"Humankind does not live by edifices alone. The constant temptation of ancient monarchs was to seize grandeur rather than earn it, by coercing

resources from the margins to the center, to invest in ostentation and display. The Justinian who is remembered for what he built is not the Justinian of history - or, rather, is an embodiment of the weakness of that Justinian. To see Hagia Sophia and the great church Justinian built in Jerusalem as testimonies to his weakness and shortsightedness is to see them as they really are. The outsize scale of his buildings shouts aloud the ego and insecurity of their creator. Justinian and his great empire proved vulnerable to the tiniest of enemies, the plague bacillus.

"The years in which his military campaigns in the west went bad and he found himself in his Italian quagmire were dismal ones spent close to home. So much Justinian scholarship has concentrated on the self-glorifying legal, military, and architectural self-assertion of the early years that an important recent scholarly work was impishly called 'The Other Age of Justinian' - precisely to signal the long years of frustration and decline that formed part of the career of this grandiose monarch. ...

"Ancient empires kept abundant financial records, but hardly any of those documents survive. (Palaces and their archives are designed to be plundered, sooner or later.) A recent scholar has made some sober estimates of the profligacy of Justinian's expenditures. A summary of the bad news runs something like this:

· Justinian is reported to have begun his reign with 28 million solidi 'in the bank,' reserves that [his predecessors] Anastasius built up and Justin preserved.

· Justinian's wars cost him about 36 million solidi, with some interesting proportions:

- About 5 million on the eastern front

- About 8 million in Africa, half of it after 'victory' was achieved

in Belisarius's short campaign

- About 21.5 million in Italy, fully half of it in the last two ruinous years 552-554

· By comparison, his annual revenues for a good year of his reign amounted to about 5 million solidi; when Africa and Italy were added to his domains, they brought about another ten percent each, or 500,000 solidi each. Most of that revenue was expended locally on governing those restive provinces

"When he began to feel the financial pressures of such extravagant wars, Justinian took the natural action of a martial but improvident ruler: he

plundered his own subjects and attacked his own currency, progressively thinning out the amount of bronze in the coinage and profiting handsomely at the treasury as a result. The effects of such a devaluation were slow but inevitable.

"Justinian's successor inherited (with Italy and Africa) greater responsibilities than Justinian began with, and had far more restricted financial capacity to address them. No emperor at Constantinople after Justinian had the opportunity for both lavish construction and warfare that Justinian had squandered so unwisely."

Author: James J. O'Donnell

Title: The Ruin of the Roman Empire

Publisher: HarperCollins

Date: Copyright 2008 by James J. O'Donnell

Pages: 285-289

"A tortuous path had led Demosthenes to the speaker's platform. His boyhood had been lonely. A weakling with a chronic stutter, he made no friends at wrestling practice or hunting parties. His father died when Demosthenes was only seven, and from then on Demosthenes lived at home with his mother and sister. To an outside observer the boy must have appeared starved for companionship. But he had one constant friend, a familiar spirit from the past: Thucydides. The historian had been dead for some three decades, but his stirring voice lived on. Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War fired Demosthenes' imagination with tales of perilous adventures and epic battles. Unrolling his copy, he was transported back to an age when Athens blazed with glory, its navy seemingly indomitable and its leaders larger than life. Demosthenes read the whole book eight times and knew parts of it by heart.

"Demosthenes' father had left him an inheritance worth fourteen talents (a talent was worth very roughly 11,700 troy ounces in silver or $150,000),
some of it tied up in a factory that manufactured swords. He therefore
expected to be financially independent when he turned eighteen, an event
that took place five years after Athens made its final peace with Sparta. But
it proved a painful coming of age. The three guardians appointed in his
father's will had stolen or squandered most of his inheritance. Of the fourteen talents in money and property left to Demosthenes, only a little over one talent remained. To rub salt in the wound, the embezzlers had concealed their depletion of the estate by enrolling young Demosthenes in the highest bracket for taxes and liturgics. At the age of seventeen he was already listed among the trierarchs [those wealthy enough to be required to fund the military trireme warships] and had made partial payment for the outfitting of a trireme. Two of the guardians were his own cousins, but Demosthenes filed a lawsuit against them, family or no.

