Chance conjunction of the day

The conjunction came from a song lyric and a book fragment, within not very minutes of each other.

The song lyric came first; it was playing as I worked on the text of an article about statistical testing:

She was physically forgotten,
Then she slipped into my pocket
With my car keys.
She said “You've taken me for granted
Because I pleased you...”¹

I was hungry so, when the track finished, paused the player and put aside the article for a while to get a bite to eat. Filling the gastric gap with a sandwich from my right hand, I picked up the book with my left to give my mind a brief change of scene as well. The book was an old favourite (in fact, I find that I already referenced this same line from it, earlier this year ... I'm getting repetitive) which is, to embroider the conjunction (or to suggest that am stuck in a particular past), very close to being coeval with the song:

There’s a photograph of an olive tree among the stones on my desk; when Luise left she wrote on the back of it: “I trusted you with the idea of me and you lost it”.²

It's so easy to take someone for granted and lose the idea of them ... not just a significant other, but oneself and (the thought that occurred to me in this case) those friends more removed as well.

---

1. Paul Simon, "Diamonds on the soles of her shoes" on Graceland, 1986
2. Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency Ch.3. 1987, London: Cape. ISBN 0224024647

Now playing...

Tanita Tikaram, Ancient heart.

Now playing...

Charles Gounod, “O nuit divine” Roméo et Juliette , Act II [Angela Ghiorghiu].

Coming and going

Yesterday, JSB's Ray Girvan captured me with a sixteenth century CE poem (Dark night of the soul) and a piece of music (of the same name) which I bought before the day was over.

Today I've been listening to that music; and the music has stopped for a twentieth century poet: Sèamus Heaney, RIP.

It's a mystery

Mysteries come in all shapes, sizes and kinds.

My first attempt to reach Topsham, yesterday, went well for the first couple of hundred kilometres but was thwarted in the last five ... a threatened suicide closed rail and road routes for long enough to lose me the evening. My second try, today, seemed to be following suit, as a fellow rail passenger was taken ill in the same last stretch and had to be airlifted out; but the evacuation was swift, and I arrived in time. Such an unlikely coincidence on the same line, on two consecutive days, constituted my own small personal contribution to the mysteries of the universe.

The mysteries for which I had come, however, were well worth the effort. I was there to see Ray Girvan (of JSB blog) play bayan for Estuary Players' production of Tony Harrison's The Mysteries, and even though I wasn't able to stay to the end of the evening, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

The production was staged in the main body of St Margaret's parish church, and wonderful use was made of the setting: stage in the altar area, music section in the adjacent arch, audience in the pews. Eden's tree of the knowledge of good and evil was embodied in a human figure holding the fatal fruit. The shepherds and magi seeking the Christ child arrived (with sheep and dromedaries respectively) up the main aisle. The humour of the original mystery cycle was perfectly handled, with modern twists – the lamb taken by Mak the sheep stealer, for instance, being played by Shaun the Sheep, while the dromedaries were accompanied by Monty Python and the holy grail style clipclop sound effects.

Not that the humour was over dominant. The story of Abraham and Isaac (from Genesis 22), from which every fibre of my being has always recoiled, here became something to draw me in and break my heart. Mimed, to the solo accompaniment of  a haunting song from the music section, it highlighted the human pain at its heart, moved me to tears and became my high point of the night. Truly beautiful.

My only regret was that I couldn't, for much of the time, isolate Ray's bayan (my original reason for being there) from the amplified electronic instruments around it. He came through identifiably at times, probably because I was consciously tuned to listen for him, but was often lost as an individual voice – but his playing was, of course, a component in the overall success which is what really matters.

This is, I realise, a bit late to be singing the praises of a production whose last night I have just left. But if you are within reach of the Estuary Players’ next venture, I thoroughly recommend marking it on your calendar.

If music be the food of love...

You may have heard or read about the Post War Orchestra (for example, in today's IoS) – using ploughshares beaten from swords (OK; actually musical instruments built from military hardware) to make music which urges ends to conflict.

