Atonality Bargain

cheap guitars and weird tunings

2013-02-25T23:32:00.001-08:00

[Sonic Youth] could only afford cheap guitars, and cheap guitars sounded like cheap guitars. But with weird tunings or something jammed under a particular fret, those humble instruments could sound rather amazing – bang a drum stick on a cheap Japanese Stratocaster copy in the right tuning, crank the amplifier to within an inch of its life, and it will sound like church bells.

—Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, pg. 243

Have Yourself A Double-Dip Recession

2012-12-22T01:10:00.002-08:00

Have yourself a double-dip recession
let the tax cuts die,
now our expectations will be not so high.

Have yourself a fiscal cliffjump session,
speculators pray.
From now on austerity will be the way!

Here we are, as in recent days.
Congress gridlock days of yore.
Faithful cronies, lend an ear to us,
fear the boom and bust no more.

Through the years
the deficit will pile up
If the Fed allows.
Some think Congress must be muddling through somehow,
so have yourself a double-dip recession now.

Moina Mathers at the Rite of Isis

2012-09-29T00:03:00.001-07:00

Kepler's Planetary Melodies

2012-09-13T12:05:00.001-07:00

Music isn't what it used to be.

2012-07-29T22:19:00.000-07:00

"A study of music from the '50 to the present using the Million Song Dataset has concluded that modern music has less variation than older music and songs today are, on average, 9dB louder than 50 years ago. Almost all music uses just 10 chords, but the way these are used together has changed, leading to fewer types of transitions being used. Variation in timbre has also reduced over the past decades."
via Slashdot

Bohmian Trajectories for the Two-Slit Experiment

2012-05-27T02:59:00.003-07:00

(to be interpreted as a musical score)

Parodicality Aphorism

2012-01-14T21:35:00.000-08:00

Counterpoint means never having to ask a dissonant interval how it expects to resolve back to the dominant.

Overtone Stacking as Tower of Babel

2011-12-28T21:27:00.000-08:00

"How much room?" depends on how many subdivisions

2011-12-28T11:41:00.000-08:00

Jam Session as Scriptorium

2011-12-20T22:40:00.000-08:00

Medieval Download Muse

Composition as Profane Illumination

2011-12-20T22:24:00.001-08:00

All illuminated manuscripts are not gold. But this one shines!

Harmonics of the Furnace / Heating Space Design

2011-12-18T14:51:00.000-08:00

Every Element in its Own Ideal Heating Space

Gift Idea: Cool art book filled with medieval sacred geometry and music theory

2011-12-17T22:54:00.000-08:00

I saw this at the used bookstore and it's delightful. Had seen its sister book on music theory at the Museum of Jurrasic Technology. Great for browsing and bibliomancy. Buy it for the esotericist in your life through this link to support my blogging, research, and this webcomic.

Theorist as Astrologaster

2011-12-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

Renaissance Artists really knew how to poke fun at totalizing symbolic regimes.

Kircher's Planetary Music Theory

2011-11-27T23:07:00.000-08:00

The distances between the sun, earth, and planets are such as to balance the sun’s heat with the moon’s coldness. For example, in summer the sun is strong, the moon weak, causing a variety and mixture of consonance and dissonance. The influence of the sun and moon is like a perfect octave. However, God has added Venus to give support with virtues such as vary the lunar influences; meanwhile, Mercury modifies that which is noxious in the sun. The changing distances from the earth bring about different effects.

Moreover, God has placed two dissonant bodies, Mars and Saturn, from whose pestiferous evaporations all the earth’s ills come. Yet between them is the benign star of Jupiter. The malefic planets act like caustic medicines which attract sick matter and liberate it, so that there is no ill in nature that does not turn to good.

