Dies Irae

Today I went to an All Souls Day Requiem mass. In an interesting coincidence, that mass opens with the Latin hymn “Dies Irae,” and my “exemplary poem” for Junior Poet, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” draws its title from the hymn’s opening stanza: “Dies iræ! dies illa / Solvet sæclum in favilla / Teste David cum Sibylla!” Thus, I will endeavor to give a reading of it now, while the coincidence is still interesting.

The poem itself, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (full text here), is a fascinating look at three of the four last things: death, judgement, and hell. One of Hopkin’s darkest poems, it does not speak about heaven; the reasons given for this vary, among them that it is a pre-Christian poem in content, that it stemmed from an Ignatian meditation on hell, and that logically it ends by rejecting poetry while it is meant to aesthetically, through the music of the words, redeem poetry.

In any case, whatever caused Hopkins to write the poem, its substance is him confronting the fact that all life boils down to a choice between good and evil. The octave presents the world disintegrating, the image being one of the sun setting, the stars rising, and, while in the heavens the stars are fixed, stable, below on earth, everything succumbs to entropy. Here we find such great lines as “womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night” and “her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ‘ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height / Waste”; these descriptions blend the distinction between symbol and what is symbolized, and we feel that the nightfall is the Apocalypse.

In the sestet Hopkins turns inward, seeing that now that the world has ended, the dappled and pied beauty of things is irrelevant. It begins with the cryptic but evocative line “Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ‘ damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,” going on to explain the threat implied there as one of morality: now that the world has come to an end, the only distinction that matters is “black, white; ‘ right, wrong.” Aesthetics no longer matter, Hopkins fears; even as he strives to assent to it. In a sense the poem is about poetry, and whether it is worthwhile to write beautiful poetry about the beauty of the world; Hopkins concludes that it is not, unless that beauty serves a moral purpose.

But of course that is what all of Hopkins’ poems are about – his nature sonnets all begin with observing the natural world and move up to God. Some people think “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” is somehow atypical of Hopkins; on the contrary, it perhaps best encapsulates his concerns: nature, the self, sin, and God. It is written in the Baroque style of earlier poems like “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and “The Windhover,” which he returned to with e.g. “That Nature is a Heraclitan Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” (these four poems I would say are Hopkins’ most important), but its darkness ties it in to his later sonnets of desolation, which are written in a more plain style.

What I’ve left out so far from my explanation of the poem are the last two lines – and indeed, those who want to place the poem as an extremity, not an example, of Hopkins’ poetry look to those two lines to make their argument. They’re difficult lines; they’re also what first turned me on to the poem, as I at first grew frustrated with Hopkins for not making any sense and then slowly realized the brilliance of them. They describe the damned souls after the Last Judgment, and their difficult rhythm – it is almost painful to put the stresses where they are marked, rather than where they would naturally fall – makes them sound like a drumbeat out of Hell. They’re not unmusical; it’s just a terrifying sort of music. Nor is it hopeless terror; the poem is a prophecy and a warning. “Teste David cum sibylla.”

—

So that’s my exemplary poem. With any luck, I’ve convinced you at least that the poem is worth looking at. It’s really amazing, in sound and sense (Hopkins is a master of combining form and content). I get to do a practice presentation of it tomorrow morning, then my panel’s Friday the 13th; I hope writing this out in the last half hour will actually help me with those (and the paper we have to write in a month) rather than prove a hindrance. We’ll see.

Epic Metal Playlists

I recently fixed something with my computer so that I can once again scrobble (i.e. submit lists of listened-to tracks to last.fm, which will then give me musical suggestions based on my listening habits). In celebration, I suppose, I put together two playlists on my last.fm account, both of which point out phenomena I find interesting in the music I listen to – the tendency towards really long songs, songs which often tell a story and move from one “movement” to another, and the tendency to use a certain language specific to epic metal, by which I don’t mean singing in foreign languages (though this is seen as well), but rather using certain words and phrases much more often than they appear in ordinary English.

