Plurpe

Et incarnatus est

2013-03-09T17:39:00.001-05:00

At a recent NCS rehearsal, the notion of "full-body singing" came up a number of times. It even came up in reference to some form of incarnatus.

I find the phrase et incarnatus est (from the latin creed) to be actively useful in thinking about music-making in general, and specifically singing.

Music at its best engages the complete being. Every aspect is pleasing to mind and body (if one insists on separating the two). The resolution of a minor second to a minor third isn't a theoretical notion, it's an actual physical sensation. Rhythm physically pulses within the body, and the dance of piece can only be joined through physicality; the particulars of syncopation and shape often pique intellectual interest, but the intellect cannot actively join the dance.

Keith Jarret wrote in some liner notes that the performer takes the stage "hoping to have a rendezvous with music" (or similar; I can't find the notes). It's always "out there", but we have no guarantee that we'll actually meet it. Yet, a singer can breathe it in and be the music incarnate.

As I noted here, for me, a relatively simple technique, consistently applied, helps me become fully engaged:

Focus on breathing as far down within the abdomen as possible
Imagine -- and feel -- the physical sensation of floating on a column of air.
Sing as legato as possible...
yet execute consonants as clearly as possible and as quickly as possible such that the vowel always arrives on time (rather than moments late).
Per usual, lean into the word stresses and the dissonances. Relax the resolutions and weak syllables.

The material has to be amenable to this, of course. When the opportunity allows, I find that approaching things in this manner consistently heightens the musical experience and brings maximal enjoyment, which is the point of the entire endeavor. However, it also seems to brings out the best of my limited abilities, which is enjoyable in its own right. I feel like the music personified, for brief instants: the navigation of the consonants and vowels requires that one join the rhythmic dance, and the emphasis of dissonances and word stresses adds another layer of rhythmic sensation as such things typically float above the underlying pulse, giving awareness of larger-scale rhythmic forms. Finally, with the breath fully applied in the support of these concerns, the entire abdomen is involved with the rhythm and it is inevitable that one feels more deeply engaged with the music. The music is literally entering your body and manifesting through you. Et incarnatus est indeed.

Here endeth the self-importance, until next time.

Pay Attention to Seeds in Your Cassandra Ring

2012-06-21T00:06:00.000-04:00

At work, we've got a some 0.8.5 cassandra clusters running stably for nearly a year now. This is fairly behind the stable cassandra release, at this point, but we got things to a stable point and didn't want to mess with it further, so 0.8.5 it is.

So, a node died. A volume went dead, and that was that. Fortunately, the documentation on how to handle node failure are pretty clear, particularly when using the docs from DataStax.

We went for option two, bringing up a new node at the adjacent token. Unfortunately, the new node saw the dead node it was meant to replace as up, and thus in bootstrapping attempted to stream data from the dead node. Shockingly, that doesn't work.

Why did the new node thing the dead node was up? Every other node in the ring saw the dead node as down.

My suspicion, not truly confirmed by a proper review of the code but conveniently strengthened by observed behavior, is because of seeds.

When we built our cassandra clusters, we used chef. And not just chef, but "cluster chef". As the link shows, there are several generations of cluster chef. When we built our clusters, version 2 was under development, so we based things on version one (if memory serves). That's so old and decrepit that they don't even list it.

Unfortunately, while the version made rolling out a new cluster relatively easy, it was not so great about maintaining existing clusters, and it made some unwise choices when selecting seeds for your cassandra ring. Specifically:

Every node known to cluster chef was used as an entry in the seed list
Including each node's own IP

(Note: it is entirely possible that subsequent releases of cluster chef make better choices. Of course, it's similarly possible they do not.)

(Note further: I was aware of this stupid choice, but frankly, it was working, and development efforts are focused on totally separate parts of the system. So I left it alone, noting but not comprehending the magnitude of this folly. It is thus not unreasonable to conclude that somebody should shoot me in the face).

Populating the seed list this way made cluster maintenance a real nuisance, because a new node would always come up thinking of itself as a seed, and seeds won't auto-bootstrap. So we would carefully pick out initial tokens, make sure the node attribute's were set to bring it up with auto_bootstrap, and of course, it wouldn't, and we'd be stuck scrambling to repair this node that joined the ring without ever receiving any of its range data. Our reliance on QUORUM operations saved us in this case; a sub-QUORUM operation could have lead to fairly unpleasant levels of inconsistency (which for us would've been unacceptable but of course varies according to use).

Anyway, about seeds. Take a look at the gossip architecture. Note that seeds are special.

I read up more on seeds and general practices within the community, and found that folks in the know seemed to prefer a smaller, actively managed seed list. They kept it consistent across the cluster (or at least across a "data center"), and kept it up to date.

At this point, I:

Stopped Cassandra on the new node that was stuck in its never-ending-'cause-it's-never-starting streaming state
Picked two of the servers with marginally lighter load as seeds, and updated the configuration for all other nodes in the ring. (The dead node was explicitly excluded from the possible seeds, naturally.)
Performed rolling restart of all other nodes in the ring
Verified that all the nodes listed the old dead node as, well, dead (down).
Updated the seed configuration to be consistent on the new node
Brought up the new node, and verified that it saw the dead node as down, and that it was streaming data from one of the live neighbors instead of the dead one.
Cheered. Hurray!

Some lessons I take from this, that I'll at some point dig into the Cassandra source to verify/understand:

Don't accept the choices of a tool you don't know well; pick the seeds yourself
Actively manage the seeds so they are known to you and reflect a reasoned choice.
If a seed dies, get it out of the seed list and propagate that change throughout the ring before you try to replace the dead node.

Wonderful North Carolina

2012-05-11T08:26:00.001-04:00

For the sake of convenience, I've gathered all my offensive comments about North Carolina in one place. Enjoy!

1. This state apparently doesn't learn from its history on the ills of denying the humanity of an entire group of people.

2. Why are "states' rights" used again and again to trump "individuals' rights"?

3. Perhaps the real reason NCers disapprove of gay marriage is the ambiguity; without traditional gender roles, it's impossible to determine which party owns the other.

4. In a country with relatively poor voter turnout, it's good to know people will haul their asses to the polls for the opportunity to express their bigotry.

Enabling block compression in Hive's sequence files

2012-03-09T10:56:00.004-05:00

If you're like me, you like Hive, and you like storing some of your data in sequence files. You also like compressing your data, so that your data is snappy and delicious.

If you're like me, you may have taken these recommendations from the Hive wiki for enabling block compression in your sequence files.

Alas, we found that block compression wasn't actually happening. In looking at the Hadoop 0.20.203.0 source, the logic associated with the "io.seqfile.compressiong.type" setting is marked as deprecated.

We found it necessary to use the newer "mapred.output.compression.type" setting instead.

Program Notes for Pinkham's Wedding Cantata: Draft the First

2012-02-18T13:39:00.003-05:00

This is the first draft. I expect to need to prune it down. Comments welcome.