This is not (unlike my “Warm” post of 18 January) a blunt request that you give money. Whereas each Euro, dollar or pound donation to UNICEF may directly save the life of a child, I don't kid myself that a performance by PWO at Glastonbury cathedral will, in itself, have the slightest effect when it comes to ending war – any more than my individual decision to be a vegan will, in itself, move us closer to ending world hunger.

The value of cultural and individual gestures like this is different: they play a part in asserting that there is another way. In time, such assertions can play their part in shifts of viewpoint which may, eventually, support real change. Think of the abolition of slavery, or the rise of mass literacy; each of them the eventual result which had to start with an assertion of the belief that things could change.

So … no. I am not asking that you give money to support PWO's project … I'm simply suggesting that, should you feel that you would like to, a good place to do it is on their KickStarter page (for details of which, thanks to reader Geoff Powell).

After thinking about it, becoming a backer seemed to me something I would like to do. It doesn't even cost me anything unless sufficient numbers of other people join me – if POW don't hit their declared pledge target by 20th April, my debit card will never be charged (and I can change my mind and my pledge at any point up to that date). So I went ahead and pledged my little bit of dosh (and it really can be little – the minimum pledge is £1 sterling: currently about €1.20 or US$1.50).

If you should happen to feel that you are inclined to do the same, the address is http://kck.st/16MW09o

Rain man

Outside a café in the rain misted square at the heart of a small market town, a busker (probably in his eighties) plays a plangent harmonica: Malvina Reynolds' What have they done to the rain?

Haunting. And well worth every cent of my five Euros.

Now playing...

Kate Bush, "Deeper Understanding" on Director's cut. 2011, London: Fish People. 5099902777221.

“Are you lonely, are you lost?”

Dum...dum..DUM-DI-dum, dumDUMdum-dum

Ray Girvan could do this topic (and many others) so much better justice than I, but...

Musical structures and conventions tend to stability within any given culture, yet nevertheless show drift over time and differ between cultures. They appear to be good examples of memes which have some roots in our neurobiology and others in convergent experiential conditioning.

Whilst looking for something else entirely, I just ran across a fascinating paper in PNAS which explores rhythm spectra across a corpus of Western classical music. Here is the abstract...

Much of our enjoyment of music comes from its balance of predictability and surprise. Musical pitch fluctuations follow a 1/f power law that precisely achieves this balance. Musical rhythms, especially those of Western classical music, are considered highly regular and predictable, and this predictability has been hypothesized to underlie rhythm's contribution to our enjoyment of music. Are musical rhythms indeed entirely predictable and how do they vary with genre and composer? To answer this question, we analyzed the rhythm spectra of 1,788 movements from 558 compositions of Western classical music. We found that an overwhelming majority of rhythms obeyed a 1/f β power law across 16 subgenres and 40 composers, with β ranging from ~0.5–1. Notably, classical composers, whose compositions are known to exhibit nearly identical 1/f pitch spectra, demonstrated distinctive 1/f rhythm spectra: Beethoven's rhythms were among the most predictable, and Mozart's among the least. Our finding of the ubiquity of 1/f rhythm spectra in compositions spanning nearly four centuries demonstrates that, as with musical pitch, musical rhythms also exhibit a balance of predictability and surprise that could contribute in a fundamental way to our aesthetic experience of music. Although music compositions are intended to be performed, the fact that the notated rhythms follow a 1/f spectrum indicates that such structure is no mere artifact of performance or perception, but rather, exists within the written composition before the music is performed. Furthermore, composers systematically manipulate (consciously or otherwise) the predictability in 1/f rhythms to give their compositions unique identities.

If this doesn't interest you, you've probably stopped reading already; if it does, the article reference is below

---

• Daniel J. Levitina, Parag Chordiab & Vinod Menonc. "Musical rhythm spectra from Bach to Joplin obey a 1/f power law" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 6 2012, vol. 109 no. 10 3716-3720.

Double delight

I've just been looking with unrestrained admiration through the work of musician David Adams (which I only discovered today), on YouTube and elsewhere, orbiting back to his own company website Bozarts.

