riseofgenius

[riseofgenius]

Detail of G.F. Handel’s statue at Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

[riseofgenius]

I just want to point out

mahler’s height.

ive been dying over this for 3000000 yrs now

hes shorter than alma (at least in this picture)

according to a friend’s estimate he couldn’t have been taller than 5��3”

girl I’m 5’3” like

just…… … . . lookit him i….… .

he a s m o l b o i

gustav… smoler

[riseofgenius]

25 classical music composers

[riseofgenius]

Gustav Mahler conducting Beethoven’s 9th, 1905.

[riseofgenius]

[riseofgenius]

“From September to May we children and our teachers got up between eight and nine o'clock and went to the hall to have breakfast. After nine, in his dressing-gown, still unwashed and undressed, with a tousled beard, Father came down from his bedroom to the room under the hall where he finished his toilet. If we met him on the way he greeted us hastily and reluctantly. We used to say: ‘Papa is in a bad temper until he has washed.’ Then he, too, ame up to have his breakfast, for which he usually ate two boiled eggs in a glass. He did not eat anything after that until five in the afternoon. Later, at the end of 1880, he began to take luncheon at two or three. He was not talkative at breakfast and soon retired to his study with a glass of tea. We hardly saw him after that until dinner. At five we had dinner, to which father often came late. He would be stimulated by the day's impressions and tell us about them. After dinner he usually read or talked to guests if there were any; sometimes he read aloud to us or saw to our lessons. About 10 P.M. all the inhabitants of [Yasnaya] foregathered again for tea. Before going to sleep he read again, and at one time he played the piano. And then retired to his bed about 1 A.M.”

From a text of Sergei Tolstoy

instagram.com/riseofgenius

[riseofgenius]

Visual Development art for my senior thesis Anna Karenina.  

This is my interpretation of the classic russian novel. I had a lot of fun working on this project and hope to develop it further in the future

[riseofgenius]

Classic Book Recommendations For Each Hogwarts House

Gryffindor

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Henry V by William Shakespeare

Beowulf

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Histories by Herodatus

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Hufflepuff

East of Eden by John Stenbeck

Othello by William Shakespeare

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Love In the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

White Fang by Jack London

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Ravenclaw

Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Odyssey by Homer

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Slytherin

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Dracula by Bram Stoker

[riseofgenius]

“I think, if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

[riseofgenius]

Today, in the International Redhead Day, we celebrate this redheaded great minds: 1. Galileo Galilei 2. Antonio Vivaldi 3. Emily Dickinson 4. Bram Stoker 5. Vincent Van Gogh 6. Mark Twain 7. Henri Matisse Do you know of any other redheaded genius that should be celebrated?

[riseofgenius]

When life seems not so awesome:

I think about Beethoven and the heilegenstadt testament.

MUSIC HISTORY LESSON TIME (but only the awesome parts)

Beethoven: badass composer of the time (Mozart had died, Haydn had died… Beethoven is the new sheriff in town, bridging classical and romantic music. He has tons of jobs as a composer and conductor)

He starts going deaf. no bueno. He hides it for a long time, but it starts to get bad, so he goes into the country (Heilegenstadt) and tries to recover.

He falls into a deep depression and writes a letter. Parts of it seem to be a suicide note, it seems to be going that direction, but then he says “Thanks to it (virtue) and my art, i did not end my life by suicide.”

The rest of the letter pretty much says, I want to die, but the music is too important. He is ready to die, but he still has pieces to write and things to say.

So pretty much this letter is him saying, yeah, my life blows, i’m going deaf (probably from syphilis), but I am a badass, and my music is worth too much for me to kill myself.

There is always something more out there, and if someone with that big of a life crisis can keep going to find it, so can i.

Also Beethovens 5th (da da da dum!) was written when he was going deaf. That motive occurs throughout the symphony and is supposed to sound like fate knocking on the door. his fate of becoming deaf. Such a badass.

[riseofgenius]

Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum manuscript score.

[riseofgenius]

Josef Anton Bruckner (4 September 1824 – 11 October 1896) was an Austrian composer, organist, and music theorist best known for his symphonies, masses, Te Deum and motets. The first are considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, strongly polyphonic character, and considerable length. Bruckner’s compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies.

Bruckner expanded the concept of the symphonic form in ways that have never been witnessed before or since. … When listening to a Bruckner symphony, one encounters some of the most complex symphonic writing ever created. As scholars study Bruckner’s scores they continue to revel in the complexity of Bruckner’s creative logic.

Bruckner composed eleven symphonies, the first, the Study Symphony in F minor in 1863, the last, the unfinished Symphony No. 9 in D minor in 1887–96. With the exception of Symphony No. 4 (Romantic), none of Bruckner’s symphonies originally had a subtitle and in the case of those that now do, the nicknames or subtitles did not originate with the composer.

[riseofgenius]

All men by nature desire knowledge.

Aristotle

[riseofgenius]

Albert Camus

[x]

[riseofgenius]

Anyone want to know about one of the funniest things in art history??

Cause in older art you often see Moses depicted with little horns for example Michelangelo made this statue:

You can clearly see the horns on top of his head

And these horns were based on a mistranslation of the Hebrew text, instead of 'horned' it was meant to be 'shining' and thats a biiig difference

But since the horns were so ingraved in the iconography of Moses, they weren't ready to let them go completely so you get hilarious artworks such as:

Here you see there are little rays of light, where there would've been horns

Or another great one

They were just really keen on the horns

[riseofgenius]

“By this invention every live part of Mother Earth’s body would be brought into action. Energy will be collected all over the globe in amounts small or large, as it may exist, ranging from a fraction of one to a few horse power or more. Every waterfall can be utilized, every coal field made to produce energy to be transmitted to vast distances, and every place on earth can have power at small cost. One of the minor uses might be the illumination of isolated homes. We could light houses all over the country by means of vacuum tubes operated by high frequency currents. We could keep the clocks of the United States going and give every one exact time; we could turn factories, machine shops and mills, small or large, anywhere, and I believe could also navigate the air.

“One of the most important features of this invention will be the transmission of intelligence. It will convert the entire earth into a huge brain, capable of responding in every one of its parts. By the employment of a number of plants, each of which can transmit signals to all parts of the world, the news of the globe will be flashed to all points. A cheap and simple receiving device, which might be carried in one’s pocket, can be set up anywhere on sea or land, and it will record the world’s news as it occurs, or take such special messages as are intended for it. If you are in the heart of the Sahara your wife can telegraph you from Washington, and if the instrument is properly made you alone will get the message. A single plant of a few horse power could operate hundreds of such instruments, so that the invention has an infinite working capacity and will cheapen the transmission of all kinds of intelligence.”

–Nikola Tesla

“A Talk With Nikola Tesla.” By Frank G. Carpenter. The State, December 18, 1904.