I think I am going

I think I am going to pass on the bullfight next Friday, so the next bullfight report will have to wait until the 9th. Who knows, I might go on the 6th, since it is in Thornton, which is one of my favorite rings. I will be going to Thornton for the Festa for Nossa Senhora de Fatima in October, and will go for both days this year, so I will get my share of that ring. Thornton is a delta town, so it is shady and pleasant.

Speaking of bullfight reports, I have a correction to make on the last one. It was not the Modesto Festa. I was confused becuase it was the same cartel, but the Modesto Holy Ghost Festa is the one on the 9th. Oops! And the second forcado group was Tulare. That is called Bad Reporting! Sorry!

Just as I warned

Just as I warned you to get your Easter menu in order, it is about time to start thinking about San Fermin menus. I will be once again representing the countries where bullfighting is important: Spain, Basque Country, France, Portugal, Mexico, Peru, and California. Of course, the Basque items get pride of place, but we honor the whole world of the bulls here.

If you are doing a San Fermin party you will want to find bullfight music. I recommend any recording by the Taurine band of Mexico City. I like to play "La Virgen de la Macarena" when the guests are called to the dinner table, as that is a good way to start things. Find a version with a good trumpet soloist, though, as that is what makes that particular pasodoble great. The Tijuana orchestra does a great job of that piece, and they follow the tradition of playing it when the matadores have entered the chapel.

Someone mentioned Margaritas in the

Someone mentioned Margaritas in the Comments Box at Two Sleepy Mommies and that got me to thinking about ceviche and that made me think about summer Mexican menus.

Let us start with a proper Margarita. No slushies here. We drink 'em straight up in a martini glass. 100% blue agave tequila. No Cuervo! Grand Marnier. Juice of a freshly squeezed lime. All in a shaker with ice. Rim of glass coated in lime juice and sea salt. The drink is poured in. Yum.

Ceviche: halibut or salmon or some other ocean fish soaked in lime juice with a diced white onion and cilantro for three hours. Add sea salt to taste. Serve on grilled tortillas (corn only, preferably hand made) with a salsa of diced white onion, cilantro, green chilies, mango, avocado, and the merest hint of garlic.

Since you have fired up your Weber to grill the tortillas why not grill some shrimp and a nice carne asada?

And, since we are talking about a feast here, let's fix carnitas:

Simmer a whole pork loin roast in water with a sliced onion, three peeled and squashed garlic cloves, a stick of cinnamon, a few cloves, a half teaspoon of coriander seeds, a hallf teaspoon of whole peppercorns, a good pinch of Mexican oregano, a handful of cilantro sprigs, and a bay leaf. Let it simmer until the meat is well cooked and ready to fall apart. Remove the meat, reserving the broth for risotto with Italian sausages (holler if you need that recipe). When the meat cools, shred it. Fry the meat with a diced onion, a dusting of cinnamon, and three finely diced chipotle peppers (with their adobo sauce) in goose fat (let it get crispy and brown but make sure it does not burn). Salt generously. Serve with onion, cilantro, guacamole, and lime wedges on grilled corn tortillas.

Now it is desert time, and you are probably full, so skip desert or have a little fresh fruit if you must. A shot of very good tequila would be in order here.

Friday Five 1. What do

Friday Five

1. What do you most want to be remembered for?

I want to be remembered as being the best Emperor who ever lived.

2. What quotation best fits your outlook on life?

"People who think in quotations deserve the thoughts they get." -E Keilholtz

3. What single achievement are you most proud of in the past year?

Wasn't too spectacular a year for personal achievement. No big splashy thing. No great paintings, no fantastic musical performances or compositions. I did not write anything great, did not create any new dishes that will change culinary history forever. I had some great times with Melanie and Amália, though, so as a cumulative thing, that would have to be it. I suppose the drawings I did in Italy were noteworthy, but they are lost and gone forever (thanks, Air France!), so perhaps they weren't so great.

4. What about the past ten years?

I don't know. What counts as an achievement? I don't tend to count things like getting married, having a baby, etc. Those were the most exciting and wonderful things, but achievement? I suppose it would have to be one of my paintings, but since I do not have a digital image of it, I can't post it, so I won't waste your time talking about it.

5. If you were asked to give a child a single piece of advice to guide them through life, what would you say?

Obey the Pope in all matters! The trouble you will get into by obeying the Pope will be worth it. The trouble you will get into by not obeying the Pope will not be worth it.

I tried something new this

I tried something new this week: garlic scrapes. I have a farmer that I often buy from who offers a lot of wonderful and unusual products. She has been on hiatus from the market for awhile, as she had to build a deer fence to protect her crops. But she is back and was offering garlic scrapes, the stem and bud of the newly mature garlic plant. Like green garlic, the scrape is milder than the bulb. Following her suggestion, I brushed them with olive oil and threw them on the grill (mesquite lump charcoal and hickory wood) after I had cooked my arista (pork loin, with a lengthwise incision stuffed with pancetta, rosemary, and garlic, tied, generously treated with sea salt and fresh cracked pepper and olive oil). Delicious! Unfortunately garlic scrapes are only available for a couple of weeks, so we will see about next week.

Tonight I am making another green garlic and cheese soufflé, from the Chez Panisse cookbook. It was so good last time that I wanted to get one more in before the end of green garlic season.

That's it for the food report! Go out and cook something!

550 years ago today the

550 years ago today the last part of the Roman Empire fell with the sack of Constantinople. Think about that. 1453 was less than 40 years before the discovery and Evangelization of the New World by Christopher Columbus.

The great Cathedral of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Holy Wisdom Cathedral (Hagia Sophia in Greek) was desecrated and turned into a mosque. At least now it is no longer a mosque, although it still bears vandalism in Arabic and is not a church either. Constantinople now is known by the preposterous name of Istanbul (which is Greek for "to the City") and is still run by the Turk. They Might Be Giants are wrong. It is not just the Turks' business. It is not the Turks' business at all.

Sad to say there is a Latin role in the sacking of Constantinople, even, dare I say it, a specifically Italian role. First we have the Latin Church ignoring calls for help from Eastern Christians who were on the front in a war that continues to this day. We did finally come around and mount a fairly spectacular defense of Christendom in the First Crusade (and the next Two Crusades, as well as in the Reconquista of Iberia), but it was too little, too late. Two thirds of Christendom had been conquered and converted by the swords of the followers of the doctrines of Mohammed. Then, because of the betrayal of the Byzantines by the Venetians, the Byzantines were weakened and unable to resist.

Both the East and the West have paid for this event in blood, but the burden has been tragically higher on the East, so far. The West has yet to learn from the mistakes of abandoning our Eastern brethren. In the last decade we ensured that the snares of Mohammed will last for many years in the cradle of Christian monasticism, Kosovo (please note that I do not think that Milosovic is an honorable man, but we betrayed the Serbian people, as well as all Christians when we handed Kosovo to the followers of the doctrines of Mohammed).

But there is a light on the horizon. The cocktail of Nestorianism, Iconoclasm, Arabian mythology and tribalism that Mohammed either created or received from a demon is on its last leg. These followers of Mohammed reached their intellectual peak around the e 10th Century (more or less, we can debate this one for quite awhile). They cannot wage war without our weapons (I remember being struck by a picture of multi-billionaire Osama bin-Laden looking very pleased with himself as he was firing a rifle, although there is no way his people could have made that rifle). In order to survive in the numbers they have they require our liberalism, our food, our technology. Just like they did when they encountered Roman philosophy during their expansion, when their own philosophy is lacking, they turn to ours. Their understanding of God allows no more advancement in knowledge than they achieved in their first 200 years.

When the collapse gets momentum history will never have seen a major movement fade so quickly (well, the collpase of Commie-ism may give it a run for its money). It may not be in our lifetimes, but it will be by our grandchildren’s day.

On a regular basis we make fundamental mistakes with dealing with the challenge they pose. We assume that they think like us, when they don't. As a culture (not as individuals) they are incapable of a poker face. In fact they are playing poker with their cards facing us. Not only are they displaying them to us, but they cannot see them all themselves. Only we are too busy with our noses in our own cards to look. They are desperately trying to see our hand, and we are too busy studying our own hand to see theirs, which is held up in plain view. When we want to know what they think we throw some money at a few indoctrinated Marxist scholars who give us useless information. When their leaders tell us exactly how they see the world we assume that they are posturing.