Prominent at Bozarts is coverage of his new play, Dmitri and Uncle Joe, which “...explores an imagined meeting in 1950 between the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich – both unexpectedly stranded and forced to share a bedroom together in a snow-bound dacha.”

Over the years, JSB's Ray Girvan and I have several times discussed in passing the use of "faux Cyrillic" text, where Cyrillic characters are substituted (as a typographic design device) for Latin ones* with which they share a visual resemblance. Ray recently noted a current example in the posters for The Darkest Hour (Chris Gorak, 2011; released as Phantom in Russia) and, a few months back, a more subtle example on a bar. The promotional material for Dmitri and Uncle Joe offers me the chance to post (on the left, here) two faux Cyrillic examples in reply.

---

*I feel a slight feeling of irritation whenever this device is used ... thoroughly unreasonable irritation, I hasten add: the problem is entirely mine, not the designer's. Having a slight, but only slight, familiarity with Cyrillic I find myself trying to read the substituted characters, falling over them, and feeling foolish...

Now playing...

... "A church is burning", sung by Paul Simon.

It used to give me the shivers in my mid-to-late teens. It wasn't just the protest song nature of it (though that was the genre that most moved me at the time) or the fact that it came from one half of Simon & Garfunkel (which, I confess, also gave it a head start for me) or the rousing tune (which certainly helped). I was also deeply impressed, then, by its ecumenicalism: the identification of a Jewish singer/songwriter with a oppression of Christian victims. Christian imagery ran through other parts of Simon's repertoire too: not always to Christanity's credit, as in "Blessed" for example, but ecumenical nevertheless.

It gives me the shivers still.

---

• Paul Simon, The Paul Simon songbook, "A church is burning". 1965, London: CBS.
• Simon & Garfunkel, Sound of silence, "Blessed". 1966, New York: Columbia.

The “real” thing...

I have always had a strong æsthetic preference for physical rather than purely electronic media in my acquisition of information content. Practical considerations often outweigh that preference when the content is utilitarian; but they never eclipse it.

I've mentioned this before, in relation to text. If I am seeking facts, or must carry a lot of content at the same time, then one or another electronic reader makes more sense than paper and ink. The reader can give me a thousand documents, or more, for the same weight and bulk as one. But when it comes to reading for pleasure, I would rather carry the bulk of a novel in paperback than the weightless downloaded version. I value the electronic reader¹ (though I'm in the process of ditching it in favour of software on a tablet computer; more of which another time), but I can't love it.

So it is, too, with music. Except, of course, that I have no utilitarian reasons for choosing downloaded music over physically purchased media beyond cost and availability.

Matt Revell commented to my previous post that “The beauty of a book is, I believe, that I just need a little light and my specs to enjoy it. It's not like listening to music, where you do need some kind of equipment whether you're listening to an Ogg file or a vinyl record.” A good point, and one which reverses to the case that if one is listening to music on the move², it makes little difference how one came by it. I never have a need to consult Stockhausen's Helikopter-Streichquartett or Craig Davis playing Sister Sadie in the middle of a meeting, the way I might have to consult legislation or published papers ... but, if I did, I could do so just as effectively from digital copies of purchased CDs (or even shellac 78s, for that matter) as from digital downloads.

Some music is no longer available on physical media. Some new music never was. In either case, I am quite happy to download it as my primary means of procurement and store it not only on my hard disk and back it up on the cloud but also save it onto a CD of my own. Much music, however, is still (so far; it may well not always be so) available for physical purchase – and I prefer to buy it that way if I possibly can.

There are the obvious advantages and disadvantages. Electronic copies are usually at a quality level compromise which is good enough and small enough for a particular purpose, and if I have the original physical medium I can go back for a better conversion at any time (see note 2 below). On the other hand, two and a half thousand albums fit as neatly in my shirt pocket as one, on a hard disk, but represent an increasingly demanding storage problem in physical form.

None of that, however, whilst true, really has much to do with my real reasons for preferring physical ownership. When it comes right down to it, my real reasons are æsthetic. I love the complete artefact which an album (or book) represents, and that is the true basis for my preferences.