Daniel Pinkham's Wedding Cantata, published in 1956 and scored for mixed chorus and piano, celebrates the joy and profundity of love as expressed through biblical texts drawn from the Song of Solomon. By turns exuberant and poignant, the long, leaping lines and sparkling harmonies magnify the spirit of the texts, while clever formal construction and common musical material meld the four movements into a unified whole. Pinkham accomplishes this with his characteristic brevity.

The cantata opens with Solomon verses 2:10-12 ("Rise up, my love, my fair one..."), set to a joyous, dancing 6/4 rhythm. The piano accompaniment features bright, closely voiced harmonies, generally arranged with added seventh or ninth tones; the harmonies sound familiar, but shine with a sparkling, mystical character that pervades much of the piece. The chorus' opening unison melody, in rising by a fourth, then fifth (appropriately given the text), states a powerful melodic theme that appears in various forms throughout the first and third movements. The second section of the opening movement builds upon the earlier melodic material, this time employing mixed meter, to Solomon verses 6:1-3 ("whither is my beloved gone..."). The text continues the common themes of joy in the beloved, with pastoral imagery.

The musical and textual themes of the first movement return in the third movement, to verse 4:16 (“Awake, O north wind...”); while the third movement features canon and generally simpler accompaniment, it shares an unmistakable similarity in melodic shape and rhythmic character, and opens its themes with the same ascending intervals of fourth and fifth. The conclusion of the third movement brings a dramatic resolution to this set of themes, which the first movement denies us.

In contrast, movements two and four draw from verses 8:7 and 8:6, respectively, and meditate on the profundity of love. Both feature thicker choral textures, with a heightened use of counterpoint, and intense legato over steady duple rhythms. Both employ dissonance in a somewhat more traditional way, though Pinkham refrains from the full resolutions we might expect (of particular interest is the ringing dissonance used in movement two between tenor and bass, shortly before the soprano entrance). The homorhythmic chorale setting of number four (“Set me as a seal...”), and the plaintive insistence of number two’s canon theme (“Many waters...”), paint their shared subject with passionate intensity.

While the pairings of odd and even movements stand out, other aspects unify the piece as a whole. The inner movements both employ canonic singing, providing a sense of overall cohesion. In contrast, the outer movements both contain extended sections of homorhythmic chorale singing, and share some striking harmonic passages; the harmonic progression that closes the whole piece first appears in the conclusion of the first section of the first movement. Most strikingly, and appropriately, the celebration of love unifies the whole.

Large Scale Symmetry in Pinkham's Wedding Cantata

2012-02-05T13:58:00.003-05:00

The movements can be paired in various ways, giving a general symmetry overall and a sense of formal and stylistic cohesiveness.

The outer movements can be paired for a couple reasons:

Extended sections of either unison or chorale textures (in the chorus)
Common harmonic material (as noted earlier, mm. 28-31 of movement one has same harmonic motion as mm. 15-22 of movement four, which concludes the piece); it's a fairly striking harmonic passage.

The inner movements can be paired in that they're both feature canonic singing.

The odd movements are a more obvious pairing in that they have similar themes/imagery in text, some common melodic material, dancing compound meter, syncopation.

The even movements are additionally an obvious pairing in their focus on love's profundity, in their thicker choral textures, in their meditative or even plaintive qualities rather than jubilation. Use of dissonance between voices is somewhat more traditional in these movements, though there are of course occasions in which traditional resolution does not take place.

Much of the piece uses a common harmonic language, with traditional tertian harmonies expanded with added sevenths, sixths, ninths, etc. Such extended chords are often spelled in a way that adds a crystalline or spiky quality to the sound (as one often observes in Ravel, Satie, or even Stravinsky). In contrast, some harmonic passages utilize standard triads, but moving in unconventional ways; motion by thirds between major triads (requiring chromatic movement in one voice) is especially prominent.

ETHAN: The use of canon in mvt. 2 helps to paint the text. "Many waters cannot quench love." The text conveys an idea of a feverish, burning love that cannot be tamed, a fervent passion that cannot be calmed. The music reflects that idea by cycling through the main melody in canon, each voice pursuing the others, not stopping for rest, endlessly alight with motion. The final, forte unison D at the end represents the coming together of hearts and souls into unity.

2012-02-05T13:18:00.002-05:00

Text sources for Pinkham's Wedding Cantata.

I. Rise up, my love

King James Bible, Cambridge Ed.; Song of Solomon 2:10-2:12

Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the eart; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.

Song of Solomon 6:1-6:3

Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women? whither is thy beloved turned aside? That we may seek him with thee.
My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lillies.
I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine; he feedeth among the lillies.

II. Many waters

Song of Solomon 8:7

Many waters cannot quench love; neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

III. Awake, O north wind

Song of Solomon 4:16

Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden; that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruit.

IV. Epilogue: Set me as a seal

Song of Solomon 8:6

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.

Observations

Solomon 2:10-13, and 8:6-7, appear to be pretty popular biblical readings for weddings. Solomon 4:16 may be less common, but has obvious symmetry with the themes of 2:10-2:13.

The music appropriately focuses on the differing characters of these sections; the wind/spice-related settings of movements one and three share a dancing, jubilant rhythmic character, and seem to revel in the joy of love and the wedding occasion. In contrast, the text of 8:6-7 focuses on the profundity of love, and as such the settings of movements two and four reflect that profundity, using thicker choral textures, with lines suggesting reverence, in contrast to the dancing joy of the others.

Prep notes on Pinkham's Wedding Cantata

2012-02-03T08:13:00.002-05:00

First obvious formal thing: the clear relationship between first and third movements. Both have a primary theme in a fast 6/8, with similar piano accompaniment at opening (repeated chord patterns with prominent parallel fourths). Both themes open with the same melodic figure (both in terms of intervals and rhythm). The melodies differ in their particulars but have a similar overall shape. And the text are clearly related, with the first having the male wondering what his beloved's up to in the garden, and the third having the female asking the wind to blow the spice fragrance to the man that he'll be inclined to come to the garden and eat his pleasant fruit.

What husband doesn't enjoy him some pleasant fruit?

The harmonic sequence at the end of the first section of the first movement is the same as the final of the piece.

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Regarding Difficulty

2011-11-27T12:34:00.002-05:00

As mammals with linguistic tools handy for the structuring of thought, we are by nature inclined to analyze and categorize and tokenize, so that we might apply labels to things and speak about those things in a rough group consensus of shared meaning/experience.

Modern culture owes a great deal to this tendency, as it allows us to accumulate knowledge across generations, in volumes far surpassing the capacity of an oral transmission medium.

It seems when we're learning, however, that the tendency may get in the way. Consider the case of the word "hard":

"I am learning this new thing, and it is hard."

People who dabble in creative activities, particularly temporal arts like music or dance, would find this statement familiar. Certainly as a software engineer the statement seems like an archetypal expression of experiences encountered every few months.

What does it actually mean? The word "hard" provides a rough label encompassing all sorts of situations.

