The Fredösphere

The US Army Filed Band & Soldiers' Chorus will be at Hill Auditorium (Ann Arbor) this Friday night.

They Might Be Giants will be at the Power Center Saturday night.

Hill Auditorium is a concert hall with a vast stage capped by a semicircular plaster shell, with quite good acoustics considering its size.  (Just avoid the middle of the main floor and you'll do great.  As is the case in some other auditoria*, you get the best sound if you are sitting near a reflective surface:  a wall, or better yet, the ceiling.)  The recent remodeling greatly increases the comfort and convenience of patrons, and the color scheme chosen (plum, gilt, and smoky blue, is the way I would describe it) is a little unnerving at first, but was a gutsy choice and deserves praise.  I'll never forget going there for the first time as a junior in high school, as part of the 100-member Michigan state honors choir.  Ann Arbor in all respects seemed like a happening cosmopolis to my hayseed-clouded eyes, but Hill Auditorium was the summit of the cherry on top of the creme de la wow -- the world's classiest dirigible hanger.

Power Center is a proscenium stage under a concrete bunker, with very steeply raked seating spread out like a big fan.  Everywhere you look you see the off-putting texture of undressed concrete, except in the lobby where mirrored glass and aluminum framing dominates.  The building knows what it is, and it proceeds to be that exactly, if you know what I mean.  I've performed there once, when the Ann Arbor Cantata Singers and a chamber group from the Detroit Symphony gave Mark Morris' troupe some Vivaldi to dance to.  The tiny pit there barely had room for the strings, so the back doors of the pit were opened up and we singers performed from this weird backstage space where we could see the conductor barely and the audience not at all.  For all anyone knew, we performed in polka dot boxers and bunny slippers.  We were mic'ed (poorly, as we found out later) and the whole experience was everything a live performance should be, but with every bit of immediacy and magic removed.

In recent years, they've allowed ivy to climb up the big blank walls on Power's backside, which softens and humanizes the building.  I like Power Center, I really do.  Like I said, it embraces its cold, forbidding modernist ideals in a way that inspires admiration.  But Hill Auditorium I love.  In the firmament of performance spaces I have known, it is the Polaris.


*I bet this is the only blog you read all day that contains the word auditoria.  "Will the fora be held in the auditoria or the stadia?"  My dream is that I hear that sentence spoken uncontrivedly before I die.  Fat chance.

After reading this, I'm really, really, really, really afraid this blog might become too popular.  Thank goodness I'm only getting 10-40 hits per day.  My readership:  it's so ... selective.

Talk of a space elevator built within 15 years is fascinating, in that it could impact a remake of the film version of The Fountainhead.  I can imagine the final scene (with Dominique rising above the New York skyline in an open elevator) different in the new version, with Howard Roark in a space suit standing atwart a satillite of his design, with no wind to blow his clothes around in some kind of cheesy tape loop.  Oh, and Dominique travels 62,000 miles in the elevator, so the whole scene lasts a couple of weeks.

And while they're taking the trouble to do a remake, I hope they fix the film's one flaw and shoot it in color this time.

Speaking of her Aynness, I wonder how she would react to the news that individuals are often dumb, but acquire wisdom when they are subsumed into the mob, er, I mean a group.  What you notice when you have watched The Fountainhead more than 10 times (as I have) is that in that bizarre but fascinating world I will call the Randösphere, whenever a decision is made by any group, committee, board, commission, or the public at large, the result is always the worst possible.  (The odd exception is the jury that finds Our Hero not guilty at the end.)  Good decisions can only be made by loners (usually arrogant entrepeneurs) who swim against the current.

To be fair, if we read past the title we find out that groups work best if their members retain independence of opinion.  Otherwise, the dreaded groupthink becomes a real possibility.  Read the whole thing for details, but it seems the ideal is a subtle blend of individualism and collectivism working together to produce the wisest outcome.  Ayn Rand is half-right, which is what I suspected all along.

An article from Nature gives us more information on why people hate atonal music.  But beware this garbled sentence:

In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency.

That sure sounds to me like they are saying "words used a lot in a text tend to be present more often," or maybe if I read it even more carefully, it says "words used a lot tend to be present less often."

Anyway, if you read the whole thing I think you discover its point is simply that a conventional piece of music sets up a context for itself early on, and then sticks to it through the rest of the piece.  If it doesn't, we call it a failure, unless it was deliberate and systematic, in which case we call it atonality.

