I thought this was going to be a big year for turquoise, but it wasn’t.
Since Yahoo is discontinuing support for FrontPage (yes, I was still using FrontPage) as of September 12, 2011, I’ve updated the web site using Site Solutions… It’s a cute and quick tool but unfortunately you can’t update the backgrounds. C’est la vie.
Largo from Winter by Vivaldi is good for contrary motion and finger independence.
The prelude from the Bach Cello Suite is a good lever exercise…
And playing “Brig o’ Perth” in different rhythms (reel, scottische, hornpipe, strathspey) is fun and I’m sure it’s good for something. It’s like turning Samuel Pratt’s “The Little Fountain” into an etude, by changing the arpeggiation patterns.
Parthenogenesis: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/lizammerman
Day and night sounds; ambient space music. Owls in rain; construction.
This album’s title was inspired by a BBC news article about a boa that had produced several litters through parthenogenesis despite the presence of males. The babies had an unusual cream and dried leaf color to them. There’s also a recurring motif of doors.
BBC News Article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9139000/9139971.stm
Recently some confessional liner notes inspired me to think:
I go round and round with these concepts like a hamster in a wheel.
Why do you make art?
- To take any gig there is? Any music is better than no music?
- Just concerts – “High Art”
- Functional art – carved chairs and wedding processionals.
- Only self-generated original art, not copies.
- Is your only goal immortality? Who will forget you?
What’s your relationship to your “fans?”
- Do you need privacy?
- You need to transmit your art/product somehow (for some reason. It seems like OCD). It’s a combination of communicating and saying, “Look, I made this!” If you just wanted to make money, you’d do something else, so this long ago ceased to be about potential gobs of money you could make from art.
- Your need to feel “authentic;” if what you show to others is too far away from your actual position, then it feels “fake” and is not sustainable without a great deal of effort. To keep doing a job, it must be in some way rewarding and not too strenuous, even if minimally rewarding and exhausting.
- Consumers’ (the fans’) needs to believe that the artist is genuine and transmitting their own personality and ideas; that it is truth and not “product” as the basis for credibility and shared experience; the fans need to believe the artist is “authentic.”
- This sort of thing provides a fertile ground for endless unfounded and entertaining speculation on internet forums. Maybe these liner notes are just in-jokes for former housemates.
So what we get as an “art product” is hybridization of what’s personal and what’s commoditized (I’m not sure, honestly, if in this case I’m confusing commoditization with palatability). To be clear, I’m referring to a CD where, no matter how confessional, the point of the thing is to sell it to “fans.” It’s not a series of paintings based on the artist’s life, where their purpose as commodity is secondary to the purpose of existing at all. I’m certain that there’s a wider spectrum of commoditization available due to modern technology, from home-made CDrs to signed limited edition box sets. For further reading you can go to the Color Theory blog, here: http://passivepromotion.com/an-argument-against-fan-funding… remember to read the comments too!
Anyway…
- If the art product is too unique, it’s too introspective, it’s not salable, mostly because no one else is you. Something that is too unique, too intimate, TMI, an “unfinished” product, may not meet the minimum standard of what the average reasonable and prudent person would expect from an arm’s length transaction in regards to an average art product of that type, or average music in that genre.
- Universal truths sell well (think Shakespeare) but are inherently not unique to any one person. But because they apply to everybody, they’re personal truths.
- So what we end up with is a refined, commoditized, processed product two or three steps away from the source experience and yet described as “deeply personal” or “meaningful” in some way to the artist. It’s grape jam instead of grapes on the vine, but not so far away as wine. And sometimes it rhymes badly.
- Hopefully, as a result, the public’s been sufficiently convinced that the product is authentic, you’re sharing something personal, and it’s been smoothed over to include a commonality of experience and language that makes it “shareable” and not just TMI. And in the process the artist has some catharsis from stepping away from the source material, or some extra practice from bringing a project to completion.
Art can be cathartic and communicative amongst its other functions and benefits. Although, I tend to prefer both functional-decorative arts and “pure art” or “art for art’s sake” possibly because they don’t occupy the muddy middle ground of confessional communications. I also have noticed that I gravitate toward unfinished products, possibly because they feel more “authentic,” and I’ve absorbed a large chunk of the cultural cult of the authentic along with American individualism.
Is it important to minimize convergent evolution in art?