"I am working with a distributed database that employs eventual consistency to allow for improved availability and scalability; it is difficult to adapt my thinking to an eventually consistent model."
"I am learning a new piece of music that freely mixes meter and does not use functional harmony; it is challenging to get the details right because they do not move in ways I can predict."
"I am trying to understand how collateralized debt obligations wreaked such havoc in our financial system, and I can't make heads or tails of it because everything I read is in such financial insider speak."
"I am learning a new piece of music that has a lot of melismatic passages and awkward phrasing; it's difficult to keep my tone consistent and to find spaces to breathe without disrupting the line."
"I trying to make some configuration changes in my distributed software system and it's challenging because there are so many performance-impacting details to consider."

Of the list above, I think only the last two are truly aligned with our original statement ("I am learning this new thing, and it is hard"). These last two are not about familiarity with the problem space; they are about actual details of the problems themselves. The others are better summarized:

"I am learning this new thing and it falls outside my realm of experience."

Or better yet:

"I am learning this new thing and it is not yet familiar to me."

If a thing is outside one's experience, then one cannot authoritatively say whether that thing is intrinsically "hard" or not. Here's an accurate statement about what is hard:

"I am learning and it is hard."

Isn't that more to the point? In learning, we program ourselves. We force ourselves think differently (in the literal sense, as opposed to the Apple marketing sense). We tackle problems that we previously avoided, ignored, or were entirely ignorant of. We experience the world from a broader place. In short, we change ourselves, and that is very hard work indeed.

Take something you tackled some time in the past. A piece of music, for instance. When you first looked at it, perhaps you thought it looked hard. Perhaps those notes just wouldn't come to your ear. Perhaps you just couldn't get those rhythms. Whatever.

After you transcended the challenges of the piece, did it still feel hard to do? Did you even stop and consider it? Or did you integrate the piece into your experience, so it stopped being about hard versus easy and simply became about doing it well every time?

I cannot think of an instance in my musician life or engineer life in which classifying an unlearned thing as "hard" was useful, except as a means of identifying things that would require more effort than usual. For any given learning challenge, there's a pile of stuff you don't know well, but there's a pile of stuff you do know. In most situations, the pile of stuff you do know is larger than the other. Is it fair, then, to classify an unlearned thing as "hard" if in fact you are intimately familiar with the bulk of its parts?

It's more helpful, in my opinion, to think and speak accurately about the problem:

"The technical challenges of this piece are difficult and require practice."
"There are a lot of variables in this system and finding the optimal configuration will require careful benchmarking and analysis."
"I am unfamiliar with the harmonic language of this piece and need to spend more time than usual getting the harmonies in my ear."
"I am unfamiliar with the problem space of distributed databases and need to read some of the seminal literature on the subject to better understand the implications of this system's design."
"I have trouble following the metric switches throughout this piece; I need to be better about counting and pay more attention to the word stresses."

That is, shed the vague notion of "hard", isolate the real problem(s), and identify concrete solutions to each. Then the notion of difficulty changes:

I have not achieved familiarity with the harmonic language of this piece yet.
I do not have the necessary background knowledge to work effectively with this system yet.
I am not able to consistently execute these melismatic passages yet.

But I will. That's what's fun about challenges.

Thanksgiving Prayer

2011-11-09T23:37:00.002-05:00

On that day, God created Carbon;

He created Carbon, and sprinkled it both within and without the face of the Earth;

and He created Gravity, because it is not Just a Theory, to hold the Carbon and the Oxygen and the gases of the Firmament about the Earth;

and He gave Man dominion over every living creature on the face of the Earth;

and He said unto Man: "Go forth and multiply, and create Markets, and let not ye regulate the Markets".

And Man created Markets, and Man incorporated, and called it Man, and Man gave Man dominion over every Carbon on the face of the Earth.

On that November the ninth of 2011, God saw the Markets, and the way of Man with the Carbon, and the Earth that looked like the Earth of September the fifteenth, and God said it was Good.

On Normalcy

2011-09-13T07:28:00.001-04:00

My children are not normal. Not surprising; their parents aren't, either.

Normalcy never struck me as an especially desirable state for a human being, within a certain range of tolerance. The "normal" of standard decorum -- excrete in the allotted area, speak at an appropriate volume for your environment, wear pants to work, take turns speaking when engaged in conversation, etc. -- makes sense and provides a reasonable framework for productive discourse. But the "normal" of social interaction with one's peers, taking the foundational stuff as a given, is another thing entirely. That "normal" feels biased towards a relatively narrow range of interests and behaviors, none of which appear to offer any unique merit apart from their popularity. The former gives us rules for the mechanics of conversation, the latter for the content. I happen to think the mechanics are fine and the content basically sucks.

So I don't offer the assessment of my daughters' standing in this respect with woe or despair. More like amusement at best, and pride at worst.

We recently enjoyed a hurricane-filled weekend with my parents, elder brother, and his family. He observed during the visit that while his son sings occasionally throughout the day, my girls seem to sing pretty much continuously between the two of them.

And well they should: their parents both sing pretty seriously for pleasure and to a lesser degree work. Both work on so-called classical singing on a regular basis. Their mother sings kiddie tunes at various pre-school events. Their father sings damn near constantly, while working at the computer, driving to the grocery store, walking through the grocery store, cooking dinner, taking a shower, or excreting in the allotted area. For these girls, singing is normal.

Lots of parents, and lots of children, sing. The near ubiquity of it in our home, and the primary stylistic focus, are probably outside the norm, but gently so. A little eccentric, perhaps, but an eccentricity that people can appreciate.

Eccentricity: when we listen to "Music Together" albums in the car, my daughters' parents frequently improvise harmonies. Not all that unusual. Except that daddy improvises chromatic counterpoint, or turns every harmony into a seventh, ninth, or sharp eleventh.

Eccentricity: the father's endless singing often eschews identifiable "songs", instead playing out a part in some new piece in his head that will never be written down, never heard by anyone else. It might be the Coltranesque improvisatory horn line, the jazz/funk bass line to the latest James Brown noncreation, or a chant melody on nonsense syllables sounding two parts DuFay and one part Hindustani raga.

(The mother's loving acceptance of the father's oddities in this respect teach us the meaning of grace.)

For my daughters, singing is a constant companion, rather than a mere activity. You don't fit it into your schedule like gymnastics classes and play dates; you carry it with you everywhere you go. Sometimes you go to the grocery store.

Young children naturally emulate the adults around them, before learning the hipness of rejection. The ways in which the described parental behaviors manifest in the children are easy to see. But the degree to which this shifts the girls' sense of normalcy is only recently coming out.

The two year-old now sings around the house with a frequency rivaling that of the almost-five year-old. While she colors, looks at books, etc. The almost-five year-old breaks into song in the aisles of the grocery store, mid-conversation, after dinner at Stone Heath Pizza, whenever and wherever. She looks you in the eye, as if she regards this as a standard part of discourse.

Additionally, after asking her mother about her parents' disdain for Ariel's singing in "The Little Mermaid," and their appreciation of Aurora's singing in "Sleeping Beauty", the almost-five year-old will consciously shift between her regular voice and an affected nasal style. We didn't tell her that one is better than the other, and she continues to enjoy stuff that we pretty much despise. As she should. She simply integrated the information into her awareness and takes note of the different approaches as she hears them.

