Chris Molla

Not So Fast

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:44:30 -0700

I was listening the other day to Hillary Hahn's recording of Bach Violin Concertos from way back in '03. It's a decent record, except that all the fast movements are just too damn fast. I was particularly disappointed by the D minor concerto for two violins. I have a special fondness for that piece. J.S. arranged it for two harpsichords, and that version appeared on a Nonesuch recording from the seventies. It was one of the very first records I bought with my own money, and I played that thing to death. I loved every piece on it, and the D minor double kicked the whole thing off. I can't now recall who played on it, but I'm pretty sure I still have the vinyl somewhere. I should dig it up.

There are times when the sheer rhythmic relentlessness of up-tempo Bach lights me up. That's my head-banging jam. I get a pleasure from that steady chugga-chugga barrage of notes not too dissimilar from that which I get from a good crunchy electric guitar. Taken too fast, however, it sounds frantic, it's just not sexy anymore. It doesn't rock. I can't help feeling that Jeffrey Kahane was setting it up so Hahn and company could show off, but if you want to demonstrate how fast you can play, there's plenty of music out there that suits that purpose much better. At any rate he and I disagree on the tempo for those pieces.

A Little Pentatonic Exercise

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:44:14 -0700

Remember when I wrote about pentatonic scales way back when? I said I'd continue that thread. Here's a little study using only a C pentatonic scale. It's definitely not a polished realization; just a raw Finale file, but it shows that one can do a lot with just five pitches.

MP3: cpentatonicexercise.mp3

Betrayed Again

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:35:53 -0700

I figured that by now no degree of lameness from our Congress could surprise me, but Thursday's Senate vote on the the FISA Amendment bill - yes, I know it was expected, but still... - left me sad and very angry. I read through most of the bill last night. The bulk of the text has to do with procedures the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is supposed to follow when certifying surveillance authorizations, and fol-de-rol the Justice Department's goes through when submitting authorizations for review. That's all a lot of hot air, because the court is quite impotent. There are plenty of provisions in the bill that allow the Intelligence people or the Attorney General to get around the FISC, and the bill doesn't give the court any teeth.

The real nastiness, as we all know, lies in the grant of retroactive immunity to all the telecommunications companies for the Bush administration's spying when it was illegal - not merely illegal, but unconstitutional. As Senator Russ Feingold and others have noted, we don't even know the extent of the telecoms' activities in this mess. We don't know the extent of the crimes that were committed. Now, without a radical overhaul of the legislation, we'll never know.

But this needs to be repeated often as bluntly and as publicly as possible. George W. Bush is a felon, many times over: a felon, a crook, a criminal. His violations of the fourth amendment have been public knowledge for several years now.

But Congress has voted to cover up a whole bunch of his crimes.

The passage of this bill is a profound betrayal of Americans - and the very idea of America. The irony is that the original FISA of 1978 was enacted in the aftermath of the Nixon administration's intelligence-gathering abuses (Nixon was of course facing the distinct possibility of criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford pardoned him), in order to regulate such activities. So the laws conceived in the aftermath of Presidential criminality has been tinkered with to cover up more Presidential criminality, and every legislator who voted for it is an accomplice. We voted in all those Democrats in '06, and they just cave in every time it counts. Is there a bottom to all this? When will Democrats at last grow so sick of not getting anything done that they get something done. Are they so cozy inside that beltway that they've not only lost touch with the American people, and the most basic principles of democracy, but lost any desire to be in touch? Wait, maybe I just answered my own question.

Obama's 'yes' vote was the most serious betrayal of all. Here he had a chance to walk his talk, and he sided with behemoth corporations. I suppose I'll still vote for him, but I had concerns about his progressive credibility from the beginning. Now he's starting to look like little more than the lesser of the evils. I'm lowering my expectations of any genuinely progressive action coming out of an Obama administration. Making history by being the first African American President is just not enough. If he's elected, we need to keep the pressure on him constant.

What the hell are the Democrats afraid of? I think the American people would love to see something real happen: to get at the truth and see some justice done, even if - especially if - it shakes up our politics in a serious way. All these Democrats seem to think that they have something to loose if they so much as mention the elephant in the room. I think the public's opinion of the Dems would skyrocket if they showed some guts. This unending capitulation is painfully tedious. They could do the right thing, bring some genuine excitement to the theater of politics, and get folks interested.