Epic Length Epic Metal – ‘Epic metal bands (i.e. viking, folk, power, symphonic, progressive metal bands) have a tendency to love really long songs. This is a playlist of all of the songs in my library over 8 minutes long. There’s a lot of them; they make up 51/828 songs in my popular music library (6%), and take up 8 hours, 52 minutes of the 66 hours, 23 minutes of music there (13%).’

Language of Epic Metal – ‘There are a certain set of words that appear over and over in the titles of songs I listen to – meaning, songs of the “epic metal” genre (viking, folk, power, symphonic, and progressive metal, to be precise). This isn’t surprising; every subculture develops its own distinct language, with words that carry special significance for its members. This is an exploration of those words. The playlist includes every song I have from these genres that contains in its title one or more of these often-appearing words (defined as appearing in >9 titles). The words: Dark, Dream, Land, Night, Song, Time.’

You probably can’t listen to the playlists on last.fm unless you’re a subscriber, but you can still look at the track listing and compare them with your own music library, if some of your musical tastes overlap with mine.

Jonathan Coulton

It iced over here (i.e. Irving, TX) last night. I love cold and gloomy weather, so it was fun; I was walking around campus while everyone else was huddled in their warm dorms/apartments.

But then the next morning classes were canceled and I was mildly irritated. So, these are probably the exact opposite reactions to this turn of events than what most people had.

The good thing is, the Aquinas Lecture (a once-a-year thing where the Philosophy Department brings in someone cool and has them lecture about Thomas Aquinas) wasn’t canceled, so I’ll be there tonight. And probably won’t get a chance to make an actual substantial post today. Or tomorrow, or this weekend. Thus you get this post.

What I am going to do is point you towards the awesomeness of Jonathan Coulton. He’s a programmer turned musician who sings about what nerds find amusing; evil geniuses, Mandelbrot sets, and unrequited love. Plus all his stuff is under a Creative Commons license, meaning you can download it all for free, legally. Almost makes it worth it pay for it.

Last.fm vs. Pandora

I’ve been using two different internet music streaming websites on and off for a while now – Last.fm and Pandora. They’re different, and complementary in a way – one of them relies on statistical analysis, the other on analysis of the music itself.

Last.fm, in essence, looks at what music you’ve listened to so far, finds other people who listen to the same sort of music, and suggests for you music that they listen to. It does a decent job of finding bands close to the ones you listen to – it’s how I found several of my favorite bands. But it does a rather bad job, I think, of diversifying – it won’t really suggest bands you might like that aren’t in almost the exact same genre as what you’re currently listening to. It doesn’t help that you can’t divide your music into different profiles – all of them are lumped together for suggestion purposes, even if, while you’re interested in genre A and genre C, but have no interest in genre B, which is between them.

The people at Pandora, on the other hand, actually sit down, listen to each song, and record information about it, and give you songs that are musically similar to the ones you have listened to already. This does a decent job of suggesting music you’d like, and I think manages to be more diverse in its suggestions (I’ve found several bands I find interesting and not exactly the same as the other stuff I listen to through it, though most of those I’ve never pursued). It helps that you can have different, unrelated “stations”, and in each of those explore a different sort of music. But, since the people at Pandora are working quickly, some of the songs are rather badly described, and since they’re doing the descriptions by hand they can’t get that many done. Last.fm has more music available, I think.

This dichotomy seems to apply to a few different things… just using statistics versus actually looking at what is being sorted. Movies, for example; a lot of movie services will do “suggestions” based on what other people listen to (a la Last.fm), but I read recently about a service that plans to be more like Pandora – actually watching the movie and describing it.

Or take automatic translation. My understanding is that currently, it’s done mostly with the Pandora method – it translates individual words using a dictionary and applies different preprogrammed grammatical rules. But they’re thinking that a way to get more accurate translations might be to use the Last.fm method – create a database of a bunch of documents that are considered well-translated (by humans, I guess), and then when automatically translating a document, take each phrase and find where it is used in one of the documents in the database and use that translation. The translating device doesn’t have to actually know what the words mean to do this.