Every little kid has his or her developmental points of interest. I don't pretend that the girls' behavior is in some way exceptional (in the overloaded sense of exceptional that conflates "highly unusual" with "excellent"). Nor do I maintain lofty aspirations for them or a desire to push them towards a living in music. The degree to which music matters to me, and the place it occupies in my interior life, falls outside the range of normal. My only hope for the kids in this regard is that they might have something occupying a similar position in their lives. It gives tremendous satisfaction to see that they already do. We didn't need to teach them or give lessons. We needed only to let them see us being our own weird selves.

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Extremely Important Thoughts on George R. R. Martin and J. K. Rowling

2011-08-22T00:32:00.004-04:00

I enjoyed HBO's "Game of Thrones" quite a lot, which naturally got me interested in the books by George R. R. Martin. One does not need to spend much time reading the writing about the writing -- the information on wikipedia, various critical pullquotes, etc. -- before running headlong into the Thrones-versus-Potter drama.

Given the publishing timelines of the books, and the overwhelming popularity and general cultural sensation of Harry Potter and the Miserable Adolescence, it is perhaps inevitable that comparisons come up. And of course, J.K. Rowling won the coveted Big Dork scifi book prize over Martin, which only serves to increase the likelihood that readers and pundits draw comparisons between the two series.

And given that near inevitability, it is all the more nearly inevitable that I will weigh in with great wisdom and insight.

First, let's start with the 2001 Hugo award. "Eat your heart out, Rowling. Maybe you have billions of dollars and my Hugo, but you don't have readers like these." Readers like what, sir? Twelve year olds? I'm pretty sure Rowling's got twelve year olds. Older? Younger? She's got 'em. Pathologically concerned with the outcome of the series? Got 'em. So readers like what, exactly?

At least one of the Martin books has a pull-quote in the leading fluff pages of critical babbling that explicitly says the series is "better than Harry Potter." This is obviously a stupid thing to say without defining the terms: better at what?

Both are multi-generational sweeping epics. Martin's is considerably vaster in scope and considerably more complex in terms of parallel narratives, questions of morality, etc. Rowling's is more complex on an emotional level as it focuses so consistently and deeply on the trials, suffering, and development of one primary character.

Is Martin's writing "better"? It's more elevated in tone and more structurally sophisticated than that of Rowling, to be sure. There are moments of laugh-out-loud humor, of poignant loss. There are moments of sheer tedium, when we're told of the outfits the character deemed appropriate for wearing to court, or the history of some local non-existent figure of legend, or the lyrics to some moronic song that a traveling bard offers up.

(In that sense, George R. R. truly is the "American Tolkein"; he may not describe the generations of Proudfeet, nor every succulent detail of Bilbo's parting breakfast smorgasbord, but he doesn't hold back with the utterly irrelevant, pardon-me-while-I-skim-this-horsecrap detail. I don't hold it against him; some of Bach's de capo arias have this quality as well, but Bach's accomplishments remain nevertheless staggering.)

Martin presents a world perhaps more like the one humans actually inhabit, apart from the dragons and the like. People act out of self-interest, nobility is a crutch, and the only honest, loyal people are the broken ones. The world is gritty and unforgiving and, above all, perilous. There's something beautiful and dazzling about the interweaving narrative threads, about the sheer scope of it all. Characters like Tyrion, Jaime, and Arya are quite a lot of fun, as well. And anybody can be taken from you, at any time. It's stark. Refreshingly so.

Yet, Rowling's world, while simpler and more fanciful, is not without grit. Rowling waits a long while before she takes somebody from us that we really care about, so when it happens, it hurts all the more. Martin focuses on the bleakness, the fickleness of fate. Rowling focuses on the loss and its consequences. Which is more interesting?

So, to return to the original question ("better at what?"): Martin excels at scope, grandeur, concurrency, weaving, twisting, turning. Yet his characters all feel a little too simple, too straightforward. Rowling, on the other other, develops a few characters with great care and great patience, and the development of tween years through adolescence feels, to me, familiar and fundamentally true. As much as I enjoy Martin's work (thus far), I find it impossible to care about any of the characters to the extent that I cared about Harry and co.

Which is your preference? Both will suck you in. They're both quite good and quite enjoyable, and both have plenty of flaws. So what do you want from a book series? They are both good enough at what they do that one can almost forget that they're fantasies. The fanciful aspects are just facts of the world the characters inhabit, but the choices and development of the characters are what matter.

For my money, I'll take Rowling. I am a human, and Rowling writes about humans and their pains. But it's understandable that one could conclude differently.

Now, all that said, let's consider one fatal flaw in Martin's writing: the sex.

The sex scenes peppering Martin's books are unfortunate. Truly unfortunate. They read like Penthouse Forum letters. They read like what a hormone-addled, pimply, thirteen year-old boy would imagine sex to be. The epic nature of them, the female submission to the man's sheer man-ness, all of it: embarrassingly ridiculous. That they focus purely on the animal act, utterly devoid of love, could arguably be said to fit with the bleak nature of the series. Whatever the case, as flaws go, the sex flaw is tragic: Martin directs this vast array of characters and narratives with virtuosic ability, but repeatedly exposes the weakest elements of his writing in these superfluous scenes that could be better expressed through implication.

(Arguably one such scene is not superfluous: that of Khal Drogo and Dany in their yes/no dialog. Yet that scene is one of the most absurd and poorly conceived in the entire series. I can believe in his dragons, his wights, his Others, his Lord of Light. I cannot believe in his concept of sexual intercourse.)

It is possible that my reaction reflects some latent puritanical impulse of which I've been thus far unaware. It is possible that my own concept of these topics is shriveled and puny, that these sexual scenarios I find comical are to most people utterly pedestrian. It is possible that Martin is the greatest lover in the history of the universe. All these and more are possible, but the books would still be better without these scenes. These things are better left unsaid. To make them concrete is to make them ridiculous, disappointing, cheap, useless. Don't you know that, George?

Rowling had the good sense to avoid this topic. (Can you imagine the parental outcry if she hadn't? That would've been fun to see.) She touched on some adolescent physical stuff, but only just. She wisely focused on the more relevant aspect of romance (though Martin's sexcapades could hardly be described thus) through the obsessive lens of adolescence. Her characters desire each other with crippling hormonal longing, and it drives them crazy, but they long to be loved rather than to merely possess or grapple. This aspect of the great sex game is actually worth reading about, because it's actually, you know, interesting. It's the great mystery that occupies so much of our time (until suddenly it doesn't). It can't be solved with simple measures. The aspects with which Martin concerns himself can be solved with a good wank.

In conclusion: I admire Martin's accomplishment, and I admire Rowling's. Both are great fun, particularly if you approach them first and foremost as such; that way, you can be pleasantly surprised at the emotional depth as the series carry on. Yet Rowling's is the more meaningful achievement, in my view. Rowling wrote for twelve year-olds, but achieved something moving and significant. Martin strives for something significant, but unfortunately at times writes like a twelve year-old.