Part of the problem of the West is that we have, since the French Endarkenment, maintained, as a culture, the notion that religion is not much more than a club. We assume that the followers of Mohammed think this way too. They don’t. We shouldn’t either, by the way, and we will talk about ways that we should look to the followers of Mohammed as examples.

When the followers of Mohammed critique the West they are mostly spot on. We have let our culture sink to an incredibly low level. With rampant abortion, pornography, consumerism, suburban isolationism, absurd individualism, factory farming, sky-high divorce rates, tremendous neglect of religious duty, drug abuse, usury, sodomy, oppression of the poor, robbing workers of their just wages, so forth and so on, we cannot take the completely high ground here. If we look into Scripture, we must see the many examples when God used an army of barbarians to punish His people. And this is the key to how I see the Holy Father’s warnings against our rush to war. If, instead of relying on our own strength, we as a nation spent that energy shutting down abortuaries, stopped subsidizing factory farms, praying the Rosary, etc., then the Holy Father might have seen that we were ready to take on this foe. But I can understand his lack of enthusiasm for the Global March of the Consumerists. (There is more on this particular thread on Mark Shea’s Blog).

Certainly God not only endorsed but helped His people in time of need, WHEN they appealed to him, repented of their sin, and resolved to amend their behavior. Can we as a culture hope to defeat the Infidel if we are trying to beat them so that we can inflict Planned Parenthood, Playboy, and Walmart’s on them? Can we win when we are led by heretics (I am asking this honestly – even though Bush professes orthodox Christology, I am not so sure with Ashcroft – does anyone know? But even with orthodox Christology, are these people so caught up in Puritanism that they are unable to do the job)? Also, do we have the humility to see the good in the religion of Mohammed? The piety, the reverence, the honest attempt to follow God’s will, the concern towards the poor, modesty in dress, control over one’s sexual impulses, etc. There is plenty we can learn from them. They have their faults, some of which are well-known, some of which are not, but their determination to adhere to what they believe is the will of God is admirable.

It would be much better if we were not at war with them, but as long as they believe in the doctrines of Mohammed, and take said doctrines seriously we will be at war with them or we will be subjugated by them. We must work for peace through dialog. And, we must clean our own house and turn away from the crassness, the consumerism, the culture of death that has much of our society in its grip.

I supported the recent war, but because we, as a nation must trust our leaders on sensitive national security measures. If the President says there are weapons of mass destruction, we need to trust him. But now, Herr President, du bist jetzt dran. Das Spiel ist in dein Hand. It is up to the coalition to show that this was a just war, part of the ancient war for the very survival of the West. It is too early to give up and call President Bush a liar, but it might be time to start drumming our fingers on the desk. If those weapons existed, it is getting close to the deadline for producing them.

So remember the fall of Constantinople. But also remember the West’s role in this tragedy. Examine where this war is today, and what our role is today.

St. Michael, Pray for us!
St. James, Pray for us!
St. Francis of Assisi, Pray for us!
St. Dominic, Pray for us!
All Holy Martyrs, Pray for us!
Blessed Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us!
Blessed Mary, Seat of Wisdom, Pray for us!
Blessed Mary, Queen of Heaven, Pray for us!

Sorry to lapse so much

Sorry to lapse so much in posting, but it has been a busy weekend (I know, excuses, excuses). I hope to be a better blogger this week!

Bullfight Report As it is

Bullfight Report

As it is late, and I am not at my own computer, I am going to stick to a brief report of last night’s bullfight. I will discuss more general taurine topics later, but here is an account of a specific bullfight. The novice should be able to glean some notion of what the art (not sport) of bullfighting is all about, even though an outline of the nature of the art is beyond the scope of this report. Please keep in mind that what I am describing is a Portuguese bullfight, performed on horseback. Purist aficionados see this as a secondary art to toreo en pie, even though this form is the elder.

Last night was the bullfight of the Modesto Festa and was held in the Praça de Toiros in Stevinson. Following local law, the bullfight was bloodless, and the banderillas were placed using Velcro. The performers were Cavaleiro (Alt) Pedro Franco of Portugal and Eduardo Costa (Praticante) of California. The forcados were from Turlock and (I believe – I get the two groups mixed up, and was talking to another aficionado when they were announced) Tulare, although they may have been from Southern California. I enjoy the forcados, but consider them a much lesser part of the fiesta brava (although in California, they enjoy the highest following of anywhere in the taurine world).

As for the bulls, there was not much to say about them. The first bull was decent, the rest borderline or out and out mansos. The focus was on three of the horses, which were bought from the legendary Rejoneador Pablo Hermoso de Mendoza of Spain.

These horses were incredibly well-trained. Hermoso de Mendoza, who I have had the privilege of seeing twice in Mexico, is known for performing ballets on horseback (albeit in a small ring with a wild bull charging at him). His horses are trained to respond to the subtlest of cues, bowing, dipping, turning, dancing, and outrunning the bull at the slightest nudge on the reigns or pressure of the knees. Under Hermoso de Mendoza’s guidance these horses move in ways that seem to defy physics.

Unfortunately, under the reigns of Franco the horses showed only a glimpse of what they can do. Although Franco is a full-fledged professional cavaleiro, he spends much of the season in California. This is akin to Barry Bonds playing softball in Japan from May to September. Needless to say Franco is not a top-tier performer. I have seen him many times on lesser steeds, and he is adequate, although somewhat dull. Watching him on the Hermoso de Mendoza horses, however, did not help him. Citing the bull, Franco would engage in the same elegant dances as Hermoso de Mendoza, but would then botch the placement of the sticks.

The effect was akin to a performance of a Bach suite in which the performer perfectly ornamented every phrase, but hit essential notes incorrectly. As I said to my neighbor in the stands, “this is like giving the keys to Dad’s Ferrari to the 16 year old and telling him to hold his own at Sear’s Point.”

Franco, inspired by the horses, was attempting to perform at a level far beyond his abilities, and the results were revealing. He misread the bulls, failed to engage the admittedly poor bulls, missed on his placement, and generally failed to dominate the animals.

Costa, who, as a young Californian, has shown tremendous potential in the past, was distracted. He fought one decent faena, making up for missed sticks with a beautiful over the back placement, a la Rodrigo Santos. His last bull was a disaster, and Costa allowed his horse to be pegged at least three times and was eventually unseated. My hope is that he will not be discouraged, as he has shown in the past that he can be a brilliant cavaleiro, probably even equal to California’s cavaleiro (alt) Joseph Correia (in fact, last year at Correia’s alternative ceremony, Costa fought in tandem with Correia in a brilliant faena). California has benefited greatly from having two decent local boys (and the young Sario Cabral who shows promise), and hopefully the remainder of the season will show that Costa is on track with the progress he has made in the last few years.

As far as the forcados, there was one good, clean grab from Turlock. The rest of the evening was less than inspiring, mostly the fault of bad bulls and improper preparation by the cavaleiros (I say this as an admitted non-expert on the forcados, however. Others may disagree and be completely correct).

The orchestra, from Livingston, was excellent. They have a good repertoire and sounded better than ever.

At long last I will

At long last I will be at the bulls this weekend! While I would love to be in Tijuana for the corrida at El Toreo (the wonderfully rickety downtown bullring), I will be at the Festa at Stevinson watching Pedro Franco and Edouardo Costa. So there will be a bull report sometime soon!

I remember a cartoon directed

I remember a cartoon directed at those of us who are interested in historically informed performance of early music. It portrayed a dentist nonchalantly explaining to his terrified patient that "today's treatment will be performed with period instruments." Looking at the stuff that led folks to this blog from search engines, I found "painkillers" + "1940's" Hmmmm.

Look, I like period harpsichords, but give me "painkillers" + "2003" any day! Although, really I can't imagine that the synthetics I used last week were that much better than the opiates of the 1940's.

Happy! Happy! Happy! Thanks to

Happy! Happy! Happy!

Thanks to Fr. Bryce, I just learned that the greatest film ever, namely Wim Wenders's masterpiece Himmel Über Berlin (a/k/a Wings of Desire) is going to be released on DVD on July 1! Yeeeeeeeeee-haaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwww!

