Dido's Lament

One of my new discoveries in concert music is Dido's Lament.
The aria is pretty simple and is sung when Dido commits suicide and is about to die and she sings it to her maid:

When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create
No trouble, no trouble in thy breast;
Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate,

The instrumentation is a Passacaglia with descending bass which gives a sense of enormous pathos to the aria. The best version i have heard so far is Susan Graham's.
If you are feeling sad or depressed you want to put your arms around it and give some realization or visualization for the depression, this song and Susan's rendition of it is your best bet. She wrings the pathos out of the words and music which seeps out slowly and takes enormous shape around you in your ears and in your minds eye.

The words "Remember me" reinforces and etches the sadness in your feeling, ensuring it is not brushed away or ignored and hence it pacifies and assuages the dark feeling. At the same time, the words "No Trouble" and "forget my fate" rings again and again it is going to be okay after all.

And all of this is reinforced by the ground bass lines. While they paint a deep blue as they ominously start going down, they resolve each time at a comfortable place where it is dull but it is not so dark. This passage from dark to dull each time consoles the heart and gently pats the soul to reconciliation. The train that started descending down to the abyss in the beginning of the aria come to a gentle stop at the end of the aria.

Wonderful music!

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music - by Robert Greenberg

This is the first teaching company course that i took and it was absolutely fabulous. I finished all 48 lectures of it. The instructor is a very good teacher and his voice and his lecturing style are very suitable for the audiobook. This is not a book that gives you drowsiness as you listen to it and on the other hand it keeps you very attentive.

The course is a combined music history and music appreciation course. I learnt a lot of subject matter from this course. The only complaint i have is that the author sometimes has an edgy sense of humor so this course is perhaps not sharable with small children. But the subject matter itself is very accessible for children too, especially if they have some musical background.

Book Reviews: Patrick Lencioni's Business Fables

I read the following books from: Patrick Lencioni

In general, I hate business or philosophy books that are structured as fables. The following books just made me cringe:
Who Moved My Cheese?

Our Iceberg is Melting

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Books But Patrick's way of storytelling is a bit different and less cringe inducing when the book is well written. However, when he uses the same style for all of his books, soon they get old and as annoying as other fables. Having said that, his concepts are very good and very usable. If you want to cut to the chase and save yourselves from those fables, you can read the methods from his website.

Here are my reviews:

Three Signs Of a Miserable Job

This book talks about how the root of misery in workplace is rooted to 3 things: Immeasurement (lack of measuring one's progress in the job),
Anonymity (when people are not known, recognized and appreciated for what they are and what they bring to the job)
Irrelevance (People need to know how their works matters to someone or a group of people).
I liked the fable part which was actually instrumental in illustrating the above 3 concepts. The fable was about an old executive trying to revive a clunky pizza place using the above 3 concepts.

The Five dysfunctions of a Team
More than the concepts, you need to read the fable which illustrates how an executive revived a team and helped them function well. The five concepts are too many to remember crisply, however, here is how it stuck in my mind.

When you have a team of people, they need to function in such a way that they are accountable to each other. They should expect open criticism from their team and should not feel vulnerable because they could be criticized. So you could have conflicts and you should not be afraid of facing such conficts. Conflicts need to be played out and resolved instead of trying to achieve artificial harmony which does not resolve the underlying conflicts. After having such conflicts and the decisions are made, everyone needs to stick to their commitments and be accountable for those commitments. And the team must pay attention to the results of the team. So individual goals should give way to the goals of the team.


Death By Meeting
This book is when the fable structure stopped working for me. Essentially this book talks about how the meetings must be like performances. They should have drama and conflict and they have to be played out and resolved. Just like the different forms of performances (ex: sitcom, serial drama, movie, etc.) you should have different types of meetings: daily checkins, weekly meetings, monthly strategic and quarterly offsite reviews.


Three Big Questions For A Frantic Family
This fable was the most boring. But the concept was interesting. It asked families to make a value statement for themselves embodying what made their family unique. Then it asked families to identify their most urgent rallying cry (like: buying a new home, getting the child into college, etc.) for things they should do in the next 2 to 6 months. Then it asks to identify defining objectives, the way they will achieve the rallying cry. Then it asks to outline the standard objectives, i.e. standing responsibilities. This is a good framework for families.

I liked all these books but the above order indicates my ranking for this series.

Interesting program in KQED forum this morning

Interesting forum program : Astronomical Update

I need to check out the book from:

* Ken Croswell, astronomer and author of "The Lives of Stars"
More info:
* View images from the Hubble Telescope : at HubbleSite.org

Need to check out the book and the website.