Amazon's computer emailed me today, offering for my consideration a book I'd never heard of before: The Craft of Modal Composition, by Thomas Benjamin. The author instructs readers on how music before the High Baroque style worked, most especially sacred music by folks such as Palestrina and earlier.

Which brings back memories.

In high school Music Theory class we were instructed (briefly) on classic theory, and given the assignment of an old hymn to set in four-part harmony. I set it as if I were Josquin, apparently; the teacher said I should've been born in the Renaissance.

Not long after I was composing piano music in a post-tonal, neo-modal style, where melodies and harmonies flitted around on keys rather than in them. It was only recently that I figured out the mechanisms of the classical style. This, despite my love of Haydn!

Perhaps my love of neo-classical music, with its do-it-wrong-on-purpose procilivity, infected me too early. I went from 1580 to 1920 just without much trouble.

In the mail today a number of books came in. One, I believe, came courtesy of Amazon. Here they are:

• Invariances, by Robert Nozick
• The End of Barbary Terror, by Frederick C. Leiner
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

How many are for work, and how many for pleasure? All three are for both, of course.

It's quite acceptable to hate hate hate Songs from Liquid Days, a pop-minimalist fusion album of songs composed by Philip Glass. The music doesn't fit into normal and accepted parameters. It's as if a space traveller explained rock and roll and other popular American music to an alien on a distant planet, sang a few songs with air guitar accompaniment, and then that alien composed songs to obscure poetic texts from the distant planet he'd never visisted.

Alien: Is it difficult music?

Earthman: No. It's simple music! Just a few chords.

Alien: Rhythmically?

Earthman: Make syncopation integral to the music, and you've got it.

Alien: What instruments do you use?

Earthman: Well, use whatever you like. For pop music you just mic them closely and they can sound electric.

Alien: So that's all I need to know?

Earthman. So that's all you need to know.

The texts, of course, are not quite so simple. They are by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Paul Simon (maybe others; I've forgotten). The title song cryptically speaks of a couple undergoing the woman's menstrual period (yes, liquid days). It's sequel, Open the Kingdom, continues the sexual references in the form of a religious parody, sung full get-out by classical singer Douglas Perry, but about the end of said menstrual period. You figure it out, what this kingdom is, and how it can be opened.

The first song on the album, Changing Opinion, has fantastic lyrics by Paul Simon, and great singing by Bruce Fowler.

The song Freezing is, for me, the gem. A brief sad epigram sung beautifully by Linda Rondstadt, accompanied by the Kronos Quartet.

The whole thing is sui generis. Most people will chortle in incredulity. It is not pop. It is not classical. What the heck is it?

As one friend of mine put it, I have no trouble with simple; but this is simple-minded! Well, maybe. But simple-minded is really nothing more than a pejorative for simple. As I see it, The Arkansas Traveler is also both simple and simple-minded, and still a lot of fun to sing. Or, perhaps more in a minimalist spirit, think of Rolling Over the Billows.

The world has a lot of room for a lot of different stuff. Stuff to fill our heads and our lives and chill the spine a myriad ways.

Freezing chills my spine even today.

Even today, listening to the album on my old LP.

Even even today, listening. To the album. To the songs. On vinyl. An old LP. Repetitive? Yes. But not too.

One of the more pleasant extraneous things about going to an orchestral concert — far more pleasant than dressing up or sipping champagne from plastic glasses — is listening to the warming-up period, before the performance, and during intermissions. I like the tuning-up sound clouds, too. It's a pleasant sort of cacaphony, like a frog chorus or cicada gamelan.

Now some guy's recorded a whole bunch of these, and calls them his compositions. Oh, well . . . if John Cage can claim four minutes and a few odd seconds as his own. . . .

In the July 2007 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ray Vukcevich ably tackles a staple of magazine sf, the short short. Fredric Brown was the master of this. Vukcevich, in this entry, Cold Comfort, adds an amusing example to the literature.

