Fifty years ago there was a very different life pulse. I remember the year well.
As it seems to be at any given time, the dynamic of daily life during the year of 1974 appeared to be much less consequential then than we are likely to admit today in retrospect. This is what memories are for – to remember and implement, to relive, analyze, reconsider, and often better understand in a wider, perhaps more objective context what was lived.
The Aristipposian Poet
celebrates with
Thoughts and Sounds of 1974
October 11 at 3 pm EST
October 25 at 3 pm EST
on Clubhouse
a selected list of events, compositions, and arts in 1974
| Person, Group | Work, Album | 1974 |
| Tangerine Dream | Phaedra | February |
| Steely Dan | Pretzel Logic | |
| King Crimson | Starless and Bible Black | March |
| Frank Zappa | Apostrophe | |
| Chicago | Chicago VII | |
| Blue Öyster Cult | Secret Treaties | April |
| Miles Davis | Big Fun | |
| Rick Wakeman | Journey to the Centre of the Earth | May |
| The Kinks | Preservation Act 2 | |
| David Bowie | Diamond Dogs | |
| Weather Report | Mysterious Traveler | June |
| Supertramp | Crime of the Century | September |
| Gentle Giant | The Power and the Glory | |
| Rolling Stones | It’s Only Rock and Roll | October |
| Todd Rundgren | Utopia | |
| The Who | Odds and Sods | |
| Queen | Sheer Heart Attack | November |
| Kraftwerk | Autobahn | |
| György Ligeti | San Francisco Polyphony |
The Chipko Movement
According to the Centre for Science and Environment, Chipko began in 1973 in the remote hill town of Gopeshwar. That morning, representatives from a sports good factory in Allahabad arrived to cut down ten ash trees for their use. At first, the villagers requested them not to do so; however, it became clear that contractors were not interested in negotiating with the villagers. So, the people sought to take direct action. Villagers marched into the Mandal forest, beating drums. The contractors soon realised, the villagers were well-organised and not willing to back down. They left without cutting down the trees. The Chipko movement spread quickly as villagers marched in Rampur Phata, another remote village, just a few weeks later. However, it was only in 1974, during a significant protest, that women began to participate more and in deliberate terms.
In 1974, the government announced an auction for over 2000 trees near the village of Reni, overlooking the Alaknanda River. The Garhwali people were acutely aware of the causes and results of the last flood. There were landslides that had obstructed roads, washing away villages and other infrastructure. Following the government’s announcement, students led demonstrations. To avoid protests, the government summoned the men of the surrounding villages to the nearby city for discussions on compensation. However, the meeting had been a ruse, to get the men away from the grove. The contractors seized the chance to continue logging without any confrontation.
Women had always taken interest in issues that dispoportiately affected their lives. Yet, up to this point, no one formally included them in such meetings. A local girl rushed to Gaura Devi, a 50-year-old widowed woman and the head of the village Mahila Mangal Dal, to inform her of the arrival of loggers. Gaura led the women of Reni and surrounding villages to the forest. They refused to move out of the forest and continued hugging the trees. The women kept up an all-night vigil to guard the trees. The next day, word spread to the neighbouring villages of Lata and Henwalghati. And as the men returned from the city, more people joined.
The contractors offered her, and the other women bribes to leave, then threatened to call the police and have her arrested. People branded women as enemies of democracy and development, but they stood resolute. The contracts withdrew after a four-day stand-off. The action in Reni prompted the state government to establish a committee to investigate deforestation in the region, and this ultimately led to a 10-year ban on commercial logging in the area.
Source: Sayfty
The Chipko Movement is a non-violent resistance movement aiming to protect India’s forests. When government-controlled exploitation of natural resources started to threaten the livelihoods of Indian villagers, the movement sought to stop the destruction using Mahatma Gandhi’s method of Satyagraha or non-violent resistance. The movement, which got its name from protesters hugging trees (the Hindi word “chipko” means “to hug”), has had a tremendous impact on India’s environmental policies, including the preservation of forests and other natural resources in the Himalayan region.
Source: Right Livelihood
Hungarian design teacher and serious puzzler Ernő Rubik assembled his first cube puzzle in 1974 and called it the Magic Cube. After a toy agent pitched the puzzle to Ideal Toy & Novelty Company, it renamed the puzzle Rubik’s Cube and began putting it in stores in 1980. Soon puzzlers all over the world wanted to solve the cube. Within two years they bought one hundred million of them, making Rubik’s Cube the title of most popular puzzle in history.
Though media first circulated a story about Rubik designing the cube to help teach students about three-dimensional objects, Rubik himself later acknowledged that he purposefully set out to design a puzzle based on geometry. The 27 tiny cubes called “cubies” produced a truly challenging puzzle. Each carried one of six colors, and when assembled they formed a square. Rubik’s challenge was figuring a way to allow the cubies to slide and rotate alongside one another while holding together as a unit. His key insight lay in realizing that if the individual blocks hinged on a rounded core, they could move freely while maintaining the shape of a cube.
