In the spirit of the radio program "Music and Company," hosted by Tom Allen on Radio 2 of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I offer a cage match of compositions, musical and otherwise. Most of these are in Latin; one or two others may be sneaked in for purposes of comparison. Competitors will be introduced in the Wednesday afternoon class, with voting to take place either by e-mail or in class on Friday (exceptions: Monday, February 6 and February 13).  In the spirit of Tom Allen's cage matches, comments are welcome -- the more vivid, the better.

• Link to the "real" cage match by Tom Allen

 Projected competitors (information on opus numbers , specific movements, and performers under construction):
 

• 1.  February 1:  Augustan prophecy (text): Do Wheelock and LaFleur (Wheelock's Latin) or Groton and May (Latin Stories) have a better prose adaption of the beginning of Vergil's Fourth Eclogue?

• 2.  February 8: When it comes to talking about difficulty and profundity (which may or may not be the same idea), the ancients had the phrases "gradus ad Parnassum" (an ascent to  and up Mount Parnassus) and "piling Pelion on Ossa and Ossa on Pelion." All of these mountains are in Greece, but this fact of geography did not deter the Romans from using them as metaphors for both difficulty and profundity. For that matter, being born in Germany more than a thousand years after the collapse of the Roman empire did not prevent Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven from composing two of the  masses with the most profound examples of sung Latin known to us. The competition will include selections from the Credo of Bach's B Minor Mass and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

Ludwig van Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, op. 123; the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner (Archiv)

                                Voting results: 5-4 in favor of Bach

• 3. February 15: Musical coffee on what will probably be a cold winter day. Unfortunately, J.S. Bach's "Coffee" Cantata is not Latin, no matter how I stir the pot, so I offer up selections from Mozart's Exsultate, Jubilate and Vivaldi's Gloria.

• 4. March 1: Sacred vs. profane love. After reading week you will no doubt be preparing for yet more midterms, mine among them. Take out your frustrations by comparing some of the most joyous Christmas music from the Renaissance via the Boston Camerata with a cut from the Latin music in Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

• 5. March 8: He said, she said. A female composer and all-female ensemble (Hildegard von Bingen, performed by the Anonymous 4) will duke it out against an all-male chorus singing Gregorian chant. RESCHEDULED TO MONDAY, MARCH 20.

• 6. March 15: Tartarus (and Elysium?). On the Ides of March, I could give you Handel's Giulio Cesare, but that opera is not sung in Latin (and besides, I have to save something for Latin 204 next year). But just to whet your appetite for gloom and doom, our competition today will be selections of Mozart's Requiem vs. Stravinsky's opera Oedipus Rex. Believe it or not, the libretto for the latter is written in Ciceronian Latin at the behest of the composer himself. I'll leave it for you to decide whether Elysium comes into the picture at all.

• 7. March 22: Lingua Latina vivit. In case you thought that no one writes Latin masses any more, consider the strikingly contemporary idioms of Leonard Bernstein's Mass and David Fanshawe's African Sanctus.

• 8. March 29: The maple leaf vs. the rain forest. You'll know by now how the Ottawa Senators and Toronto Maple Leafs are doing, so why not extend your horizons by determining how one of the finest composers of Canadian choral music, Toronto's own Healey Willan, stacks up against a performance from a recently-discovered Baroque manuscript from Bolivia (yes, that's right: Bolivia). Willan will be respresented by part of one his Missae Breves; the selection from Bolivian Baroque is T.B.A. once my own copy of the disc has arrived.