After describing these things, I can’t help but think, not about how these two stack up against each other, but how they are both somewhat deficient. Neither of them is as good as just getting a person to do it. Actual music recommendations from an actual person are probably better than either Last.fm or Pandora; movie recommendations from someone you can trust (be it a friend, a professional critic, or a blog you read regularly) are better than the suggestions of a machine; getting a human to translate a document is surely more accurate than either automatic method. Both automated contextual and textual analysis are poor substitutes for an actual person doing it – their only advantages are in speed and
convenience.

Not that those aren’t great advantages. I’d definitely recommend using Pandora and Last.fm, for as long as they’re both free. But neither can substitute for a person who is knowledgeable about music, if you know one. The same for music; the same for translations.

Natural Talent

This is something interesting that I’m going to post here even though I wrote it for somewhere else first. On the Wesnoth forums, we’re discussing the question of natural talent, specifically in the disciplines of art and music. Is it actually natural? Are they related to each other? Etc. My answer to the (rather open-ended) question is as follows:

With respect to both art and music, I fall into the same category [as Eternal] – I naturally had above-average, but not exceptional skill, but was not motivated enough to actually pursue it, and so now I fall into the category of being better at it than everyone who never took it seriously, but worse than everyone who ever did take it seriously.

For music, for example, I’m pretty sure I was better than most people; in the school orchestra I would always make 1st chair (I play(ed) cello), make all-city and all-region, etc. But I never practiced more than an hour or so a week (they tell you to practice three). When I got to 11th grade, I kept playing it, but not as often because my high school didn’t have an orchestra and I had to take private lessons, which are only once a week and didn’t motivate me to practice as much. Now, I’m in college and haven’t picked up my cello for almost a year; if I picked it up now, I could probably carry a tune on it, be mostly in tune, and maybe even be somewhat musical in my performance, but I’d be much worse than anyone my age who played an instrument regularly.

So, right now I don’t consider myself an art or a music person, even though I sort of did when I was a kid. But it’s not that I wasn’t encouraged, or was disappointed by the realization that I wasn’t really very good and had a lot to improve (I knew that fairly soon) – it was more that I realized just how much damn effort would be required to actually become good at it, and decided I’d rather become good at other things. I could have tried to be a jack-of-all-trades, and become good at mathematics, writing, music, drawing, and maybe a few other things, but I decided to focus on a few.

And, actually, it really was Wesnoth that helped choose the things I would focus on – I started writing campaigns, and found I was decent at it and people kinda liked them, at a time when I was not nearly good enough at art to do portraits (though I tried for a while – the results can probably be found around the forum – and in theory I’m still trying to improve, just slowly) and nowhere near good enough musically to contribute (obviously – musicians here are amazing). So I kept writing, got better at it, and now am in love it and am willing to put a lot of effort into getting better.

I’m also a math nerd, though that doesn’t really show up on the Wesnoth side – but that’s also really more natural talent than actual willingness to put effort into it. I’m still doing math, and plan to major in it, but I don’t yet know whether I have enough internal motivation to keep me at it when I could be writing instead.

So, basically, (like most people here) I am fairly intelligent and, when you are young, that corresponds to being naturally good at most things you attempt. Art, music, writing, mathematics, science, whatever. It’s just a question of which ones you are motivated to get good at – because you can’t be good at all of them. I don’t think it’s so much a question of giving up on one, as of embracing another and thus necessarily abandoning the others along the way.

More on Music

It’s been a while since I have listed the bands I’m listening to on this blog.