OK, maybe it's not a short short, but just a short — it's three pages long. Whatever its designation, it explores the idea of the Turing Test in an amusing way (a way I wish I'd thought of), and, were it not for the last sentence, which lays on false piety too thickly, it would be a classic.

The Firebird is the first work by Igor Stravinsky I heard as a rational being. (When I was a kid, my older sister played The Rite of Spring on the old hi-fi; but I barely remember such sessions. I was not of the age of reason, yet, and not ready to accept either Apollonian or Dionysian music for what either are worth.) Now I'm listening to Stravinsky's first ballet again, in a performance conducted by Ernest Ansermet.

Two things:

1. This is very odd music, the whole ballet. The suites constructed from the complete ballet are more sylistically uniform.




2. This performance is excellent.

It's good to get back to the beginning and re-experience delights one first had when young.

I'm nicely surprised by the performance by L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under the baton of Ernest Ansermet, of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony. Lighter touch than usual. It almost feels of a kind with the Sixth Symphony, an affinity I hadn't noticed before. (I had previously bought into the idea that this symphony was enigmatic and daring and all that; not pastoral!)

I've just started listening to the new box set, Ernest Ansermet: Decca Recordings 1953-1967. The Sibelius follows performance of Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, also not bad. (The first disc featured a Bach piece, a brisk-but-elegant performance of Haydn's Philosopher, and a well-directed but not quite well-performed rendition of Beethoven's great Fourth Symphony. I'll be listening to this disc a lot, I'm sure, despite its flaws.)

I cut my Stravinskian teeth on Ansermet's interpretations of Stravinsky masterworks, on LP, years and years ago. Now it's interesting to hear Ansermet again, eons later. I can hardly wait to crack open another Decca set I just got, an eight-CD box set of Ansermet doing Stravinsky classics.

Why buy this set too? Because I just can't get enough Stravinsky? (Close.) But the answer is a bit different: I've never heard the one-act opera Mavra, and it's included. Still, I'll be keeping that as a treat; I've a lot of music to go through before I get to that final CD.

Besides, I would have to take Sibelius's Fourth off my queue long enough, wouldn't I?

I just came across this, an early (ancient) play on an old theme:

Gala wants me, Gala wants me not.
Because she wants and wants me not,
To say what Gala wants, I cannot.

Amusing, no? Good recreation by Donald C. Goertz.

Chris Sciabarra often features a song of the day on his Not a Blog blog. Today I'll echo his program, featuring one of my favorite songs, Es sang vor langen Jarhen, by Arvo Pärt. I've nothing really to say about it, other than that it is very beautiful.

I don't listen to songs much. I usually prefer music without voices. As I type these words, another Pärt piece hits my ears via headset: Fratres. It is even better than the song.

In the last several years, I have found myself unable to read fiction with my old wide-ranging zeal. Science fiction, in particular, wears on me, and I stop after a few sentences.

Parasites Like Us, by Adam Johnson, is an exception. This book grabbed me from the beginning, and, had I not lost track of it in the mess of my office, and then in the mess of my bedroom, I would have read it immediately upon purchase, in as close to one sitting as possible. As it is, it's taken me many months to read. (I've since cleaned up my bedroom, and I'm cleaning my office as I move to the room next door.)

It is a first-person narrative, but one of those with plenty of description and opinion, and one that builds up its story. In structure, it most resembles (or so I say in dim memory) Gore Vidal's Kalki. But this book is far superior to that.

And, though billed as literary fiction, and obviously written at a high level, this book cannot help but be called science fiction. It is more science fictional than most books so labelled, for here we are not only dealing with an imagined future, but a science is focused on as a living, breathing human enterprise, and the focus of that science provides the major plot points.

The science? Anthropology. The focus? The Clovis hunters, who (may have) eradicated the bulk of the large mammals of the North American continent. A Clovis discovery by the narrator's star pupil turns into something almost farcical, and then horrific. The general tone of the novel is satirical.