There is a process of fragmentation in cultural forms, at the moment, which for the first time seems capable of excising those forms from our cultural stock. I don't suggest that there is anything wrong with fragmentation, and certainly there is nothing new about it. From my earliest reading memories, I have returned to favourite passages in a novel without reading the whole; from my first LP purchase as a teenager, I often put a disk on the turntable to play just one favourite track from an album or one favourite passage from a long work. But there is now a broad tendency to only hear the fragment, rather than choosing it from the whole. Downloading did not start this ... radio stations which play tracks from albums, arias from operas, extracts from concertos, predate downloads by a long way ... now the process has moved to the point where it is legitimate to wonder whether production of long, structurally coherent cultural forms such as the novel and its musical equivalents might not face a future redundancy.

In music, the continued existence of the long form is often (not always) tied up with the physically æsthetic object. I bought The defamation of Strickland Banks, which is an exception: while I get real pleasure from the sleeve note booklet in general, and from two of the black and white photographs in general, this is a brave attempt to carry the concept album into the new nonphysical era. Defamation relies on its narrative continuity, and planned video form, to bind itself together as a single long entity.

At the other end of the scale from Defamation, I have recently been given Emily Barker's Almanac and Kate Bush's Director's cut, both of which, in different ways, play on my desire for a physical æsthetic.

Almanac, like several other albums in its genre (Joanna Newsom's Milk eyed mender, for instance), dispenses with the usual jewel CD case in favour of a fold out cardboard one. There's a thumbnail picture of it on the left; click it for a large view showing inside and outside, including slotted disk sleeve.

This sleeve, as I hold it, triggers in me all the responses which I usually feel towards a craft object ... including books, particularly hand made books. I am aware that I am being manipulated to respond in this way; but both art and crafts are, always, manipulating our responses. I'm so glad that I don't have a download version, even though I have stored the music itself on a music player from which I listen to it without any need to go into the sleeve.

Director's cut also abandons the jewel case, but instead of a handicrafts approach it takes the form of a hardback book of the same size – with the disk itself sleeved inside the front cover. The book contains the song lyrics, but also a set of intriguing, humorously linked, photographs reminiscent of Penny Slinger meets Duane Michals (for example, the one shown on right, linked to the song lyrics for "And so is love"; again, click the image for a larger view). Many of these images depict people wearing fish heads³.

Both of these I handle with tactile and visual delight which synergises with my enjoyment of the music to produce an æsthetic whole which is so much more than the sum of its parts. The download version of Director's cut includes, in PDF form, a copy of the booklet ... but that really wouldn't (excuse the pun) cut it, for me; I would value it highly, if that were all that was available, but I value the inclusion of the "real" thing, the physical, touchable thing, so very much more.

---

1. I say "electronic reader" rather than "Kindle" because the Kindle, being tied to one supplier, is both barely useful to me and philosophically less open than most of its competitors.
2. Listening to music at home, in high fidelity, may be a different matter. By way of experiment, I downloaded and bought copies of the same Bach choral recording from the same supplier. Played through good speakers, the difference was palpable: the download lacked depth and dynamic range compared to the CD.
3. Clearly a reference to the Fish Heads label on which Bush's holding companypublishes her music. This sort of play is not isolated. The holding company itself is "Noble and Brite"; Bush's son, around which much of her life and one explicit song title revolve, is "Bertie", short for "Albert"; and the name Albert means "bright, famous, noble..."

---

• Plan B (aka Ben Drew), The defamation of Strickland Banks. 2010, New York: Atlantic Records (679 Artists).
• Emily Barker and The Red Clay Halo, Almanac. 2011, London UK: Everyone Sang.
• Kate Bush, Director's cut. 2011, London UK: Noble & Brite (Fish people).
• Joanna Newsom, The Milk Eyed Mender. 2004 Chicago: Drag City. DC263CD.

Now playing

After two days of heavy rain, this morning brought brilliant sun again over ground still wet with birdsong.

Now playing: The Hollies, "Bus stop".

New world ... real soon now

My friend Dirk Dusharme writes in delight at rediscovery of “Roger Whittaker, a folk singer I loved as a kid”.