Now, my taste in music remains the same as it has been for a while: ++epic metal. My favorite bands are still Rhapsody(of Fire), Blind Guardian, Kamelot, and TÝR. But I have started listening to some different bands recently too, and there’s a new TÝR album out as well, Land. So, without further ado, a list of bands I listen to that I haven’t described before:

• DragonForce. You might have heard of this band; they’ve gained a sort of popularity due to the opening track of their album Inhuman Rampage, “Through the Fire and Flames”, being the final bonus track in the game “Guitar Hero III”. (I have actually played that game a few times, though I don’t own it, and beaten TTFAF on ‘medium’ difficulty; it is quite a fun song for that game, and I can see why they picked it.) Their strengths are that they have two really good lead guitarists, a quite good keyboardist, and a lyricist who is rather good at writing cool-sounding fantasy-themed lyrics even if they don’t really hang together into a coherent, well, anything.Their weaknesses are exactly what you would expect given those strengths; they rely too much, IMO, on long guitar solos. First of all, almost all of their songs are formatted like so: introduction with lyrics and guitars and/or keyboard, guitar/keyboard solo(s), short stretch of lyrics and guitars/keyboard again, a long series of guitar/keyboard solos, and an ending with lyrics and guitars/keyboard. Their songs tend not to have much of a sense of purpose – they have some lyrics, and then play around on their instruments – which they are quite skilled at, no doubt – and then they have some more lyrics and the song ends. Their songs tend to be 6-7 minutes long, but they could stop after 3-4 minutes and it would be just as good – they just keep going because they like to play around with their instruments. This results in the listener being really into the song for the first few minutes and then growing bored (since I find lyrics more interesting than instruments, this usually happens for me about when the singer stops singing). My second complaint is that their lyrics tend to not really make sense. This is somewhat intentional on their part; I remember reading somewhere that they take their music seriously but not their lyrics. Still, I would like to be able to tell, for example, whether the lyrics are from the point of view of the “bad guys” or the “good guys”, and sometimes I can’t even tell that much – not because the story seems to be morally ambiguous, but because you just can’t tell what’s going on, or if there is anything going on at all rather than just a bunch of cool-sounding fantasy lyrics that don’t mean anything.Still, for all my complaints I do like DragonForce, and listen to them a lot. My favorite song at the moment is “Soldiers of the Wasteland”.
• Elvenking. You know it’s a strange band when the members refer to themselves as “Aydan”, “Damnagoras”, etc, rather than having actual names. Last.fm claims they’re similar to Rhapsody(of Fire), but, really, they’re not – Rhapsody(of Fire) is much better. I don’t really know how to describe Elvenking; their songs somewhat irritate me, but I keep listening to them, and they do seem to have a sort of merit to them.
• Ensiferum. This is one of the only bands I listen to that does “death growls”. I normally don’t like death growls, but they work well with Ensiferum, I think. This band sounds, I think, basically like a harsher, angrier version of Rhapsody – they have the bombastic guitars and keyboard, and a real strong fantasy sound, but the vocals are more aggressive. I rather like it; much better, anyway, than something like Amon Amarth which has the anger but not the power. They are rather similar to, but better than, I think,
• Turisas. Both of these bands are Finnish, too; it must be something about how much power metal has come out of Finland that makes even the non-power metal bands (these two are viking metal) still sound something like power metal – the fast guitars and orchestral sound being key. Turisas uses death growls as well, in about equal proportion with normal vocals.
• Falconer. This band is Swedish, and does not have a whole lot going for it, but not a whole lot against it either. It is somewhat generic power metal. Still, it is fairly good; they have some folk influences, a decent guitarist, and their lyrics are not bad at all. They also have an instrumental song on their album Northwind called “Black Tarn”; any use of the word “tarn” gets them points, in my opinion.

And, finally, a summary of the new TÝR album Land. It’s quite good, but not nearly as good as Ragnarok. I actually have some of the complaints I have with it as I have with DragonForce, even though their sounds are wildly different from each other – namely, that the songs on this album tend not to have much arc to them, and rather they just find a cool riff and noodle around with it for five minutes. Some of the songs don’t have this problem – the opening track, for instance, though it almost doesn’t count since half of it is just a poem being recited, not really music at all – but tragically, the two longest songs both do.

