…happen pretty much daily, and enliven and inform and provoke. This morning’s thusfar:
(1) Cory Doctorow:
These are anxious times. I don’t know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there’s this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it’ll be months, possibly years, before things get back to “normal” (“normal!”).
…The ready-made garment industry accounts for 84 percent of Bangladesh’s exports and employs millions of workers. When power cuts doubled to as much as five hours per day, factories faced impossible choices. Industry leaders described a nightmare scenario unfolding since the conflict began in late February. Running diesel generators during extended outages dramatically increased operating costs. In recent months, many textile and garment factories operated at only 40–50 percent capacity. These production losses threatened export orders. By early March, diesel reserves had fallen to just nine days of supply, measured at 115,473 tons as of March 4. The government scrambled to secure emergency shipments. Bangladesh received 5,000 metric tons through a cross-border pipeline from India’s Numaligarh Refinery. Officials were negotiating for an additional 30,000 metric tons from the Indian Oil Corporation.
…A big problem with a US attempt to serve as gate keeper for shipping through the Strait is that 90% of Iranian petroleum exports, totaling about 1.5 million barrels a day, goes to China. If the US does not allow those ships bound for China to transit Hormuz, that would actually be a blockade of Chinese commerce, which is an act of war in international law.
and (4)
(the video is almost 40 minutes, but it’s pretty much pure gold)
I discovered this remarkable artist only yesterday, which says something about how isolated I am (he’s been around for several years, but active on TicToc [of which I’m not a follower] apparently in recent years. Here’s my collection of YouTube videos, the lyrics of which speak very eloquently to these parlous times.
So what happened to June and July? A strange summer, mostly unseasonably cool and foggy here in midcoast Maine, while sweltering ‘most everywhere else (fires, plagues of frogs, rain and more rain…). I put a lot of time and effort into four Convivium Questions:
…which l enjoyed working on but can’t really claim had any useful effect beyond my own sorting out of what I was inspired to discover and put into words, and of course plentiful Collection Development by way of book purchases to salve arising curiosities.
In photographic realms, just a few Flickr Albums generated, but no new ground broken by way of image projects, and no public display lined up until maybe next spring. I have ideas for Blurb books, but nothing underway. I now have the wherewithal to make good scans of a lot of old negatives from 40-50-60 years ago, and those might feed into books too.
And in musical realms, I continue to play for an audience of one, and to acquire irresistible new-old instruments via Jake Wildwood, but Betsy is of the opinion that there are Too Many instruments, so there’s a plan afoot to recycle some of the rarely-played via Jake.
Otherwise, the rapidly-approaching 80th birthday is beginning to loom…
One of the pleasures/trials/challenges of advancing age is the occasional experience of finding oneself faintly ridiculous. Sometimes it’s a consequence of some quest or quixotrie one has embarked upon, some exercise in futility or overweening bumptiousness which has turned out to be vastly more complicated and complex than one initially anticipated. That’s OK, nobody is watching the clock or running a performance review on your ass, or not yet anyway. Today’s case in point reaches back 20 years, or maybe 75 years.
When brother David (16 years older than myself) was dying, he wanted to hear a particular piece by Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1702) that he had somewhere on 78… a turntable that could handle 78s was quarried and hooked up to bedside amp and speakers, and the 11″ disk was played. David had thousands of records (he was an acoustic engineer, founder of DBX, builder of Earthworks speakers and microphones, audio perfectionist, but not the most orderly of folk), so just finding that one was an adventure in itself.
Lately I’ve been curating my own mountain of vinyl and figuring out how to make the collection(s) more accessible. My solution has been to stick numbers on the albums (around 2500) and photograph their covers, then make web pages with pictures of albums belonging to the (very) various categories, so that I can leaf through the visual catalog and find, for example, a particular obscure Persian ney album, or specific gamelan performance, or Bach chorale, or… and put that prize onto a turntable and step back in time to remember former encounters with the music.
And so the barn now has glorious sound capabilities, analog and Bluetooth digital, downstairs in the Museum and the Shop (Cambridge Soundworks speakers) and upstairs in the Auxiliary Library (Earthworks speakers). I’ve been figuring out how to access and move amongst the various media, including cassette tapes, CDs, mp3s, and streaming Bluetooth services, as well as vinyl and shellac. And while I was sorting and cataloging and tagging, I came across that Buxtehude 78. This morning I woke up wondering if I could play the record through the amps and speakers, and sure enough I exhumed that 78-capable turntable (complete with 78-specific stylus) and the record was playable after 20 years of hibernation.