This is one of the better end-of-the-world stories I've read. It is one of the best novels I've read in some time.

The title is meant, I think, to be evocative, not literal. Towards the end there is something said about parasites:

The successful forms of life are the parasites, the ones who bleed their environment to optimal exploitation, who stunt everything by taking a lion's share, who leave their hosts alive but shriveled.

Interesting, but not glorious. One might say that's the author's view of humanity: interesting, but not glorious.

One of my favorite sf stories, White Fang Goes Dingo, came out in a collection of same, years ago. I owned a copy. I no longer have it.

Which of my friends borrowed it and did not return it? Or did I actually give this book without expecting it back?

I've forgotten.

I miss the book, though.

If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don't have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts.

Thus spake Kurt Vonnegut, as of today, dead . . . this latter concept captured brilliantly by a Vonnegut drawing on today's front page of vonnegut.com:

Flown the cage, eh?

My drawing for my event would add a hand reaching into the cage and daintily pulling out, by one claw, an inverted bird.

It's not only my parents who probably are glad I didn't go into the visual arts.

But back to Vonnegut's advice. The greatest sorrow for parents, is when one of their children dies. The real sorrow, for the child, is when parents die.

Readers? Their sorrow at the passing of an author is not usually so great. Being at several removes of distance, we can take to heart the usual advice at death: As long as we remember him [or her], there's still life.

Still life.

Amazing, after all these years. Life still goes on, going it just so. That Vonnegut himself died of irreparable trauma to the head, that seems, oddly, fitting. He saw so much in civilization that he took at repeated blows to the head, to the sensibility of the humane man. Humans are such frail creatures. And yet, we endure. Vonnegut himself endured for quite a long time, no matter how many cigarettes he smoked, no matter how many pills he took. He even tried to kill himself once.

He found reason to laugh at in his survival. Even as we are saddened, can we find reason to laugh at his death? That, I bet, would be carrying laughter too far.

And yet we'll laugh again. Perhaps at a Vonnegut quip. His words will be remembered for a long time.

Vonnegut's novels, in my order of preference:

1. Mother Night




2. Slaughterhouse Five




3. Sirens of Titan




4. Bluebeard

The latter is, I believe, one of his books that most people never read. It is not sf. It is not considered major. But I'm very fond of it. It is Vonnegut's satire on modern art (abstract expressionism in particular) and on art-as-investment, and a whole lot more. And once again he brings up the matter of genocide.

Vonnegut was obviously obsessed with the subject. It was his touchstone concept. Man's inhumanity to man? Genocide is the ultimate form of this inhumanity.

The thing about Galapagos, the book of his that disappointed so many readers (including Jesse Walker), the chilling thing about it? In that book Vonnegut contemplates post-human evolution, and in a sense seems to be wishing for genocide. It has the same problem that Vidal's Kalki had: is this satire or is this wish fulfillment?

It's easy to be "against genocide." Vonnegut explored the idea, and tried to make some sense out of human senseless slaughter.

A human death, on the other hand, is just one natural death among so many . . . there's no use trying to make too much sense of that. Death is just the final burst of the glorious bubble of an individual life, and, though one hates to burst a bubble, every bubble will indeed burst. That Vonnegut's bubble lasted as long as it did is amazing in its way. And, iridescent as the bubble was, its longevity was something for which we could be grateful.

Joshua Bell — classical music's prettiest (er, handsomest?) male violinist — busks in Washington, D.C., and almost no one notices:

Bell earned $32 and change. The Post quotes him as saying, "That's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent."

Or, ahem, taxes.

The event was pitched to Bell as a test of whether, in an unlikely setting, "ordinary people would recognize genius." Whether or not she recognized his genius, at least Brazil native Edna Souza, who has been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza for six years, recognized something unusual. She dislikes buskers — she says they are make too much noise and prevent her from talking with her customers, which isn't good for business.

But asked about Joshua Bell, she says while he was also "too loud," "he was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call the police."