Now, I’m a big fan of long, >10 minute epic metal songs, but they have to be done correctly. Blind Guardian and Rhapsody both know how to do this; the longest BG song, “And Then There Was Silence”, about the fall of Troy, manages to have enough variation, what with tempo changes, dynamics changes, and sudden stops (about three minutes into the song everything goes almost silent for about five seconds), to remain interesting for the entire 14 minutes 3 seconds. The same with the two longest Rhapsody(of Fire) songs (they have seven over ten minutes, but only two are over fifteen minutes) – Rhapsody even  goes so far as to divide them into five sections for one and three for the other, and each section (they’re 3-6 minutes in length) each has its own feel to it. And it certainly helps that all three of these epic-length songs tell a story. With Ocean (ten minutes) and Land (sixteen minutes), though, there is no real story to be told, and so while the lyrics are cool, the music is cool, and the sound effects are cool (the sound of waves on the open ocean is used at the end of Land, and in Ocean, if I recall correctly), I come away from both of them just thinking, “these are just too long“… which is a real shame.

Also, only three and a half of the songs are in English (Ocean, Land, Hail to the Hammer, and part of Brennivin), and, as cool as it is to listen to songs in Faroese, Norwegian, and whatever else they throw at us,  I honestly prefer listening to songs in plain old English – it means I can understand what they’re saying and follow the storyline of the song. For me, lyrics tend to be more important than anything else (not to say that nothing else is important!), and so while I can handle having a few songs in other languages, I would have preferred to have a bit more English on the album.

Body Breakdown (June)

What is that a picture of? Well, it’s the animation I did last night for the Death Knight unit. (If you don’t see an animation, try loading the image in a new window/tab in your browser. Sometimes it’ll only show the animation once instead of looping it, so if you miss that one showing, it looks like a static image.)

I spent probably two, maybe three hours on it already. But there are still obvious problems with it – the leg motion doesn’t look convincing, and the cape doesn’t really either. I almost think it might need another frame because it looks like he’s stopping mid-swing. The first two of those are problems I haven’t figured out how to fix yet; the third, I haven’t decided whether I’m going to actually try making another frame or not.

Well, I don’t really mind that the animation has problems with it. I’m still honing my pixel art skills, and even what I have here is better what I could do even a year ago (and I’ve been doing pixel art on and off for what, four years?). But it seems absurd to me that it took almost three hours to make that. Look at it. Even if it looked perfect, which it doesn’t, it doesn’t look like something that should take several hours to complete. (Keep in mind that I didn’t draw the base frame, only the attacking animation.) The images are only 72 pixels by 72 pixels, and there’s only six frames! It’s like less than a second of extremely low-resolution film. But it took hours to make.

Anyway, my point is, making anything just takes a long time.

Which means that, no matter how much time I spend working on the Imperial Era this summer, I’m not going to get it anywhere near a “completed” state. Which is frustrating. And after August I’ll be in Rome, where I probably won’t be on my computer nearly as much.

It’s almost like I’m out of control, in that life is speeding past me as I’m trying to get things done. Reminds me of this DragonForce song (for which this post is named).

Anyway, this is kind of a stretch, but I’m going to tie together all aspects of this post by choosing, as the character of the month, Lionel the Lost General (who is a Death Knight), as seen in his eponymous Heir to the Throne scenario. For his body, you see, is rotting away, breaking down. And I just made the attack animation for his unit type.

There is some coherence behind it; Lionel says, at one point, “I am destroyed, but my mission must be completed.” I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to connect this to the rest of my post in the manner of a Túrin Speaks blog post.

The point is, for June, I am Lionel, the Death Knight.

This is a portrait of a Deathblade, but it’s the closest we have – there’s no Death Knight portrait.

Quantity

Sometimes I find the sheer amount of music out there amazing.