And a tip 'o the hat to the indispensable, inexorable, implacable, incorrigible Arts & Letters Daily.

THE FREDÖSPHERE is seated in a crowded network.  We see him only in semi-back view, a broad and powerful back.  With him are the press agent MANNY and an attractive, if fatuous GIRL.

THE FREDÖSPHERE

Manny, what exactly are the unseen gifs of this lovely thing you manage?

MANNY

Well, she blogs a little...you know, blogs....

GIRL

Manny's faith in me is simply awe-inspiring, Mr. Fredösphere.  Actually, I'm still studying, but -

MANNY

She's a great talent.  And we figured a mention in the Fredösphere -

GIRL

Just a little link -

REVERSE ANGLE

THE FREDÖSPHERE'S face appears to be contorted with sarcastic malice, but it's hard to be sure due to billows of cigarette smoke.

THE FREDÖSPHERE

Oh, and one mention in my blog is all you need to shoot straight to the top of the search engines?

MANNY

You are the most powerful man in the blogosphere, after all.

THE FREDÖSPHERE

Darn right, I'm powerful.  Even my bathrobe has sholder pads.  Huge ones.  I have to turn sideways to walk through a doorway.  But I know what you're trying to do - your plan.

GIRL

Me?  I mean "I"?  Are you kidding, Mr. Fredösphere, sir?  With my Jersey City Brains?

THE FREDÖSPHERE

The brains may be Jersey City, but the software is Moveable Type!  I link to you, suddenly you're the spider at the center of the blogging web.  The black widow herself!  Then you give me nothing, no links back to me, no hat-tip.  And my blog ends up with pictures of my family at Disney World and a list of what I eat for breakfast each morning!   No thank you!  You're dead - get yourself buried!

Shamefaced, MANNY and the GIRL shuffle out.

THE FREDÖSPHERE

I love this dirty internet!

I see here Terry Teachout is not a fan of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof.  I'm relieved.  I thought I was the only one.  That is, me and my relatives I convinced to attend a production down in Sarasota, Florida a few years ago.  What a mistake.

Like Terry, I found the older generation gives you characters you -- well, not like or admire, but at least enjoy watching on the stage.  The young couple, however, are whiny and repulsive.  More to the point, the characterizations seem to be contrived in a way to maximize sympathy for Tennessee Williams', uh, interests.

More recently, the wifeosphere and I spent a week in San Fransisco, and as our hotel was only a block away from a theater, I dragged her to see Waiting For Godot.  "It's a classic!" I told her.  Sheesh.

The theater had a traditional proscenium, and the staging included a second, smaller copy of the proscenium's gilded trim work, set back and slightly askew.  It's a frame within a frame!  Another level of indirection!  Irony!  Hoo boy.

Sadly, that was the most interesting thing in the whole production, although as best as I could tell, the acting was good enough.  After intermission, I noticed maybe ten seats ahead of me that were occupied in the first act but not in the second -- and I was sitting in the fourth row.  Like me, they didn't seem to define entertainment as spending an evening listening to pointless arguments by aliens.

With all the attention that Fareinheit 911 is getting  right now, it's high time I come clean about my relationship with Michael Moore, who is my wife's co-worker's wife's interviewer.

I've always regarded it as my greatest accomplishment that Kay Lani attended my wedding.  Yes, I'm talking about that same Miss America (née Michigan) who gets mugged by Michael Moore in Roger and Me.  I like what this reviewer says about her:

Low-level GM public-relations people make squirmy, evasive statements; elderly women on a golf course are confused as to what’s wanted of them; visiting entertainers are cheery and optimistic; Miss Michigan, who is about to take part in the Miss America Pageant, tries to look concerned and smiles her prettiest. What does Moore expect? Why are these people being made targets for the audience’s laughter?

When you meet Kay Lani, you get what you expect,  a conversation with with someone who is profoundly emotionally intelligent and personable.  Gov. John Engler tried to recruit her to run for the Michigan state senate, which made perfect sense to me.

Tomorrow, I'll reveal my shameful, shadowy business dealings with Dick Cheney, and explain just exactly how I managed to become so rich, powerful, admired, and feared.

My research into the exciting new field of nested counterpoint has made progress and today I will share my discoveries. (If you are going to need a glossary for the counterpoint terminology that's coming up, here's one.) I have decided to attempt a two-part canon at the octave. (I toyed with a tritone interval just to show off but decided not to push my luck.) I intuited that a nesting scheme based on the fibonacci sequence would be fun and might be aesthetically pleasing. It turns out, that is the minimum amount of time between entrances of the nested canons, for reasons which I will explain later if I can find a way without this post colasping under its own weight.

