Author: Patrick

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Idle thoughts

Idle thoughts while at work. (This means: not enough material for a post in any of them alone. So I put them together on a tray and serve while other posts stew in the kitchen. How bloggy.)

1. Have you ever actually heard anyone say that two plus two equals four in “the tone in which one says that two plus two equals four”? When I was taught it, it was an important fact to be studied and learned (so I heard it in tones of incantation, tones of authority, and tones of confusion). Now that I know it, it’s a fact to be referred to on the deductive way from fact to fact (so there’s a pensive tone, well, let’s see, we need to carry the two, and two plus two equals four, so…). But when someone says that someone says something in the tone in which one says that two plus two equals four, they mean a certain unaggressive firmness to the tone which indicates a firm belief that may not be shared with the interlocutor.

2. Throat singers seem to spend as much time teaching technique as they do singing. Why can’t people leave the music to the professionals? I don’t know what it is about producing overtones that makes everyone want go off and make their own instead of listening to the artist. It seems disrespectful. (Yes, I know I do the same thing. When did I become the image of all that is respectful?) Is it because they hear it as unusual noise, not music? But music is just that, very unusual noise with a specific unusualness. I wouldn’t say 25% of concertgoers have the urge to get a precis of Gradus Ad Parnassum after the show. Or are there guerrilla violin workshops that I don’t know about, held in the late evening, when the bowties are all let down?

3. I tend to think that my current concatenation of interests is in itself interesting. Whatever jumble of unrelated things I’m looking into at the current time (why yes, I would love to tell you, but they might just be all too fascinating, especially how they reflect on each other and on me, and especially on me, and you might lose the thread of what I’m saying) are just so attractive, and make me so attractive, that I can’t imagine other people being able to stand remaining uninformed about them, so I inform them. (I try to work all of them in at once, when I can.) Until next week, when they seem played out and boring; and the things I have uncovered about them so obvious and well-known I wonder at anyone’s not knowing them. (And I avoid explaining them, unless I feel like being pedantic and insulting.)

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On board ship

[T]here was a general urge to complete the operation quickly and get out, for the unventilated huts were made of planks of unseasoned, resinous pine which, after being impregnated with dirty water, urine and sea air, began to ferment in the sun and give off a warmish, sweet and nauseous odour; this, added to other smells, very soon became intolerable, especially when there was a swell.

One of the things I like best about Tristes Tropiques is the pleasure it takes in getting the sensuous detail right. There’s a kind of knowledge muscle it likes to flex as well: “unseasoned, resinous pine” has the ring of expertise to it that pulls the trust from me needed to allow him to give me the whole picture of the cramped, unpleasant on-board showers. It’s the same kind of implication of explanatory power that helps me take in his picture of wartime Martinique, with its purposeless guard, confused as to which side they were on and who their enemy was, taking out their agression with bureaucracy on a helpless boatful of refugees.

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Tristes Tropiques

Blogs collect unfulfilled projects. (It’s a form of internet lint.) Why should this one be different? One more thing I plan to use this site for, another thing I get to avoid doing in avoiding coming here, I won’t notice it. So let’s announce it: We, Mfc and I, plan to read Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a couple chapters a week, for the next however long, and blog an exchange about it. It’s one of my favorite books, and I haven’t read it in five years. I’m really looking forward to revisiting it. You’re welcome to participate, comments are open.

The rough idea is: we’ll choose a short passage, one each each weekend, and write a short, off-the-cuff post about it. Dialogue, hopefully, to follow, threaded beneath. (No promises, though.)

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Post

Shortly before I moved across town at the beginning of December, I sent a letter to my new address, as a welcome home. But I didn’t include my apartment number (it had slipped my mind). I sent it a couple days too early, there was no one by that name at that address. So it was sent back. But by that time, I had changed my address at the post office: so it was forwarded on. But it had already been sent back from the new address once. So it was sent back again, and went into postal limbo, from whence it emerged only last week; but I had forgotten about it by then. So it was a little traveling time capsule.

The longer pace time walks with when you write letters: you write, you send, you wait. A month later, the conversation you had started continues, with the reply. You view it from a new place – much has happened. Do you still speak or think in the same way? But not much has changed in a month: are you different at all? An interchange of letters makes a good repeated theme: longer than a measure, shorter than a movement. And, unlike either, subject to variation, expansion, iteration; potentially never completed.

I used to be an excellent correspondant (up to about eleven years ago), I remember writing letters between classes, on the metro, during classes, at home in the morning and the evening. I would have hardly sent a letter off before beginning another, often to the same person (to be completed, and sent, after I got the reply back). The extended monologue directed to a single person is a model of thinking.