Take metal, for example. It’s generally considered a somewhat fringe genre; not a whole lot of people listen to it. So you’d expect there to not be a whole helluvalot of metal bands. But, on the contrary, there are a great number. And they are quite diverse. The name “metal” is actually quite misleading; I don’t think it makes any sense to group everything called metal into one category. I would never, for example, listen to this voluntarily. I would rather listen to country or, even *shudder* rap. So what I listen to is really this one sub-genre of this one fringe genre. And yet there are dozens of bands that play the kind of music I listen to.

And I suspect this is true for a lot of other genres. I might see most kinds of rap as similar, but anyone who listens to rap probably draws a sharp distinction between their kind and the other kinds (I can’t give examples, I don’t know anything about rap). Same for electronic, country, folk, etc.

Cool as this sometimes seems, it seems somewhat disconcerting. If there’s nothing that everyone agrees to listen to, how can we say that anything has any kind of artistic merit? I tend to think some of the bands I listen to (not all of them, but some of them) are actually worth listening to, objectively – in other words, they are good art. But the same is doubtlessly true of a number of other people, all  of whom listen to different mutually exclusive genres. So how do we decide what is truly meritorious?  It seems like we no longer have people like the old classical composers, who everyone agrees are worthwhile. We just have a million different people singing various songs and no consensus on who’s better than whom.

I suppose it might be that, eventually, a few decades from now, there’ll be some idea of what current music is trash and what is decent. At least some more developed idea that what we have right now. But until then…

Love is the Only Truth (3/4)

Then there’s Kamelot, an American band led by Roy Khan on vocals and Thomas Youngblood on guitar, with the two of them co-writing the songs. (I’ll mention right off the bat that those two names are pretty awesome. Roy Khan’s actual name is Roy Khantatat, and Thomas Youngblood is the guy’s real name. I think that’s amazing, since those names seem like perfect power metal musician pseudonyms.)

Kamelot is in medium much more like Blind Guardian than Rhapsody of Fire. This isn’t surprising – I doubt anyone else could pull off what Rhapsody of Fire does. It’s just too weird. Most epic metal groups, Kamelot included, are better off with albums in which different tracks are about different things (though all of them epic), with a concept album or two thrown into the mix – but no concept albums so engrossed in their conception that they forget they’re albums at all.

I have four of Kamelot’s albums – Karma, Epica, The Black Halo, and Ghost Opera. Karma is roughly analogous to Blind Guardian’s earlier work, in that it is fairly standard power metal (and quite good power metal at that). Epica and The Black Halo are, taken together, roughly analogous to Nightfall in Middle-Earth; they’re concept albums loosely translating the story of Faust. Ghost Opera is roughly analogous to A Night at the Opera, with the basic idea being “these are various stories you would see if you went to the opera-house one night”.

Interestingly, both have tracks centered on the story of Pontius Pilate (“Up Through the Ashes” and “Sadly Sings Destiny”, respectively). I also wonder about the beliefs of the member of both of these bands – it seems to me Kamelot is inspired greatly by Catholicism, and I think at least one of them was probably raised Catholic, but they seem to have a mixed view of the Church. Blind Guardian is similar. I’m not sure what to make of that, but it’s certainly more interesting than Avantasia’s blatant anti-Catholicism.

Anyway… despite these similarities, Kamelot’s work is not analagous to Blind Guardian’s in content. They never talk about mythopoeia directly, except in their most recent album Ghost Opera, and even there the idea is only implied. Blind Guardian might be best termed an “artist metal” band, in that they deal with artistry per se, and Rhapsody of Fire could be called a “myth metal” band, in that they don’t just talk about making myths, they do make myths, but Kamelot is probably best called a “philosophy metal” band.