This crude chart shows what I mean. I will call the two voices Soprano and Bass, since Merrill and Lynch are probably under some kind of trademark protection. The brackets above the dashed line belong all to the soprano and represent the various entrances of its nested canons. Below the dashed line are those of the bass. At the bottom are beat numbers. I decided to number the beats backwards for reasons which seem compelling to me and may become obvious to you but I just don't feel like trying to articulate.

The soprano is the leader and begins at beat 34. The bass line follows at a time interval of 13 beats. This means that, when everything comes to a halt at beat "0" the base will have been in for 21 beats. These parts are the conventional, outermost canon and are represented by the A brackets.

The first nested canon begins at the B brackets. The leader-follower relationship switches back and forth; I really haven't worked out if that is switching is required, but at least I know it works. The bass' B theme is 13 beats long and the soprano will sing just the first eight beats of it.

Please realize that these inner brackets do not represent new voices entering. They simply represent new canonical relationships coming into play. Therefore, in the bass for example, the first beat of B is exactly the same music as the 9th beat of A (and must be since they are sung by only one voice.)

In a similar way, the soprano then leads with canon C which is five beats long (and the bass sings the first three beats of it) followed by the two beats of canon D, lead by the bass, with the soprano singing only one beat of it.

By the time we reach the end, we have a beat that is heavily burdened with canonical relationships. Extrapolating from the standard rules of how to write a canon systematically, I can see that I will have to start with the last beat and work backwards. This will guarantee that I will end up with a canon that follows all these rules. This working backwards will not unfortunately guarantee that the results will be beatiful. But then, counterpoint was never about beauty, was it? It's all about showing off.

My next installment should be much easier to follow because it will use a musical score instead of some goofy chart. So stay with me.

Sound of a hand briskly slapping your face several times. Odor of smelling salts.

Stay with me! Stay with me!

Labels: NestedCounterpoint

The NYT tells of the work of Dr. David Huffman, who brought mathmatical rigor to the art of origami and created some unbelievable shapes out of folded paper:

Dr. Huffman explored structures composed of repeating three-dimensional units - chains of cubes and rhomboids, and complex tesselations of triangular, pentagonal and star-shaped blocks. From the outside, one model appears to be just a rolled-up sheet of paper, but looking down the tube reveals a miniature spiral staircase. All this has been achieved with no cuts or glue, the one classic origami rule that Dr. Huffman seemed inclined to obey.

(Mixolydian Mode spotted it first.)

Is it ever, at all possible to somehow become too fixated on the importance of design?  To perhaps lose sight of content while one pursues form in its elusive perfection?  Perhaps even become just a little decadent while doing it?

Of course:

More tough guy than tender, there are six different scents in the series, including Garage, Dry Clean, and Tar; in each bottle, ingredients such as ozone, town gas, and nail polish mingle with Chinese cedarwood, bay leaf essence, and bergamot.

Suddenly that dusty, eight-year-old bottle of Polo that's been slowly leaking all over my vanity drawer seems terribly inadequate.

And then:

It’s hard not to blush and murmur that this is the most attractive sandwich maker we’ve ever seen.

Gosh, then I must be unusually good at suppressing blushing and murmuring.

(Follow the links by all means, but they're screwy [how ironic that they would try so hard to get the look just perfect, then drop the ball when it comes to the functioning part of the page.  Beautiful.  Or maybe its all just a post-modern ...no, no, no, stop that!  Aaaaaargh!] so you'll have to type the links into your navigation window yourself.)

I didn't know this kind of sensitivity training was still going on these days.

My one encounter occured in high school, waaaaay back in the 1970s.  My sociology class was held during "zero" hour, which was an early morning elective before the first hour of classes.  Essentially, the school was empty except for us.  I took the class only as a means of avoiding the undignified school bus; my mother was forced to drive me.

One day at the end of class my teacher announced that the next day the blue-eyed kids would be treated as second-class citizens.  We would be segregated and singled out in various ways.  Now, not for a moment did any of us suspect that the whole exercise would rise above the level of slight annoyance.  Nevertheless, being the priveledged, red-blooded blue-eyed kids that we were, we weren't going to take it lying down.  Furthermore, we intuited what was expected of us in the whole unreal exercise.  We made our plans.

