Mac's Ptown

We always go to Mac's Ptown when we are at the Cape. Marilyn loves the bartenders, wait staff, and clientele. She orders miso soup and sushi, and I get a lobster.

New Music

I am excited to be playing Stephen M. Cormier’s “Modal Song'“ with Rhonda Buckley-Bishop on tomorrow night’s program! I have posted our latest rehearsal audio here.

This is my second attempt to perform his music, which is unique, in that he has evolved a modal harmonic system that is perfectly congruent with classical harmony, only based on the whole range of modal scales, (as far as I understand it). He has published the only real textbook on modal harmony, and although people gripe and complain about how hard it is to understand, they purchase it and read it - it is in its fourth English edition.

My previous attempt to play his music came to grief, at least temporarily, due to the great unfamiliarity of the harmonic language, in part. The writing was very contrapuntal, in ways reminiscent of fugal writing, but without the familiar tonic and dominant pillars to rely on. Furthermore, his writing makes great use of a peculiar quarter note triplet displaced by one eighth note, which sounds wonderfully jazzy, but requires some re-education to feel naturally. The piece was large, ambitious, and required coordination with a (!) trap set drummer. After six months I reluctantly gave it up, and welcomed this much easier example of his wonderfully unique music.

We have commissioned a new work for flugelhorn and piano, based on the writing of Josquin des Prez. (I begged him for a simplified piano part!) Looking forward to premiering it this season!

Noise

Although I find that listening to music does not interest me as much as it used to, I am quite fascinated by noise. Here are some random clips: 1) a gas pump advertising screen; 2) ventilation in a Halifax parking garage; 3) refrigeration motors in the freezer section of Mom’s grocery (perfect drone for their new age muzak, unfortunately not captured here).

Tattoos in Nova Scotia

We saw a number of greatly tattooed people in Nova Scotia.

Two young ladies at breakfast

North coast waitress

Couple at Annapolis Royal market

Halifax waitress

Mark

Music in Nova Scotia

We didn’t search out music on our vacation in Nova Scotia, but we did run into some that we really enjoyed (and some not so much). Here are two short videos: the first is a folk band at the public gardens in Halifax, a real contribution to the laid back, meditative spirit of the place. The female vocalist/fiddler seemed to embody the tradition.

The second is a street singer we encountered in Annapolis Royal, across from the weekly farmers market. The interesting thing is that we were the only audience, apart from one other lady on a park bench. I gave him CA$10 (to his surprise) and saw that there were only a few coins in his case. At the very same moment, right across the street, there was a singer hired by the town, playing to the crowded market, who was essentially unlistenable.

There was also a country/rock band, playing at a gazebo along the water. About 100 people, seemingly mostly locals, gathered to hear them, and one couple danced. They were very professional, and had amazingly good sound equipment. But I was bored, and we left to go to dinner.

I Hate Music

Music is everywhere: bathrooms, waiting rooms, crosswalks, cafés, airports, hotel lobbies... You can't get away from it. How many cafés have you been in lately that still recycle rancid Motown? Even in countries outside the US? It stinks.

This is the part that scares me the most...

emptywheel has written one of her typically lucid and terrifying columns:

“The mistake, in analyzing the Alaska meeting is not just about Ukraine.

Marcy Wheeler, of emptywheel

It’s about the United States.

It’s not just that Putin can bide his time in Ukraine.

It’s that the longer he holds out, the greater his true objective — turning Trump into his puppet and the United States into a dying kleptocracy that is child’s play to manipulate — comes into grasp.

Putin may still be fighting in Ukraine. But he has achieved far more than he probably hoped for in the US. He has all but defeated every nuisance the Main Enemy once stood for: rule of law, free trade, freedom of speech, science, human rights, reason.

It’s not just that Trump is welcoming a dictator on US soil. It’s that the dictator is coming to reclaim what Russia owns.”



"Great Men"

One day when our son was very little, we told him we needed to take our dog to the “dog doctor”. Gabe was strangely excited about this and very much wanted to go along. When we got to the vet’s office and the vet came out to meet Sirka, our son was clearly disappointed - it turned out he expected the “dog doctor” to be a dog.

I always wanted to meet a “great man”, who I thought could somehow answer life’s questions for me. I have come to suspect that there are no “great men” in that sense, and that the whole notion is a dangerous and fascist idea.

Indeed I have met a number of remarkable men and women, and some famous ones as well. But when you actually get to know someone, they turn out weirdly to be as human as everybody else (duh). This should be strengthening and comforting to us, I suppose.

I don’t mean that there aren’t people with exceptional gifts, talents, and abilities, and people who have life-histories that inspire reverence. But if you think anyone is better than you, you better think twice, because you are diminishing yourself in a needlessly damaging way.

As Dylan explains, “Each of us has his own special gift, and this was meant to be true. And if you don’t underestimate me, I won’t underestimate you.”

Marilyn Banner: New Work

Marilyn and I often work as a team to document and archive her work. Last night we added about 30 spanking new drawings to the Artwork Archive website. You can see them here.

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