On to the next battle, i guess. There are plenty. Let us slog on, and create some theater of our own in the process.

Go Read This, Please

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:04:54 -0700

Last week I started drafting a post about how the Hillary Clinton's campaign was profoundly historic whether or not she won the nomination and the great good it did for womankind in general and how I hoped her die-hard supporters didn't give up on the Democrats because an Obama presidency can also be a vehicle for moving the feminist agenda forward and because a McCain presidency would just be no damn good, but one of my favorite Nation columnists, Katha Pollitt, wrote a piece that I think just nails it. So just go to the link and read it please.

Children and Technology

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:58:51 -0700

There is a refreshingly level-headed piece in the N.Y. Times today about kids and technology. The question of when it is appropriate to introduce certain gizmos to your child is now a basic parenting issue that simply did not exist twenty years ago. Author Warren Buckleitner did his homework and consults the literature on child development. While he focuses exclusively on the concepts of Piaget, he successfully conveys the notion that cognitive development proceeds in stages which must be allowed to play out if an individual is to achieve anything like her or his full potential. Infants and toddlers, for instance, do just about all their learning through their senses and their bodies. They need to push, pull, grasp and poke. They need to put things in their mouths (that's the most sensitive place; you get more information that way. It's not all about whether something's edible.). Most electronic or digital gadgetry is pretty useless at this juncture. Three and four-year-olds love to pretend to talk on telephones, just as they pretend to use other tools grownups use, but they're not likely to do much more with a functioning telephone than pretend just the way they do with their toys. Many technologies will be useless to children before they're ready for them.

There are of course electronic and computer-based devices designed and marketed for children in different age ranges. Toys with buttons to push and wheels to turn that also make recorded sounds have their place, and I know my nephew has has done some solid early reading work by playing games on his Leapster. But such things are no substitute for tapping a bell and hearing it ring, or spinning a top with one's own fingers, or finding out how high a structure one can build with simple blocks. A child's play constitutes a vital set of physics/social science/biology experiments, and they need to experience the mechanical and living world directly. We live with all manner of technology around us, and children should certainly be exposed to those realities, but it's more important for them to know about earth, sky, water, sun, leaves, bugs, and friends.

As with most of these ideas, this applies to adults every bit as much as to children.

So turn the damn thing off, whatever it is. It'll be there when you come back.

The Thing About Scott McClellan Writing a Book

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:57:28 -0700

It sounds like a confession, but Washington Week is one of the only television shows I watch on a regular basis; call me a nerd or whatever. It's such a rare treat to hear civil, reasoned discussion on TV - even if the ideas are often pretty tame - it's almost like getting a massage.

One of the topics on last Friday's show was ex-White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book. Of course it attracted derision from his former employers at the White House, sometimes disguised in smug, aloof rhetoric: "...we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew." That should be good for sales, which, I've heard, are quite robust.

I haven't read the book. I'm not inclined to give Mr. McClellan any of my money. Perhaps I'll skim it at the library (I know that remark sounds really arrogant. I don't intend it to be so. I just have tons of other more compelling reading demanding my attention.) What I did do was spend about an hour reading transcripts of his old press briefings to refresh my recollection of those heady days at the start of the war, and the emergence of the Valerie Plame scandal. I was reminded that the job of the White House Press Secretary is to not answer questions. The Press Secretary is there to stonewall and obfuscate, as he or she performs a ritual dance with the press corps which is designed to make the fourth estate look like a pack of fools. It's pretty effective. The reporters ask pointed questions that they know will not be answered, then resort to asking silly questions and receive equally silly answers in return

Back to the Washington Week gang. When they got to talking about McClellan's book, they all spoke in non-confrontational language about how "extraordinary" his disingenuous claims were about soul-searching and a "higher loyalty to the truth". How did he suddenly come to understand the depth of the lying and conniving of his bosses after the fact, and be so blind to it at the time? Several such rhetorical questions were posed and left to hang in the air, the way in-the-know folks tend to do.

Is McClellan cynically opportunistic and disingenuous? Of course. The whole gesture reeks of disingenuousness and opportunism. If you watch and read his performances as Press Secretary, it's difficult to imagine him as an ingenue who was led astray. Sure he was following orders - just doing his job - but he knew who he was riding with.

