Happy Chinese New Year!

[springrite]

It is that time of the year again:

Seems like half a billion peopl are traveling across the country to go home for the New Year. It is the one day when however difficult, the family will try to get together, preferable 3 or 4 generations with everyone included.

It is a time when if you go into any market or store in Chinese, you get the impression everything is free. Everyone is picking up everyone by the cases, dozens.

Soon, fireworks!

It is the year of the Snake.

FYI, composers and musicians born in the year of the Snake include:

1653
Arcangelo Corelli
Johann Pachelbel
Georg Muffat
1689
Joseph de Boismortier
1713
Paulo Lorenzani
1725
Pasquale Pisari
1737
Michael Haydn
1749
Domenico Cimarosa
1773
Joseph Wölfl
1785
Friedrich Kalkbrenner
1797
Franz Schubert
Gaetano Donizetti
1821
Giovanni Bottesini
1833
Johannes Brahms
Alexander Borodin
Adelaide Phillipps
1845
Gabriel Faure
Leopold Auer
Ion Ivanovici
Nina Hagerup Grieg
1857
Sir Edward Elgar
Cecile Chaminade
Eusebius Mandyczewski
Ruggero Leoncavallo
1869
Hans Pfitzner
Sir Henry Wood
Siegfried Wagner
Albert Roussel
Sigismund Stojowski
Clara Damrosch Mannes
1881
Bela Bartok
George Enescu
Egon Petri
Nikolai Miaskovsky
1893
Andrés Segovia
Walter Piston (b. 1/20/1894)
Lili Boulanger
Vladimir Golschmann
Federico Mompou
Clemens Krauss
Isolde Menges
Paul van Kempen
Lily Laskine
Rued Langgaard
Nils Grevillius
Karl Krueger (b. 1/19/1894)
Alexander Gauk
Arthur Benjamin
Douglas Moore
1905
William Alwyn
André Cluytens
John Kirkpatrick
Constant Lambert
Hugo Rignold
Louis Kaufman
Eduard Tubin
André Jolivet
Alan Rawsthorne
Boyd Neel
Dag Wiren
Louis Kentner
Walter Kraft
Jeanne-Marie Darré
Karl Amadeus Hartmann
Roya Garbousova
Eugéne Bozza
Gunnar Johansen (b. 1/21/06)
Matyas Seiber
Rudolf Schwarz
Leon Orthel
1917
Dinu Lipatti
Robert Merrill
Lou Harrison
Oscar Shumsky
Gottfried von Einem (b/ 1/24/1918)
Richard Yardumian
Antonio Janigro (b. 1/21/1918)
Louis Auriacombe
Richard Arnell
Robert Erickson
Thomas Scherman
Marc Blitzstein
Isang Yun
Rudolf Baumgartner
1929
Beverly Sills
André Previn
István Kertész
Alexis Weissenberg
George Crumb
Christoph von Dohnanyi
Bernard Haitink
Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Kenneth Schermerhorn
Walter Berry
Paavo Berglund
Nicolai Ghiaurov
Joerg Faerber
Robert Muczynski
Donald Keats
Wilfried Boettcher
Alun Hoddinott
1941
Edo de Waart
Riccardo Muti
Martha Argerich
Maurizio Pollini (b/ 1/5/1942)
Christopher Hogwood
Lawrence Foster
Jaime Laredo
Yuri Simonov
Adolphus Hailstork
Anthony Newman
Daniel Lentz
Paula Robison
Chick Korea
John Williams (guitarist)
Margaret Price
1953
Riccardo Chailly
Osmo Vanska
Hugh Wolff
Bramwell Tovey
Chen Yi
Richard Margison
1965
Sakari Oramo
Kajiura Yuki
Yuri Khanon
Susan Gritton
Christine Schafer
Giovanni Verrando
Russell Braun
Giovanni Bellucci
Alfredo Perl

So, Happy New Year everyone!

[Karl Henning]

A happy new year to you & yours, Paul!

Hm, Hartmann a snake, eh? Must listen some more!

[mahler10th]

It is fantastic that this is the year of the Snake, for I myself am a Snake!    

Is this a good influence?   

[Szykneij]

Happy New Year Paul!

Out of curiosity, what other countries celebrate Chinese New Year? The high school where I teach has an Asian Club, and this past week the holiday has been referred to during the daily announcements as "Asian New Year". Is it accurate to call it that, or is it an attempt at political correctness?

[North Star]

Happy New Year, Paul & the family!

Out of curiosity, what other countries celebrate Chinese New Year? The high school where I teach has an Asian Club, and this past week the holiday has been referred to during the daily announcements as "Asian New Year". Is it accurate to call it that, or is it an attempt at political correctness?

From Wikipedia:
Chinese New Year is celebrated in China and in countries and territories with significant Chinese populations, including Hong Kong,[2] Macau, Taiwan, Singapore,[3] Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mauritius,[4] Philippines,[5][6] and also in Chinatowns elsewhere. Chinese New Year is considered a major holiday for the Chinese and has had influence on the lunar new year celebrations of its geographic neighbors.

[mahler10th]

It is fantastic that this is the year of the Snake, for I myself am a Snake!    
Is this a good influence?   

If you are a Pig, Goat (Sheep), Tiger or Snake, it's best to fast forward to 2014. Interestingly, those with the same birth sign as the year sign invariably have bad years.

http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130208/NEWS02/130209840

GROAN   

[Mirror Image]

Happy New Year to you, Paul!