I didn't know Roger Whittaker as a kid ... but in my student days, "New world in the morning"^[1] was something of an anthem.

Everybody talks about a new world in the morning.
New world in the morning takes so long

As we listened to the song we looked around us at the mess of a world which we had entered. "Yes," we all thought impatiently (though I don't remember anyone saying it aloud), "we need a new world, and yes, the morning is too long to wait for it".

Four decades on, I look around me at the world which my own generation (we who were listening to Whittaker in the early 1970s) have bequeathed to those who follow. We have no cause to feel proud. Some of us who were so impatient for a new world now have long ago deserted the cause and settled for profiting from the old one. Some have given up, resigned.

Some of us continue to dream of, hope for, and work towards a new world. But we tend to think in terms of achieving small steps towards it. Possibly we dare to hope that within our lifetimes we might see some sort of early prototype virtual concept model of it. All of which is sad evidence that we are grown old and wear our trousers rolled^[2].

I met a man who had a dream he had since he was twenty.
I met that man when he was eighty-one.
He said too many people just stand and wait up til the mornin',
Don't they know tomorrow never comes?

I scan the faces of young people I work with, looking for the same impatience as we had. It's there; not in every face ( when was it ever?) but in enough. There will never be a new world today, nor for that matter in the morning; but we desperately need those who can still demand that there should be.

---

1. Roger Whittaker, New world in the morning. 1970, EMI Columbia. DB8718. (More recently on Roger Whittaker, New world in the morning, 2007, Philadelphia: Collectables, B0000TAOFM.)
2. T S Eliot, "The love song of J Alfred Prufrock", in Prufrock, and other observations. 1917, London: The Egoist. (More recently 2001, London: Faber, 0571207200, or in TS Eliot, Collected poems, 1909-1962, 2002, London: Faber, 0571105483.)
   

Down through the layers of song

At JSBlog, Ray Girvan extols the joys of song "with layers of meaning".

Thinking about that, I realise that it holds the key to something about my own musical preferences which I have struggled to explain – to others or to myself.

On one hand, and it's perhaps the major strand, I have always been drawn to song lyrics; if they are backed up by good music, that's important too, but the lyrics come first. It started with attraction to storytelling songs (Woody Guthrie was an early childhood avourite) and then, in my teens, developed into "literary" ones. I love the verbal acrobatics of Catatonia, for instance, such as the line “so she buys wet fish” (in the Equally Cursed & Blessed song "She's a millionaire") which Matthews sang in such a way that “so she” slurred into “sushi” or the opening play on "treasure chest".

But then, on the other hand, I am primarily attracted to Kate Bush not by the lyrics (though they are interesting in themselves) but by the astonishing things she does with her voice.

Reading Ray's comments, I realise that layers of meaning are the key in both cases. Catatonia play with verbalised layers; Bush with the emotional effects of melody; both invite multiple readings of the result. Not that I reach the levels of layering displayed by Ray's German and Icelandic examples, but the principle is there.

So that's that sorted then; on to the next thing...

Lute

I enjoy polymaths. They don't have to be world straddling Leonardo da Vinci figures; the only important attribute is an eager interest in a breadth of things. I'm fortunate in knowing several. Four of them have blogs which interact from time to time with this one. I ran into one yesterday and spent an enjoyable couple of hours feeding when I should have been doing other things.

And to another I sat and listened for an hour today.

Eric Franklin is nominally a chemist, and an infectiously enthusiastic one, but with a range of other passions from ferrets to early music. Today grew from the latter: he took an audience through a history of the lute music. The journey was delivered in three simultaneous, interweaving strands: commentary, document, and music played on a series of instruments appropriate to each period and built at home.

Fifty years ago, Miss Norville (primary school teacher) told me that Greensleeves was written by King Henry VIII. Yesterday, Eric disillusioned me; it was, apparently, written decades later.

The photograph was not taken yesterday. It's from the week when I first encountered Eric, four years ago, and has been lifted from the Artist at work project.