Friday Five 1. What brand

Friday Five

1. What brand of toothpaste do you use?

Perodontax. We were in Italy and we lost our toothpaste, so we went to the pharmacy and bought the one with the little drawings of herbs on it. It had a strange taste, but by a week we were totally hooked on it. It is supposed to be some homeopathic cure for gum problems, but it has flouride and baking soday and all that, so it is good stuff in spite of the quack promises it makes. We ran out, but fortunately had a good friend going to Italy, so we had her stock up.

2. What brand of toilet paper do you prefer?

No preference, as long as it is not that stuff I encountered in China that had visible bits of hay in it.

3. What brand(s) of shoes do you wear?

Land's End.

4. What brand of soda do you drink?

San Pellegrino Chinotto and Aranciata

5. What brand of gum do you chew?

Chewing gum is an abomination. It should be illegal, as it is in Singapore, I believe. If I were going to add one product to the insane list of illegal substances it would be chewing gum. Nothing is more depressing than the site of some person immitating a bovine cud-chewer. If people need something to chew on, may I suggest a piece of licorice root? Amália loves it, as it soothes sore gums from teething, and it has a really interesting taste. Also, one does not put the whole thing in one's mouth, so one looks less like a heifer than one does chewing on a piece of chicle. I think chewing gum is a symptom of malnutrition. If people ate well, they would not have this urge to indulge in a disordered imitation of eating!

Tonight I am going to

Tonight I am going to return to my bed. The last time I tried to lie down (Monday afternoon nap) resulted in a fairly painful experience in trying to get up. However, I am so sick of sleeping on the couch, semi-upright with my feet on the coffee table, that I will risk a painful awakening at the expense of a good night sleep. Other than that experience Monday, recovery is coming along.

I have not had the energy to write any great things for the Blog, and I apologize. I realize that if I do not start posting some goodies, I will lose my readers, and, without readers, I will have no reason to write, and, without a reason to write, I will become unreasonable, because I do not intend to stop writing. People say I am unreasonable anyway, so I do not need to give them ammunition.

Tonight I will also barbecue for the first time of the season. We will have grilled linguiça and Italian sausages, grilled asparagus, orzo with zucchini, sundried tomatoes, basil and goat cheese, and strawberries with cream. With a few meals like that I should be back to substantial blogging shortly.

Let us now praise DDT.

Let us now praise DDT. I am sure that the claims against it are all true, but a chemical that has killed that many mosquitoes cannot be all bad. If we were to compare the human lives saved (think of malaria and the other diseases that are spread by this diptherian pest) with the ecological harm done by DDT I am sure that we would want to give the inventor of this stuff a prize.

I am writing this at 4:23 in the morning mostly because a mosquito has been buzzing my ears for the last hour and a half, compounding the aching in my abdomen and the general rebellion I am getting from my bones against sleeping upright, and you might understand why I am ready to buy gallons of DDT on the black market. Our neighbor has a decrepit boat in her driveway that, in spite of her efforts at tarping, fills with water during the rainy season. I think word got out that I was calling it the West Nile Sloop, because the boat has been miraculously drained this year, just at the dawn of mosquito season.

But the good news is that mosquitoes make me think of insects in general and that makes me think of gardens and that reminds me that I have to post something about a certain book tonight. I was watching Bread and Tulips last night and forgot about posting. So, here I am, a Dipthera-hating insmoniac typing my little piece in the dark, with a maniacal grin. And this is without the painkillers!

The book that I think every gardener must own is the American Horticultural Society’s Encyclopedia of Gardening: The Definitive Practical Guide to Gardening Techniques, Planning, and Maintenance. It is edited by Christopher Brickell and Elvin McDonald and was published in 1993 by DK. They have a companion volume, The American Horticultural Society’s Encyclopedia of Garden Plants: A comprehensive, illustrated guide to more than 8,000 trees, shrubs, vines, flowers, foliage,and water plants and cacti and succulents. Contains more than 4,000 full-color photographs, which is excellent and useful for those who are getting deeper into it (particularly if you see a plant in someone’s garden and want to figure out what it is and if it will grow in your garden), but this first one is the one to get. I refer to it first whenever I have a gardening question. I read it for design ideas. I read it to diagnose problems in the garden.

For instance, Jeff mentioned on Pansy and Peony’s Blog that he was having problems with plumbago in Sacramento. Now, I know the climate of Sacramento very well, but I was not sure what a plumbago was. I looked it up and can now tell Jeff with confidence that his plumbagos (depending on the type) would probably do well in a cool greenhouse or other well-shaded and protected area. Sacramento’s climate is probably hitting the poor things at both extremes (too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter).

The only book that is probably as much of an essential to gardeners is the Sunset Western Garden Book, although I am not too sure that it is geared for those on the Atlantic Coast so much. The American Horticultural Society’s book is perfect for everyone who is serious about this stuff.

I thought that my blog

I thought that my blog had been hijacked by Protties of the most egregious stripe. I went to log on to see what folks have written and I got some goofball nonsense about Bible study and endtimes and cults (guess which Church, founded by Christ Himself and guaranteed to stand against the gates of Hell until the end of time is on that list?) and other such gobbledegook. It turns out that I had misspelled "blogspot" and this outfit has the domain "blogpsot.com" Oh how clever they are!

Now I may come accross as excessively anti-Protestant, and I probably am, although I have good friends and even relatives who are Protties. Yeah, I know, the classic Liberal pose, I am no bigot, why some of my best friends are deceived by Satan into following this sola scriptura nonsense. Of course you all know that I am no liberal and tend to err on the side of Torquemada much more than the side of the Universalists. And if pressed I will admit to being a bit of a bigot. Most folks are, just some of us have come to terms with it. We even embrace our inner Archie. I could never understand racial bigotry, though, but cultural bigotry strikes me as a good, if it is applied rationally. There is something superior about Latin culture. I am not ashamed to be half Teutonic, but I am glad that culturally my formation was Latin.

I am likewise glad that my Mormon ancestors left Smithism three generations ago. I am not ashamed that I have Smithite ancestry, but I am glad that it didn't take. Of that whole side of the family there was one branch (well, one couple) that remained Smithites, and they never had children. I met them for the first time at my Grandmother's funeral. They were kindly folks, and I am sure they are honest and upright. I wish them no ill, I am just glad that I do not share their view of the Cosmos. I am not ashamed to say that their view of the Cosmos is inferior to mine. It is not great achievement on my part, I borrowed it all from much better minds.

Anyway, this all came about when I wrote a good Torquemadian torrent against the Protties when I thought they had hijacked by blog. When it turned out that they are only using the mildest form of deception, one that would only fool an idiot or a drug-addled post-surgery patient, well, I am a little milder in my invective.

I actually cannot claim to be that drug-addled, as it is going on 14 hours since the last dose wore off. I hope to be completely off these things, as I am really getting sick of them! So, if all goes well, you will see a real post soon. Thank you all for your patience!

Friday Five 1. What drinking

Friday Five

1. What drinking water do you prefer -- tap, bottle, purifier, etc.?

San Pellegrino or other sparkling Italian water. German Gerolsteiner will do in a pinch. Otherwise I will take Sacramento or Bay Area tap water (right off the Sierra Nevada).

2. What are your favorite flavor of chips?

K.C. Masterpiece Barbecue

3. Of all the things you can cook, what dish do you like the most?

Probably a smoked bird risotto or maybe pigeons stuffed with sausage on toast.

4. How do you have your eggs?

In a souffle, quiche or, preferably, hatched and roasted with rosemary and lemon juice.

5. Who was the last person who cooked you a meal? How did it turn out?

My mother. It was ham with a coffee and molasses glaze and was quite wonderful. That was last Monday, and was the last real meal I have eaten!

Surgery went well, and recovery

Surgery went well, and recovery is coming along. I thought that my head was clear, in spite of the painkillers, until I tried to read an article on philosophy that a friend sent me. Wow. I haven't read that slowly since I was a wee lad. I am taking that as a sign that I should probably not try to write anything too complex. Hopefully I will be clearer tomorrow. I have some stuff to write about pain and drugs as well as the cultural issues that I have been working on, but I will probably forget all about the insights on pain and drugs, as they happened under the influence of both, so when I am more normal they will probably vanish.