[mahler10th]

Happy New Year to you, Paul!

It won't be happy if he is a snake.   

[Mirror Image]

It won't be happy if he is a snake.   

[vandermolen]

Yes, Happy New Year.

Many of the students I teach (in the UK) come from either China or Hong Kong - so there was a big fireworks display last night. In this country fireworks are usually associated with Guy Fawkes (who tried to blow up parliament during the reign of James 1st) in November. So, local people who saw the fireworks last night must have wondered what on earth was going on! 

[springrite]

Chinese New Year is not just celebrated where there is a large Chinese population. The Chinese lunar calender is used in much of Asia. So they naturally have the same traditional New Year, Chinese or not. The Vietnamese New Year is in fact the same as Chinese New Year for that same reason.

[kishnevi]

Chinese New Year is not just celebrated where there is a large Chinese population. The Chinese lunar calender is used in much of Asia. So they naturally have the same traditional New Year, Chinese or not. The Vietnamese New Year is in fact the same as Chinese New Year for that same reason.

Which is why the phrase "Tet offensive" looms rather large in any history of the US during the 1960s and 1970s.

Being Jewish,  I get to use a lunar calendar--one based on the calculations of when the new moon appears in the sky over Jerusalem, a moment called the molad.  Today's new moon officially appeared at 5:37 PM today, Sunday 10 February (not sure if the calendar I looked at is expressing that in US EST time or Jerusalem time).  So the first day of the month of Adar is Monday February 11 on secular calendars.  The holiday of Purim [=the story of Esther] comes in two weeks,  on the full moon of Adar;   Pesach/Passover falls (ideally) on the full moon of the next month,  Nisan--and the link to Easter is why that Christian holiday seems to wander about the calendar a bit, as any habitue of Bach will know.

Question: how does the Chinese lunar calendar handle leap years?  Judaism uses what astronomers call the Metonic system of inserting a full month a certain number of times during a nineteen year cycle before regular Adar.  The leap month is also called Adar, so in leap years we have Adar 1 and Adar 2, with prescribed solutions to the problems of how to mark anniversaries that fall during the leap month--technically, Adar 1 is the leap month.

Purim,btw, is the holiday when we are commanded to drink to the point that we don't know the difference betwen "Blessed is Mordecai" and "Cursed is Haman"--ad lo yada being the Hebrew phrase for "until you don't know", and therefore the name (Adloyada) of Tel Aviv's version of the Carnival parade.

And btw,  lest it get lost in my chatter

HAPPY NEW YEAR, PAUL!

(and anyone else who celebrates the Chinese New Year)

[Opus106]

Being Jewish,  I get to use a lunar calendar--one based on the calculations of when the new moon appears in the sky over Jerusalem, a moment called the molad.  Today's new moon officially appeared at 5:37 PM today, Sunday 10 February (not sure if the calendar I looked at is expressing that in US EST time or Jerusalem time).

Being an amaetuer astronomer of sorts, I have an interest in spotting New Moons as well, just to see how early I can spot it without telescopic or photographic assistance*. This started about 10 years ago when a fellow amateur from Chicagoland, as he called it, conducted a worldwide New Moon Spotting contest every month at an astronomy forum. He used to provide the timing of the Dark Moon, as oppoesed to New Moon, which was the exact moment of conjunction to the minute plus some information on which part of the world had the best seats to catch an early sighting. The timing of 24h51m from Jan '05 has remained my best effort so far.



*There are people who use telescopes and cameras to set records, for both old (waning, before conjunction) and new Moons.

[springrite]

Question: how does the Chinese lunar calendar handle leap years?  Judaism uses what astronomers call the Metonic system of inserting a full month a certain number of times during a nineteen year cycle before regular Adar.  The leap month is also called Adar, so in leap years we have Adar 1 and Adar 2, with prescribed solutions to the problems of how to mark anniversaries that fall during the leap month--technically, Adar 1 is the leap month.


HAPPY NEW YEAR, PAUL!

(and anyone else who celebrates the Chinese New Year)

Great minds think alike. We use the same trick and it works wonders.

What's even better, they have it calculated so wonderfully that invariably, if the extra month is an extra, say, July, it's always a hot hot summer; conversely, if it is an extra December, it is invariably a cold winter.

BTW, I am a rabbit.

I am also a virgo.

Somehow a rabbit and a virgo seems to not go hand in hand, huh?

[kishnevi]

BTW, I am a rabbit.

I am also a virgo.

Somehow a rabbit and a virgo seems to not go hand in hand, huh?

I'm a Boar or a Pig (I've seen both terms used).   Which might be considered a bit odd, since I'm Jewish.
And a Pisces.   

A fishy pig.  Great combo for dim sum, I suppose....

[Mirror Image]

I, too, am a Pisces but in the Chinese horoscope I'm a Dog. So I'm a dogfish.

[Szykneij]

I, too, am a Pisces but in the Chinese horoscope I'm a Dog. So I'm a dogfish.

Much better than being a Cancerous Goat.   

[Mirror Image]

Much better than being a Cancerous Goat.   

[vandermolen]

Much better than being a Cancerous Goat.   

I too am a Cancerian Goat (apparently they go together) 

[Szykneij]

I too am a Cancerian Goat (apparently they go together) 

July, 1955?