Having fun with the Carmina Burana
Recently, I started reading the great blog called Bad Astronomy. Bad Astronomy deals with astronomy of course and its primary writer, Phil Plait, touches on other branches of science regularly. The whole endeavor is peppered with a kind of sophomoric intellectualism and I can't get enough of it. Anyhow on Friday, Phil Plait wrote an amusing piece about pareidolia. Pareidolia is listening to something and hearing words and patterns that aren't really there.
To illustrate his factor, he posted this video that is had me giggling on the grounds that Friday.
That's O Fortuna from Karl Orff's Carmina Burana and it has to be one of the most stirring arrangements ever composed for a chorus. If you ever get the chance to see it performed live please drop what you're doing and go. It's at once so primal and so passionate you'd have to be a cadaver not to be affected by it. If you're interested in the lyrics, here they are in Latin as performed:
O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem,
egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.
Sors immanis
et inanis,
rota tu volubilis,
status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,
obumbrata
et velata
michi quoque niteris;
nunc in line with ludum
dorsum nudum
fero tui sceleris.
Sors salutis
et virtutis
michi nunc contraria,
est affectus
et defectus
semper in angaria.
Hac in hora
sine mora
corde pulsum tangite;
quod consistent with sortem
sternit fortem,
mecum omnes plangite!
If your Latin's no longer up to snuff and you need a translation, you could locate one here. Be warned though, those lyrics are not what I'd call uplifting. That's OK even though, uplifting lyrics are overrated.