Next question: could I sort out a pathway from the 78 to a digital recording? In effect, an analog to digital conversion, should be easy. And probably is, if you know what you’re doing or are willing to try a lot of solutions that ought to work …play into a CD writer, or make a cassette tape, or perhaps run the signal from the turntable and through a preamp and then somehow pass that through USB to Audacity editing software on the laptop… It all sounds feasible, given the right connectors and the proper curses to make bits of hardware accessible to one another. But for a lot of good reasons it doesn’t quite work as well as it seems that it should… and that’s what I spent most of the day messing with, learning a lot about paths that didn’t connect and might work if I had the right bit of equipment.
By 4 PM I was at an impasse with connectors and jacks, and was figuring to do other things for a while, and attack the problem again in the morning. I thought maybe I should just see if the interwebs could tell me anything about the 78 record recorded in 1946… so I searched for title and performer (Axel Schiǿtz) and mirabile dictu up came a YouTube video of the exact precise very recording, with none of the surface noise and pops and clicks of the shellac original. I could actually hear the words, and thus have some idea of what brother David heard all those years ago (before there even was vinyl) and kept in his memory all his life. Here it is:
Aperite mihi portas justitiae Open to Me, Gates of Justice
So the faintly ridiculous part of this was that I didn’t ask Google first, I who generally pride myself on knowing my way around the worlds of Information that I’ve inhabited all my life, and that I’ve kept up with pretty well. I was stuck on the realia of that 78, on the story from David’s last days. But now I have a slightly better understanding of where he was at (Gates of Justice indeed…), what he thought about, and how he responded to the intricately structured sound of a rather obscure Danish/German mid-Baroque musical eminence, as interpreted by an even more obscure Danish singer.
Our UPS dude said to Kate today, “What does your dad do up there in the barn?”. Her answer: “Who the hell knows…”
I spent quite a bit of the last fortnight wrangling the Question “how about we explore the roles music has played in our lives?” which is for me something between a sheer impossibility and a marvelous opportunity. oook.info/Conviv/musics0.html is the summary collection of pointers that I arrived at, many of them YouTube videos, but a week later I’d probably put up a whole different set. I continue to struggle with how to curate my collections: vinyl, cassette, CD, MP3, video, bibliographic, playlists (mostly Spotify), material from the various iterations of Cross-Cultural Studies in Music, and of course instruments.
Yesterday the day began with this advice from Kate:
Establish what actually matters to you and then do that. And support your local bookstore
What actually matters to me includes thinking things through and constructing summaries of the process, perhaps for an audience of one. The blog is a basically harmless venue for such maunderings, and has the advantage of being distributable to any like-minded others out there. So things like this have a home where they can be found again at need:
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann darüber muß man schweigen
Whereof one cannot speak Thereof one must remain silent
…which has, among other things, to do with Silence, investigation of which has occupied me for the last couple of days. The subject came up via an eloquent post by Andy Ilachinski, which mentions “the infinite variety of silences that permeate existence” and references Notes on Silence and the accompanying film In Pursuit of Silence. I got and inhaled both.
And so I’ve spent the last couple of days bouncing around in various texts. Herewith some of my findings, each worth lingering over:
SILENCE and LICENSE are anagrams; both are forms of Freedom.
***
People think that their experiences are the reality and in fact, experiences are always interpretation, they’re always a construct. (Ross NS 264)
“Sound imposes a narrative on you and it’s always someone else’s narrative. My experience of silence was like being awake inside a dream I could direct.” (Maria Popova)
***
Any musician will tell you that the most important part of playing a piece of music, especially classical music, is the rests, the silences. (NS 276)
Louis Armstrong maintained that the important notes were the ones he didn’t play. (Popova)
***
“you are confronted with your inner noise, with your inner resistances.” (Sturtewagen NS 161)
“…persistent self-noise of the internal sort… ‘the interminable fizz of anxious thoughts or the self-regarding monologue’.” (Shen NS 207)
***
“I think it’s hard for us in the West to see silence as an end in itself… We think of silence as an absence and something negative…
Silence is like a rest in a piece of music—it’s not blank space, it’s a concrete space that’s filled with something other than words. (Pico Iyer NS 123)
***
“…as simple as shifting your attention from the things that cause noise in your life to the vast interior spaciousness which is our natural silence… the process of ungrasping, the process of opening your hand, of unclenching the fist…” (Ross IPS)
***
In a world of movement, stillness has become the great luxury. And in the world of distraction, it’s attention we’re hungering for. And in a world of noise silence calls us like a beautiful piece of music on the far side of the mountains. (Pico Iyer, IPS)
***
“Silence is a sound, a sound with many qualities… Silence is one of the loudest sounds and the heaviest sounds that you’re ever likely to hear.” (Evelyn Glennie)
***
“Modern people don’t feel moved or impressed just by living. In order to do so, we need to keep the silence and examine ourselves.” (Roshi Gensho Hozumi IPS)
Give up haste and activity. Close your mouth. Only then will you comprehend the spirit of Tâo. (Lao-tzu)
I also took this opportunity to reacquaint myself with R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World (“a pioneering exploration into the past history and present state of the most neglected aspect of our environment: the SOUNDSCAPE”), and to put my perceptual apparatus to work on the soundscape of a 4-mile trash picking up expedition. The sound of car and truck tires on the road was the loudest, most frequent, but still intermittent interruptor of silence; dogs barked at my passing in four places. My own footfalls were the regular punctuation of an otherwise almost entirely silent passage.