In biology, convergent evolution describes two species of different lineages that develop similar traits, usually through similar evolutionary pressures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
I feel this happens in art, (and sometimes in science) when similar (or different) stressors result in the artist’s producing a sense of dj vu, art that’s been done mostly that way before or is substantially similar to other art going on at the same time, as a result of cultural convergence. It’s not a copy… it’s not an influence. It’s a similar result from an independent chain of inputs.
How important is it to be different? Is it OK to be in-genre? Not innovative? That even if you think you’re being innovative, there is nothing new under the sun, and you’re just expressing that which other people have expressed in similar ways, in some convergence of sentiment?
Many benchmarks for art/music/culture point to uniqueness, innovation or extremity of examples. I rarely think of work within the bounds of its genre as a benchmark, even if it’s exemplary. I think the focus on work that founds or changes a niche in people’s thinking is emblematic of the human desire to be constantly entertained with something new, even though you can’t define a genre without a reasonably sized body of work from which some examples can be selected as paragons.
I feel strongly that the current media atmosphere – bigger, faster, stronger, more spectacular, with instant gratification and shorter download times, with less room for the imagination – raises the bar for anyone trying to make “art.” For example, it’s not enough to conquer the Olympic act of singing Opera; now we must do it dressed in mermaid outfits floating in harnesses twenty feet above a moving stage. http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/09/28/arts/28met3.html
If a hamster runs in its wheel, and then someone turns its cage around, does it make a difference to the hamster?
Do you have tomatoes that won’t ripen before frost? Are they a pale mint to Kelly green color? Fried green tomatoes are a nice side-dish option.
1 small or medium green tomato
2 tablespoons olive oil, I prefer the dark green oil
1 piece of cooked turkey bacon crumbled in pieces
Pinch of salt and pepper
Tablespoon of grated parmesan cheese
I slice the tomato with the stem end down because usually that’s more stable and it makes nice oval slices. Cover the bottom of a pan with the olive oil and add the tomato slices. Sprinkle with turkey bacon crumbs, salt and pepper and parmesan. Cover the pan and heat until the cheese is sticky. Then uncover and stir until the tomatoes are slightly fried to an olive-green color.
Variations:
Add a pinch of tarragon and a dash of tarragon vinegar
Or
Add a pinch of basil and oregano
Or
Add a pinch of thyme, rosemary and sage
To double the recipe, add enough oil to cover the bottom of a pan large enough to accommodate all the tomato slices flat in the bottom of the pan.
http://www.amazon.com/Through-Language-Glass-Different-Languages/dp/080508195X
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher
In the first several chapters I focused more on what the book made me think about, and where my mind wandered off to, than what was in the text.
Here’s what I thought about :
Essentially, we notice, describe, and give names to what is important to us. By repeating those names, and by being compelled to transmit certain attributes – how much red is in a poppy, if the sea was dark, what gender your neighbor is – we carry certain impressions, stereotypes and information through our culture, thereby reinforcing the importance of whatever it was.
I had a geology professor in college who used to say, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” People forget that a lot.
With the same subject matter, different cultures will come to a different conclusion. White connotes purity in the West, let’s use the US as an example, brides in the US wear white. A red wedding dress in the US would probably be considered scandalous even today. Red, in China, is seen as lucky and auspicious, and is a traditional color for Chinese wedding dresses.
With the same culture and background, people will have different interpretations of a text or context. Different inputs – individual perceptions can be physically different. Color blindness has many variations, some people can’t smell caraway, and hearing varies from person to person in range, sensitivity or overall loudness. In the same culture, differences abound in learning, experience and interpretation. Even siblings will have different views of their family units based on their birth order, how other siblings treated them, the parent’s experience with older siblings, etc. Now compound these things with the differences in public and private schools, religious or secular education, living in towns with different levels of affluence. What’s normal for me may be very different for you.
Evolution is based mostly on accident and some kind of minimum adequacy. There’s no purpose to it; it just means that whatever evolved was adequate enough not to get killed off. The giraffe’s neck is long not “in order to reach tall trees” but merely because some giraffes had longer necks and didn’t die. Thus it is with language. Whatever someone came up with to begin with was adequate to convey the concept, and through trial and error more layers of complexity were added until we forgot some.
The human mind likes to impose order on a world that’s inherently less predictable than we think. In India, a child was born with four arms and lived; regardless of the number of images of people with multiple arms, would you believe this was real if you didn’t see it on CNN? I would like to think all of our myths have a kernel of truth somewhere.