Source: museum of play
String Quartet no. 15 in E flat minor, Opus 144
Dmitri Shostakovich
Composed: February, May 1974
The String Quartet no.15 in E flat minor, opus 144, is one of the most moving of all Shostakovich’s compositions and is arguably the most intimate quartet in the cycle. If there were a season for all things, then Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Quartet would dwell in the darkness of mid-winter. The profound melancholy of the music is akin to a requiem. Shostakovich’s concern with death is clearer here than in any other earlier chamber work.
Beethoven concluded his cycle of quartets with the transcendental question ‘Muss es sein?’ (must it be?). Shostakovich’s answer, like Beethoven’s, seems also to be a yes – ‘Es muss so sein!’ (it has to be!); but only because there is no alternative; nor could there ever have been an alternative. Everything had to be the way it was. Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Quartet embodies a Spinozian fatalism. And this work, like the personality of that once defiled philosopher, is loveable, restrained and supremely stoic.
The Quartet no. 15, Shostakovich’s final and longest string quartet, was started in February 1974 and completed three months later in a Moscow hospital on 17th May. 1974. The quartet is written in the mysterious but traditionally morbid key of E flat minor and bears no dedication.
Movements
Elegy – Adagio
Serenade – Adagio
Intermezzo – Adagio
Nocturne – Adagio
Funeral March – Adagio molto
Epilogue – Adagio
All of the movements are in the key of E flat minor; all are marked adagio; all flow seamlessly into one another.
“Play the first movement so that flies drop dead in mid-air and the audience leaves the hall out of sheer boredom.”
were Shostakovich’s strange instructions for its performance, but his advice can be understood when the movement is heard. The elegy is sombre, unhurried and peaceful. It starts with a fugue, but this quickly ceases after all four voices have been heard. The second theme is in C major and suggests the innocence of the first quartet. But the music seems not to progress. It seems that time has ceased; that we are in a platonic world of perfection and beauty, where change is impossible; an incorruptible world of motionless eternity.
The opening of the next movement, the serenade, remains indelibly in the memory. The motionless world of the elegy is scattered by four sets of three searing cries that break out one after another from the first and second violin and the viola. The first is in B flat and refers back to the Thirteenth Quartet which ended on a similarly sustained pitch. Each, equal in duration, start pppand expand to sffff. Are they screams of anguish? Their significance is not revealed but their effect is to introduce change and motion; time is moving again. These cries recur during the movement, before a tortured waltz appears. Then the next movement begins, an intermezzo, introduced through a deep pedal, and a dramatic solo violin cadenza occurs before the nocturne emerges. A simple march rhythm becomes apparent which leads to the funeral march. Slowly, however, the passion subsides and the final movement, the epilogue, begins. This movement based on the final eight bars of the first recalls its sense of timelessness although without making reference to its fugue. The music, depleted of energy, culminates in a fateful and bleak viola solo only to terminate in a despairing morendo.
Richard N. Burke makes the interesting suggestion that the fifteenth quartet is constructed as a chronological narrative. Beginning with the second movement the passage of life is recorded; the serenade which typically represents youth and hope is followed, after an intermezzo, by the nocturne of old age and finally by death. After burial, depicted by the funeral march, the protagonist would be remembered in an epilogue and an elegy. In Burke’s interpretation Shostakovich has placed this elegy at the beginning of the work as an analepsis or cinematic flashback which gives meaning to the final moments of the epilogue. The twelve cries on the two violins and viola at the beginning of the serenade serve to destroy the peace of the elegy and mark the transition to the remaining section of the quartet.
Burke’s idea is attractive because it recalls Shostakovich’s familiarity with the movies both as a young cinema pianist and later as a composer of film music. But the idea is confined to technique. The meaning of those twelve screams and in particular the first, the B flat, which recalls the death and murder themes of the Thirteenth Quartet, remains open. As for the question who the protagonist of the piece might be, Shostakovich’s contemporaries were in no doubt that the composer meant it to be himself.
Approximate 35 minutes in length, the work is unforgettably death-bonded. We sense that these are the composer’s final words and that the whole cycle of quartets has terminated. We have travelled from the innocence of the first quartet into a world full of memories, pain, resignation, peace and death. Significantly too, but only to be expected from this composer, we know that with the key signature of six flats we cannot travel any further: we are now at the greatest tonal distance from the C major of the first quartet; the journey took 36 years.
The quartet had its première on the 15th November 1974 at the Leningrad Composers‘ Club, with Shostakovich present. It was performed by the Taneyev Quartet (Vladimir Ovcharek, Grigori Lutsky, Vissarion Soloviev and Josif Levinzon). Thus along with the first quartet it is distinguished by not having been first presented by the Beethoven Quartet. This break with tradition was due to the sudden death of the cellist Sergei Shirinsky on the 18th October 1974 shortly before the planned première by the Beethoven Quartet 8. They did however give the first Moscow performance on the 11th January 1975 and it was to them that Shostakovich gave his instructions for the first movement. The autographed score of the quartet is preserved in the Shostakovich family archive.
Source: quartets
Sila Blume 
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