In musical terms, Mars and Saturn are dissonances, tied in perfect syncopation to Jupiter, while Mercury sounds a dissonance between the concords of Venus and the moon. The seven planets together give a perfect “tetraphony” or four-part harmony

Joscelyn Godwin, Kepler and Kircher on the Harmony of the Spheres

Alchemy and Music Theory

2011-11-22T02:06:00.000-08:00

Alchemical metaphors have much to offer music theory--theorizing by means of colors and subtle changes, attention to time, geometry, and measurement generally. Just as chemical changes happen "like magic," the effects of music are mysterious and we tend to require a mythic map in order to approach them with soul grokking.

Philip K. Dick on Music -- Beethoven expanded the hologram (time, inner space, and alchemical music theory)

2011-11-15T16:15:00.000-08:00

[47:626] Music is normally a temporal process, but Beethoven, uniquely, uses it to enclose space, the most vast volume of space possible. Thus Beethoven literally expanded the hologram for anyone understanding his music, and he was part of a historic movement involving the abrupt evolution of the human being in terms of
so-to-speak relative size vis-à-vis his reality. This is the inner firmament of Bruno (or Paracelsus—whichever). Ah! The microcosm is transformed briefly into the macrocosm; and a slight but permanent expansion of the person, the microcosm, occurs: perhaps an altered relationship to the macrocosm, in terms of identity. Beethoven's music as a means by which the alchemical Verklärung can take place: thus it is directly related to the Hermetics.
...
This is a radically different way of experiencing the self (microcosm) and reality (macrocosm). Memory and inner space. There is some relationship. Memory involves vastly augmented time which is then converted into space.

-Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis

For more about Philip K. Dick's weird religious and philosophical ideas check out his Exegesis, and also my blog Philip K. Dick and Religion

Schopenhauer on Noise and Racket (thanks to Kim Cascone for the link)

2011-11-02T19:36:00.000-07:00

On Noise and Racket

Arthur Schopenhauer

In 1937, a 31-year-old Samuel Beckett, convalescing from a spell of "gastric flu (so called)" and his first completed novel, Murphy, wrote to Thomas McGreevy: "When I was ill I found the only thing I could read was Schopenhauer. Everything else I tried only confirmed the feeling of sickness. It was very curious. Like suddenly a window opened on a fug. I always knew he was one of the ones that mattered most to me . . . a philosopher that can be read like a poet, with an entire indifference to the a priori forms of verification. Although it is a fact that judged by them his generalisation shows fewer cracks than most generalisations." The following mass of cracked and flagrant generalization is excerpted from the great post-Kantian pessimist's 1851 collection of essays, Parerga and Paralipomena—two volumes much concerned with human suffering and its sources, among them: women, bad poetry, and noise.

Kant has composed a disquisition on the Living Powers: I, for my part, would like to write a dirge and a threnody for them; because their exceedingly frequent employment in knocking, hammering, and clattering has been, throughout my life, a daily source of anguish. Admittedly, there exist an enormous number of people who merely laugh at such things, for they are impervious to noise: these are precisely the same people who are likewise impervious to reason, to ideas, to poetry and works of art, in short, to intellectual impressions of every kind: and this is owing to the density and sturdy texture of their cerebral matter. In contrast, I find lamentations over the pain occasioned by noise in thinking men in the biographies or miscellaneous accounts of personal remarks of almost all the great writers—for example, those of Kant, Goethe, and Jean Paul; indeed, if any of them omits to mention it, this is purely because the context fails to provide an opportunity. For my part, I construe the matter thus: as the value of an enormous diamond smashed to pieces is reduced to that of so many slivers; or as an army, if it scatters—that is to say, dissolves into tiny bands—is rendered impotent; so a great mind is likewise reduced to the commonplace as soon as it has been interrupted, violated, scattered, diverted; for its superiority is conditional on all of its strength—like a convex mirror all its beams—being focused on a single point and object, and precisely in this is it thwarted by clamorous interruption. Thus all eminent spirits have been highly averse to every sort of disturbance, disruption, and diversion, but particularly to violent noise; whereas the rabble finds little objectionable in the same. As a matter of fact, the wisest and wittiest of all the nations of Europe—England—has made its eleventh commandment Never interrupt. Racket, however, is the most impertinent of all interruptions, for it disrupts our very thoughts, indeed, shatters them. But where there is nothing to interrupt, this shattering will not, of course, be especially felt. — Now and again I will find myself afflicted and perturbed by a persistent middling noise for quite some time before becoming consciously aware of it, in as much as I simply feel it as a continual impediment to thought, a stumbling block, until at last I realize what it is.