So the elite of mainstream journalism essentially got to dwell on the cynicism of the situation and momentarily deflect attention from the fact that the press is deeply complicit in the whole sordid, deadly mess. It almost doesn't matter if what he says in the book is true. After all, everyone who marched in protest of the war five years ago knew full well that the Executive Branch is currently run by a bunch of mean, greedy liars. McClellan has added another book to the stack of expose's and tell-alls to confirm what is painfully obvious to most. But given who McClellan is, what he did for a living, and the timing of his latest venture, he becomes an enabler of a sort, inadvertently allowing the spin to keep on spinning - even among those who are charged with looking beyond spin. He places himself in a position to be easily discredited even when he's telling the truth, while that nasty truth continues to be glossed over.

Will I still watch Washington Week? You bet.

Sigh of Relief

Sun, 25 May 2008 18:55:35 -0700

Phoenix has landed successfully. Champaign should be flowing at at NASA and the University of Arizona. Now the real work begins!

Fingers Crossed

Sun, 25 May 2008 11:25:53 -0700

I must say I'm a little nervous about the Phoenix spacecraft landing on Mars later today. The thing looks pretty delicate to me.

I really want this to go well, and I really, really want us to find fossilized bacteria on Mars. It would be a very healthy shock to humanity to learn beyond doubt that Earth is not the only place where life exists. We could definitely use the kind of perspective such a discovery would provide.

And what better way to make such a discovery than to dig up harmless fossils on the planet right next door. It would give us plenty of room to ponder the implications; so much easier to digest than an "Independence Day" type of scenario, don't you agree?

The Mission website has a countdown clock, so we can all count down together!

Fingers crossed.

Spring Shows in the Preschools

Sat, 24 May 2008 22:18:34 -0700

My academic year is winding down (though my daughter's is already over; we moved her out of the dorms this afternoon). In the preschools, it's all about getting ready for the end-of-the-year performances for the families. For the EC music specialist, that means making sure everyone's singing out, knows the words, and does the movements together. Suddenly all the work we do in music time takes on the feel of an actual rehearsal. We stop in the middle of songs to go over tricky lyrics. I cajole them to sing out - without shouting - more than I would in a regular class, and we the atmosphere is one of greater concentration.

I always choose songs that the kids already know well, but are sufficiently demanding that they effectively show off their new level of sophistication. One thing I'm doing this year with the graduating classes, who will go on to kindergarten, is use a fingerplay song called "Little Fish" to let the kids show off their solfege chops.

In addition to the finger play, which involves resting one hand on top of the other, wiggling the extended thumbs to show fins, and clapping the fingers of both hands together to make a mouth that opens and shuts, the children have learned to sing the entire song using solfege syllables and the Curwen hand signs, which we've been using on and off all year. The kids will perform the song both ways as part of their graduation festivities.

This is serious music theory for four and five-year-olds. By learning the solfege syllables and the hand signs, the children learn three different representations of a "note". Through the use of the solfege, and particularly the hand signs, which can be shown higher or lower in space, melodic contour, and the relationships between individual pitches (step vs. skip) is shown. The kids are manipulating several interrelated symbol systems to create multiple representations of the melody. Without realizing it, the kids are engaging in analysis.

And they dig it. They love showing off their knowledge of the signs and solfege, and it's pretty amusing to compare those with the original fingerplay and lyrics. From where I sit, these kids are ready for kindergarten.

We'll also be belting out some oldies, like "Rattling Bog" and "Mole in the Ground".

Observation is Important (duh)

Sat, 24 May 2008 01:03:04 -0700

One of the good things about the speed with which children grow and change is that you can see the growth and the learning happen right before your eyes. The breadth and boldness of a child’s learning, however, are often manifested with fleeting subtlety. In our classes, a child’s early attempts to sing out with the group may consist of no more than the first syllable of a song lyric. A look of extra concentration on a child’s face might be an initial sign that she’s getting ready to make a leap in performing a rhythm pattern or playing out on the drums. Little sparks like these are great rewards for an attentive adult. That attentive observation is key

