This article possibly contains original research .(May 2008) |
"Cygnus X-1" | ||||
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Suite by Rush | ||||
from the album A Farewell to Kings (Book I) Hemispheres (Book II) | ||||
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Label | Mercury | |||
Composer(s) | ||||
Lyricist(s) | Neil Peart | |||
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Rush suite chronology | ||||
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"Cygnus X-1" is a two-part song series by Canadian progressive rock band Rush. The first part, "Book I: The Voyage", is the last song on the 1977 album A Farewell to Kings , and the second part, "Book II: Hemispheres", is the first song on the following album, 1978's Hemispheres . Book I is ten minutes and twenty-five seconds long (10:25), and Book II is eighteen minutes and seven seconds (18:07).
It was released as a limited-edition extended play on April 22, 2017 for Record Store Day. [3]
A black hole, known as Cygnus X-1 (a real-life X-ray source believed to be an actual black hole), lies in the constellation Cygnus. An explorer aboard the spaceship Rocinante journeys toward the black hole, believing there may be something beyond it. As he moves closer, it becomes increasingly difficult to control the ship and he is eventually drawn in by the pull of gravity. The final words of Book I describe his ordeal: "Sound and fury drown my heart/Every nerve is torn apart."
The explorer re-enters the story midway through Book II, left a wandering soul due to the destruction of his body. He has emerged into Olympus, where he witnesses the gods Apollo and Dionysus caught in the struggle between Mind and Heart. Prior to his arrival, the logical thinkers are led by Apollo and the emotional people are ruled by Dionysus. Apollo shows his followers how to build cities and explore the depths of science and knowledge, but a lack of emotional attachment to each other allows Dionysus to lure many of them into the wild forests, where he provides love. Dionysus' followers do not store any food for the winter and are caught unprepared. A conflict breaks out as the two different ways of life clash, leading to the world splintering into hemispheres, each with a deeply unhealthy society.
When the explorer reflects on what he sees, he becomes tormented in the lack of balance of the people who insist on one extreme or the other and the violence that has ensued. His silent scream is felt by the warriors and causes them to rethink their struggle and unite. Wanting someone to keep them in check to avoid a repeat of their conflict, the gods recognize the explorer as a nascent new god and name him Cygnus, the God of Balance. The final words of Book II describe a harmonious society where emotion - "the truth of love" - and logic - "the love of truth" - coexist and feed each other "in a single perfect sphere."
Although the storyline revolves around a science fiction world, it uses Greek mythology to explain the double meaning. "Cygnus X-1" is primarily about the discovery of two conflicting ways of life, and two vastly different ways in which the human mind thinks (logic and emotion are separated into separate sides, or hemispheres, of the brain). The balance point (Cygnus) allows the mind to think with some logic and emotion at the same time, allowing people to be analytical, but not unemotional.
The name of the spaceship Rocinante is derived from the name of the title character's horse in the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
"Prologue" This starts with a dissonant electronic soundscape and spoken introduction by album producer Terry Brown. Afterwards, a heavily syncopated bass riff in shifting time signatures (3/4, 7/8, 3/4, 4/4) fades in, with the full band joining in as the introductory sound effects fade out.
"1" The shortest section of the song describes the black hole itself, and asks the question of what happens to someone who flies into it.
"2" The protagonist sails into the black hole on board his "Rocinante". This section contains a wah-wah guitar solo by Alex Lifeson.
"3" The climactic section of Book I uses a chord sequence first heard at 3:21 in the Prologue. The lyrics describe the "Rocinante" spinning out of control, and the protagonist's body being destroyed ("every nerve is torn apart"). This section includes the highest note sung by Geddy Lee on any studio album (B♭5 at 9:27). The song fades out with a repeated chord sequence – which returns at 11:56 in Book II – along with the sound of a beating heart. [4]
"Prelude" This section contains several themes heard later in the song, similar to the "Overture" in "2112."
"Apollo: Bringer of Wisdom" Apollo, the Greek god of the sun and the arts, represents the left hemisphere. 'Left-brainers' are often logical thinkers, adept at mathematics.
"Dionysus: Bringer of Love" Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and fertility, represents the right hemisphere. He stood for uninhibited desire in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Human, All Too Human and was the opposite of Apollo. 'Right-brainers' are more common than 'left-brainers,' and include people who are artistic and sensitive.
"Armageddon: The Battle of Heart and Mind" The title is reference to the Biblical war, but in this case Apollo and Dionysus pull man in opposite directions, toward Order or Chaos, respectively. The debate between classical and romantic (Apollonian and Dionysian) cultures is ongoing. The left stereo channel switches to the right for dramatic effect when Lee sings the word 'hemispheres'.
"Cygnus: Bringer of Balance" The chords played at the end of The Voyage return here. The explorer from The Voyage is frightened by the fighting and, after hearing the explorer's silent cry of terror, Apollo and Dionysus stop fighting and dub him Cygnus, god of Balance.
"The Sphere: A Kind of Dream" Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensibility may be alluded to in the last few lines of the song. [5]
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. In 1869 at the age of 24, he became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. In 1879 he resigned due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, after which he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889 at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Swans are birds of the genus Cygnus within the family Anatidae. The swans' closest relatives include the geese and ducks. Swans are grouped with the closely related geese in the subfamily Anserinae where they form the tribe Cygnini. Sometimes, they are considered a distinct subfamily, Cygninae.