Let’s start with Karma. The first track (with lyrics – “Regalis Apertura” is instrumental only), “Forever”, is about a guy wondering what has happened to his dead lover, and whether they will be reunited once he dies as well. “Wings of Despair” has to do with, well, despair, at the idea that everything is predestined. “The Spell” laments that the modern world is too scientific and isn’t magical enough (at least that’s my take on the lyrics). “Don’t You Cry” is a tribute to Thomas Youngblood’s deceased father, talking about how father and son are still connected. “Karma” has an evil king realizing he has lived an evil life, and wishing he could trade his karma with someone else. “The Light I Shine On You” – well, I don’t really understand it, but it seems to be about the power lovers have over each other. “Temples of Gold”, well, a simple love ballad. Then right back to the philosophy with “Across the Highlands” claiming that immortality would be torture, that the narrator “is dead if life itself is condemnation”. The final three tracks are the Elizabeth Bathory series, about the historical Hungarian countess who bathed in the blood of virgins because she believed it would give her eternal youth.

Ghost Opera is quite similar. “Rule the World”? Man’s fear of the Other. “Ghost Opera”? Perseverance through hardship, or something like that. “The Human Stain”? Life itself is perhaps an evil. “Bluecher”? The fate of love when facing death on the battlefield. “Love You to Death”? Same thing, sans the battlefield. “Up Through the Ashes”? Whether or not Jesus was the Christ. “Mourning Star”? War and the fear of death inspiring belief in God. “Silence of the Darkness”? Similar to “Rule the World”. “Anthem”? “What’s the miracle, if life itself is not? /Who am I to praise it’s worth / With a hymn?” Finally, “Edenecho” is about the despair felt at romantic love – destroyed.

So it seems to me that Kamelot has two main interests – the meaning of romantic love and death/afterlife/immortality. These seem to be the predominant themes in Karma and Ghost Opera, anyway.

Now let’s take a look at Epica and The Black Halo. First, note that they chose the legend of Doctor Faustus for their concept double-album. Like Blind Guardian’s choice of the Silmarillion for Nightfall in Middle-Earth, this tells quite a lot about how to view the two albums. The story of Faust, especially as Goethe tells it, is one of love versus pleasure versus eternal salvation. (If you don’t know the basic plot, you should look into it – it’s a fascinating story, and several great works of art have been inspired by it.)

All this is well and good, but… now that we know what Kamelot’s questions are, we should ask – what are their answers? The entirety of the Faust sequence is Faust searching for these answers, but in the final few tracks – “Nothing Ever Dies”, “Memento Mori”, and “Serenade” – we see what he arrives at. I think that Faust’s answers are ones Kamelot would agree with, though of course I can’t be sure.

In Nothing Ever Dies, Faust proclaims that

Love is the only truth
Pure as the well of youth
Until it breaks your heart

He follows this up with

And the final winter comes to us all
Life is treacherous
But you’re not the only who must pretend

We’re a second in time
We’re the last in the line
Of the prey that walks the earth
Good and evil combined

I am the god in my own history
The master of the game
I may believe if she would come to me
And whisper out my name

So – man is doomed to die, a beast, and yet a god, and he achieves this godhood through love. I find it fascinating that “love is the only truth”. This seems similar to Rhapsody of Fire’s emphasis on “pure love and great emotion”, but it is much stronger. Love is the only truth? And I ask – what is love? Romantic love? Since in the next song Faust talks about how “she (Helena) [will] come to me / and whisper out my name”, I think that is what he means.

Interestingly, Kamelot seems to place romantic love in opposition to sexual desire. Kamelot’s idea of love seems to be quite spiritual and ethereal. I like that in many ways, but I wonder if they don’t tend too much towards that extreme – after all, humans are physical, and the purpose of romantic love is in some sense procreation.

Onwards and upwards. The final track, Serenade, isn’t part of the Faust saga per se. It seems to be meant as a summation of the ideas discussed in the preceding two-dozen-or-so tracks. The chorus goes,

So bow down with me
Where summer fades into fall
And leave your hatchets of hate
Bow down with me
And sing the saddest of all
The song we all serenade

This saddest song that “we all serenade” is apparently the fact that, as humans, we are doomed to death. The idea seems to be that we ought not to fight each other, because death will come for us all anyway – instead, we ought to love. It sounds cliche, but it is a noble sentiment nonetheless.