As I continue to read (and my mind continues to wander) somewhere about pg. 177, there’s a quiz about how you figure out relative direction. There’s a picture of toys on a table, and the picture is rotated 180 degrees from page to page and on the last page you put the toys in order. There’s a house, a doll, and a tree. Evidently, I don’t solve this puzzle the way most English-speakers do. Most English speakers choose an object on the table, figure out whether the other objects are to their left or their right (i.e., in relation to themselves – egocentric relative directions) as opposed to whether the other objects are relative to each other or some other landmark (geographic relative directions). I figured out the order relative to the distance from the corner of the room, instead using left or right of other objects or left or right in relation to myself. However, I’m sure if you asked me if the objects were to my left or right, instead of in relation to other objects, I would have figured out the puzzle using egocentric relative direction, because the answer given frequently depends on the question asked, especially for those of us who can be very literal. And why would anyone have a toy tree?
More links for you…
1) Change it up: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html
2) Smell the roses: http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=3179
3) Wine and Dark Chocolate: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/oxfordshire/7799288.stm
4) Study at both Morning and Night: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/12.11/03-sleep.html, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081008151318.htm,
5) Mozart: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~lswartz/mozarteffect.pdf
If I actively think about arranging music, it seems like a great chore. You learn the melody of the tune and the appropriate chord progression and then put the pieces back together with some new chords and ornaments and a few variations… It’s reverse process engineering. Looking at my wedding repertoire, I’ve arranged more songs than I think I have; but I’ve done it as needed, not all at once; and only once have I actively sat down, with blank staff and pencil, to go about arranging something. Really, it seems to be the paper and pencil bit that gets in the way; I’ve got most of the “wedding favorites” memorized, and the sheet music binder is more like a glorified setlist than a necessity in most cases.
So, I ask myself, how have I been doing this? It’s a combination of those skills you’d use to learn a piece by ear; combined with what I know of music theory and the score of the piece, if I have it; and the memory of the piece. That last bit seems to be the most important for me, because if I learn, for example, an Irish tune that I remember from a live performance or a specific recording or from “somewhere” and the arrangement isn’t the same as what I remember, it requires either unlearning the memory, or keeping in mind an option – for this section, A or B?
If you click on three or four different harpists’ web sites, and listen to the Mendelssohn wedding march (otherwise known as “There Goes the Bride” or “Wedding March from a Midsummer Night’s Dream”) you’ll get several very different arrangements. I’ve heard a march, a waltz, and a fountain full of glissandi… each is idiomatic to the harpist. It’s very helpful when you’re multitasking to have an arrangement that resonates with your background and style. That’s also part of the live music experience; that each performance or performer will be in some ways unique, bringing their knowledge and perspectives to the event.
Understanding string tension is important; most harpers know not to put pedal harp strings on a harp made for lever strings, and that lever gut strings are thinner than pedal gut strings for the same note. I’ve always assumed that between lever gut and pedal gut strings, the pedal gut string requires more force to displace due to the higher string tension. The tension over length ratio is also important. While strings with a tension/length ratio of less than one are too “floppy” strings with a t/l ratio of near three are too “hard.” The material is also important in the “feel” of the string, since I find that a wire-wrapped string or a gut string will have more “bite” in feel while a monofilament nylon string or a nylon wrapped string will have more “slip.” For harpists, string tension/materials/”feel” are usually viewed as part and parcel of the harp as a whole, unlike guitar or mountain dulcimer where there’s more leeway for changing strings within a range of parameters on any particular instrument, and there are more commercially available options for prepackaged string sets. One of the interesting take-aways that I found from looking the subject up on the internet is that the musician can’t necessarily tell how much force is being used to pluck the string, and therefore how much they’re exerting themselves, because some of the other perceptions you’re juggling at the same time are the t/l ratio and the feel of the material.
Also note that I’m not talking about wire-strung harps, which are obviously under a great deal of tension but require an extremely light touch!
Here’s a bunch of links for you:
http://liutaiomottola.com/formulae/tension.htm
http://liutaiomottola.com/myth/perception.htm
http://www.sligoharps.com/struc1.htm
http://www.robinsonharp.com/index.html
http://www.markwoodstrings.com/
http://www.harpkit.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=library
http://www.noyceguitars.com/Technotes/Articles/T3.html