Schafer’s chapter on Silence provoked a brief dip into acoustical theory via Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), whose On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music is a still-relevant exploration of the psychophysics of sound. von Helmholtz distinguished ‘non-periodic vibrations’ as “noise”, distinct from the ‘periodic vibrations’ that characterize music. Others (among them Claude Shannon) developed the notion of signal-to-noise ratio as a measure of the operational health of an information system. Noise is generally formless, seems to carry very little information, is inclined to the random rather than the patterned, and is that which we try to edit out of soundscapes as we pass through them. Anechoic chambers are sound environments that reduce noise to a minimum. John Cage’s description of his experience in such a space
is perhaps an exaggeration (the high frequency may have been tinnitus), but the reported basic disorienting experience of hearing ONLY the sound within (the “persistent self-noise” cited above) is worth the price of admission.
Evelyn Glennie is another wonderful and inspiring re-discovery in the context of silence:
This 3 CD reissue anthology is the first to track twentieth century American vernacular music of old time country, bluegrass, jazz and blues by tracing their beginnings in 19th century blackface minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley.
Country Music is a genre driven by songwriting and publishing. This fact alone has given opportunity for songs to be refashioned again and again showcasing stylistic as well as lyrical changes over the past 100 years. The foundation of the American popular songbook traces its beginnings to the Vaudeville, Circus, Minstrel, Music Hall and Theater stages of the mid-late 1800s. The songs spread throughout the country and world creating a new musical tapestry that included both black and white performers of all backgrounds. Their songs and styles are presented in this three CD anthology.
By aligning performances from the earliest cylinder recordings with later 78 rpm, LP and CD versions, PROTOBILLY brings to life 81 historic recordings, more than half never before reissued…
Assembled by collectors and music scholars Henry Sapoznik, Dick Spottswood, David Giovannoni, and Dom Flemmons, this wowed me from the first cuts. I hadn’t realized that those Edison cylinders (and other brands too) had any relevance to the music recorded in the 78 era, or that the material captured in cylinder recordings had itself a considerable pedigree in sheet music and mid-19th century stage performance. Dom Flemmons puts it beautifully:
…songwriters, black and white, performed in the streets, theaters, music halls, medicine shows and circuses of a budding America reimagining the American Dream through song. The songs reflected and exaggerated the social climate of the world at that time. Like the internet memes of the digital era, Tin Pan Alley was not limited to unapologetically featuring songs that included ethnic humor lampooning working class people whether they be Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, African-American or Asian-American for the amusement of a paying audience. But it would be blackface minstrelsy, the songs that lampooned African-American experience, that would reach worldwide fame much to the chagrin of modern culture…
Black songsters pull songs of black buffoonery inside out and create humorous toasts of black ingenuity and excellency. Rural hillbilly singers take Broadway harmonies and give them the “high lonesome sound” of the Southern Mountains…
Here’s an example from Protobilly: The Arkansas Traveler seems to be datable as music and text from the 1850s, and was popularized on the vaudeville stage by Mose Case from the 1850s to 1880. There was a piano roll version by 1900, credited to Case. Here are three versions from Protobilly: Len Spencer (Edison cylinder 1902), Jilson Setters (Victor 78RPM 1928), and Clayton McMitchen & His Georgia Wildcats (Crown 78RPM 1932). And here’s a New Lost City Ramblers rendition:
The cylinder recordings I’ve heard before were so scratchy-noisy as to be almost unlistenable. The examples in the Protobilly compilation have been cleaned up beautifully, and I’m inspired to (re-)explore MAC’s (Michael Cumella) Antique Phonograph Music Program on WFMU, which has 23 years of archived programs (see list of artists played in those 23 years). MAC uses antique disk players, so you get a sense of how the original technology sounded to early 20th century ears.
MAC did programs of cylinder recordings as well, with guest collectors. Try this one for a good introduction to cylinder technology (broadcast date April 15, 2003):
Earnest and Bogus have been away on a Guitar Heroes and Other Musical Influences field trip, an effort to summarize my own musical history, which remains a subproject “Under Construction” in perpetuity, but has for the moment stabilized enough to feel distributable. I’m plunging back into the larger project of corralling Nacirema musics, but also being diverted into exploration of thousands of downloaded video clips.