"Two years passed before the case came to trial, and during that time
Demosthenes prepared tirelessly for his day in court. Athenian juries expected citizens to speak for themselves, even if professional speechwriters had been hired to compose the speeches. Demosthenes, intensely self-critical, knew that he made a poor impression. He could do nothing about his wretched physique or habitual scowl, but he learned by listening to actors and orators that he could at least train and strengthen his voice. He began to make solitary excursions to a deserted beach and strained to make himself heard through the whistling wind and crashing waves. To overcome his speech impediment, Demosthenes would put a pebble in his mouth and work his tongue around the stone while still trying to pronounce words clearly. Away from the beach, he declaimed speeches while walking or running up steep hillsides, Skinny legs working, narrow chest heaving, his delivery eventually became smooth even as he almost gasped for breath. Demosthenes had inherited a true Athenian's competitive nature, but he turned it not toward wrestling or running but toward public speaking. [His inherited fortune proved unrecoverable but he made a second fortune through his powerful oratory.]"

Author: John R. Hale
Title: Lords of the Sea
Publisher: Viking
Date: Copyright 2009 by John R. Hale
Pages: 280-281

By Homer's day Egypt was well known to the Greek world. Egypt came to be seen not only as a source for riches but for all knowledge, as early Greek intellectuals such as Thales were said to have learned their ideas from Egyptian sources. By the Classical period there was a steady stream of Greek visitors to the country, of which Herodotos was the most famous. ...

So it is perhaps no surprise that Alexander the Great, accompanied by two of Cleopatra's ancestors, would [conquer] Egypt. But perhaps more significant for the future was Alexander's assumption of the religious titles and honors of the Egyptian king (and pharaoh). ... Association with Egyptian cult and royalty also gave Alexander access to the concept of deification of the ruler, something alien to the Greek world. Greek leaders had long been bestowed with quasi-divine honors in recognition of their services, but Alexander, a unique personality, became essentially a god. This concept of divine monarchy would continue into Cleopatra's day and affect the self-image of the Roman emperors.

Another significant accomplishment of Alexander's [was] laying out a new city, to be named Alexandria, one of many such foundations that he would make. He designated the grid for the city himself and located its major building sites, and Alexandria was formally founded on 7 April 331 B.C. Recording the events was his close companion, [childhood friend] and Cleopatra's ancestor, Ptolemy I.

Eight years later, at the end of 323 B.C., Ptolemy was back in Egypt. Alexander had died at Babylon in the summer, leaving no provisions for governance of his realm, and the 40-year-long struggle of his successors was under way. In the assignment of territory after Alexander's death, Ptolemy had received Egypt as his satrapy - the Persian administrative model was still in use-but soon he began to act as if he were an independent ruler. Shortly thereafter he engineered the major coup of his career, bringing the body of Alexander to Egypt and eventually enshrining it in a monumental tomb at Alexandria, creating a royal burial precinct that would be part of the palace compound. As
the successor to Alexander, Ptolemy could acquire his divine attributes for himself, both those connected to the personality of his predecessor and those obtained through ancient Egyptian ruler cult. Ptolemy thus had a status that none of the other successors could ever claim, and this passed to his descendants. By 305 B.C. he was calling himself king and in the following year was crowned as Egyptian pharoah.

Monarchy, which had lost favor in the Greek world in the sixth century B.C, had been rejuvenated through the personality of Alexander. The failure of the Classical city-states to create stable governments had discredited the more broadly based systems such as democracy, and from at least the time of Plato political theorists had seen monarchy, of a proper sort, as the best form of government. Alexander's personal charisma had restored faith in monarchy - assisted, perhaps, by his association with the outstanding political theorist of his era, Aristotle - and after Alexander's death many of the successors adopted the title of 'king.'