The bad news of the surgery is that I forgot to bring a video tape, so I will not be able to see the film of my insides. Darn. Stuff like that facinates me. Oh well. Melanie says I can probably find something like that available on DVD. True, but it won't be MY insides. Hmmm. See one intestine, you've seen them all?

Back to sleep....

As I mentioned before, I

As I mentioned before, I am going to be recovering from surgery for the remainder of the week and will be out of the office for a few days starting tomorrow. If all goes well I will be at home with lots of time and enough energy to blog a bit (even get that CO in E Major post polished and up). No matter how well things go in surgery, however, I will not be in the office. So, it was with mixed feelings that I greeted the boxes of promo copies of The Best of Clifton Chenier that arrived this morning. I have been anxious for these to arrive, but I will not be able to supervise the mailing myself, and that makes me nervous. I am not the best at leaving instructions (I tend to assume that everyone thinks exactly as I do, I mean, why not, it works?).

I listened to the CD, and it is a great record (and there were no obvious replication problems), so come July, be sure to get out to your local independent record store and buy it! Even if you are not normally a zydeco fan, this is a title to have. Zydeco fans will probably grumble the standard, "but I have these tracks, and now I have to buy a new record to get the 15 minutes of interview and the unreleased version of 'Les Zydeco sont pas Sale'"

Well, yes, but it will be worth it. The alternative is for us to not release this material.

Anyway, I am as relaxed as I can be, fairly sure that things will be comprehendable to my coworkers, a little nervous about the surgery, and not looking forward to what sounds like a painful recovery. If you don't hear from me for the next few days it probably means that I am not feeling up to it, not thinking in coherent sentences (OK, say it together. 1.2.3... "that hasn't stopped you before!"), or not up to sitting in my rather monastic chair in front of the computer. I should be back to somewhat normal and blogging by Monday at the latest. Ciao!

Whenever I go to post

Whenever I go to post something I am told that Blogger offers audio blogging. Now, it is bad enough that I can rant pretty much unchecked and publish to the whole world without benefit of an editor, but does the world need me yakking into a tape recorder and having that broadcast? Back in the days when Hunter S. Thompson was a good writer, he spent more time editing than writing. He went through draft after draft after draft, just to hunt down the right word. His book Hell's Angels shows the kind of writer he was in his prime. Later he was pressured to meet deadlines and took to sending his recorded mutterings off to be transcribed. The result is, well, awful mutterings.

So, if Blogger wants me to yak into the dictophone and broadcast it to the world, what next? Some gadget that reads my thoughts? Even better. A gadget that reads my thoughts before I even have them.

"No, Erik. That is not what you were going to think."

I just cannot see the benefit of taking away even the small discipline of writing. What Blogger needs to offer are editors, preferably crusty old cigar-chompers with one eye in perma-squint and a deeply held belief that nothing is to be trusted. Ever. $149 for a year of 15 minutes of daily editing. Then I might consider upgrading.

Until then, I am off to the Central Valley and Beyond! I might blog later, but probably not. See you Monday for more of the same.

Firday Five 1. Would you

Firday Five

1. Would you consider yourself an organized person? Why or why not?

Yes and no. Some things I keep in strict organization and other things no.

2. Do you keep some type of planner, organizer, calendar, etc. with you, and do you use it regularly?

Yes

3. Would you say that your desk is organized right now?

No

4. Do you alphabetize CDs, books, and DVDs, or does it not matter?

Alphabetizing is terrible. I organize by genre and subgenre and date. In classical music I organize chronologically by idea. Same in jazz (a 1964 Turk Murphy recording is going to come before a 1949 Gillespie record). I hate discs that mix stuff around (a Bach and Berlioz CD would give me fits), but they exist, and are in the collection, so I deal with them in other ways. Folk music is organized by geography/linguistic affinity. I tend to divide books into Trivium and Quadrivium, with some special sections. Fiction is divided by geography, language, era, and the mood I am in (yes, I do occasionally refile books and CDs to disparage a work, for instance, filing John Adams next to Brahms because they are roughly equally bad composers). My system drives Melanie crazy, but I insist that it always makes logical sense.

5. What's the hardest thing you've ever had to organize?

Boxes of miscellaneous screws, bolts, electrical insulators, etc. When we had to sort out my grandfather's belongings, the job of his shop came to me. He saved everything, including things that probably fell out of common usage sometime in the 1940's, so there were lots of things that were difficult to identify, let alone classify.

This is the deal. I

This is the deal. I have worked on this Cultural Carbon Monoxide thing too long to put it up in the state that it is in. It needs some work. One of my big problems is that I tend to want to do everything perfectly and then it doesn't get finished at all, but I will not let this happen, because publishing for the Blog is not final, in fact the ideas and feedback that I get help me sort things out for more final writing. That is the whole justification for having this blog and putting time into it. But, all that being said, the thing is just not ready yet.

The long and short of it is that CO in E Maj post will not go up today, and, since we are going to Redding this weekend, it will not go up this weekend. Then, Monday night I will be in Sacramento and Tuesday I will be having minor surgery (more on that later) and will probably be in a bit of pain and doped up for awhile. I cannot guarantee brilliance in the next week. If I am posting barely incoherent stuff, forgive me, because I will know not what I do. I generally do not respond well to opiates and synthetic opiate pain relievers (they tend to make me grouchy more than anything), so if I am short with any of you in the comments boxes, complain to Ann!

Since she has done such a good job of making this blog look good, I am going to put her in charge of complaint resolution for the next week (since I will be too grouchy to respond to even legitimate complaints). In reading this, Ann will learn that this is her new job, and will have a legitimate complaint for me. Since it is in her department, she should duly take down a report and file it. That is how complaints are handled in an Italian organization, and this is an Italian organization. Maybe someday someone will look into it. Yes, next month. That is probably the case, now buongiorno, signora, I hope you have tried our city's pasta, delicious, no?

So, the big, long-awaited post will have to wait most probably until the week of the 20th. I will not neglect you, and will try to post other stuff, although it may be slow on Tuesday through Friday.

Now, here is the good news. I was at the surgeon's office yesterday and found out that if I bring a video tape I can get a copy of what the surgeon will see as he fixes the hernia (it is a monster of one just North of my belly button). Naturally, I have never seen the interior of my abdominal cavity before, and am beyond excited at the prospect. All of this is going to be done from behind the abdominal wall, using a camera, and it is all incredibly cool. If I were not going to be under general anesthesia, I would be rivetted to the screen. For those of you who find this stuff equally fascinating, when I am feeling better I will be having a party where we will eat pizza, drink beer and watch the video. It will be called the Abominable Abdominal Movie Night, and will be a lot of fun. See real live intestines! See a Gore-tex mesh stapled to a muscle! See what makes this sick puppy, Keilholtz, tick! Maybe I will cleverly mix music into it, maybe not. We'll see.

"Dude, it's sort of like Pink Floyd, but gross. Pass me another slice of pepperoni!"

While we are on the topic of up and coming events... on the 25th of May, a Sunday, I will be finally getting to a bullfight. I will write a review, and may even post pictures (if I can figure out how to do it). Since I missed the season opener a couple of weeks ago, and will miss Pico dos Padres tomorrow (and nothing is as beautiful as the orchard around the bullring in the spring), I am really champing at the bit to see some bulls. It sounds like last weekend in Tijuana was good. Eloy cut two ears on his second bull, and I don't think he would have cut two if he were completely flat (as much as aficionados sniff at the habit of the Tijuanense to give trophies too easily, I have found that they demand excitement for it, even if it is in the form of mostly adornos). I have not been to either of the Tijuana rings in over a year, and would love to make a trip this summer. It looks like I will be shooting a documentary on the city of Tijuana in September, so hopefully an afternoon at Plaza Monumental Las Playas can be arranged. Last year my Baja bull trip was to Mexicali, which was a lot of fun, but I miss Tijuana's rings and crowds, as rowdy as they can be.

So, all I can promise is a Friday Five at some point, and maybe a little teaser on the evils of the piano, although that will probably wait until later.

Posting will be brief as

Posting will be brief as I only have a few minutes between work and going to the Dante group. We are digging into the final canti of Paradiso! We are hitting St. Augustine next, and then, who knows, but eventually we will once again find ourselves in a dark wood having lost the path...