The next morning, we rushed into the room with ski masks over our faces and toy guns in our hands.  My buddy Jim* (career arc:  Annapolis midshipman, navy pilot) was supposed to shout some inspiring slogan but to his shame he panicked and shouted "Raid!" instead.  We grabbed brown-eyed Ronda (career arc:  senior class president, poly-sci at University of Michigan, drunken ex-cheerleader) and hauled her down to the chemistry lab as a hostage.

Our teacher loved it.  Loved it.  He saundered over to the principal's office, got on the P.A. and urged us to surrender without bloodshed.  I really don't remember what happened after that, except it got boring quickly.

What's interesting to me now is how well we understood the conventions of the narrative of oppression and protest.  The only thing we forgot to do was call in a local TV news team.  (Since the nearest was an hour away, maybe they wouldn't have come.  But if we had known how to pitch it, maybe they would.) 

Except for full-blown riots, how often do "the people" act spontaneously as a mass?  In the modern world, such an event as a truly spontaneous protest must be the rarest of things.  Everything you see that pretends to be such is merely a made-for-TV movie.

*The names have been changed.

My home PC is sunk in an emotional crisis right now. Boots about once every five tries. I have a deep suspicion that files on the hard drive are being corrupted with every try. The OS (whoops, better put scare quotes around that: "OS") is probably offering those files cigarettes and fascist pamphlets right now. So anyway, I'll be blogging via the handy email method that blogger.com provides. But that method is unreliable, as I've found out from two posts that bounced and others that took forever to show up. Ten days, and my honeymoon with blogger.com is already over. As my father-in-law might say, the first question you should always ask is: "how much will the free one cost?"

Thanks for my buddy Rick for this link about a rare musical instrument:

The IBM 1403 printer was noisy, but it could also be musical! Clever engineers figured out what line of characters to print to make a noise at a given pitch, and how many times to print that line repeatedly to sustain that pitch for a given duration. In other words, the printer could play musical notes.

Rumor has it the downloadable rendition of Born Free is especially fine.

Moderism fails more often in architecture than any other art because of the importance of context.  Either the result is a fascinatingly wierd blob placed incompatably next to traditional buildings, or the result is another tower in a park that Michael Blowhard often complains about. OTOH when modernism succeeds we ought to talk it up.  I think this bridge is absolutely gorgeous -- a new, funky design completely justified by the demands of the site.  Form and function.  Firmness and funkiness.  Yes. It's not surprising that bridges are among modernism's great achievements.  They rarely share their space with other objects, so they have the lebensraum to be the unique sculptures their designers crave to make.  There are a few exceptions, however.

I took this on-line quiz that's supposed to "determine" what sci-fi author you "are." These things are always silly and frequently fail to live up to my already-rock-bottom expectations.  But this one may end up changing my life!  For the better!  Maybe!  My author is E. E. (Doc) Smith (never heard of him) the inventor of the Space Opera (only dimly aware of that).  Now I've got his book First Lensman sitting on my shelf. This is classic sci-fi from the 30s and 40s. I regret now that I wasted so much of my prime sci-fi years on that incontinent zitbrain we call Isaac Asimov, and now I intend to make up for lost time. Space opera is defined as plot-driven stories with strong heros and villians acting in a universe where individuals can still make a diference. I'm feeling good about this. No sniveling, etiolated psychohistorians anywhere in sight. (And if this post's title has you really, really confused, go here.)

UPDATE:  last link was dead; I switched it to a better one.

Right now I'm looking at the cover of this CD, part of the Royal Edition, a series of classical recordings sponsored or blessed or something by HRH Prince Chas.  A painting by the prince graces the cover.  My first instinct was to scrutinize the painting for lapses of technique or taste.  After all, someone in his position must be a dilettante, right?  (This coming from me, a person once described by the New York Times as "the hardest-working dilettante in Rock 'n' Roll.")

Being a royal would simply suck, at the point one wanted to actually do anything.  Has Prince Charles ever wanted to build a tree house?  If he did, he would have to make sure it was one of the finest tree houses ever constructed.  To guarantee that, he'd have to have help.  And then the story would be "he had help."

Back in the old days, there were compensations for this dilemma, mainly that they allowed you to do other cool things like send men to their deaths and stuff.  But now, in the days of figurehead monarchy, you're stuck.  If being the honorary chairman of this 'n' that isn't your thing, you're one little lame prince indeed.