In philosophy, metempsychosis is the transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death. The term is derived from ancient Greek philosophy, and has been recontextualized by modern philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Kurt Gödel, Mircea Eliade, and Magdalena Villaba; otherwise, the word "transmigration" is more appropriate. The word plays a prominent role in James Joyce's Ulysses and is also associated with Nietzsche. Another term sometimes used synonymously is palingenesis.
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus by the Greeks for a frenzy he is said to induce called baccheia. As Dionysus Eleutherius, his wine, music, and ecstatic dance free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful. His thyrsus, a fennel-stem sceptre, sometimes wound with ivy and dripping with honey, is both a beneficent wand and a weapon used to destroy those who oppose his cult and the freedoms he represents. Those who partake of his mysteries are believed to become possessed and empowered by the god himself.
The Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy, written by the Athenian playwright Euripides during his final years in Macedonia, at the court of Archelaus I of Macedon. It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BC as part of a tetralogy that also included Iphigeneia at Aulis and Alcmaeon in Corinth, and which Euripides' son or nephew is assumed to have directed. It won first prize in the City Dionysia festival competition.
Cygnus X-1 (abbreviated Cyg X-1) is a galactic X-ray source in the constellation Cygnus and was the first such source widely accepted to be a black hole. It was discovered in 1964 during a rocket flight and is one of the strongest X-ray sources detectable from Earth, producing a peak X-ray flux density of 2.3×10−23 W/(m2⋅Hz) (2.3×103 jansky). It remains among the most studied astronomical objects in its class. The compact object is now estimated to have a mass about 21.2 times the mass of the Sun and has been shown to be too small to be any known kind of normal star or other likely object besides a black hole. If so, the radius of its event horizon has 300 km "as upper bound to the linear dimension of the source region" of occasional X-ray bursts lasting only for about 1 ms.
Hemispheres is the sixth studio album by Canadian rock band Rush, released on October 24, 1978, by Anthem Records. It reached No. 14 in Canada and the UK, and No. 47 in the US. The album was a steady seller in the group's catalogue, and was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for selling one million copies 15 years later.
A Farewell to Kings is the fifth studio album by Canadian rock band Rush, released on Anthem Records on August 29, 1977. The album reached No. 11 in Canada and marked a growth in the band's international fanbase, becoming their first Top 40 album in the US and the UK.
The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music is an 1872 work of dramatic theory by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was reissued in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism. The later edition contained a prefatory essay, "An Attempt at Self-Criticism", wherein Nietzsche commented on this earlier book.
Greek tragedy is one of the three principal theatrical genres from Ancient Greece and Greek-inhabited Anatolia, along with comedy and the satyr play. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy.
Robert Evan Ornstein was an American psychologist, researcher and author.
"God is dead" is a statement made by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The first instance of this statement in Nietzsche's writings is in his 1882 The Gay Science, where it appears three times. The phrase also appears at the beginning of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Rocinante (Rozinante) is Don Quixote's horse in the 1605/1615 novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. In many ways, Rozinante is not only Don Quixote's horse, but also his double; like Don Quixote, he is awkward, past his prime, and engaged in a task beyond his capacities.
Narcissus and Goldmund, also published in English as Death and the Lover, is a novel written by the German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse which was first published in 1930. At its publication, Narcissus and Goldmund was considered Hesse's literary triumph; chronologically, it follows Steppenwolf.
"Eclipse" is the tenth and final track from English rock band Pink Floyd's 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon. It was written and sung by Roger Waters, with harmonies by David Gilmour and Rick Wright. After Waters left the band, Gilmour sang the lead vocal when performing live.
R30: 30th Anniversary World Tour is a live DVD by the Canadian rock band Rush, released on November 22, 2005 in Canada and the US, and November 28, 2005 in Europe. The DVD documents the band's R30: 30th Anniversary Tour, and was recorded on September 24, 2004 at the Festhalle Frankfurt, Germany.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian are philosophical and literary concepts represented by a duality between the figures of Apollo and Dionysus from Greek mythology. Its popularization is widely attributed to the work The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, though the terms had already been in use prior to this, such as in the writings of poet Friedrich Hölderlin, historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and others. The word Dionysian occurs as early as 1608 in Edward Topsell's zoological treatise The History of Serpents. The concept has since been widely invoked and discussed within Western philosophy and literature.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image is a work of historical anthropology by American surgeon Leonard Shlain, published by Viking Press in 1998.
The R40 Live Tour was the final concert tour by Canadian rock band Rush that commemorated the 40th anniversary of drummer Neil Peart joining the band in July 1974. The title hearkens back to Rush's 2004 R30: 30th Anniversary Tour that celebrated the 30th anniversary of the band. The tour grossed US$37.8 million, with 442,337 tickets sold at 35 concerts. Although the tour was shorter than many of Rush’s preceding tours, it was very successful in terms of average concert attendance and gross, which was 12,638 and US$1,080,000 respectively. The tour also saw more sellouts than any other Rush tour in recent memory. With 26 out of the 33 reported shows being sellouts, and the remaining 7 still over 90% capacity, the band felt a taste of their success from their prime years again.