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Meditation on "Alliluya"

2011-03-11T06:13:00.001-05:00

Rachmoninoff's Vespers make considerable use, as one might expect, of the word alliluya. The manner in which the word is set serves to illustrate the same principles I raved about in my previous post: an awareness of the text, its shape, and its relationship to the musical line inevitably yields a deeper engagement with the music itself.

The Vespers are essentially unmetered. Barlines and subdivisions thereof abound, yet their particulars differ from one moment to the next. The barlines tell us about the musical feeling, and specifically how one beat leads to the next. The first beat of any "measure" or subdivision is typically temporally larger than its neighbors, so it feels like a strong beat, while the tail beat (or beats in the case of a triple grouping) leads.

"Alliluya", which is sung al-li-lu-i-a, frequently sits with the first two syllables on weak (read: leading, moving) beats, and with the third syllable "lu" on a strong beat. That is not an accident.

Furthermore, the final syllables i-a may vary in their setting within a rhythmic grouping, but the word is a phrase unto itself, typically comprising a single-word sentence. This alone tells us that syllable i, as the penultimate syllable, leads to a, and that a should be unstressed as the final note in a musical grouping.

By placing this word so frequently in this manner, Rachmoninoff gives as extremely clear direction. The word tells us how to sing the rhythmic grouping. The rhythmic grouping tells us how to sing the word. On the various occasions when the setting differs, an awareness of this makes the offset rhythm more energizing.

For me, focusing on these little details of this little word brings out all the legato, moving linear singing I have to give. Which is not as much as I might like, but is hopefully always getting better.

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The Mechanical Roots of Inspiration

2011-03-01T07:27:00.001-05:00

I've recently been thinking a lot about musical expression, and specifically where it originates for a performer. It's an interesting topic that to me speaks of what it is to be human. Not in some abstract, metaphysical sense, but in a physical, mechanical sense: how we perceive, learn, experience, etc.

As much as I love music, singing, etc., upon starting any kind of practice session -- whether individual or ensemble -- my default mode of operation is primarily cerebral. It's been this way as long as I can remember. The musical engagement focuses on technical matters of execution: proper breath support, vowel placement, phrasing, ensemble awareness, and so on. All important things crucial to keep in one's attention, but not necessarily giving any kind of emotional connection. Yet the emotional connection is the only reason to do such things, and is certainly the only reason to ask people to listen. Without it, who cares?

Finding the emotional connection requires an act of will; it doesn't just magically happen on its own (for me, at least).

I consistently find musical inspiration from mundane mechanical matters. Specifically, from the union of legato singing and word stress.

Legato singing to me means a lot more than connecting pitches; it means proper breath support to sustain the lines, a constant sense of linear motion, of directedness. A smooth, moving legato line brings a kind of tension; not vocal tension, of course, but a musical tension. The line is going somewhere and that trip brings musical intensity.

Breath support and vowel placement as technical concerns are subsumed by the focus on legato singing. You do them because they support what you're doing, rather than treating them as a primary goal. This is how it should be with technique: it is the means to an end, not the end itself.

But word stress is where it really comes alive for me. This draws attention to the text, but at a higher level than mere pronunciation. Attention goes to the actual language, the fabric of the text, and you suddenly consider not just words over syllables but groups of words and entire phrases, so you can shape the syllabic stresses to match strong/weak patterns within both polysyllabic (is that a word?) words and whole sentences.

Vowel placement and attention to diction naturally come in to support this, so as with legato singing the technical attention is there to accomplish a larger goal.

The union of these concerns therefore accomplishes a number of things:

Attention goes to larger-scale structures. Groups of notes over individual notes. Entire phrases. This is where the music lives.
Important technical concerns automatically come into focus, but in a supporting role.
It naturally increases awareness of the interplay between melodic shape and the flow of the language.
It feels really good. Seriously. It's physically enjoyable.

I find that no matter the circumstances, how I'm feeling, etc., focusing on these two concerns inevitably overcomes distractions and the limitations of my analytical tendencies. They bring deeper, musical engagement that is both a lot of fun and self-enforcing. This engagement feeds on itself: you start to observe ever more nuance in the musical fabric, to feel the dance of word stresses across meter, across harmonic motion, all of which make for a deeper experience and, hopefully, a more rewarding performance for a listener.

"Inspiration" is a loaded word in our culture; one that I typically regard with deep skepticism. We attribute it with grandiose qualities that stray from the personal nature of it (or maybe just I do). Yet, it best describes how I feel when applying these practices. How it would make a listener feel is anyone's guess and beyond the performer's control. But who am I singing for, ultimately? Feeling inspiration myself is a good motivation to keep going.

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Help Me Write my Bio!

2011-02-01T18:57:00.003-05:00

So, it turns out that I need to put together a brief bio for myself in preparation for a concert I'm participating in. I did this before a few years back, and never was very happy with the results.

So I need your help! Help me pick the best bio that captures my spirit as a musician and human being.

Here's the straightforward, obvious one:

Ethan Rowe, tenor, is known for his passionate musical advocacy of all things American. His debut of "I am John Galt" at CPAC 2009 heralded the arrival of a major voice of authentic American artistry, and his "Impressions of a Budget: for Paul Ryan" won the Heritage Foundation's American Righteousness award of 2010. When not singing, Rowe enjoys tax cuts, exercising his second amendment rights, and maligning the downtrodden.

This one really tries to put my work and achievements in context:

Ethan Rowe, tenor, sings out of humanity's raw, desperate need to extract meaning out of meaninglessness. Rowe strives through song to hold back the creeping sense of irrelevance, to keep the universe's indifference at bay. When not singing, he does not matter. Neither do you.

This one is more revealing; maybe it's a little too honest?

Ethan Rowe, tenor, is not an American citizen. He studied voice in Indonesia, where he spent his childhood, and where he became a birth certificate artisan and an expert in the ancient art of expressing jihadist Islam through traditional western Christian idioms. When not singing, he is actively converting his "fellow" Americans to socialism.

But shouldn't I somehow work the family in? Let's try.

Ethan Rowe, tenor, specializes in answering the question "whazzat?" His eldest daughter knows three girls, who are all named Madeleine, but they didn't go to the pool because there was a THUNDERSTORM.

And I really like this one, but I'm not sure. Too braggy?

Ethan Rowe, tenor, has been heralded by Miles Davis as having a voice like "a motherfucker." His interpretations of Purcell and Bach have been described as "bad", and his fiery performances "get all up in that shit." When not singing, Rowe smokes cigarettes and hangs around on the corner of Mass Ave. and Boylston.

Thanks in advance for you help!

Poulenc: one month on

2011-01-02T09:04:00.002-05:00

So, it's been about a month of the Great Poulenc Study Session of Late 2010. Rehearsals are coming up. At the start of the process documented so voluminously in my previous post, I didn't know what to expect in terms of results, but I hoped that the deep score study would bring a level of familiarity with the piece's harmonic language and ultimately my own part's place therein.

I've met with decidedly mixed results. There are a number of reasons for this.

Life is complicated. Particularly around the holidays. You can have the best of intentions regarding regularity of practice/study and fall short. Travel, family plans, general stupidities related to JesusDay, etc. You just don't get as much time as planned.

