Friday, August 26, 2016
Thursday, July 7, 2016
Friday, May 29, 2015
HOW TO REMOVE VOC FROM INDOOR AIR
I'm posting this blog by Elizabeth Palermo, Staff Writer of livescience.com, July 29, 2013 07:46pm ET
Do Indoor Plants Really Clean the Air?
Sure, that potted fern is pretty, but can it really spruce
up the air quality in your home? Studies by scientists at NASA, Pennsylvania
State University, the University of Georgia and other respected institutions
suggest that it can.
Plants are notoriously adept at absorbing gases through
pores on the surface of their leaves. It's this skill that facilitates
photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert light energy and carbon
dioxide into chemical energy to fuel growth.
But scientists studying the air-purification capacities of
indoor plants have found that plants can absorb many other gases in addition to
carbon dioxide, including a long list of volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Benzene (found in some plastics, fabrics, pesticides and cigarette smoke) and
formaldehyde (found in some cosmetics, dish detergent, fabric softener and
carpet cleaner) are examples of common
indoor VOCs that plants help eliminate.
These VOCs and other indoor air pollutants (such as ozone)
have been linked to numerous acute conditions, including asthma and nausea, as
well as chronic diseases such as cancer and respiratory illnesses.
An indoor plant's ability to remove these harmful compounds
from the air is an example of phytoremediation, which is the use of any plant —
indoors or out — to mitigate pollution in air, soil or water.
Indoor plants remove pollutants from the air by absorbing
these gases through their leaves and roots. The microorganisms that live in the
soil of potted plants also play an instrumental role in neutralizing VOCs and
other pollutants.
While most leafy plants are adept at purifying indoor air,
some of the plants that scientists have found most useful in removing VOCs
include Japanese royal ferns, spider plants, Boston ferns, purple waffle
plants, English ivy, areca palms, golden pothos, aloe vera, snake plants and
peace lilies.
Japanese Royal Ferns
Spider plants
Boston Ferns
Purple waffle plants
English Ivy
Areca Palms
Golden Pothos
Aloe Vera
Snake Plants
Peace Lilies
Friday, March 20, 2015
SCORES TO SETTLE
FIRST, THE
MONEY 0921
In memoirs he
wrote in 1896, conductor Luigi Arditi recalls a situation in which a stubborn
baritone named Novara pursued his demand for money all the way into a
performance.
Novara had agreed
to sing the part of Rocco for three performances of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio with the understanding that, like everyone else in the company, he would be
paid in advance.
His payment for
the first performance went well enough, but on the second night he had to go to
a lot of trouble to get paid, and so Novara made it clear that he would not
sing the third performance until he had his money in hand.
He arrived at the
theater, put on his costume, and asked the impresario’s agent for his money,
only to be told that impresario James Henry Mapleson was dining out and had
forgotten to sign a check for him,
Novara told the
agent, Levelly by name, that he wasn’t going to sing until he was paid. Find
Mapleson and get the money, he demanded.
“I don’t know
where he is,” Levelly said, all too aware that curtain time was approaching.
“Here, take my watch as a guarantee, Novara, and for God’s sake, get into your
clothes.”
The baritone
stood his ground. “I don’t require your watch, man. I want my money, and unless
I get it before the curtain rises, I shall take off this damned wig, and the
stage carpenter can sing the role of Rocco.”
Levelly ran from
the theater and hailed a cab for parts unknown in search of Mapleson.
When the curtain
rose and Rocco sang his first aria offstage, conductor Arditi was startled to
hear a voice that sounded strangely like that of the stage manager. About then,
Levelly ran back into the theater, dripping with sweat, having come up with the
necessary cash from nowhere. He stuffed it into Novaro’s hand, and the stubborn
baritone rushed onto the stage just in time to save the performance.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
SCORES TO SETTLE 0304
The Right Season 1230
“I think they’re very interesting. You should learn
them.” So said Alfredo Antonini to violinist Louis Kaufman in the autumn
of 1947. The Columbia Broadcastin System’s music director had just said much
the same thing in the hope that Kaufman would perform the distinctive
200-year-old Vivaldi concertos in an upcoming concert. Kaufman was reluctant.
He had never heard of the four concertos known collectively as The Four Seasons.
Two days later Kaufman got a call from Samuel
Josefowitz, the co-owner of Concert Hall Records, wondering if Kaufman could record some
concertos for solo instrument and small orchestra during a visit to New York.
Kaufman mentioned the Vivaldi concertos and Josefowitz snapped up the idea
because Vivaldi was all but unknown to performers and concert goers.
Josefowitz had another reason to be eager. The
President of the American Federation of Musicians had banned all recordings
after December 31, 1947, unless record companies accepted his terms requiring
the payment of domestic royalties to the Federation rather than to the
musicians. The big companies – RCA, Columbia and Decca – had big stockpiles of
unreleased discs that they could use to skirt the ultimatum. Smaller companies
like Concert Hall Records were working hard to stockpile recordings before the
deadline.
Josefowitz hired string players from the New York
Philharmonic and conductor Henry Swoboda and rented Carnegie Hall for the last
four nights of the year, with the sessions in the tightly-booked hall to begin
at midnight. Kaufman received the Vivaldi scores from CBS the day before he
boarded the train from Los Angeles. He studied them en route and found them
enchanting.
