Organ improvisation is a remarkable art, whether or not accompanying a silent film. In any of France's great cathedrals, the foremost musical experience is to hear the "titulaire" (essentially the headline organist) improvising on whatever theme they've selected for the day - sometimes chant, sometimes a hymn tune, sometimes something entirely frivolous and inappropriate that takes on a life of its own.
Even here in the UK, where it's not such a big thing, there's often an enjoyable few minutes at evensong where the organist improvises in the gap between finishing the prelude and the choir processing in. But France does it like nowhere else. One of the finest musical experiences I've ever known was Olivier Latry, titulaire at Notre Dame, giving a recital at Worcester Cathedral. After the appointed recital, he performed a 20-minute improvisation on the hymn chosen for evensong earlier that day (Herbert Howells' "Michael"), which he had never heard before. Superb yet entirely ephemeral - like most improvisations, it was never recorded.
There are more great improvisers, in other traditions, e.g. Sietze de Vries (1), who's Dutch and improvises mainly in Northern German Baroque style (the video has an improvised fugue), and Wolfgang Seiben (2), who's German and improvises more in late Romantic/early 20th century style.
However, these improvisations differ quite a bit from theatrical improvisations. All are virtuoso, but the classical traditions emphasizes structural elements, such as a uniting theme, counter-point, and development, whereas movie accompaniment is more fragmented, and builds on common musical experience, usually popular, to evoke the right mood, and is restricted by the visuals.
Playing styles also differ quite a bit. E.g., theatre organs have all kinds of bells and whistles (literally), a complex registration system, and sometimes extra techniques such as a "second touch" which allows to play dynamic accents, which is almost impossible on church organs.
It’s second nature very quickly. Our train into Oxford leaves at ten past the hour. You find yourself thinking “oh, I’ll aim for the ten past eleven” an hour or two beforehand and organise your morning accordingly. It’s absolutely no hardship.
So far it seems to be making a noticeable, albeit modest difference. Traffic in the city centre is clearly reduced. Buses are no longer queueing for ages at the Plain (the notorious roundabout that connects East Oxford to the city centre) - in fact, bus journey times are improved throughout. There are some knock-on effects, particularly in North Oxford in the evening peak, but generally it's working well. Footfall in the city centre remains high according to official figures, and certainly it was pretty rammed yesterday when I was doing my Christmas shopping.
It's only the third congestion charge to have been implemented in the UK, after London and Durham. (The Oxford scheme thus far is a slightly watered-down version of the full "traffic filters" mentioned in the review, because of the overrunning closure of the bridge by the railway station which cuts off one of the main routes into Oxford.)
So Tolkien was right. Ignore the conspiracy theorists. Have courage and fight back. Cars in historic city centres like Oxford are not something we have to just accept.
The bridge closure is such a big impediment to travel into Oxford I haven't even bothered applying for the residents' permit...
Congestion charge is only ever going to be a minor inconvenience to Oxford city centre visitors since it's already inconvenient to drive in and driving has very little benefit considering it's very small, doesn't sell much in the way of bulky items and has a decent bus service to the suburbs and park and ride.
For UK readers, this is eerily similar to the typeface originally used on the "Thames Turbo" trains (class 165/166) from their construction in the 1990s until a refurb about five years ago - I could believe it was the same manufacturer. Some photos:
NJ Transit uses 105-segment displays. Not only do they include lowercase letters, but the uppercase and numbers are noticeably different from MUNI's 38-segment displays.
I used to edit a news-stand magazine: every article that went into the magazine was subbed with TextEdit. All my daily notes are in TextEdit. My todo lists are in TextEdit. If I'm writing longform for the web I draft in TextEdit and then copy and paste.
It's just so immediate. Write, save. WYSIWYG formatting in the way the Mac has always done it.
The author says "It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does". I think it changed its interface once, c. 2005. Before then you could just have a window with no chrome whatsoever, just a blank slate to write in. Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline. That pissed me off for a while. But compared to the ongoing hurt of 25 years of a broken spatial Finder, I can cope with it.
>Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline
Patches welcome! (Textedit is open source, should not be too hard to ask your favorite LLM to add a menu option to toggle the visibility of the format bar)
Even here in the UK, where it's not such a big thing, there's often an enjoyable few minutes at evensong where the organist improvises in the gap between finishing the prelude and the choir processing in. But France does it like nowhere else. One of the finest musical experiences I've ever known was Olivier Latry, titulaire at Notre Dame, giving a recital at Worcester Cathedral. After the appointed recital, he performed a 20-minute improvisation on the hymn chosen for evensong earlier that day (Herbert Howells' "Michael"), which he had never heard before. Superb yet entirely ephemeral - like most improvisations, it was never recorded.
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