The morning commute often distracts; the tendency on the way in to work is for the upcoming tasks and problems to worm their way into your consciousness. This does not facilitate quiet focus on music study. Additionally, I found that if I left the house on time, my focus was likely to be much better than if I left two minutes late (in which case I had to hurry to make the train); in the latter case, I would get on the train with my heart rate elevated and my mind more active. A quiet activity requires a quiet start. Unfortunately, I'm late more often than not.

Stubborness in prioritization: I've had trouble getting as much singing time in lately, so I wanted to keep my singing time strictly about focusing on technique; part of the score study exercise was to maximize use of commute time, which is otherwise a total life-waster, and to get more music in the day without actually making music. This meant that when singing time did arrive, I actively stayed away from the Poulenc. When your time is limited, you have to prioritize, make compromises, etc., so it's not unreasonable that I essentially said "this is Poulenc time, this is technical time." But the study would have been vastly improved by actually singing it more than I did.

Ultimately, I found that studying the score like this has helped familiarity with the harmonic language, the formal structure (to some extent; I don't usually find formal structure particularly interesting and this was no exception). But here's what I didn't get:

Transitions: the whole point of the score study was to slow down and absorb at a large scale. While this is not incompatible with learning sectional transitions, it's biased against it; you study section by section, in manageable chunks. I didn't account for this, so that's one lesson learned: to get the transitions, you have to study the transitions. Duh. It's quite obvious when you're actively executing something on your instrument of choice. Less so when you're treating the score like a novel. Now I know.

Mental hearing is not the same as physical hearing/doing. I found along the way that I might get flashes of clarity, where I really could internally hear the parts I was examining, without effort and without approximation. But they were only flashes: most of the time it took considerable mental effort and inevitably approximation would sneak in: you do your best to be honest about what you can and cannot internally hear, but time pressure and the desire to make progress are powerful forces, and suddenly you've gone on for two pages without being absolutely certain that you were really hearing those dissonances for what they are. This is as much a matter of managing mental focus and practice time, and at getting better at internally hearing, as anything else; it's not a problem inherent with the score study, it's a problem to be overcome through years of practice at this kind of score study.

There are a few spots that stand out as having the greatest harmonic complexity, either from density or from the lack of functional/modal logic or both. I paid a lot of attention to these spots, but my own means of hearing music and experiencing music is so deeply rooted in functional progressions or modal relationships that I found certain progressions nearly impossible to hear accurately. Consequently, I have familiarity with all the parts in such sections, and have a nice academic/theoretical understanding of what's going on, but actually executing my part in context remains nonetheless challenging. And I just need to sing it to fix this problem, I can't study my way out of it.

So, the conclusion one month on: this is rewarding way to study, but it has to be integrated with regular execution. It would have made more sense to study things deeply on the morning train ride and then take 15 minutes after work to sing through what was studied in the evening. Now when I actually sing the stuff some parts still feel like I'm reading (though thankfully quite a few places do not feel like that) and there a few transitions that I need to work out. Additionally, there are two or three places where I just haven't been hearing the intervals correctly which now require correction.

So it goes. I'll keep going with this, because the only way to improve is to continue applying effort over time. What else would one expect on a first attempt but mixed results?

Adventures with Poulenc

2010-12-04T11:32:00.005-05:00

I'm working on learning Poulenc's Un sour de neige for a small ensemble performance thereof in March. It's a pretty cool piece that musically amounts to Poulenc repeatedly saying "you may have noticed that I am a french composer." To me, it speaks of the influence of Satie and perhaps Ravel. Quite plainly tonal, but with the "impressionistic" emphasis on sonority over harmonic direction.

While the melodic writing is not traditionally contrapuntal, the interaction of the lines is quite interesting (which is a dumb thing to say, since "interesting linear interaction" describes a large swath of choral works). Of particular interest is the degree to which individual lines are deceptively simple -- only in the group context is the full harmonic richness apparent. This is in contrast to the writing of Bach, or Mozart, or Brahms, for example, in which any given line tends to carry pretty strong harmonic implications (to varying degrees, of course).

For instance, at the start of section 2 in the second movement, were a singer only to consider his or her part, he or she would be in for an unpleasant surprise in ensemble context: the alto and second soprano both bop around a second-inversion G minor triad; the first bass outlines a root-position C minor triad against the second bass' C pedal point; the tenor would likely hear the line as a first-inversion E-flat major triad with a decorative upper neighbor C along the way. But put those parts together and you have what amounts to one big statement of a C minor 9 harmony; the moving of lines makes the overall texture move between different voicings of that harmony, but it is always that harmony, with the harmonic motion coming largely from the changes in color inherent in the placement of sevenths/seconds.

With all this in mind, I'm trying a different approach in preparing for this. Namely: I'm not "learning my part" (tenor). Rather, I'm studying the score as a whole, building familiarity with the entire texture, with the full harmonic language. I think this will ultimately aid my understanding of how my part fits in, but more importantly, heighten my appreciation of the piece and the experience of performing it with the ensemble.

It's possible that this approach will blow up in my face and I'll wish that I had just learned my part more directly when the first rehearsal comes, but there's plenty of time to prepare and I've got a 45-minute train ride every morning during which I can quietly study the score. Also, I'm not all that familiar with Poulenc's work and this seems like a good way to get into his stylistic world more completely.

So, each day on the train to work, I look over one or two movements. After picking a movement to work on, it typically goes like this:

If there's an obvious melody/theme, look over that first; if there's a relatively simple accompaniment, try to look at both simultaneously. For instance, at the start of movement two, it's useful to try to hear the droning C's against the melodic activity.

At any given section where the texture changes, look over the material in the most active parts, one part at a time.

Look at pairs of parts and try to read both simultaneously. Try this with various pairings and go slow if it helps.

Look at all the active parts (or as many as concentration allows) and try to hear the harmonies; don't do it in rhythm, just read from one chord to the next. When the texture gets particularly thick, reduce the number of voices under consideration.

Those are the steps, but the steps are probably less important than the guidelines used in applying those steps:

Try to hear it in your head, rather than actually vocalizing.

Don't hear abstract pitches; try to hear the actual sound. When reading an alto line, try to hear the timbre of a small alto section. This makes it more musical and meaningful and less of an academic exercise.

If your concentration starts to wander, stop and think about something else for a few minutes. On my morning commute that typically means looking out the window, or closing my eyes, or getting irritated by that guy who always sits in the same seat and loudly shares whatever inanities are on his mind with whomever happens to be nearby. Get a blog, dude, so you can be as verbosely pretentious as you like and others need only endure it by choice (as so aptly demonstrated in this little article).

Accept that it will never be easy, and at times it will seem impenetrably hard.

For the past six or seven years, I've generally refused to learn my part with the aid of the piano, unless the piano is used to play a part other than my own. This has, on occasion, bugged the crap out of Courtney. (Quite understandably; we'll be reading through music together, I screw up and swear about it, she starts to play the notes I messed up and as a reward gets barked at by her jackass of a husband.) Having spent the entirety of my life learning and playing music by ear, I didn't see any way to overcome my sight reading limitations other than to be pretty strict about it. So this little experiment in learning the Poulenc is the next step in that process.