Then there are also times when the demonstrations are a bit more dramatic. This past week, a little boy of seven months was exploring the rhythm sticks for the first time. The sticks we use are six-inch wooden dowels about half an inch in diameter. The adults and the older children (13 months or so) were tapping the sticks together, playing along with a song and playing patterns (the adults were playing the patterns. The kids played). After spending some time with the sticks in his mouth, he suddenly took one stick in each hand and, holding them out in front of his body, began shaking them up and down and at the same time rolling his hands over and downward at the wrists. His eyes were wide with excitement, and his movements became quite animated. He kept this up for the remaining five or seven minutes of our rhythm-stick play. It was pretty clear that the boy was motivated by what he saw and heard as the rest of us made music with the sticks. According to his nanny, the wrist-rolling motion was a sign for “milk” which he had learned. If that is the case, then he was adapting a motion he already knew to a new purpose. If not, then he had invented a new movement that got him a step closer to tapping the rhythm sticks together.

It required a bit of inference to interpret this behavior – as is often the case with such observations. In my experience the safest presumption, while observing infant and toddler behavior, is that there is both intent and a desire to learn behind nearly every action. As any attentive parent of caregiver can attest, young children know and are aware of quite a bit more than they let on. Alert observation can yield some of the great delights of spending time with young children.

The Major Pentatonic Scale in ECM classes and "Apple Tree"

Sun, 11 May 2008 22:30:31 -0700

Pentatonic scales consist, as the name suggests, of five notes per octave. Pentatonic scales are used worldwide, and figure prominently in African musics, Chinese and Japanese folk music, folk traditions throughout the West, and of course, children's songs. In western concert musics, composers have used them to considerable advantage (Debussy readily comes to mind). If you're straining to conjure up the sound in your mind as you read this, consider film music. When Hollywood wants you to think, "Asian" or "Native American" the coded (cliche´d) music in the soundtrack typically uses some form of pentatonic scale.

Here's the "major" pentatonic scale we use an awful lot:

Which sounds like:

MP3: pentatonicscaleexample.mp3

As you can hear, it contains components of the seven-tone major scale found in tons of Western music.

I know you know what this sounds like, but here it is for comparison purposes:

MP3: majorscaleexample.mp3

In our current Toddler Tunes session, the song Apple Tree is a great example of the Major pentatonic scale found in so many Western children's songs. It climbs steadily through all five tones, and steps back down just as smoothly.

The tune sounds like this:

MP3: appletreeexamplemix.mp3

Wikipedia has an article which is a good primer on the topic. So check that out, and we can take it from there. This is a pretty big subject, and we're going to make it an ongoing discussion rather than try to compose a definitive monograph in one go. We'll be digging deeper into this, to be sure.

Old News

Thu, 08 May 2008 18:12:31 -0700

One of the supposed blessings of weblogs is that one can respond instantly to any new development in the world and toss in one's two cents. The downside of course is that such responses can be knee-jerk affairs. In most cases, the frenzy of up-to-dateness can also, it seems to me, accelerate the collective amnesia that is a most unfortunate symptom of our media-saturated culture (By saying that, I don't mean to condemn media-saturated culture out of hand, just to say that it has unfortunate symptoms). Writing a reflective, thought-out bit on something that was news a couple of weeks or a month ago provides a remedy for both problems. Take your time and think about what's really going on and what it means, and by writing on an event that's slightly less currant, you can revive it in the minds of your readership and perhaps discover - or maintain - some continuity between the flurried present and the immediate past (brand new history).

With that little preamble, I want to write something, which may or may not be well thought out, about the "3 AM Phone call" ad which was put out by the Clinton campaign (and quickly rebutted by the Obama campaign). It is certainly blatant fear-mongering, a critical ingredient of which is that the menace invoked be implied but not explicitly described or depicted. It's a staple technique of horror films. But if you think about it for half a second, you might ask yourself, "What might that phone call be about. after all?"

What sort of crises would require a snap decision at 3 AM (or any time of the day or night)? There aren't likely to be too many. If there's a military crisis somewhere in the world that requires immediate attention, the president wouldn't have a single decision to make, she or he would have hundreds. If the call comes in at 3 AM, you get all the necessary people and information into the Situation Room by 3:15 and start figuring it out. I'm sure either candidate could do that. Natural disaster? Mobilize aid. That's a no-brainer. A "dirty bomb" threat in a major urban area? You need more intelligence: back to the Situation Room.