Author: Duane W. Roller
Title: Cleopatra
Publisher: Oxford
Date: Copyright 2010 by Oxford University Press
Pages: 29-31

Jaques:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
As You Like It Act 2, scene 7, 139–143

"Nothing is more active than thought, for it travels over the universe, and nothing is stronger than necessity for all must submit to it." -Thales

"Every Sunday the family, clad in black and bearing flowers, set off to the little cemetery at Groot-Zundert, where they went directly from the gate to a grave marked 'Vincent Wilhelm Van Gogh 1852.' A single date to mark a birth and a death, for this was the grave of a child six weeks old. As the father, mother, two sons and three daughters prayed, the eldest of the boys--also called Vincent Wilhelm--stared intensely at the gravestone and the name, his brother's, that was also his own."
The young Vincent Wilhelm was born March 30, 1853, a year to the day after the death of his brother. Was his destiny to be that of an earthly replacement for the child now lying at his feet beneath the slab of gray stone? To take the place of another? Or was he himself the other his identity had usurped?
Each Sunday little Vincent Van Gogh--the new Vincent--asked himself the same question, not daring to look at his mother with her hands joined and her eyes brimming with tears. Whom was she praying for? The dead child? Or for Vincent himself, the substitute? As they silently made their way home, Vincent, troubled and riven with doubt, stayed huddled against his younger brother Theo, born May 1, 1857, with whom he was very close.
The dismal ritual was repeated every Sunday for years. Every March 30, they celebrated Vincent's birthday, but who were the celebrations really for? The dead child or the boy who was now ten years old? ..."All his life Vincent would struggle against a brother more insistently present than if he had actually been alive, as his parents inevitably measured him against the virtues they attributed to the lost child."
Pierre Cabanne, Van Gogh, Terrail, 2006, pp. 7-8.

"Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Shylock, The Merchant of Venice (3.1.48-49)

Doesn't a Jew have eyes like us? And doesn't a Jew have hands and bodily oprgans and a human shape, and the five senses and feelings and passions?

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English composers of religious music, in particular William Byrd and John Taverner, are among Muhly's (Nico Muhly, the 26-year-old American classical and electroacoustic composing prodigy) chief influences, though he also draws musical inspiration from the spare repetitions of Philip Glass and Steve Reich and from the off-kilter rhythms of songs by Björk, whose recordings he has worked on. ... "

Philip Glass, for whom Muhly has worked since his sophomore year of college, at Columbia, says that he finds in Muhly 'a curious ear, a restless listening, and a maker of works. He's doing his own thing.' (Although Muhly is much in demand as a composer in his own right, he still has a day job, which includes feeding Glass's film-music manuscripts into a computer program that can play the scores.)

Following the model of Glass, Muhly prefers to have his work performed as often as possible, and in as many different contexts as possible, rather than refining his compositions within the academy. In the past year, American Ballet Theatre staged a ballet, 'From Here on Out,' on which Muhly collaborated with Benjamin Millepied; the Boston Pops premièred his composition 'Wish You Were Here'; and he made his Carnegie Hall début as a composer, when a program of his works, which he paired with Renaissance choral music, was performed in Zankel Hall. ..."

When Muhly composes, the last thing he thinks about is the actual notes that musicians will play. He begins with books and documents, YouTube videos and illuminated manuscripts. He meditates on this material, digesting its ironies and appreciating its aesthetics. Meanwhile, he devises an emotional scheme for the piece-the journey on which he intends to lead his listener. ..."Muhly usually composes on sheets of manuscript paper, though sometimes he also uses an electronic keyboard, which sits on his desk next to two large computer monitors. One afternoon when I was watching him at work, one screen displayed two pages of a score, and the other showed his e-mail inbox and several open instant-message chats with friends. (Muhly does not require silence or seclusion while working and, in addition to conducting multiple online conversations while composing, often has several online games of Scrabble under way.) ..."

Muhly started to play the organ in addition to the piano; one day when he was ten, his mother took him to Trinity Church, in Boston, where she knew the assistant organist, ... [who] asked if he would like to play something. He sat down and his feet couldn't even reach the pedals. He said, 'I am going to play some Bach,' and this big sound came roaring out of the organ. There were all these people taking a tour of the church who were saying, 'Who's playing?,' because he was only four feet tall. That afternoon, [she] recalls, Muhly started composing his first piece of music, a setting of a Kyrie for choir, on a napkin at a coffee shop in Harvard Square. 'He wrote it vertically- all the parts simultaneously,' she says. 'He was thinking in chords, rather than in individual lines. He said, 'That's how I hear it.' ' "Rebecca Mead, "Eerily Composed," The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2008, pp. 74- 78.