I can't claim to know my part yet, nor all the others, but it feels like a good process to apply. I'll follow up here as time goes on and the process unfolds. In the meantime, please try to contain your excitement.

Recipe the First - Meatballs

2010-11-28T15:59:00.004-05:00

My sister-in-law, Caitlyn, asked me for recipes to a variety of things. Note the use of past tense, which indicates only that a thing happened prior to right now, without conveying the magnitude of temporal distance.

She asked some nine months ago. I'm lame.

So, at long last, here's the first: meatballs.

First, some context:

I don't measure anything. This is the means by which I assert my masculinity in the kitchen.

It comes out a little different every time.

Texture and feel are my guide.

I like garlic more than most.

Preparation

Here's what you need:

A lot of garlic. Get garlic cloves, don't use dried, powdered stuff. I tend to use 8 to 10 cloves, depending on the size. Chop 'em finely or put 'em through a garlic press before you get started.

Sauce: if I were more of a foodie, I would make my own, but I'm not and I don't. I tend to prefer Trader Joe's arabiata sauce, or its roasted garlic marinara. Classico's basic tomato/basil sauce is okay, as is its roasted red pepper sauce.

Ground turkey: I tend to prefer the basic ground (not lean ground) Empire kosher turkey; industrial kosher is pretty similar in preparation to industrial organic, but costs less.

Veggies: up to you, but my preference tends to be for a couple red peppers, a zucchini, and sliced mushrooms (either basic white or portabello will do), and a decent-sized onion.
- Dice the onion
- Chop the pepper into slices
- I like to cut the zucchini lengthwise into two long, skinny halves, and then slice them up into half-moons

Salt and (freshly ground, preferably) black pepper.

Olive oil

An egg

Bread crumbs

Pasta

A good-sized frying pan; I recommend iron, if available.

Another good-sized pan of whatever make you've got. I'll refer to this as the less-nice pan.

A big-ass bowl

A cleanser that contains bleach

Additionally, you will want one of the following:

Oregano

Basil (fresh if you can get it)

Lemon juice (paired with basil in one of the alternatives below)

Getting the Meatballs Ready

Into the big-ass bowl, plop:

The ground turkey

Half the chopped-up garlic (unless you're doing the "fancy alternative" below, in which case save the garlic for the fanciness)

Olive oil: a good pour, probably amounting to about a quarter cup. Don't be stingy with the fat. This is good fat, and most of it comes out into the water anyway.

Salt: a pile. You obviously don't want to oversalt, but shake more on that you might be inclined to.

Black pepper: a pile. Too much can overpower, but like the salt you want to put plenty in there. Incidentally, if you're using a grinder, the chances of putting too much in are a lot lower than if you're using pre-ground pepper.

Bread crumbs: at least equal in volume to the turkey itself, but in fact probably more, perhaps like 20-30% more. This is something you get a sense for from repeated cooking attempts.

The egg. Sans shell, preferably, unless you enjoy a crunch surprise.

Choose one of these flavoring alternatives and do it:

Yia-yia's way: add oregano (probably equivalent to a couple tablespoon's worth) and a plop of sauce. Greek oregano if you've got it.

Simple alternative: add basil (to taste, but I put in quite a bit) and a plop of sauce.

Fancier alternative:
1. Put olive oil in a pan and get it quite hot.
2. Put in half the garlic; stir rapidly until it whitens, then quickly...
3. Put in half the onion; stir rapidly again, turn the heat down to medium after 20 seconds or so
4. Stir for a few minutes until the onion gets translucent. Don't let it burn.
5. Put the resulting stuff oil/garlic/onion slop into the big-ass bowl
6. Pour in some lemon juice, perhaps amounting to two or three tablespoons (make sure this is getting poured into the breadcrumbs, and not directly into the oil, so you don't get spattered)
7. Give the stuff a minute to cool alongside its previously refrigerated big-ass bowl brethren

Roll up your sleeves, put your less-nice pan right next to your big-ass bowl on the counter. Mix up the ingredients by hand, massaging the turkey gently into a wonderfully fowl glop in which everything seems to be evenly mixed. If it's really shiny and slippery, add more breadcrumbs. If it feels almost grainy and seems to come apart pretty easily, add more oil. It should not feel overly oily but should hold together without effort.

Grab little handfuls and roll 'em into balls, putting 'em into the less-nice pan. Use whatever size you like, though I tend to make 'em probably a 1.25 to 1.5 inches in diameter.

Fill the less-nice pan with water until the meatballs are perhaps two-thirds submerged.

Put the less-nice pan on a burner, put it on high until you get a boil, then back off to medium; cover the pan if you've got a big-enough cover (not essential, but helpful if available). Use a spatula to flip the meatballs every five or ten minutes; treat them as if they were burgers, meaning flip them by scraping the spatula on the pan underneath them, because they could stick to the pan and you want to keep the meatballs intact.

While that's going, you can move on to the other things and be confident that by the time everything else is ready, the meatballs will be ready too.

Veggies and Sauce

Get the pasta water going. Put plenty of olive oil and salt in the water. I assume you can handle the pasta from here.

In the good (iron, right?) pan, pour a good bunch of olive oil. Remember not to cheap out on the yummalicious fattiness. Get it way hot.

Put in the rest of the garlic, stir quickly letting it whiten but not burn. Then put in the onion (whatever's left of it, depending on your flavoring choice). Stir quickly, reduce the heat after 30 seconds or so (to medium or med/hot), keep stirring. You want the onion to go translucent and ideally do not allow the garlic to burn.

Once the onion is translucent and you're getting hungry from the smell, toss in the other veggies. Stir 'em around and let the zucchinis be your guide for readiness: I like to keep them frying at a pretty high temperature (stirring all the while, of course) until the majority of zucchinis have gone mostly soft (they'll start to appear as if they are soaking through or something, which indicates that their softening and cooking through).

At that point, pour in the sauce. When you start getting bubbling in the sauce, turn the heat down and shoot for a simmer.

Let the sauce simmer for a few minutes, stirring periodically. If you've got fresh basil, wash it and shred it while you're waiting.

Turn the meatballs off and plop them into the sauce/veggies. Add basil now if that's what you're using for seasoning.

Let things go for a couple minutes more, until you're confident that the sauce is evenly hot and (if used) the basil's been in for a few. Turn it off.

You're done. Chow down.

I Like This Article Because It's Wrong

2010-11-18T15:45:00.003-05:00

In reference to the enjoyable article "I Like Unicorn Because It's Unix".

I don't take any pleasure in claiming that the intelligent, read-worthy author is wrong. I don't even really mean it; the article has plenty of good stuff to say and has been a useful point of reference for me in weeks past. I have one point with which to quibble, and it may have been right when he first wrote it.