Recently I decided to start writing again. I made a list of everyone I could think of (I made a file of stamped and addressed envelopes), I wrote three letters a day. I scattered them, for about a month. And so now I’m receiving my bread back from the waters. A couple times a week, another letter comes in, or two, replies go out. Correspondances make a nice zigzag canopy to live under: they provide continuity and mutually reinforcing roof support, like a web of interlocking rafters, or better grape vines growing on a scaffolding above a path.

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Piling up

I’m not being productive unless I’m feeling overwhelmed. Usually I don’t do much. Then I’ll have a burst of activity. Then the energy will run out, and I’ll find myself overcommitted. & then I retract from my commitments, rest, then feel ashamed of how little I do, and start the cycle over. I’ve never learned how to surf, but an analogy suggests itself:

In between active periods, I’m just afloat. A wave will cross me, I’ll swing with its motion, and return to my original starting point. Likewise a new interest will come up under me, and carry me with it for a limited period of time, and then it passes and I am back where I started. This is the normal state of things: rest, ride, retreat, repeat.

Then a wave of energy approaches (I can feel it coming across the calendar), and I start to gather myself up: I sign up for more activities, I plan to start new habits, I acquire responsibilities. The wave comes, I’m on top of it; the best part of the feeling is the power I have. I can do anything, and I can take anything. The feeling of infinite adjustment: I have room in my time for whatever new might come along, and any jar that comes along I can translate into a pleasing bump in my schedule; accidental becomes intentional.

The wave comes down eventually – it runs out of room underneath, and brings me down with it, or in it. The bouyant forward motion that sustained me before begins to push at me from all sides, with no coherent progress that I can perceive. I’m suspended in chaos by contrary motions. (And I get sand and salt in my mouth and eyes.)

When the wave is done with me, I’m deposited, exhausted, on dry land. Little waves of energy come and go but don’t move me. (They sort of tickle.)

Later, what remains with me, both in what I’ve produced and what I remember, tends to be the period of falling and unwilling abandonment to too much from too many sides. The fear and loss of control make it exhilarating, in a different, less pleasant way from the feeling of gathering power that comes on the crest of the wave, but more true, in a way I fail to express adequately.

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Low

I haven’t been blogging, because I haven’t been writing posts, partly because I’ve been feeling low, and strung out. That shouldn’t keep up for too long.

By weight, blogs are 75% and upwards apology, like zines and communications with thesis advisors and editors.

Here’s something I wrote six months ago, and I wonder at myself:

Avoidance of responsibility can also be a sign of confidence. Either in yourself: you are sure that the responsibility is not onerous, you will get to it at some later date, or that this failure will not affect you (your essential you); or in events, that they will smile on you, and your debts will be erased.

I think I had told myself I had to write one of those a day. So there are a lot of iffy ones. I’m not sure the thought on that one was all bad, but it’s poorly expressed. More exactly: I’m not sure what I’m saying or whether I mean it. And I’m pretty sure I’ve got the intellect to power it through regardless. So it’s strutting; checking its fly with one hand and combing its hair with the other. This one has more zip:

The foundation is measured quickly, but what if you become old, waiting for the concrete to set, before you can begin building.

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Xomuzum

The three-week period I’m allowed to keep an interlibrary loan book out is usually just long enough that I can get interested again in whatever it was that induced me to order the book in the first place, three weeks before the book arrived; and then it’s time to check it back in, almost entirely unread. I’ve got a collection of papers in Russian on throat-singing [Melodii Khoomeya, edited by Zoya Kyrgys], a translation of the Central Asian chapters from a Soviet encyclopedia of ethnomusicology [Central Asian Music, by Viktor Beliaev], and some kind of anthology of short descriptions of archaeological discoveries of the remains of depcitions of ancient musical instruments and in some cases the instruments themselves [didn’t write down the title before I returned it]. They’re all due tomorrow [have now been returned], and I already spent money getting them here: I can’t keep them out for the next three weeks. This post is all the use I’m going to get out of them.

I think I had been browsing this article online just before I went ordering ILLs. I’d noticed (it only took me a year of listening) how common it was to hear the jew’s harp played along with Tuvan/Mongolian throat-singing.