Now how about this one: a hijacked airliner is on a collision course with a tall building in a major city. Fighters are scrambled and are following the plane. The president has to give the order to shoot it down, sacrificing the lives of a couple hundred Americans so that possibly thousands more might be spared. Well, that's a pretty simple calculation too. If the plane is allowed to fly into a building, then all the passengers die as well as everyone at the site of the crash. Oh yeah, we already have a president who failed that test (We won't go into the part about how the scrambling of Air Force jets in those situations are part of a Standard Operating Procedure, and we've never heard an explanation for why they took so long to get off the ground, etc.).

That whole 3 AM-phone-call thing is a crock. It's astounding that the phrase is still bandied about. Shame on the mainstream media for not pointing out that the ad was a really cheap shot and an insult to everyone's intelligence.

And while we're in Fantasyland, that whole bit with Hillary last week about obliterating Iran, is equally outlandish. The proposed scenario was that Iran nuked Israel. Didn't we all hear about a certain report recently that said Iran abandoned its nuclear arms project? Even if the Iranians were working on a bomb, blowing up Israel would hardly be in their best interest. If Iran wasn't destroyed outright in return, it would certainly feel the wrath not only of the U.S., but of most of the world. Besides, Israel's a small place, with lots of Palestinians mixed in and more right close by. Would Iran be so crazed with hatred for Israel that they would be willing to vaporize all the Palestinians in the bargain. Absurdity.

So Hillary says her response would be to nuke Iran. That kind of insane talk is reason enough not to vote for her. If I were president and such an outrageous disaster did occur, my first act would be to get aid to what was left of the Israelis and Palestinians. Then get creative with Iran, without slaughtering innocent Iranians.

I'm tired of Fantasyland. I always liked Tomorrowland better anyway.

Untitled Poem

Wed, 07 May 2008 15:01:47 -0700

Supine, open-throated,
vomiting spirit.
That's my bachelor pad: the sky.

Let's Talk More About Choosing-Rhymes

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:23:26 -0700

Why, I'd be happy to.

When children gather to play a game such as hide-and-seek, or some form of tag, that involves a three or more participants. the decision as to who will be "it" at the beginning is an important one which often involves the the enactment of a choosing-rhyme ritual. All the participants gather in a close circle; sometimes standing, sometimes crouching close to the ground and placing a foot into the circle to be counted (I tend to use the terms "count" and "point" interchangeably. Each participant must be noted or pointed to, though often the process doesn't require "counting" in an ordinal sense). One child takes it upon her or himself to recite the rhyme and point to each participant in time with the stressed syllables in the rhyme. Because the poem is chanted with a strong sense of pulse, the pointing also proceeds with a steady beat.

The process requires that the chosen poem be brief, and composed in a solid accentual prosody. Here is the poem we've been working with in class:

Ick-y bick-y so-da crack-er

Ick-y bick-y boo.

Ick-y bick-y so-da crack-er

Out goes you!

There's more to say about the scansion of this poem, but that'll be a separate discussion. For now I want to focus on the political dimension.

Here music and poetry are implements in a group decision-making process that is very democratic, and the process exemplifies some of democracy's basic principles.

The use of a choosing rhyme is a method of achieving an end which is of interest to everyone in the group, and is agreed upon by the entire group (though the agreement is often tacit). The process is part of a long-standing tradition among children and is readily understood by all participants.

The recitation of the rhyme and the rhythmic pointing provide transparency to the process, because all the participants can observe the ritual and determine for themselves that the process is fair. Any child who is paying attention can object if she or he sees that someone has been skipped over, or counted twice.

This ritual also gives ample demonstration of the limits and gray areas which are an inherent part of any decision-making system. If the child doing the pointing can calculate ahead and predict where she or he will point at the end, s/he can begin at the place which will ensure that the child s/he wants will be chosen. Choosers will sometimes extend the rhyme with extra words or lines in order to choose whom they wish. Some rhymes allow for participants other than the chooser to influence the outcome, by having the child who is chosen pick a number or a word to spell out, by which means the counting continues. Here is one such rhyme:

Bubble gum, bubble gum

in a dish,

How many pieces

do you wish?

The child who is chosen then picks a number, and of course she or he can choose a number that will yield a desired result.

It is thus possible to "game the system" in ways which lie within the technical bounds of the process, but transgress its intended spirit. When this happens, other children in the group will often object and take the chooser to task for spoiling the game. As we know, either from our own childhood experience, or as caregivers, it's not unusual for such debates to become heated. More often that not, however, the kids resolve things amicably. After all, they want to get on with the game.