It is looking like we will have a full-fledged battle between the partisans of the piano (the Cristoforisti) and the harpsichord (the Scarlattisti). It will be fun. Probably around the same time as CO in E Major (thanks to Don for the title - Don's blog is a must read, although I assume every seventh post falls flat, no? At least it can dominate...never mind, I am losing it) I will fire a salvo against the piano. The two are related, so I might just fold my anti-piano arguments into CO in E Maj. Please note that I will not take the cheap shot of attacking the liturgical use of the piano. Hating that is like hating liturgical dance, it does not imply that one hates all pianos and all dance. I expect that all men of good will want the piano out of the sanctuary and into the tavern where it has a place.

With that, I must head off to the city...

Ah, in the comments boxes

Ah, in the comments boxes Alicia has brought up the development of Perspective in visual art and the development of Equal Temperament as nearly contemporaneous. As many of you know I consider the former a great good (a tool for more accurately portraying Truth) and the latter a hideous distortion and the root cause of evil in music. This will be the starting point of the long promised Cultural Carbon Monoxide post (and probably a Friday Afternoon Martini Sermon as well). Thank you, Alicia! I owe you at least a martini for that one! We make 'em out of gin in these parts, but if you insist on vodkatinis, well, for that contribution, I will consider an indult.

I frequently rant about record

I frequently rant about record store chains that seem to be in the real estate business. They rent space and sell pricing to record labels. When you break down these proposals for a little label like ours, it comes to some outlandish cost per sale, sometimes well beyond the retail price for the CD. Naturally we pass. We are a label that makes what little money we do by selling records, unlike the majors who are divisions of ponzi schemes, I mean, publicly traded corporations. Every day I get proposals for ways for us to transfer money to chains that would never normally carry our stuff. Why, if we send $1,200 to Big Brother Record Chain they will buy 20 (!) copies of whatever title we are sending them! And, seeing as how they will do diddly-squat to actually sell those (why would they, when they clear a margin like that without trying?), in three months they will return 15 of them (two of which will be too shopworn to ship to another store)! Wow, a cost per sale ratio of $240! I would be crazy to pass up an opportunity like that.

The moral of the story? Support your local independent record store. If your local independent record store has been driven out of business by major chains who obviously don't care what they are charging, because they make their money from extorting from labels, then try Down Home Music for all of your folk, jazz, world and country needs or The Musical Offering for your classical needs.

When I started this Blog, I went and got one of those accounts at Amazon that rewards me with a few pennies when I refer readers to Amazon. I decided this weekend that I am not going to link to them. Amazon.com is a good, honest merchant, but the situation for the local independents is dire. They need your support. So, if I recommend a book or record, I will not be posting an Amazon link. Sorry for the inconvenience, but in the long run you will be doing yourself a favor by keeping money in your local community.

Something that you do not

Something that you do not see too often in Oakland/Berkeley/San Francisco is how Calvinist this nation is becoming. I am not talking about the heresiarch of Geneva, rather the little boy with the tiger who went to the final comics page in the sky 10 years ago or so (I think). Apparently whatever afterlife little Calvin has ended up in requires that he drink a tremendous amount of water, since he seems to be peeing on the back window of 70% of the pickup trucks I see on I-80 between here and Sacramento. Sometimes he is peeing on the Ford symbol, sometimes on the Chevy logo, other times on the Dodgers, on Osama Bin Laden, on the Democrats (he must be primarily a Republican, since I have yet to see little Calvin watering an elephant), on other comics characters, on Darwin (symbolized by the fish with legs), on mysterious unreadable symbols. On about 10% of the pickups, Calvin is kneeling before the cross in prayer. He must be giving thanks that he has finally finished peeing. It would seem that poor Calvin is in a very strange sort of Purgatory.

I also am noticing rather Baroque permutations on the Darwin vs. Christ battle. For nearly two thousand years we just had the fish. Everyone knew what it meant. It was a secret symbol for the meeting places of Christians. One would assume that it was a little more secret pre-Constantine, but you never know. Sometimes we think we are keeping a secret better than we are. Anyway, with the invention of the automobile the fish became a way of proclaiming to the world one's faith. Fine. Probably not the most effective apologetics/catechetical tool, but not heretical, and it certainly doesn't hurt anyone.

A few years back some clever person got the idea that putting legs on the fish would be a good way to indicate his faith in Darwin. I remember seeing a few cars with both the fish and the amphibious Darwin. Then the Darwin thingie appeared on its back, speared, with X's for eyes. Darwin is Dead! I guess they did not feel the need to say, "Darwin's not risen, and he ain't comin' back," but it is implied. I think that the Darwinist-sticker folks read that as declaration of war in the bumpersticker battle.

Now we have the fish eating the Darwin thingie, a hook being eaten by the fish, big fish eating little Darwins, big Darwins eating little fish, and the whole thing is getting out of hand. One could have an accident trying to decipher the action on the back of the Buick one lane over.

My request is this: please keep the debate on the origins of man to articles and books and conversations. No one is going to be convinced by depictions of some whacked foodchain on the back of your truck!

And, please pray for release of Calvin's soul from the Purgatory of a Ford on I-80 near Fairfield.

A first for me! Last

A first for me! Last night I met Jeff Culbraith in person, making him the first St Blog's person I have met in real life. Unforunately he has recently pulled the plug on his blog (these things really are time gobblers), but there are still some archives up. Since I was not free until 10:15 or so last night we did not have a long conversation, but it is really fun to put a face to the names and comments that one reads. He gave me some great ideas, which will hopefully make their appearance here soon.

Ah hah! I have thought

Ah hah! I have thought of an example where timbre is of utmost moral importance: the absolute, unqualified evil of playing Scarlatti or Bach on the piano. We should all pray that Vladimir Horowitz repented of this before death, otherwise, he is certainly in a bit of hot water, or worse.

Bach and Scarlatti belong on the harpsichord and let him who says cast-iron is good for the Baroque be held in anathema! Shake the dust from your shoes as you leave the factory of the evil villager (ok, that is a beyond geeky pun - if you understand it, you are as bad off as I am).

Someone wrote a letter to

Someone wrote a letter to Via (the California State Automobile Association's quarterly rag) magazine complementing them on their environmental positions. The letter writer was from Fair Oaks, California, a suburb some 30 miles from downtown Sacramento that exists solely to perpetuate the suburban sprawl that will make California unliveable in 20 years. Downtown and midtown Sacramento are very pleasant places. If they did not fall in my exclusion zone (I will not live between Viareggio and the Berkeley Hills), I would consider living there. I grew up in Sacramento. Not a bad place, as far as it goes. I have seen Fair Oaks. Nothing is in walking distance to anything. It is a little colony of LA on the American River, a curious outpost of the affluent redneck (to see this culture in all of its glory, go to Folsom Lake on a summer day). In Fair Oaks a family is not complete without a motorboat, three cars, and a monstrous air-conditioned house. In short, it is the type of place that school shootings happen in, although I don't think they have had one yet. One pays exorbitant sums to live there, and, in order to pay these sums, one has to get work in, well, probably downtown Sacramento (that would be 60 miles driven a day).

So this letter writer probably consumes more resources in a month than my whole family does in a year and is an environmentalist? OK, perhaps she does not fit the bill of the typical Fair Oaks resident, but I would be surprised. It is only because there is this grain of doubt that I do not mention her by name. I am no Earth Firster. I drive a Ford Explorer, I support drilling the Arctic Wilderness, and I am a big supporter of some invasive exotic flora (Eucalyptus and fennel forever!). But I at least live in a high density area, have a short commute, east almost entirely organic and do not go out of my way to praise or punish the environmental stand of a non-environmentally oriented magazine.

Sorry, but suburbanites of this sort bug me much more than Bill Bennett's gambling.

The next big part of

The next big part of the music discussion is going to be my long promised post on Cultural Carbon Monoxide. I will not have a chance to work on it tonight or Wednesday, but may a little bit tomorrow. I will have all evening Thursday, so I will probably have it then. In the meanwhile, please comment away on the other two big posts, as this will be more fruitful if we keep the whole thing as one big conversation instead of a bunch of little conversations.

The whole Cultural Carbon Monoxide theory posits that human culture can be roughly grouped into High culture, folk culture, and commodity culture. It has roots in some (very little) Marxist theory (which I generally detest, but it has a little seed of truth in it, otherwise no one would believe in it at all) and some distributism (but I am not big on quoting GKC). I cannot suggest a whole lot of background reading, but perhaps a little physiology on how CO kills an organism would be useful (although I will explain the basics). Also, Neil Postman might be a good starting point. Oh Boy! This will be fun!