But now—pressing onward from genus to species—I must denounce as the most unjustifiable and nefarious of rackets that truly infernal snapping of whips in the echoing streets and alleys of our towns. These abrupt, piercing, brain-shredding, thought-murdering cracks must strike anyone with anything even remotely resembling a thought in his head as unbearably painful; every such crack must disrupt hundreds of his mental operations, be they ever so degraded; they sweep, however, through the cogitations of a thinker as painfully and perniciously as an executioner's sword between a head and trunk. And now, add to all this that the accursed cracking of whips is not merely unnecessary, but worse, completely counterproductive. That is to say, its imagined psychological effect on the horse is entirely blunted and comes to nothing, for thanks to the incessant abuse of the whip, the animals have become wholly inured to it: they invariably fail to quicken their pace; as one sees particularly when drivers with empty hacks go trawling for customers, constantly cracking and clattering, though dragging along with the slowest of steps: the slightest touch of the whip would be more effective. The matter at hand must therefore constitute precisely an impudent mockery of those that work with their heads on the part of the poor and laboring portions of society. That such an infamy is tolerated in our cities is indeed a gross injustice and barbarity; and all the more so, as it would be rather easy to abolish by means of a police ordinance requiring knots to be tied at the end of every whipcord. It cannot hurt to call the proletariat's attention to the mental labor of the superior classes: for when faced with all such mental labor they are seized by an ungovernable fear. But that a wretch driving a single nag or a carthorse through the narrow alleys of a city, incessantly cracking a fathom-long whip with all his might, does not immediately merit five passionate strokes of the rod—of this, all the philanthropists in the world, all the societies convened for the abolition of corporal punishment, no matter how sound their reasons, will never persuade me. What, with all of this general solicitousness for the body and its needs, should the thinking mind be the only thing that we fail to afford the slightest consideration and protection, never mind respect? — We can only hope that in this too the more intelligent and sensitive nations will take the lead, and that the Germans will be led by their example. Meanwhile, Thomas Hood has remarked of the latter: For a musical people, they are the most noisy I ever met with.

Now—what of the literature treating the subjects touched on in this chapter? I have only a single work to recommend (though a lovely one)—namely, a poetic epistle in terza-rima by the renowned painter Bronzino, entitled De romori, a Messer Luca Martini: here the torment visited upon one by the manifold dins of an Italian city are elaborately and very wittily delineated, in a tragi-comic fashion. One will find this epistle on page 258 of the second volume of the Opere burleschi del berni, Aretino ed altri, ostensibly published in Utrecht in 1771.

Translated by Aaron Kerner

Counterpoint with an Edge

2011-10-30T11:33:00.000-07:00

Peering Outside the Everywhere of the Sphere

ownership and memory -- composer/performer

2011-10-12T22:50:00.000-07:00

"When oral+literary tendencies intersect, ownership, rather than written legacy alone, may be a more sophisticated signal in the continuum between performer+composer."
from a review of Music and the art of Memory.

Harmony vs. Melody / Holism vs. Modularity

2011-09-23T17:20:00.000-07:00

Dissonance is a Challenge for the Body

Competing Zonality Programs

2011-09-20T20:10:00.001-07:00

Intelligible Solar Music and Babbitt's Turn

2011-09-20T19:45:00.000-07:00

Spontaneous Satire in Retracing Trance

2011-09-20T19:31:00.001-07:00

Modal Subjectivities / Harmony as Collective Trance

2011-09-20T19:13:00.000-07:00