"To be, or not to be: that is the question". Hamlet (Act III, Sc. I).

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry". Hamlet Act I, Sc. III).

"This above all: to thine own self be true" Hamlet (Act I, Sc. III).

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) was an American composer of classical music. Barber's Adagio has become recognized as one of the truly powerful and enduring pieces of the twentieth century

(Samuel) "Barber had met and fallen in love with his fellow- student at the Curtis Institute, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, in the autumn of 1928 and--though you would hardly believe they were more than devoted friends from Barbara B. Heyman's otherwise thorough biography--they were to share a house as lovers for over thirty years. The summer of 1936, which Barber spent spent with Menotti in the Austrian mountain village of St. Wolfgang, was one of the most idyllic times either could remember, and it was toward the end of their stay there that Barber wrote to the cellist Orlando Cole: 'I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today--it is a knockout!' When, encouraged by Arturo Toscanini, Barber made a five-part arrangement of the string quartet's adagio for string orchestra and Toscanini duly conducted it, the Adagio entered the orchestral repertoire ... [and] won the praise of Barber's contemporaries. Copland praised its 'sense of continuity, the steadiness of the flow, the satisfaction of the arch that it creates from beginning to end,' asserting that 'it comes straight from the heart,' while William Schuman thought 'it works because it's so precise emotionally ... you're not aware of any technique at all.' And Virgil Thomson came closest to the reason why when he described it as 'a detailed love scene' --a fact which its subsequent memorial usage has all but obliterated."


David Nice, Elegy: Music for Strings, Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Jarvi, Notes on the Music, Chandos Records

"True Hope is swift and flies with swallows's wings. Kings it makes gods and meaner creatures kings" Richmond in Richard 111 (5.2.23-24)

Hope with good cause is swift; it flies as fast as a swallow. It turns kings into gods and men of lower rank into kings

We are blessed by having more extant words written about Socrates than any other man of his time, and cursed by the fact that we cannot tell which, if any, of these words are true. We can be certain that Plato and Xenophon were not committed to factual reporting. ... Socrates himself wrote nothing, and the work of his immediate followers, after his death, is not historically reliable."Generations of classical scholars ... [have] chosen to privilege Plato's portrait over those Xenophon's or anyone else. And so the Socrates who is likely to be familiar is Plato's Socrates: the merciless interrogator, committed to nothing but the truth, and determined, by means of incisive argument, to lay his own and our moral lives on a foundation of knowledge rather than opinion; a specialist in moral philosophy and moral psychology; a man of immense moral integrity, who was unjustly put to death (by drinking a cup of poison hemlock), aged sixty-nine or seventy, by the classical Athenian democracy under which he lived. "But the uncomfortable truth is that little or nothing of this picture of Socrates may be accurate. Plato's description of Socrates' philosophy was actually a clever way of outlining and introducing Plato's own philosophy."In the course of his speech 'Against Timarchus', the politician Aeschines referred to Socrates' trial, saying that the Athenian people condemned him for having been the teacher of Critias. Aeschines was speaking in 345 BC, fifty-four years after Socrates' trial. ... Critias was one of the leaders of the Thirty Tyrants, the oligarchic junta which Sparta imposed on the Athenians in 404 BC after defeating them in the Peloponnesian War. The Thirty aspired to turn Athens into a hierarchical, Spartan-style society. They restricted the number of citizens to 3,000, disarmed everyone else, awarded themselves the power of life or death over all non-citizens, and expelled all non-citizens from living within the city itself. Non- citizens were to be the farmers, manufacturers and merchants for the elite 3,000, while all political power was effectively vested in the Thirty and their henchmen. In order to see through their radical program of social reform, and in order to raise much needed cash (the city had been bankrupted by the war), they murdered about 1,500 people in a few weeks. Many more fled into exile. "The Thirty were soon defeated. Critias was killed and the rest fled or were allowed to leave. But Critias had long been a friend and student of Socrates, who had became tainted by the association. [Socrates] tolerated even the excesses of the Thirty because he was, at least to a degree, sympathetic to their aims ... of favouring a Spartan-style society over Athenian democracy."There can be no doubt, then, that Socrates' trial was politically motivated, and there can be no doubt that, from the point of view of the Athenian democracy, he was guilty as charged. He was no true citizen of the democracy. There can be no doubt, either, that attention to the historical facts surrounding the case must lead us to qualify the Platonic-Xenophontic portrait of Socrates. He was put on trial as a political undesirable, and his radical political vision was indeed anti-democratic. This is not the Socrates with whom we are comfortably familiar, but it is more likely to be closer to the truth than the fictions that permeate the literary evidence."