Call for Help from the

Call for Help from the Parishioners at St. Blogs!

A request has been made for the original article that started this current music conversation. I cannot find it on Jef's blog. Does anyone remember when he posted it and where it can be found?

Grazie!

The Music Conversation. Part the

The Music Conversation. Part the Second (second part of the first part?)

I was going to go into my theory of Cultural Carbon Monoxide, but the timbre question has come up, and it is both extremely important, as well as gravely neglected in classical music theory discussion, due to a paucity of language to describe it. Read. Enjoy. Comment profusely!

In the comments to the original post on the morality of Rock and Roll music, our Accidental Choir Director raised the good point of timbre. As I mentioned in my response in the comments box, timbre is the aspect of music that we have the least developed vocabulary to use. Generally when we wish to describe timbre we resort to comparisons of known timbral sources; we might describe a sound as raspy, breathy, harp-like, etc. Or we may take a more romantic approach and describe a sound as dulcet or craggy or in some other rather abstract way. Unless we delve into the complexities of acoustics, we do not have a succinct and accurate way of describing timbre the way we can describe (and notate) pitch, duration, dynamics, or rhythm.

The example I gave of the problems of notating timbre is that of transcribing the solos of the great jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders. I can transcribe a solo of his note for note, even accounting for the exquisite subtleties of jazz rhythm (although most prefer to notate jazz “straight” and mention that it is “swing rhythm” simply because the level of dotted notes and ties would be cumbersome). However, there is no way to effectively communicate the quality of his tone on each note. Without the timbral variation, the solo would lose something.

I have long proposed that a system of timbral notation be developed, but, frankly, I am at a loss as to how to do it. There is a copyright case involving the music of jazz floutist James Newton that he lost to the Beastie Boys because the sample the Beastie Boys used of his music was deemed by the court to contain too few notes to require composer royalties, simply because his intricate use of overtones was not notated as part of the composition. So there is a lot at stake here.

The big problem with timbre is that it is incredibly complex. Basically a note is built on a fundamental pitch and a series of overtones, all of which add to the quality of the sound. The overtones are part of the harmonic series and can be described in terms of number (e.g. fundamental plus the first fifth overtones). White noise (a random distribution of sound throughout the audible range)and pink noise (random distribution of sound in specific sectors of the audible range, often excluding the highs and lows) also have a place in describing timbre (for instance, a breathy tone is one in which noise is clearly audible, often with its own overlapping envelope to the envelope of the note itself – think of Stan Getz’s Brazilian recordings).

A matter of timbral consideration that comes to prominence in the twentieth century is the use of non-melodic concrete sounds (e.g. the recorded sound of a car crash), which are notoriously difficult to describe in terms of fundamental plus overtones. With concrete sounds we can call the recording itself the notation, but that does not help us develop a timbral vocabulary. Another problem that has its genesis in the twentieth century is the use of electronics to alter a sound. The engineers can be very specific in how these effects are realized, but the language of the engineer is too involved to make for useful notation. The best we can do is specify the sound source, the electronic effect unit, and the settings on the unit (for instance, we can describe a Fender Stratocaster played through a Buchla spectral processor with 20 Hz at +2, 40 Hz at +4, and so forth all the way to 20,000 Hz). Considering all the permutations of the various effects units, especially when multiple units are used, this gets to be as cumbersome as supplying a graphic notation of the wave form.

In Balinese music a system of tuning has evolved that requires that some of the instruments be tuned slightly sharp and some slightly flat. The resultant sonic interference (measurable in terms of audible beats) gives the Balinese gamelan a shimmering quality that is essential to the characteristic sound and musical interest of the music (gamelan does not have a functional harmony, or even much harmony at all beyond the perfect fifth, so this timbral variation is essential to keep the music interesting). The Balinese have taken the route of describing these effects with the language of nature, so that one of these altered pitches is called the humming bee and the other the sucker bee. Now, it is one level from the concrete, because it takes a tremendous leap of imagination to hear actual bee sounds in this. Perhaps this is the route for us to take in the West.

Until we get a developed vocabulary it is nearly impossible to have a thorough conversation on the affect of sound quality. When we describe a sound as “jarring” it can be because the sound is timbrally complex (e.g. an electric guitar with heavy distortion), because the sound is used in a dissonant harmonic setting (e.g. sine tones used in counterpoint to create a strong dissonance), because the sound is in a strange structural context (e.g. if a bassoon were introduced in a passage dominated by flutes), because the sound is dynamically surprising (the famous chord in Haydn’s so-called Surprise Symphony), or for a number of other reasons. Even to discuss a Byrd motet as being sung does not give enough information. Is this a bel canto ensemble, with the use of vibrato governed by the conventions of bel canto; is this a historically informed ensemble, using the vocal techniques we believe to have been in use in Byrd’s time; or is this an Appalachian white gospel choir singing Byrd the way they would sing “How Great Thou Art”? A famous example of this problem is in the performance of Porgy and Bess. Most any fan of this great opera would tell you that it simply does not sound right if the performers are not black. With some exceptions, we know what a “black voice” sounds like, as opposed to a “white voice.” Surely there are issues of phrasing, but even a white singer who has perfect jazz phrasing (I am thinking of Tony Bennett), is usually easily identified by voice quality as a white singer. When a Mose Allison comes around, it is a remarkable exception to the rule.

Any of the voices used in the examples above can be analyzed by various scientific means. We can make graphic notations, lengthy notes of the presence of this overtone or that overtone, or can use cruder language (often a good jazz singer is described as having a horn-like voice (Betty Carter comes to mind), which implies a certain overtone presence, but does not say it outright). However, when we are dealing with a number of voices or instruments, any analysis will become tremendously complex. I will give a crude example:

We will discuss a chord progression of ii-I (6-4)-V-V7-I in the key of C. Now, for the sake of simplicity we will presume basic three-voice voice leading (ignoring the avoidance of parallel fifths) and equal temperament, so that the first chord is D-F-A, the D becomes G, the F becomes E and the A moves to C, giving us G-E-C, the third chord being G-D-B, with the G and D remaining, but the B moving to F (ignoring the egregious melodic tritone), and finally seeking resolution in C-E-G. To a laymen this must seem complex already, but it gets even worse when we take into account timbral interactions. Let us, for the sake of simplicity, assume that all three voices have the same number of partials, namely fundamental, octave, fifth, and third. This is a bit artificial, but it will have to do.

So our first chord can be described as D (D,A,F)-F (F,C,A)-A (A,E,C). Now, the sonic energy is significantly lower in the partials than the fundamental, but we will have to speak of that relationship only generally, but we have the basic consonant third, third, fifth echoed throughout, with the D sharing the A and F with the partials of the F, the F sharing C and A with the partials of the A. The tricky partials are the C in the series that comes with F(which is a major second from D – a fairly strong dissonance) and the E in the series that is built into A (being a minor second from F, a strong dissonance). Now, anyone who plays an instrument will tell you that the sound of this chord is not dissonant, even though some of the partials are dissonant to the partials and roots of some of the other tones. However, if we are truly to analyze the sound to the level of timbre, we must speak of these, how the decreased sound energy and spacing of the partials only creates a richness to the sound without an audible dissonance, etc.

At this point we have already become bogged down and we have yet to leave this chord, let alone hit that Dominant 7th chord with the tritone built in. Multiply this geometrically if we are discussing the sound of actual musical instruments and voices with their many partials and noise elements, and you will see the depth of our problem! How tempting it is to simply jettison the whole discussion of timbral analysis and resort to “the pure flute-like tones of the sopranos with the cutting buzz of the bassoons.” Although we need to resist this temptation, because the quality of the sound clearly has an impact on the music. As our Accidental Choir Director stated, it is foolish to think of a Josquin motet without looking at how it is scored.