But, lest anyone else be led astray, here's the issue:

Most notable is the following call to select(2):

ret = IO.select(LISTENERS, nil, SELF_PIPE, timeout) or redo

This blocks until one of three things happen:
...
2. Some notable error state occurs on the file descriptor in SELF_PIPE (like when it’s closed), in which case the child’s side of the pipe is returned as an IO object. This really deserves its own essay, but I’ll take a quick shot: the IO object in SELF_PIPE is created in the parent process with pipe(2) (IO.pipe) before the children are forked off. The children then write on the pipe to achieve basic one-way IPC between child and master. It’s used here in the call to select(2) to detect the master going down unexpectedly – parent death causes the pipe to close. Unicorn children go down fast when their master dies.

That's not actually what happens.

SELF_PIPE is used in two different ways:

In the master process, the master writes to the pipe from signal handlers; it selects on the pipe in its main loop, such that signals will wake the master up in that loop.

In the child/worker processes, the original pipe inherited from the parent process is completely replaced by a new pipe; signal handlers in the child process close one end of the pipe, such that they interrupt the select referenced by Ryan Tomayko's blog as quoted above.

I admire Ryan Tomayko's blog and should he happen to stumble across this little article here, I hope he'll appreciate the tongue-and-cheek nature of the title. His article is more right than wrong, but that's not as much fun to claim, is it?

Henryk Górecki

2010-11-12T21:09:00.002-05:00

I was pretty bummed to hear of Górecki's passing today.

Courtney and I first encountered Górecki's popular third symphony in her second (I think) year at Boston University; the BU symphonic orchestra was performing the third paired with Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste, and possibly along with Stravinsky's Symphony of Winds. We went primarily for the Bartok (and the Stravinsky, if it was really on the program; that sounds like a rather long program, but I remember that it really kicked a lot of ass so it's possible that they did indeed do all that together).

I recall being pretty captivated by the Górecki. But I was emotionally invested in the Bartok and stored up my energy and focus for that. When it got to the Górecki, I was tired and couldn't focus much more. That's how it typically works for me: save the mental energy for the piece I care most about, and let whatever wants to happen happen on the others. Often that means I space out or sleep through the pieces I'm not there to absorb. But the Górecki is pretty captivating stuff, and while I won't claim that I was immediately sucked in and energized or whatever (after all, the Bartok performance was quite engaging and I just didn't have it in me to care any more), the piece was nevertheless provocative enough to prevent me from falling immediately asleep.

All of which sounds insulting to the piece, which is not how it's intended. I seriously slept through large portions of concerts on a regular basis at that time; I was always overtired, and as much as I loved (and love) music I just couldn't fight the need for sleep, and concert halls filled with beautiful music make for a marvelous bedroom. Just ask Stravinsky regarding Schubert. In any case, I was all prepared to settle in and pass out for the next 45 minutes, and instead I had a reaction of "hey, what's this all about?!"

Since then it's become one of those special musical jewels that I really adore. I don't listen to it all the time. It's not necessary. It fills a special place that only needs to be visited once and while. The third movement in particular is so astonishingly beautiful and expressive, and it embodies (for me) what music is all about. When words fail us, music is there. The deepest aspects of our emotional lives are too rich to express verbally. That third movement gently rocks you with love while it breaks your heart.

Farewell, Górecki. Thank you for the sorrowful songs.

Observations regarding large data sets

2010-10-25T17:59:00.002-04:00

I recently started a new position at startup that shall go nameless. It's been an interesting time so far, as we're dealing with fairly large data sets (not huge, but large-ish). Additionally, I've been dealing with MySQL a lot more than I'm accustomed to, as I've generally been something of a Postgres partisan. Some observations:

Some times, the query plan for a given query (as described by EXPLAIN) looks absolutely horrible, but then MySQL actually performs well.

Some times, the query plan for a given query looks great, using an index the selectivity of which is quite high, minimizing the rows for which any non-indexed criteria are considered. And yet the performance sucks.

When the performance is sucking, it is rather unhelpful to not have iostat nearby.

It is incredibly painful how with large data sets the simplest operations can take so long.

It is similarly painful that were I using Postgres, I would know exactly what to do to address some of the performance nastiness I'm seeing. And in MySQL I don't have the same level of knowledge. I think it's also fair to say that in MySQL the ability for introspection is fairly limited compared ot Postgres, which doesn't help. But I'm hoping that these conclusions are wrong and that it's just a matter of acclimation.

Hope is not useful when solving engineering problems. Rather, it's probably detrimental.

It probably makes relatively little sense sense to object to the notion of eventual consistency if one is within the same algorithm sending writes to master whilst reading from a slave, and especially so if said master/slave servers are in the crappy-io-osphere known as "the cloud".

Some of the data manipulation issues we see could be readily assisted by using a distributed datastore of the Cassandra/Ryak/Voldemort/HBase variety. Consider the implications of such a step: certain things (like arbitrary querying, or range queries, or fast sorting) become a pain in the ass. Notice that all of those things are already a pain in the ass using a relational database. Thus, it looks like a no-brainer; why spend time propping up an approach that will be horribly expensive and difficult and rickety, when you can spend that time building something with horizontal scalability, availability, and the means to exercise control over the inconsistency inherent in replication/distribution built in?

Anyway, that's all for now. It's a good bunch of folks and there are a variety of interesting problems to solve, so my brain's wanderlust is happily contained.

Noodle on "Autumn Leaves" Changes

2010-10-14T21:28:00.003-04:00

It's fall. The leaves fell by our windows. And it's time for the digital piano to retire back to its place in the basement. So, as a deeply sloppy ode to autumn, and a gift to Courtney (so she needn't tolerate this noodly nonsense from me every time a show cuts to commercial), a little improvisation that begins on the changes to "Autumn Leaves".

Samsung Fascinate Features Car Affinity

2010-10-03T22:00:00.002-04:00

As the earlier post implies, I've been contemplating making the switch to an Android phone. My sister-in-law the second (in order of birth, with which I was entirely uninvolved) has a Samsung Fascinate in her possession, and took the trouble to highlight some of its many fabulous features this weekend that I might make a more informed choice in my pending purchase/indentured servitude decision.

The feature that most impressed me? Automotive affinity.

We piled into two cars Saturday afternoon to take a trip from Needham, MA to Stow, MA (some 40 minutes away) to engage in the touristy activity called "apple picking". Unbeknownst to the rest of us, the aforementioned sister-in-law placed her phone on the rear trunk of our sporty 2001 Toyota Corolla, in a dramatic display of faith in the efficacy of the phone's auto-clinging capabilities.

Whilst driving on I-95N, sister-in-law the first called my phone and asked us to pull off the highway. We drove another mile at 55 miles/hour to get off at Route 16 in Newton, where we could pull over safely. Sister-in-law the second wandered over to our car and held aloft the mobile device from its place on the Toyota's rear hood, to which it clung with such excellent tenacity.

I had not given the Samsung Fascinate much consideration, but upon such a dazzling display, I find myself moved to give it further contemptation. It is a contender, it does have class.

2010-10-03T07:54:00.001-04:00

The problem with picking an Android phone is that they're all so damn shiny.

Additionally, deepening my association with Verizon makes me feel dirty. Oh well.