Der Drübermensch is five and I've been working with him for a while on basis music theory.  At this stage that means note recognition.  Last night I asked him to try to find on the keyboard the first three notes of Shostakovich's A-minor fugue.  It took him a painfully long time.  Sheesh, this is going to be a long haul.

This morning, he sat down at the piano and played the first three notes all by himself!  O glory, I have a budding Mozart on my hands!

But is a three-part fugue by Shostakovich really the best piece for him to start out with?  Maybe the Rachmaninoff Prelude in C-minor is the obvious choice.

Here's your assignment:

Read this description of the poetic form called Sestina.  Then, rewrite the description as a poem, using the Sestina form!  It'll be fun!  Be the first one to finish the assignment.  In case of a tie, the prize will be given to the person whose poem does not contain the letter "e".

The wifeösphere and I caught Jaws on cable TV a couple of weeks ago.  I was glad for the chance since I'd never seen it except in ragged bits & pieces.  (How appropriate.)

Last night we rented and watched Blazing Saddles.  I've had it on my to-see list forever.

Short review, appropriate for either film:  what a piece of junk.  Boring, insulting, offensive.  What is going on here?  How is it that there is even one person on earth who ever, for even one brief moment liked either one of these movies?  What is wrong with the world?

I'm not happy right now.

Thanks to Alex Ross of the New Yorker, I've made plans to turn to PBS Wednesday night to see Michael Tilson Thomas and the SFO prepare a Tchaikovski symphony for performance.  And Alex is right -- the accompaning web site is deepy cool.

And here's another music blog I should add to my blog roll.

James Lileks is bleating about Tintin.  Six months ago I would not have been able to identify that name.  Had you showed me some of the artwork, I would have said it was vaguely familiar.  But one day my five-year-old son (Der Drübermensch) noticed the Tintin series on the shelf at the Ann Arbor library, and we were off.  Now we spend the last few minutes of every day reading a few pages.

Here's the official site.

So, what's with the knickers? In the later stories, Tintin seems to be trapped in a clothing time warp while everyone around him has adopted hip fashions like bell bottoms and wide lapels. My theory is that our hero has made some kind of Faustian bargain. I will never die, but remain in my mid-twenties for all eternity, and the only catch is, I have to wear these increasingly outmoded pants?  That doesn't seem too bad! What he doesn't realize is, in four hundred years he'll be living a jaded, debauched nightmare where he claws maniacally at the now tattered and filthy rags hanging about his waist while everyone else is wearing metallic jumpsuits -- or has evolved to a point where clothing is unnecessary.

Thanks to a nifty blog called Mixolydian Mode, I found this list of religious-themed sci-fi. Beautiful Stuff has further comments on sci-fi and its history.

I started writing some 4-part counterpoint as an exercise. (See it here in a pdf file.) I stumbled across a contrapuntal technique I'm geeked about. The example shows the first two voices entering, with the tenor imitating the bass at a 30-beat interval. Now look carefully at the two sections outlined in the fourth measure: the bass is imitating the tenor at a 3-beat interval. This happens while the tenor is imitating the bass -- in other words, the counterpoint is nested.

Now, I am under no illusion that I have invented this. But I don't recall anything like this being taught in any counterpoint text I've seen, and I don't recall noticing it in any music. OTOH it wouldn't always jump out at you where it did occur. I would love to know if other examples exist.

Naturally there is no theoretical limit to the number of times the nesting occurs. In this case it was easy to do because the temporal intervals involved are different in scale, by a factor of 10 (30 versus 3). If the intervals were very close (say 6 versus 3), it might work but not be recognizable as such; it would probably start sounding like the same few notes repeated several times.

I'd like to take a crack at several nested levels. No promises how soon I do it. I'd be pretty happy if I could just learn to write counterpoint as good as Dmitri Shostakovich.

Labels: NestedCounterpoint

So now they're telling us Brigitte Bardot is a social conservative.

...lurk and you lurk alone. At this point I'm supposed to wax philosophical and give you an inspirational, high level description of this blog and its mission, but whenever I try that kind of writing I look foolish. (So do most other people.) So here are some keywords, since probably the only entities that end up reading this thing will be search engines anyway: God, choral music, living composers (including Our Fredöspherehood), architecture: new urbanism -- good, modernism -- bad (welllllll, sometimes), religious art, absinthe, Ann Arbor & Ypsilanti, Michigan, Objectivism. There.