenism and the Elephant in the Room." As an orthodox type person myself, this is something I've pondered on occasion. The Orthodox and the descendents of the Monophysite churches (the Orthodox refer to them as non-Chalcedonian, because they did not accept the Council of Chalcedon) have decided that after a thousand and a half years, the original schism was really just over semantic issues, and that it was all a big mistake. The idea that the Catholics and the Orthodox could perform a similar miracle, and end a thousand years of separation seemed less likely, though Father Kirby's essay gives me a little more hope.

His idea that viewing the schism as imperfect - as are all human things is clever. Focus on how unity is preserved even in the face of stupidity, stubborness and vindictiveness. (Like the Crusaders sacking Constantinople instead of Muslim terrorists, or the mutual excommunications, etc. ad nauseum.) Nevertheless, despite the very real similarities between your average Catholic and Orthodox, and between the Liturgy and the Mass, there are also very real obstacles.

First, you've got the whole Pope thing. As most Protestants will likely understand, the Orthodox do not go along with the notion of either Papal infallibility or Papal primacy. In the east, there are fourteen "Popes," although there is something like the notion of infallibility - when the Church, speaking as a whole, pronounces on something, that is something like infallibility. An ecumenical council can make statements for the whole church, but there hasn't been one of those for a very, very long time. The idea that one guy can do that is a little odd to anyone who isn't Catholic.

Most of the doctrinal differences could probably be ironed out, or declared semantic issues and ignored. But the biggest problem would be in the human resistance to change. Here in the US, there are at least a dozen administratively independent Orthodox Churches. Washington DC has at least three Orthodox cathedrals - that is, seats of bishops. Which is patently ridiculous, when you consider that these are churches that haven't been riven by schism, and are at least theoretically part of the same church. This situation arose because when immigrants came to this country, they brought their churches with them. The Greeks set up Greek Orthodox churches, and likewise the Russians, Serbians, Macedonians, Syrians, Lebanese, Copts, Ethiopians and who knows who else. Each reported back to the home church in the mother country. So, throughout North America, you have multiple, parallel Orthodox hierarchies. The advent of Communism in Russia split the Russian Orthodox community, adding to the problem. Some areas might only have a couple orthodox churches - maybe a Greek and a Russian. But there are two Russian Orthodox Archbishops in DC, and at least one bishop from every major tentacle of the Orthodox Church as a whole. For an idea of the complexity of the lean and efficient Orthodox machine in the old world where things are simple, check out this brief primer on the Orthodox Hierarchy Orthodox Hierarchy.

If these churches cannot "unite" despite the fact that they are already united, what chance do two churches split for a thousand years have? You could start slow, I imagine, by just saying that the two churches are "in communion" which would mean that I could go to a Catholic church and not get beat up for asking for the Eucharist at the Latin Liturgy. But eventually, real union would stumble over things like, "Hey, there's too damn many bishops in this town. Which ones do we kick to the curb?" In DC, to we fire Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, the Metropolitan Theodosius, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Demetrios, or the Antiochian, or the Serbian, and so on.

It'd be nice, but I don't know how likely it would actually be.

[wik] Ran across this little jokelet: "I don’t believe in organized religion; I’m Orthodox."