I find it interesting that in the track “III Ways to Epica”, from Epica, Faust says that

Maybe God is the melody
We all serenade

Kamelot seems to be suggesting either that God is death, or that God is love – two very different ideas. It seems that death and love are deeply, perhaps irreversibly intertwined in Kamelot’s philosophy; perhaps the ambiguity is intentional.

Primordial Myth (2/4)

Another of my favorite epic metal groups is Rhapsody of Fire. Formerly known as just Rhapsody. That can be confusing at times. Anyway…

Rhapsody of fire is in some ways the opposite of Blind Guardian. They do not present themselves as bards telling a story. In fact, they do not really present their albums as stories at all – they present them as histories of true events. These aren’t just concept albums, they’re series of concept albums forming a single giant story arc – two, really, the Emerald Sword Saga and the Dark Secret Saga.

In a way, they do what Blind Guardian talks about doing. Blind Guardian’s songs talk about mythopoeia, but Rhapsody of Fire’s songs are mythopoeia to an extent that Blind Guardian never reaches, and I think precisely because they are completely un-self-conscious. Their art is not like literature, it is like the most primordial myth. And myths don’t have storytellers, they simply are.

So Rhapsody of Fire is in a certain sense less sophisticated, less complex, than any of the other groups here. The result of this is that you don’t view their works from the outside to appreciate the artistic skill that went into them. You are either completely immersed in them, or you find them absurd.

That said, even if they are in essence more myth than literature, they can still be analyzed for meaning. Mythopoeic worlds are hard, I think impossible, to create ‘without bias’ – i.e., without arguing at least implicitly for some view of the fundamental nature of the world. In any case, Rhapsody of Fire makes its views quite plainly known through the lyrics of the songs.

Their main focus is the eternal struggle between good and evil. This takes mostly the form of good guys versus bad guys. As band’s lyricist (and guitarist), Luca Turilli, has said,

Evil can be found everywhere. But it will never win as long as there are enough good people who fight against it.

But I think they go deeper than this simplistic us versus them. Consider the following passage, from Son of Pain.

I’M THE SON OF PAIN
WELCOME MY NEW FATE
THUNDER GODS I PRAY
I DENY HELL’S FLAMES

The meaning of this may not be immediately obvious. The speaker is Dargor, who is half-demon, half-man. He has chosen to deny his demon nature and fight for the Light (represented here by the “thunder gods”… I’m not going to get into their cosmology, which I think is vaguely pantheistic). Though the Warrior of Ice is the main character of the Emerald Sword Saga, he does not in the end turn out to be the main character; that would be Dargor. This same Dargor reappears in the Dark Secret Saga. Dargor is indeed half-man half-demon, but he is in many ways the most human character in the sagas. He shows that when Luca Turilli says “evil can be found everywhere”, he means even in the hearts of good men. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said,

 If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, an it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

But, then… what is meant by good and evil?

I think we can see Rhapsody of Fire’s answer to this in what happens to be my favorite song, “Silent Dream”:

FLY, FLY HIGH
ENLIGHT MY HEART AND MY EYES
BRING HOPE WITH YOUR HOLY SUNLIGHT
THE ANGELS’ FIRE

I’LL BELIEVE
IN WHAT THE WIND BRINGS TO ME
IN PURE LOVE AND GREAT EMOTION
I WILL BELIEVE

Following the “pure love and great emotion” is the good. The evil characters in the sagas are truly evil – they are for the most part demons. One is named “Queen of the Dark Horizons”. The main enemy is Kron, the War God. Their division between good and evil is quite simple. That which is evil is abhorrent, disgusting, focused on eliminating all life from the universe. That which is good loves life. I don’t think this simplicity is necessarily bad, though I disagree with the implied pantheism.

Incidentally, it’s kind of ironic that I like them, since in many ways I distrust emotions and would prefer to be a completely rational creature. I think I like them because what they believe is what I wish I could believe.