This aspect of the choosing-rhyme process offers another parallel with democracy in the adult world: it's messy. No decision-making system can account for every contingency, and there will always be debates over interpretations of principal as well as process. To observe children engaged in such activities is to understand that we are inherently political creatures. It also suggests, I think, that democracy with the greatest practicable degree of participation, yields the most satisfying results for all concerned.

If anyone out there would like to share some choosing rhymes they remember, that would be extremely cool.

Choosing Game for Pre-K Kids

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:08:22 -0700

I'd never tried this game before with kids this young, but it worked very well.

Icky bicky soda cracker,
Icky bicky boo.
Icky bicky soda cracker,
Out goes you!

This is a classic choosing rhyme ("Eeny meeny miney mo" probably being the most widely known example) which is used by elementary-school-age children to determine who will be "it" for another game, such as Tag, Hide-and-Seek, etc. In working with infants and toddlers, I use these rhymes for the richness of their rhythmic and linguistic content. I typically begin with the children by reciting the rhyme as we tap the pulse, repeating a few times until the rhyme is learned. Then we introduce the "choosing" aspect of the play by having the adults in the class point alternately to themselves and their children while saying the rhyme. This brings in the social notions such as turn-taking, self as compared to other, and so on. With very young ones, this is plenty of information. The sounds and rhythms of the words, the pointing back and forth, and the repetition are sufficient in themselves.

With the pre-k kids, I tried a variation I had used earlier with elementary-school children. After learning the poem, and practicing the choosing motion as we sat in one large circle, I divided the kids into groups of three or four, and had them do their own choosing while the entire group recited together. I encouraged each group to decide by consensus who would be the first chooser, intervening only as necessary. At the end of the rhyme, the children who were "out" in each group gathered to form a new group, and the process was repeated. I would sometimes consolidate groups that were too small in order to keep the dynamic lively, recite with them to make sure every one began and ended together, and referee when necessary.

I was pleased to discover that the kids managed the social complexities of the game fairly well. These children are four and a half to five years old. The continual remixing of the various groups kept the interest up, and the children responded well to both the musical and social aspects of the game. At the moment, four repetitions seem to be the right amount, at which point the kids are ready to do something else.

This game makes use of some fundamental Orff-Schulwerk principles - at least as I've absorbed them: no one is actually eliminated from the game. There's always a way to participate, The game is driven by the music and poetry, it provides a rich social dynamic, and the kids have some agency in determining the process.

I expect that these little poems have evolved as choosing rhymes precisely because of their brevity and regular metrics. The task of choosing requires that the person responsible for the task point to each participant with a steady beat which is determined by the poem. The rhyme also provides a predetermined form for determining who is selected at the end (or eliminated, depending on how the game is being played). The rhyme thus not only gives all the participants an unbiased way to determine who is "it" for the game, but through the steady pulse of the words, it allows all the children to accurately monitor the progress of the chooser. The use of the rhyme thus serves the interest of fairness in two ways. This is fine example of a phenomenon which continues to fascinate me: art employed directly toward a practical - as well as, but distinct from, a psychological/emotive/spiritual, etc - purpose.

Sea chanteys are another example.

God, Guns, and Antipathy

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:51:09 -0700

The fracas over Barack Obama's remarks about blue-collar "bitterness" in the rust belt has yet to settle down. I suppose I would be affronted if I felt the remarks were directed at me (does it make me snob if I don't assume they're so directed?). After all, the way he phrased them at the time, its fairly easy to interpret Obama's words as implying that people who are thus embittered are somehow retreating from the difficulties of life by taking comfort in the familiar, and lashing out at the scapegoat du jour. It makes it seem as if these folks are unable or unwilling to cope with the modern world. If he had phrased his ideas a bit differently, they wouldn't have come across that way.

But here's the thing of it. That embittered retreat has been one of the strategic goals of the radical right for 25 or 30 years now. The right has been very effective at getting voters all fired up about gay marriage and other "culture war" issues, while they deregulate the banking system, cut taxes for the rich, start pointless wars, eviscerate environmental regulations, etc, etc.