The musicians were charmed too. Despite the late hour
and their fatigue from being overbooked, they worked with enthusiasm and
completed the very first recording of The Four Seasons just hours
before the deadline, at four o’clock in the morning of December 31, 1947.
Saturday, September 13, 2014
SCORES TO SETTLE 0912
AWKWARD
ENCOUNTERS 1009
In
the summer of 1907 Spanish pianist and composer Manuel de Falla piled up his
meager savings and went to Paris in the hope of breaking into the international
music scene. He was in for some setbacks.
The
jobs he had arranged fell through, and after playing piano with a traveling
pantomime company, he scraped by in Paris by teaching piano and harmony
students. “I’m more and more glad that I decided to leave Madrid,” he wrote a
friend. “There was no future for me there.”
He
set about introducing himself to the city’s major musical figures, but summer
was a bad time for it because many of them were out of town, although Frenchman
Paul Dukas went out of his way to be helpful and introduced him to the
influential Spanish composer Isaac Albeniz.
Getting
to know the celebrated Claude Debussy would not go so smoothly.
Fall
finally met him in October, played the piano score of his opera “La vida breve” for
him, and found the Frenchman’s sarcasm a little intimidating.
A
little later, Falla’s shyness made for an even more awkward encounter.
Falla
came to visit Debussy, was told that he was out, and was ushered by a servant
to a dark alcove off the dining room, a storage space filled with grotesque
Chinese masks. After a while Falla heard Debussy, his wife Emma, and composer
Erik Satie come into the dining room and begin lunch. Falla was too timid to
enter the dining room unannounced and sat there in the dark alcove, faint from
hunger, staring at the weird and ghoulish faces of the masks.
When
the chatting and clatter of lunch seemed loud enough to cover his retreat, he
slipped into a dim hallway and hastened toward the egress, only to bump
headfirst into Debussy’s wife, who screamed.
Even
though everybody encouraged Falla to join them for lunch, he was so rattled by
the encounter that he made his apologies and departed.
VERSATILE ENOUGH
The string
quartet is a curiosity, a series of short dances for three violins and cello to
be played on open strings. It’s attributed to Benjamin Franklin and since he
was so versatile, it’s tempting to assume that Franklin would also turn his
attention to composing music.
Franklin
played the harp, the guitar and something called the glass dulcimer, but his
best known contribution to music was his improvement of the so-called musical glasses. The
instrument had become popular in Europe by 1746, when Christoph Willibald Gluck
performed in London a “concerto on 26 drinking glasses tuned with spring water”,
accompanied by an entire orchestra.
In 1762,
during a sojourn in London, Franklin described in a letter his improvement of
the musical glasses by fitting glass bowls concentrically on a horizontal rod,
which was turned by a crank attached to a pedal. The turning of the bowls kept
them moist by passing them through water, and enabled the performer to stroke
their rims with a minimum of motions. Franklin’s new instrument, which he
called the armonica, was fairly popular in America, but quite the
rage in Europe.
A few years
later, in a letter to a friend in Edinburgh, Franklin wrote a short treatise on
music theory, setting down his ideas about the nature of melody and harmony,
and in a letter to his brother Peter he favored clarity and simplicity in vocal
music and took issue with the relatively intricate arias of recent operas and
oratorios in the Italian style.
The
intriguing string quartet
attributed to Franklin probably says a lot less about his musical tastes. The
manuscript, with Franklin’s name on it, was discovered in Paris in the 1940s,
but since then, copies have turned up in Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere, each
attributed to a different prominent composer of the time. It’s quite possible
that the scientist, statesman, and inventor was simply too busy to write music.
Friday, August 8, 2014
SCORES TO SETTLE 0511
YOU ARE PLAYING THAT WRONG
Pianist Harold Bauer had never heard of the young
woman dancing at the home of an acquaintance and took no notice of her name.
But he watched with fascination as she gestured and posed to the sound of
familiar classical music. He had never seen a performance quite like it. Her
gestures seemed to illustrate the dynamics of the music, and he hit upon the
idea of letting his gestures at the piano bring forth corresponding dynamics in
the music.
His first efforts to bring tone out of gesture were ridiculous,
but he persisted and eventually used the approach whenever he played.
Thirty years later, after he had given a recital in Los
Angeles, his friend, violinist and composer Eugene Ysaye greeted him in
the artists’ room by introducing a companion. “Of course you know Isadora”, he
said.
“Isadora who?” Bauer asked.
“Isadora Duncan,” said Ysaye.
When Bauer realized that she was the dancer from all those
years ago, he told her how greatly she had influenced his method of performing,
and before long, the two of them planned to give a concert together.
It was to be entirely pieces by Chopin, and while
rehearsing the Etude in
A-flat, Opus 25 No. 1, they had a falling out.
“You are playing that wrong,” Isadora said. She explained
that the crescendo had to continue to the very end of the phrase and be
softened later.
With some annoyance, Bauer said that he was playing the
piece the way it was printed on the page.
Isadora didn’t care. She said that the music had to build
to a climax at the end of the phrase or else she’d have nothing to with her
arms. “Anyway,” she insisted, “you are quite mistaken.”
After a long discussion, Bauer gave in for the sake of
allowing her the indispensable dramatic gesture.
Afterward, when he had a look at Chopin’s original
manuscript of the piece, he found that it had the precise dynamics the dancer
had instinctively required, and he played it that way ever after.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)