Watch J.K. Rowling Harvard Commencement Speech Live Thursday
J.K. Rowling
Posted by: Sue
June 03, 2008, 08:10 PM
As previously announced J.K. Rowling will be giving the commencement address at Harvard University, Thursday June 5. While tickets to the event were limited, fans everywhere will be able to watch this event live via this link, with the text and video reposted immediately following on this link to Harvard Magazine. Jo is scheduled to be speaking sometime between 2:15 and 4:00pm ET. TLC also has a crew attending the graduation ceremony, and will be posting complete coverage of this event on Thursday.
On a fun related note, in anticipation of Jo speaking at Harvard, you can hear Hedwig’s theme being played on 17 Russian church bells at the fabled campus of Harvard, here via the Boston Globe. Quotage: ” According to Jeremy Lin, a Harvard senior and resident bell-ringer at Lowell House, the Klappermeisters have been practicing “Hedwig’s Theme,” the signature Harry Potter tune, for some time in anticipation of Rowling’s visit.”We do a ring every year for Halloween, and one of the things that started after Halloween is that somebody figured out how to play the Harry Potter theme,” Lin said. “That person has since graduated, but we knew that it was possible, so we kind of worked up our own version and we thought that it would be nice to play for her.”
Many Thanks to Harvard Magazine
PLEASE be aware that the link to the live video feed leads to a test signal when nothing else is being broadcast. It is a VERY LOUD sound and even though I stopped it as soon as I heard it, I still have a slight loss of hearing – hopefully my poor ears will recover in time!
Sue/editors, if you could add this precaution to the news post… I’m probably not the only one who is too curious for my own good! lol
So much love for Jo. Wish I could go and hear her speak publically. Mind you, I’d probably fangirl so much that I’d faint.
And those bells? Beautiful idea, but a bit jarring in places. However I know absolutley nothing about playing bells. Maybe it was meant to sound like that… o.O
I suspect that one of the reasons why Hedwig’s Theme on the bells (not chimes!—one of the bells weighs 13 tons!) is that they don’t have all the notes they need. There are only 17 bells, and they probably don’t cover the entire chromatic scale needed for some of Hedwig’s Theme’s odder intervals. I thought they did an excellent job with the constraints that they had.
The web site
triple-w dot lowell dot harvard dot edu slash Bells slash Bells dot php
lists the notes that 12 of the 17 bells can play (and lets you “play” them yourself—neat!). As I suspected, there is no way that they could have perfectly reproduced Hedwig’s Theme with the pitches they had to work with (which are F-sharp G-sharp B C-sharp D E F-sharp G-sharp A-sharp B plus a couple more).
PLEASE be aware that the link to the live video feed leads to a test signal when nothing else is being broadcast. It is a VERY LOUD sound and even though I stopped it as soon as I heard it, I still have a slight loss of hearing – hopefully my poor ears will recover in time!
Sue/editors, if you could add this precaution to the news post… I’m probably not the only one who is too curious for my own good! lol