An article in Melodii Khoomeya [by Kh. S. Ikhtisamov] speculates on the connection. He argues that overtone-singing (one sustained bass note with a melody produced in overtones) is part of a palette of similar-types of music-making; on the igil (an anorexic two-string cello), the melody is usually produced on the upper string, the lower string producing a steady drone (on this, a funny story by Valentina Süzükei from her book with Ted Levin: trying to tune a Soviet “people’s orchestra” [modeled on the famous Moscow “Balalaika Orchestra”, these ensembles would perform classical or Soviet orchestral hits on traditional instruments – they were formed all over the Soviet Union, traditional instrumentalists being conscripted to them in packs], unable to communicate to the igil player that she needed to tune the strings separately, he unable to understand how the instrument could be played one string at a time). Likewise, the Jew’s harp: the vibrating tongue produces a steady, single tone, and the melody is produced by changing the shape and size of the resonating chamber, the mouth, to produce different overtones. Tuvan throat-singing is just another variant on this musical-cultural theme: the breaking of a “single” musical note into its constituent ground and overtones, separating out tone colors the way a prism breaks white light into colors (this analogy, or something like it, from Süzükei’s paper in Melodii Khoomeya) , and the unifying of “separate” tones into a single tone-cluster.

Of course the Jew’s harp is known all over the world. Instances have been found from pre-Roman Britain to pre-modern Polynesia (there made of reeds instead of metal); from South Asia to Yakutia (want to buy a modern Yakut khomus? got $179 plus shipping?). There are cultures in which it is the only tuneful musical instrument known (says The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments). The musical archaeology book has examples from medieval Sweden, revolutionary America, and Greek Afghanistan [I think; I returned it already].

According to Beliaev in Central Asian Music (1962), the temir komuz (i.e. the iron komuz, komuz meaning a three-stringed lute, tuned to fourths or fifths) is Kyrgyz for Jew’s harp; it’s played mainly by women & children and is played while whistling. He says: “Melodies for the temir komuz are of special interest. On theis insturment the lower buzzing tone is a drone and a narrow ranging melody, consiting of overtones, is produced above.” He transcribes the melody for a traditional song called “The Grey Calf”, the bass part of which is played on the temir komuz and the melody is whistled. (I wish there was some kind of plugin or something so I could show you the transcriptions of overtone-singing from Melodii Khoomeya.) He writes: “It is impossible to overlook the production through whistling of two-voiced vocal music by one person on this simple idiophone*. This technique, called khoomei among the Tuvins and uzliau among the Bashkirs, belongs to one of the oldest and most original ways of producing harmonics with simultaneous sonding of an extended fundamental pitch. (The translator notes: “Beliav’s remark is in accordance with the general tendency among Soviet ethnomusicologists to ignore the flute repertories of Asian peoples.” I think this note refers to the following fact: the Kyrgyz choor, Mongol/Tuvan tsuur/zuur, is an “end-blown” flute which is placed against the lip or sometimes the teeth on one side of the mouth: the player blows the melody through the flute and simultaneously creates a steady drone accompaniement to the melody with his mouth.) Beliaev remarks about the Kazakh shan kobiz that it too is a domestic, primarily children’s instrument (and notes that this is generally the case throughout Central Asia).

One reason why the Jew’s harp is so widely used among nomadic peoples (and is generally a children’s instrument there) may be that it requires a full set of [front] teeth to play – nomadic peoples, living on meat and dairy, have healthier, stronger teeth than sedentary people, living on grains; adults are less likely to have a full set of teeth then children and adolescents. At least, that seemed clear and obvious to me this afternoon, when I was in the middle of something else and hadn’t had a chance to phrase it out. That’s enough.

* An idiophone is an instrument that itself vibrates, like a bell or a washboard; as opposed to an instrument which contains a vibrating part, like stringed instruments, or that causes a column of air to vibrate, like a flute. It’s the percussions section, minus the membranophones (the drums).

** I couldn’t work this in anywhere else above, but I would have to tie it in somehow like this: the melodies produced by overtone singers (or bells, or any other instrument which produces strong partial tones) sometimes sound a little “off” or a little sour to people used to the intervals in equal temperament, since the overtones produced are from pure, untempered intervals. I was reading yesterday about organs – as equal temperament became more popular, organs were altered by placing small valves in the pipes to alter the pitches produced, until finally organ pipes were standardly manufactured to produce equal-tempered pitches. The author of the book I was reading (it may have been The Story of the Organ; the title was something like that) told how once, when on a visit to New Zealand, he was playing a hymn in D-flat for a church choir, and it sounded terrible, and the choir was thrown off. The local organ-tuner was sent for, and on hearing the problem, refused to do anything to solve it. It turned out that this man, the only tuner in that part of New Zealand and a firm believer in just temperament, himself physically altered the pipes of any organ imported from England before installation so that they would play in just temperament.