Blog

You have to go to come back, I suppose. And so I have done both of these things. I spent this summer mostly in and around Ireland, and partly in Dresden, Germany.

Trying different combinations of transport from the airport, I took the LIRR to Penn Station and got a cab with my gigantic luggage (wasn’t fancying the subway on a Friday afternoon).

After taking the West Side Highway, the taxi driver wisely bailed out at around 79th Street at the sight of congestion there and (comparatively) sailed up West End Avenue, mitigating the Manhattan midday madness somewhat.

A couple of nights ago I had the dubious pleasure of a musical performance at 4 a.m. in the morning, awake when ought to have been sleeping, roused precisely by the auditory phenomenon that captured my attention. A system of several gigantic thunderstorms, larger than any I’d ever experienced my life, trundled over and around Dresden for about a half an hour bringing with them an unignorable musical event. The sheer volume of each thunderclap was such that I felt it not only in my “ears” (whatever that means) but also in my head, my chest, my whole body. Both like and unlike standing right next to a subwoofer in a nightclub or at a mid-sized music venue, I was captivated by the magnitude of each successive thunderclap. Each strike had its own unique pattern of attack, sustain, decay and release, and each clap played a part in a dramatic developmental process, the progress of the storm as a whole. Counting the seconds that elapsed between lightning flashes (which began to take on a peculiar rhythm of their own) to determine the path of the storm became a meaningful process of analysis. Tracking exactly those intervals engendered tension, release, expectation. The storm, which seemed at one point to wane completely, returned with an almighty clap of theretofore unheard magintude. And in the silence afterwards, something had changed. If that wasn’t music, I’m not sure what is.

I am shamelessly quoting Daniel Dennett at length here, in his formulation of Rapoport’s Rules.

The best antidote I know for [a] tendency to caricature one’s opponent is a list of rules promulgated many years ago by social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport.

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1. Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.”

A simple way to write about modulations and the pivot chords which can help effect them using nothing but ASCII.

• Use braces and brackets to distinguish the controlling tonality.
• Use (tonic, mode) notation where:
  • tonic is in [C, C sharp, D flat …]
  • mode is in [-, +]

For example:

(C, +):{[VI;II} -> V -> I]:(G, +)

reads in plain English:

A modulation is effected from C major to G major by the pivot chord VI in C major which is II in G major (which progreses to a tonicisation of G major)

Reading Justin London in class this week. Checking out his website I found a link to a curated Excel sheet of pop songs with what he calls “metric fake-outs”, or metrically ambiguous openings. Using Ivy, I converted the source file (available here) into a public Spotify playlist which is available here.

Credit: Justin London (homepage)

I’ve kept it no secret from myself that the time is ripe to buy a new laptop. During the summer, the screen of my 2009 MacBook Core 2 Duo started behaving badly. Strictly speaking, it’s the backlight or the inverter which delivers power to it which is giving me bother. It was the first Mac I’d owned (having had a PC laptop to call my own before then) and I found it a natural transition because of an interest in Linux. The ability to pop open a terminal window into a POSIX-compliant system, within a slick and very stable GUI makes it a compelling experience for anyone who has a bit of technical background, but who uses his/her computer for about 80% consumer / 20% “development” purposes.

Motivation

I am, as of late, frequently in receipt of PDFs containing scanned images of text from diverse sources.

There are at least two things that I like to do with these PDFs: one is to optimise them for use with an ebook. I use the excellect k2pdfopt to achieve this end. The other is to OCR them for personal use, particularly for journal aricles for which the text content of PDFs is garbled to such an extent it is impossible to add highlight annotations. For this task I use tesseract.

It has been a great privilege of mine to have been offered a place on an integrated masters’-doctorate programme awarded by the graduate school in the arts at Columbia University in the City of New York. From this September, I will take courses in a variety of music theory and music-related topics with a focus first on tonal analysis.

I’ve just spent the last week or so moving from a small town on the west coast of Ireland to the English–speaking world’s most well known metropoles.

I would like to investigate the usefulness of an ‘agile’ methodology for producing academic work. The familiar mantra ‘release early; iterate often’ applies and the output is a short (and growing) “research brief” of 800-2000 words. Such an output should have all the citations and references necessary to aid the curious referee or reader and should not shy away from tackling highly-specialised problems or areas of interest within the field. The briefs should be version-controlled, publicly available and open for discussion and comment, particularly with a view to emendation or the co-ordination of a longer study which may expand upon the topics explored in the seed brief.

This week I’ve decided to revisit first and second year undergraduate harmony, this time through the lens of Walter Piston’s Harmony, a canonical “American” harmony textbook. I’ll be making my own notes and commentary as I read along and work through the exercises in a LaTeX document using a document class inspired by Edward Tufte, with musical examples created in ABCPlus (an extension of ABC notation which supports harmony and polyphony).