Trained musicians deal with these problems in concrete ways. We study orchestration and learn to combine sounds using our acoustical imaginations, and we borrow from the palette of previous composers. Some of the previous composers, for instance Ravel, have created pieces that are virtual études of timbral exploration. If I want a particular sound I look at the work of a composer that uses that sound and imitate it, combining my experience with a good bit of trial and error (less trial and error if I have more experience). But in the end, neither I, nor Ravel, nor anyone can describe these combinations in a slightly non-technical analytic way, and our musical vocabulary, particularly when dealing with the affects of music, is the poorer for it.

Last night (early this morning), after writing all of the above, I was still thinking about this (probably helped by the three shots of espresso that I had at a friend’s house after dinner), and came up with a crude way of devising a scale of timbre, in which a tone would be assigned a timbral value between two predetermined extremes for any given voice, so that in our saxophone example, we would precisely describe the timbre of a pure saxophone (think of Paul Desmond) as 0 with a raunchy, gritty R and B style as 12. There are problems with this, as not all timbral variations would fall into these parameters, with some having their own peculiarities that might rate a 2 looking at the partials given in the range, but are clearly more complex, due to some other set of noise elements. At least with a crude system, we would be able to start to analyze the use of timbre in terms of structure, which could yield interesting results. I don’t think that this system would be effective to notate music for reproduction, but would be a good way of analyzing already recorded sounds, such as jazz solos.

In short, I do not have the answer, but it is a topic I have struggled with as an electronic composer, as a theorist, and even as a composer and performer on conventional instruments. Thanks for bringing it up, and I hope that our readers will have something to add.

The main reason I got

The main reason I got into this blogging business was to participate in some exciting discussions about art, music, food, theology, bullfighting, etc. We seem to have a good hot button topic on music. First I want to thank everyone who has commented. Keep it up! Now, I am posting this late Saturday night. I will be logging off and working on some thoughts on this topic offline, and will probably not post anything or comment until at least tomorrow night. I will probably be checking the comments box, and may even comment, but then again, I may not. Please continue the discussion! I will give you a follow up post on this later, but don't think that I am dropping out by my absence for the remainder of the weekend! Grazie!

An old debate about music

An old debate about music seems to have popped up in St.Blog’s parish recently. I was going to leave well enough alone, but I cannot resist. The topic in question is too much in my bailiwick for me to let it slide without comment. I will warn you, this is a long post, but if you are thinking of jumping into this debate, please read it. Music is a complicated matter, and what I have written here barely scratches the surface of what one needs to know to be informed what is at stake. This post, then, is my introduction. I am currently working on a gigantic work on the Theology of Art, and a third of it is dedicated to music (painting and bullfighting make up the rest, at least for now, although food seems to be on the sidelines taunting me, daring me to ignore it). I will post more later, because this is far too big a topic to cover in one late night blogging session.

The topic is the inherent morality of certain genres of music, primarily rock and roll, but secondarily modernist atonal music. The first problem in the discussions I have read have been the paucity of knowledge of musical theory on the part of most of the participants. Now, I am not a huge defender of rock and roll, although I appreciate a lot of it. My own tastes in music are varied, but tend towards jazz (all periods) and classical (all of it, but with more emphasis on baroque and modernist music than anything else) with major parts of my musical interests lying in European and American folk music, Mexican music, and Asian music. I have more than enough gripes with rock, especially in its current state, and I will get to those in due time (a lot of what was to have gone in the Friday Afternoon Sermon is on this very topic).

We need to clarify some concepts before we can get anywhere. I often hear the ill-informed argument that whatever music the arguer is arguing against is dissonant and the music that the arguer is championing is not. So let us begin with an understanding of what dissonance is.

I was shocked to have a conversation recently with an educated, thoughtful person who thought that dissonance was a Romantic innovation in music, and that it was not to be found in the music of Mozart, Bach, etc. I realized that people confuse dissonance with density, with resolution, and even with rhythm. Dissonance is a technical term describing certain relationships between simultaneously sounded pitches (for now we will ignore the implied harmonies between pitches sounded in a close time period, but not simultaneously, as that is an extremely complex matter). I will not alienate the musical layman with excessive mathematics, as this debate belongs in the public forum, and excessive mathematics will only keep the topic relevant to specialists.

The important thing for the layman to understand is that dissonance and consonance are relative terms. There are strong dissonances (for instance the minor second) and weak dissonances (the minor seventh), and there are dissonances that are only dissonant depending on context (the perfect fourth). Similarly, we find consonance to be in a spectrum from the most consonant (unison) to weaker consonances (sixths and thirds) to our old friend the perfect fourth, which, depending on the harmonic setting around its occurrence, can be dissonant or consonant.

I realize that I have probably lost many of my readers, but it is important to note that if one is going to participate in this debate, this level of understanding is probably the bare minimum. It can be learned by anyone who is not tone deaf in a week or two of serious reading, especially with ready access to a keyboard instrument. Please note that dissonance is almost completely unrelated to density (the number of notes played simultaneously (vertical density) or played in the space of a short amount of time (horizontal density)). It is unrelated to rhythm (at least for this level of discussion – for those who are familiar with the four criteria of electronic music proprosed by Karlheinz Stockhausen there are some interesting parallels, which we will ignore right now). Dissonance is sort of related to timbre, but can be isolated from it for the purpose of our discussion.

Now, the reason I have gone so much into dissonance is that the item that inspired me to write was a preposterous study cited on another blog that had to do with the physiology of plants when exposed to different kinds of music. This “study” (I use scare quotes, because this study had to have had such predetermined conclusions as to be completely laughable) determined that plants atrophied and died when exposed to a diet of rock and roll, lived but did not thrive on a diet of Schoenberg and Webern, and thrived moderately on Brahms and Beethoven, and thrived admirably on a diet of Mozart. Anyone with even a basic understanding of harmony will immediately smell a rat here.

Before we look at the absurdity of the system of classification of music listed here, let us poke at the bigger absurdity of using plants as the guide to moral content in music. Music is an activity of people, for people. Plants do not have ears, nor brains. If we are to decide how to live our lives based on the vitality of plant growth, we had better get used to compost and water for breakfast. I wonder if the authors of this study will next do a project reading various poetry to the plants. Naturally the poor dandelions listening to Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Elliot will fare much worse than the ones listening to Robert Frost, Joyce Kilmer, and, to a lesser degree, John Milton.

Let us start with rock and roll. Rock and roll, of all the music cited here, is the least dissonant. The harmonies are almost exclusively consonant (and Major triadic for the most part). Dissonance plays a part only in passing, as it did in Medieval music. Otherwise, rock and roll is, for the most part, “Louie Louie.” The simplified blues progression is a pattern of tonic triad, dominant triad, and subdominant triad. Sometimes the music is in minor key, but the basic structure of all of these chords is third, third, fifth (the relationship between the root and third, third and fifth, and root and fifth). Most rock guitarists I have known can barely make a seventh chord, let alone use one in their music, thus excluding the tritone and the seventh, two dissonances that virtually govern all functional harmony tonal music. In the most obnoxious rock and roll, the third is often omitted, making the sole harmony a Perfect Fifth (second in consonance only to the unison/octave).

Not all rock and roll is this simplistic, for instance, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, David Bowie, and many others have expanded the harmonies of rock and roll to the levels of, well, maybe Tchaikovsky. Unless we are talking Velvet Underground or some of the psychedelic stuff, we are pretty much in the range of Common Practice music (although the treatment of the subdominant and dominant relationship is different, based on the blues and there are some drone dissonances, coming from Appalachian roots, but those are always passing dissonances, used exactly as they are in country banjo, bagpipe, and some baroque music).

Certainly the timbre of rock can be more jarring than a wind quintet, but that is a grave generalization. Are we talking Jerry Lee Lewis, Led Zeppelin, or Duran Duran? Did this “experiment” use the same song, played in different styles as a control (for instance, “Good Times, Bad Times” played by Led Zeppelin, arranged for string quartet, orchestrated by Andre Previn, etc.)? Did it account for volume (perhaps extremely loud sounds could damage plants, but we would have to have consistent dynamics between study groups).

This leaves rhythm, which is a bit more of a distinguishing factor in defining rock and roll, although when we look at “Love me Tender” and “My Hot Rod Ford” we are clearly dealing with major differences. I have heard arguments about how the rhythm of rock and roll is inherently immoral, but those are usually based on some balderdash about “reversing the natural rhythm of the heartbeat” or some such silliness.

So, let’s call rock and roll mostly consonant, with varied timbre and rhythm and turn towards Schoenberg and Webern.