Robin Waterfield, "The Historical Socrates," History Today, January 09, pp. 26-29.

In the spring of 1928, George Gershwin, [born in the Lower East Side slums of Manhattan and now the acclaimed] creator of Rhapsody in Blue, toured Europe and met the leading composers of the day. In Vienna, he called at the home of Alban Berg, whose blood-soaked, dissonant, sublimely dark opera Wozzeck had had its premiere in Berlin three years earlier.

To welcome his American visitor, Berg arranged for a string quartet to perform his Lyric Suite, in which Viennese lyricism was refined into something like a dangerous narcotic."Gershwin then went to the piano to play some of his own songs. He hesitated. Berg's work had left him awestruck. Were his own pieces worthy of these murky, opulent surroundings? Berg looked at him sternly and said, 'Mr. Gershwin, music is music.' ... Berg's Wozzeck is, for some, one of the most gripping operas ever written. Gershwin thought so, and emulated it in [his masterwork] Porgy and Bess, not least in the hazy chords that float through 'Summerime.'

For others, Wozzeck is a welter of ugliness."DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy had long interested Gershwin as a subject. ... Gershwin later said that he liked the story because of its mix of humor and drama; it allowed him to shift between Broadway-style song-and-dance numbers and vocal-symphonic writing in the style of Wozzeck.

"Porgy begins with an introductory orchestral and choral explosion in which Gershwin shows off what he has learned from his experiments in modern music. ...

The texture then subsides toward a summery, humid kind of stillness. A new ostinato gets under way, one of alternating half-diminished sevenths, recalling Wozzeck again-Marie's song of 'Eia popeia' to her child. Gershwin even uses his chords for the same scenic purpose, to accompany a mother's soothing lullaby. If the kid from the Lower East Side seems in danger of losing himself in European arcana, there is no reason to worry. We are listening to one of the best-loved melodies of the twentieth century: 'Summertime, and the living is easy ..."Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Copyright 2007 by Alex Ross, pp. xi-xii, 148- 149.

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't." Hamlet (Act II, Scene II).

"That it should come to this!". Hamlet (Act I, Scene II).

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" Hamlet (Act II, Sc. II).

"What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! " Hamlet (Act II, Sc. II).

Pygmalion is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton he is most familiar from Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.

In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides prostituting themselves, he was 'not interested in women', but his statue was so realistic that he fell in love with it. He offered the statue gifts and eventually prayed to Venus (Aphrodite). She took pity on him and brought the statue to life. They married and had a son, Paphos:

"a lovely boy was born;
Paphos his name, who grown to manhood, wall'd
The city Paphos, from the founder call'd."

In some versions they also had a daughter, Metharme.

Ovid's mention of Paphos suggests that he was drawing on a more circumstantial account than the source for a passing mention of Pygmalion in Pseudo-Apollodorus' Bibliotheke, a Hellenic mythography of the second-century AD. Perhaps he drew on the lost narrative by Philostephanus that was paraphrased by Clement of Alexandria. Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton and figures in the founding legend of Paphos in Cyprus.

The story of the breath of life in a statue has parallels in the examples of Daedalus, who used quicksilver to install a voice in his statues; of Hephaestus, who created automata for his workshop; of Talos, an artificial man of bronze; and, according to Hesiod, Pandora, who was made from clay at the behest of Zeus.