As we watch our jobs disappear overseas, our real wages shrink, our schools go to hell, etc, etc, many of us have felt an increasing sense of helplessness, and turn to anything that makes us feel a bit more in control. There is also a very real tendency to direct our frustration toward issues or groups of people upon whom blame can be conveniently laid, even if it's completely unwarranted. That is, of course, the very definition of a scapegoat.

The radical right depends on this misdirection to further its agenda, but I suspect there are few established politcians who wouldn't come down on Obama for what he said. They all have some stake in maintaining these illusions. Obama is himself no exception.

Part of the problem with Obama's remarks is that there is considerable truth to them. But getting people to acknowlege difficult truths and deal with tough issues is very delicate work, as this episode amply demonstrates. It seems to me that so far Obama has done a better job than a lot of politicians.

Little C Major Prelude

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:58:32 -0800

I guess I'm on a piano kick right now. This a little prelude by J.S. Bach. It's not the famous one from the first book of the Well Tempered Clavier, but they do share the constant-arpeggio idea. Old J.S. would occasionally scratch out little pieces for students, and I suspect this was one of those. It's really pretty.

It's a modest effort, and the performance has its flaws, but I'm proud of it because this is a single take. There are no edits. So for me it's a definite step forward as far as sharpening my keyboard skills.

MP3: cmajorprelude.mp3

From the Snippetarium

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:59:56 -0800

A little piano improvisation.

MP3: pianoimprovjammix.mp3

Musical Taxonomy: The Genre Thing

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:44:51 -0800

Labels denoting musical genres have multiplied in recent years. Sometimes it can seem like the whole process is getting a bit out of hand. Musicians have been busily sorting out their work from that of others and grouping together with like-minded artists. It might be good to step back and sort some of this out for ourselves.

I think of genre as being a notch or two up in the taxonomic hierarchy of music - like order is to genus in biological taxonomy - with the species perhaps being the work of a particular artist. In between we sometimes speak of subgenres, and one might use the term style to represent the next order of specificity. The stylistic similarities, which cause a music to be grouped with some and set apart from others, are typically the result of historical development. Musicians develop their sound based on what they’ve listened to and from which (and from whom) they’ve learned. To make music in a particular style is to participate in a branch of music history. One’s work is always part of a continuum.

Any kind of music can be used as an example. I’ll use “classical” music here. We think of classical music as belonging to a European tradition performed by certain kinds of instruments (violin and related strings, woodwinds, etc.). In everyday parlance this broad category “classical” is often used to represent nearly a thousand years of western music, which varies widely in terms of instrumentation, compositional and performance practices. The “subgenres” of classical music typically relate to historical periods: renaissance, baroque, romantic, etc. The current state of classical music is the result of a long evolution, as composers and performers learned from their elders and added their own innovations. The role of technology also has a role to play in this history. The sound of a large baroque ensemble differs from a modern symphony orchestra as much because of the construction of the instruments as of the way the musicians practice their art.

Genres are also used more and more to group music for the purposes of commerce. Placing an artist under a particular banner increases the likelihood that s/he will be noticed by the targeted audience, even though the sound might reasonably fit into more than one category (Is Alison Krauss strictly bluegrass, could she be thought of as country or folk as well?). We also see artists inventing genre designations in order to distinguish themselves from one another. One result of this is that such designations become pretty fluid, and their meanings change (this isn’t a brand new phenomenon. When musicologists use the term “classical”, for instance, they are usually referring to a period of less than a hundred years, from right after J.S. Bach to Beethoven; quite a different sense from the way most of us use the term). Some of the terms that appear demonstrate an awareness of this fluidity and a sense of playfulness on the part of the artists. What, after all, does apple-folk sound like?

All this seems obvious, but its one of those truths that’s worth revisiting from time to time. It’s all too easy to lose a sense of history, and it requires a bit of effort to retain it. Your music comes from you, but where else does it come from? What is the ancestry of your sound? Think about it and talk about it, because it’s a beautiful thing to know.

(A note a couple of sources: There’s a cool chart here of one interpretation of the genealogy of rock and pop, that provides more food for thought. Another interesting source is the All Music Guide to Electronica which goes into detail in its descriptions of the elements that distinguish different styles.)

From the Snippetarium

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:20:18 -0800

Found a cool loop, added some harmonica, guitar sounds, glockenspiel, and decorated the Whirly piano sound with this great scratched-record effect.

MP3: grooveexperiment.mp3