Hymn To Intellectual Beauty

Ojai North! music festival comes to Berkeley

On Monday, the Ojai Music Festival - which started in 1947 as a boho-intellectual-Hollywood happening for the likes of Igor Stravinsky , Greta Garbo and Thomas Mann and which has become a forward-looking classical music gathering - moves north to Berkeley. Ojai North ! , as the Cal Performances -Ojai Music Festival partnership is being called, will be an annual event and will include joint commissions and co-productions.

"It's something I've been working on since I started," said Matías Tarnopolsky , Cal Performance's director, who was appointed two summers ago. "I have long admired Ojai as a beacon of programming, and so I got in touch with Tom ( Morris , Ojai's artistic director) and started exploring ways to collaborate."

Ojai is a four-day event. The Berkeley version of it will be smaller, but not by much. Ojai North! opens with an 8 p.m. concert Monday featuring Maria Schneider and her 18-piece jazz orchestra. Tuesday night the offerings get more diverse with music by Anton Webern , George Crumb and Richard Tognetti 's arrangements for string orchestra of works by Belá Bartók and Edvard Grieg and - as a centerpiece - a newly commissioned work by Schneider for the never-to-be-missed American soprano Dawn Upshaw (who is Ojai's musical director this year) and the Australian Chamber Orchestra .

The piece, called " Winter Morning Walks ," was inspired by the writings of poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser , who during his battle with cancer went on early-morning walks that produced poems about beauty and existence. The highlight of Ojai North! may come Thursday night, with director Peter Sellars ' new staging of Crumb's 2004 " Winds of Destiny (American Songbook IV) ," a cycle of Civil War songs, performed by Upshaw - who in Sellars' interpretation is an American veteran returning home from the war in Afghanistan. The songs are familiar: " When Johnny Comes Marching Home ," " Shenandoah " and " The Battle Hymn of the Republic ." But with Crumb's "haunting, spectral sound," says Sellars, "something familiar becomes strange and ghostly.

Wednesday Literature-Hymn To Intellectual Beauty « Plagiarism and ...

“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” makes much reference to a key poet among the first generation of Romantics, William Blake. The speaker begins by drawing attention to “the awful shadow of some unseen Power.” Here, “awful” means full of awe, like the modern term “awesome.” The “power” is the human intellect, something beyond access by the senses, which must be beautiful in a way different from the things that are beautiful directly to the eyes.