Another "great man" joins the throng

Though I always tend to think of it in a politicoeconomic context, the "great man" theory of history is a tough weed which can grow anywhere. One might think, from many accounts, that there would be no calculus without Newton, evolution without Darwin. Despite my admiration for the achievements of those figures, I doubt that their fields would have withered on the vine if they had not been born ... someone else, or several someone elses, would have come along. Leibniz, in fact did come along in the case of calculus; Russell for evolution; but even they were not necessary. The development of ideas had in each case reached the point where it was inevitable that calculus and and a theory of evolution would sooner or later emerge.

So it is in western popular music. I grew upon the myth that Elvis Presley had single handedly taken it by the throat and dragged it into a track where it wouldn't otherwise have gone. Later, the Beatles gained the same mythic status. Don Mclean dubbed Buddy Holly's death "the day the music died". I have no feelings one way or another about Presley or Holly; I enjoyed McLean's song, and was a Beatles fan in my day; but all of them rode a wave of the time rather than creating it.

Now, with the death of Michael Jackson, we repeatedly (five times in half an hour, yesterday evening) hear an American fan describe this too as "the day the music died". Not having ever been much affected by his work, I'm in no position to judge whether he was as great as everyone is saying he was; but I can see that he is already being installed as the latest "great man", and being credited with the same single handed paradigm shifting status. While rejecting that mythologising, I hope that he is remembered for his music (whatever its quality) and not for the freak show media circus around his life and lifestyle.

---

• Don McLean, American Pie, 1971

C Melodies

For anyone who knows and has enjoyed Clarissa Vincent's Juggler and Storm Petrel journals, there is now a musical exploration in the form of an "online album", C Melodies.

Dancing at the edge of the world

Copied (with apologies for the "Growlery green"), because I would like to have said it myself, from the photo.net thread which I mentioned yesterday:

I find it interesting that so many adults are so uncomfortable playing with conceptual ideas.

You can ask a group of kindergarteners to think about almost anything -- say for example, "Are you a snail or a kangaroo?" and they'll have a field day "trying on" the two sides of the question and thinking about which one they are more like; in what ways and why -- and, I think -- learning from this imaginary exercise.

What you will almost never find is any one of the children saying, "I'm a human being. Therefore, I am neither a snail nor a kangaroo."

Correct. But that wasn't the point.^[1]

Long, long ago, I had a conversation with Ray Girvan about how frightened most people are of looking at themselves, their motivations, their natures, their place in their world, their mechanisms. I use the word "frightened" deliberately: fear, I think, is behind the reluctance to play with conceptual ideas. If we admit the existence of conceptual ideas other than the one we're comfortable with, to which we have nailed our lives, where will it end – and how will we get back?

I find this the most difficult part of teaching philosophy to students ... by late adolescence, so many of them have already discovered who they choose to be, and learned the fear of playing "what if?"

It's great, this feeling of being secure,
But I always thought there'd be more
... ... ...
Sometimes I'll slip away
I'll pretend that it all
Can go another way
... ... ...
I'll pretend life and dream that I
Can save the day.^[2]

Artists (writers of popular song lyrics included), I think, are the "jesters" which society tolerates because most people want someone else to take the risks of conceptual play on their behalf. Only to a certain extent, of course: Picasso went further than most people really want their surrogate play to venture.

---

1. Julie Heyward, Are you pursuing answers or establishing questions? Apr 06, 2009; 04:15

2. Melanie Safka, "Save the night" on Please love me. 1973 [lyrics ©1971], New York: Buddah. BDS5132/2318090

3. Post title ripped off from Ursula K Le Guin, Dancing at the edge of the world : thoughts on words, women, places. 1989, New York: Grove Press. 080211105X

Far away places

In my «Well, maybe I am» post, I said that "A quick ramble around the web hasn't established who authored either the words or music for this song, which was probably called Far away places."

Pauline Laybourn writes:

From Wikipedia

'Far Away Places' is a popular song.
It was written by Joan Whitney and Alex Kramer and published in 1948.

Thank you, Pauline. I feel very chastened ... Wikipedia should have been my very obvious first port of call, before rambling off through the web via Google!