The moral anecdote of the "Apega of Nabis", recounted by the historian Polybius, described a supposed mechanical simulacra of the tyrant's wife, that crushed victims in her embrace.
The discovery of the Antikythera mechanism suggests that such rumoured animated statues had some grounding in contemporary mechanical technology. The island of Rhodes was particularly known for its displays of mechanical engineering and automata - Pindar, one of the nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, said this of Rhodes in his seventh Olympic Ode:

"The animated figures stand
Adorning every public street
And seem to breathe in stone, or
move their marble feet."

The trope of a sculpture so lifelike it seemed about to move was a commonplace with writers on works of art in Antiquity that was inherited by writers on art after the Renaissance.
The basic Pygmalion story has been widely transmitted and re-presented in the arts through the centuries. At an unknown date, later authors give as the name of the statue that of the sea-nymph Galatea or Galathea. Goethe calls her Elise, based upon the variants in the story of Dido/Elissa.

In the Middle Ages Pygmalion was held up as an example of the excesses of idolatry, probably spurred by Clement of Alexandria's suggestion that Pygmalion had carved an image of Aphrodite herself. However, by the 18th century it was a highly influential love-story, seen as such in Rousseau's musical play of the story. By the 19th century, the story often becomes one in which the awakened beloved rejects Pygmalion; although she comes alive, she is initially cold and unattainable.

A twist on this theme can also be seen in the story of Pinocchio where a wooden puppet is transformed into a real boy, though in this case the puppet possesses sentience prior to its transformation; it is the puppet and not the woodcarver (sculptor) who beseeches the miracle.
William Shakespeare wrote a version of the legend in The Winter's Tale when Hermione is seen as a lifelike statue in the final scene.

George Bernard Shaw wrote a play titled "Pygmalion". In Shaw's play, the girl is brought to life by two men in speech — the goal for their masterpiece is for her to marry and become a duchess. It has an interesting spin on the original story and has a subtle hint of feminism.

The modern classical-music performance, as audiences have come to know it and sometimes to love it, adheres to a fairly rigid format. ... The audience is expected to remain quiet for the duration of each work, and those who applaud between movements may face embarrassment. Around ten o'clock, the audience claps for two or three minutes, the performers bow two or three times, and all go home. ...

"[However], before 1900 concerts assumed a quite different form. ... Here is [James] Johnson's evocation of a night at the Paris Opéra in the years before the French Revolution:" 'While most were in their places by the end of the first act, the continuous movement and low din of conversation never really stopped. Lackeys and young bachelors milled about in the crowded and often boisterous parterre, the floor-level pit to which only men were admitted. Princes of the blood and dukes visited among themselves in the highly visible first-row boxes.

Worldly abbés chatted happily with ladies in jewels on the second level, occasionally earning indecent shouts from the parterre when their conversation turned too cordial. And lovers sought the dim heights of the third balcony--the paradise--away from the probing lorgnettes.'"In other words, the opera served mainly as a playground for the aristocracy.

The nobles often possessed considerable musical knowledge, but they refrained from paying overt attention to what the musicians were doing. Indeed, silent listening in the modern sense was deemed déclassé. ...'Public concerts didn't become widespread until after 1800, and well into the nineteenth century they took the form of "miscellanies"--eclectic affairs at which all kinds of music were played before audiences that seldom sat still or quieted down. ... Applause usually erupted after movements, and at times during them, if the audience heard something it particularly liked."What changed? ...

To some extent, these changes can be explained in anthropological terms: by applauding here and not applauding there, the bourgeois were signalling their membership in a social and cultural élite. As Johnson points out, they felt obliged to reconfirm that status from year to year, since, unlike the aristocrats of yore, they lived in fear of going back down the ladder. 'The bourgeoisie isn't a class, it's a position,' the Journal des Débats advised. 'You acquire it, you lose it.' Attending concerts became a kind of performance in itself, a dance of decorum."

Alex Ross, "Why So Serious?" The New Yorker, September 8, 2008, pp. 79-80.