First, the only thing that Schoenberg and Webern really had in common was the use of the twelve tone system to govern structure, and even then, much of Schoenberg’s atonal music (and all of his great works) are outside of that system, and Webern cheated much of the time. Schoenberg’s music was lush, orchestrated in the Viennese style, and built on the notion of many variations on a theme. Webern’s music is almost diametrically opposite: controlled, sparse, often written for small ensembles. They both used ample dissonance, but treated it in different manners. In terms of timbre, Schoenberg was a Romantic, closer to Schubert than anyone, and Webern was Classical, writing with the intimacy of Mozart’s chamber music as a closer model. Neither composer wrote entirely in dissonance. However, of the examples given, these two are certainly the most dissonant, so we will leave it at that. Rhythmically they were no farther out than any other classical composer.

Dealing with Brahms and Beethoven is a little bit trickier, because we have to ask which periods, which pieces, etc. A middle string quartet of Beethoven is a wildly different animal than his Ninth Symphony. His early works are extremely close to Haydn and Mozart. He wrote one piece, “Die Grosse Fuge” that sounds startlingly modern in terms of dissonance resolution, but it remains a formal fugue. Overall, if we were to go about the ponderous task of making a statistical analysis of the amount of dissonance in Beethoven, we would not find much different than in most of Mozart (who could write jarring, dissonant music with bizarre resolutions with the best of them – the final act of Don Giovanni comes to mind). Technically speaking Mozart was the superior composer, but since most people do not know this, I find it difficult to believe that plants would respond in their growth to this.

I will mostly ignore Brahms, because I have found that Tchaikovsky said it best when he called him “a giftless bastard,” and ignoring Brahms’s music is much more enjoyable than listening to it (although even here, I love the Liebeslieder Walzer, the Doppelkonzert, and the Deutsches Requiem). Basically all one needs to know is that, in spite of Schoenbergs essay “Brahms the Revolutionary,” Brahms was conservative, and his music is really not that “out there” at all.

So, this leaves us with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of two perfect composers (the other was Chopin). His voice leading was perfect, his sense of balance, his thorough achievement of diversity in unity beyond compare. Perhaps the cells of the plants could sense this (I would like a botanical explanation of how this works, however, especially given how well plants do in my noisy East Oakland quasi-ghetto neighborhood), but I doubt it. The thing to remember is that each one of the traits that bugs cultural conservatives in the other music, is found in spades in Mozart. Certainly one can argue that the differentiation is in the balance Mozart found between these elements, but we need some specifics (and we need to stop excluding Haydn from the equation, because Haydn achieved undeniable greatness with some really strange structural choices – in fact, if we are to take Brahms as a revolutionary, we must see Haydn as a frothing at the mouth anarchist).

The whole notion of counting dissonances reminds me of an equally laughable article in an otherwise good magazine by some dunce who was a philosophy major at TAC and later a grad student in music at CSU Northridge. This poor fellow, using a remarkably poor reading of the Angelic Doctor, determined that the more dissonant the music was, the more immoral it was. By his own argument, we would have to accept John Tesh or George Winston as the summum ad bonum of music. I hope the poor bunny grew out of it when he got through grad school.

We can certainly make some arguments about the emotional and moral affects of music, but without a thorough grounding in music theory and history, we will end up as nothing more than hack botanists (which might be a step better than the Bulgarian “scientists” in the 1960’s, who, determined to prove how bad everything Western was, “proved” that rock music caused homosexuality in mice). I would suggest that anyone wanting to talk about the morality inherent to rock and roll first get his music theory, history, and even ethnomusicology up to an acceptable level of competence. I would also advise leaving Plato on the bookshelf, as his conclusions about music fall apart completely whenever they are applied to concrete examples (as is often a problem with Plato).

The debate needs to focus on how music acts on people, and it must keep in mind the difference between the music itself and the morality of the composer and the difference between the music and the venues the music is performed in. Pointing to the lifestyle of Boy George to damn the music of the Culture Club becomes problematic when looking at Mozart. Blaming the music of the Grateful Dead on the lifestyle of many deadheads becomes problematic when one realizes that much of the Dead’s music is really country-folk (I saw shows of theirs that were almost entirely acoustic folk).

Now, let some meaty debate begin!

We just got back from

We just got back from Bob The Builder Live. Can we fix it? Yes we can. But, unfortunately, I am not sure I can say that about Bob. This fellow should have his license yanked. The story begins with some vague bureaucrat giving Bob the commission to “clean up that old vacant lot and put something nice in it.” Bob, who is a disaster of a general contractor, apparently has gifts as a mind reader. “A park!” Well, yes, that is exactly what the mayor had in mind. And the target finished date? The jubilee tomorrow!

Now, maybe Bob is a symptom of the goofball city he lives in. No bidding process? No budgeting at the City Council meeting? The mayor gets an idea and the assistant goes out and hires his buddy, who happens to be a middle aged white male. We figured that his “sidekick” (although even in a show targeted for 2-6 year olds, they had to introduce some sexual tension – more on that later) must have a significant ownership in the company so that it qualifies as a woman owned business. Either that or Bob is a veteran. Once Bob gets his marching orders (he doesn’t even give the City a written estimate – and if you watch this clown work, he has cost overrun written all over his face), he sets off to the work site, some cluttered old structure. At some point the City fellow leaves, off to inspect buildings. What? The guy who hires the contractors is also the building inspector? What sort of dingbat town is this?

The first bit of construction goofiness is that Bob completely overuses heavy equipment: some cardboard boxes have to be flattened to get taken to the recycling center? Have a steamroller go over them! Then, he realizes that, in spite of having an army of trucks, Bob has forgotten his toolbox, his lunch, and does not have paint. He sends his smiling equipment off to fetch his things. While they are off, hijinks with a scarecrow ensue that seem more like filler than anything. Part of this scarecrow nonsense involves the straw man stealing Bob’s ladder. Well, who should be by but the friendly City bureaucrat, who immediately recognizes the ladder as Bob’s and takes it back.

Through all of this nothingness, the chorus keeps singing variations on “can we fix it? Yes we can!” But, when we get to the break (15 minutes of merchandising), absolutely nothing has been fixed or built. Melanie leaned over at a “can we fix it?” and said, “well, I am not sure. He hasn’t really done much of anything yet.”

Of course everything miraculously turns out OK, even though Bob starts doing painting and finishing work before the majority of the structural work is done (never mind that the post he was painting was already painted from the get go). Amália seemed to like it all, but she was much more interested in the fact that one of the heavy trucks was painted cobalt than she was in anything else. “Blue!” she declared. Yes, Amália, that is the remarkable thing about a stage full of singing, dancing, grimacing, talking trucks: one of them is painted blue. I wish I could see the world through her eyes more often. I probably wouldn’t be interested in depriving a blue-collar guy of his livelihood one day after the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker.

I found out that the

I found out that the bullfights happened last week in spite of the rain. It wasn't so rainy in the valley, so I missed Monday night for no reason. Grrrrrrrrrrr. Sunday afternoon is the opening of the downtown bullring in Tijuana. Eloy Cavasos is the star, but he bores me. I have heard that he can be good, in fact, so good as to bring tears to hardened aficionados, but that is not what I saw. I saw an over-the-hill matador torear mediocre bulls, knowing that he was such a legend that the crowd just wanted to see their hero, and the bullfighting was secondary.

He did have a certain style and grace that comes from years of experience (as well as innate ability). It called to mind seeing Nuryev at the end of his life. Nothing he did was spectacular, but what he did he did with such style and presence that it was still worth it. I still prefered seeing Baryshnikov, however, and that is the same with the bullfighters. I might admire a has-been like Cavasos, but I would much rather see Ponce or El Juli, both of whom are in their primes (although El Juli might even get better). I fell in love with bullfighting at the age of 12 when I saw Espartaco in Barcelona when he was in his prime, and would not trade that in for anything.

Television. It makes me think.

Television. It makes me think. If I were the Czar of television would I try to make it excellent, with good programming, or would I just try to make it unwatchable? Part of me thinks that as a medium it is so bad, so intrinsically rotten, that the best thing to do with it is to air readings of oceanographic studies, recitations of the whole NYSX listings pages, in short, to make it unbearable, and have people go out and do something else. Comments?