the day job

By anders pearson 08 Mar 2001

thought i’d give you all a little glimpse into what i do at my day job. Pierrot Lunaire is a project i’ve been working on for Columbia’s music department that recently went semi-live. in order to make any sense of it, you’ll need a little background. pay attention cause this is tricky; i get confused myself.

Albert Giraud wrote a series of 50 poems in french about a character called “Pierrot Lunaire”. they’re not too bad; pleasantly dark in places. the famous atonal composer Arnold Schörnberg selected 21 of them, had them translated to german and set them to “music” (Sprechstimme and chamber ensemble). the site currently contains the following material: Giraud’s 50 poems in french, english translations of those, german translations of all poems, english translations of the german translations that Schörnberg used for his 21, scans of three different print editions of the poems (1894 french edition plus 1895 and 1911 german editions), and audio of the 21 “Schörnberg” poems being recited in french and german. there’s a lot more on the way too including audio and video of the pieces actually being performed and lots of miscellaneous information about the poems.

the main focus of the site currently is the “poem interface” which is intended to allow students or scholars to easily compare and contrast multiple poems and the multiple translations of the poems. there are two panels that each contain a poem. at the top of each is a bar allowing you to choose which version of the poem to display in that panel (french, english translation of the french, german, and english translation of the german). at the bottom of each poem are a couple icons with the optional additional media for that poem/version (print editions, audio, and video which is currently inactive). below those are pulldown menus allowing you to select which poem to display based from either the original 50 or the 21 “Schörnberg” (be careful, they’re not ordered the same).

the site should pretty much work with NN4+ and IE4+ with javascript and css enabled. if it works on any other browser, i’m pretty impressed. the design is temporary until we get one of our real graphic designers to put something together for it. my real contribution to this besides the mad javascript kung-fu, was the XML/XSL backend that allowed us to go through N-thousand different iterations of the navigation trying to settle on one that would make the professor happy without going insane recoding all 171 poems over each time.

anyway, let me know what you think.