Liz Story sheet music
Glenn L
released "Hymn" in sheet music from Hal Leonard. The transcription is
excellent! She may have even done it herself.
I got to talk to her 6 months ago after a Windham Hill concert and I
talked to her about the horrible transcription of the "Escape of the
Circus Ponies" disc. She said she knew which is why she got involved in
the transcriptions of her latest disc "17 seconds..." She didn't like
her work being mutilated any more than the people who buy it.
I wish more artists were like her.
Glenn
John Brock
I own a number of the Hal Leonard collections of New Age Piano
music, and it's very nice having both the sheet music and a recording
of the composer playing it. It's never been real clear to me who
was responsible for the actual transcriptions though. I would
*think* that the artists would treat this seriously and *insist*
on doing the transcriptions themselves. After all, for people who
want to play this music on the piano -- rather than on a CD player
-- the sheet music is in some sense the "official" version of the
music; the version that will go up there on the library shelves
next to the piano music of Chopin and Brahms. But from some of
the things I read I get the sense that the record companies just
send the tapes off to Hal Leonard, which hires some joker to
transcribe the music, which is published without the composer ever
being involved. If this is so it's kind of sad. Does anyone else
have a better idea of what actually goes on?
(I like Liz Story a lot, but it's only recently that my technique
has gotten to the level where I can attempt the pieces I want to
play. I have been working on "Part Of Fortune" for a while, and
can almost handle it now. For some reason the music on "17 Seconds
to Anywhere" seems to be a little easier than her earlier albums.
Is "Hymn" a new album, or just a single piece?)
--
John Brock
jbr...@panix.com
Hmmm...
music?
John Brock wrote in message <8la8g5$478$1...@panix3.panix.com>...>In article
Larry Fletcher
>Does anyone join me in the suspicion that some New Age pianists cannot read
>music?
What do you hear when you play new age music backwards?
New age music.
Larry Fletcher
Pianos Inc
Atlanta GA
Dealer/technician
Doing the work of three men..........Larry, Curly, and Moe.
John Brock
Larry Fletcher <larryin...@aol.comnojunk> wrote:
>>From: "Hmmm..."
>>Does anyone join me in the suspicion that some New Age pianists cannot read
>>music?
>What do you hear when you play new age music backwards?
>
>New age music.
Cute, but kind of unfair. New Age music does have a real tendency
to slide towards the insipid if not done well, but I think some of
it is pretty decent. In particular I appreciate the New Age
pianists, who I consider to be writing the sort of light classical
salon music that "serious" composers haven't bothered with since
the beginning of the 20th century. (How many amateur pianists
today are combing through the works of Milton Babbitt hoping to
find music they can play and enjoy?) The fact that much of this
music is technically easy is a big plus for incompetent pianists
like myself. And I get a kick out if seeing pianists making money
playing their own solo compositions! How long has it been since
we saw *that* in the orthodox classical music world? :-/
--
John Brock
jbr...@panix.com
Verne Foster MacKinnon
>
> In article <20000721181415...@ng-cb1.aol.com>,
> Larry Fletcher <larryin...@aol.comnojunk> wrote:
> >>From: "Hmmm..."
>
> >>Does anyone join me in the suspicion that some New Age pianists cannot read
> >>music?
>
> >What do you hear when you play new age music backwards?
> >
> >New age music.
>
> Cute, but kind of unfair. New Age music does have a real tendency
> to slide towards the insipid if not done well, but I think some of
> it is pretty decent.
As long as .you. enjoy it ... I, for one, would be open to any specific
examples you might recommend. {Realize that a drift toward the insipid,
especially in performance or *realization* <cough>, is hardly exclusive
to any one genre - thus, 'tis to be disdained/fought on all fronts!}
> In particular I appreciate the New Age
> pianists, who I consider to be writing the sort of light classical
> salon music that "serious" composers haven't bothered with since
> the beginning of the 20th century. (How many amateur pianists
> today are combing through the works of Milton Babbitt hoping to
> find music they can play and enjoy?)
How many pianists {of any description} on this ng own the works of MB,
let alone comb through them, would be my musing; not I. Could you have
picked a more obscure example, John < g > I'm not quite sure about the
point you are trying to make re composition in/of the 20thC; examples
...
> The fact that much of this
> music is technically easy is a big plus for incompetent pianists
> like myself.
If less-stressful tech demands are what you seek, fine. However, you
need not forsake solid melody, form, development etc in order to find
same. Just post!
> And I get a kick out if seeing pianists making money
> playing their own solo compositions! How long has it been since
> we saw *that* in the orthodox classical music world? :-/
Do climb out of that box, John - "the orthodox classical music world".
Actually, you may just be surprized! Look/listen around you, in your own
neighborhood, the local art galleries, the public library recital halls,
...
> --
> John Brock
I do have a terrible time with some titles and adjectives - the present
examples in this thread simply pointing to the widespread plague - which
are used to describe {pigeonhole? ghettoize?} music's varied shapes.
"New Age" ? "orthodox" ? "classical" ?
There's music, and then, there's something else. {a very bad paraphrase}
Cheers all,
V.
--
"... to absent friends ..." mailto:fm4...@attglobal.net
< Netscape Communicator 4.74 / IBM 2138-E86 / PentiumII 300 / Win98SP1 >
Glenn L
Hymn is a single piece off the "Solid Colors" disc. I believe that was
her first CD. This transcription is first rate.
I think you're right that the record companies usually just send the
music off to a some Jocker to put some notes on a page and call it a
transcription. After talking with Liz, she is very disappointed with
that approach. I've never understood why they don't just have the
original artist play on a midi-piano and print the music right off
that. Especially since Liz has a Yamaha disklavier performance
available for player pianos.
To address another poster, many artists probably do not read music but
Liz is not one of them. She has been making music her entire life. I
realized when I posted this message there are many people that do not
care for her or the connotation of New Age music but I'm not one of them
and don't care what others think. At least it's music appreciation
which adds value to life. I'm sure there are many people out there who
like or would like her music if they heard it - even if they aren't
willing to admit they like it.
You are right John that "17 Seconds to Anywhere" is a technically much
easier compilation of music. However, I feel it still has her thought
and feeling evident in it. I am kind of glad she eased up on some the
technically difficult stuff to give me (and it sounds like you) a
fighting chance at playing her music. And since whe was involved in the
transcriptions they are very close (but not exact) to the CD. I still
don't understand why they can't be exact but she says she does not write
any of it down. So it sounds like one of those go back and re-create
the wheel situations and then she comes in to oversee it.
Luck-ally, I did not have too much trouble with "Part of Fortune". For
some reason, it just naturally fell under my fingers but with not nearly
the technical accuracy it deserves. If you get that one down, you may
want to try "Teased Hair" also. It's at about the same level. "Hymn"
is easier. When I see her again next year, I'm going to thank her for
releasing it and ask if she will release even more.
Anyway, I hope those interested pick up this song since so much work
went into creating a GREAT transcription. I'll tell Liz you all love
her music when I go see the next Windham Hill concert :)
Glenn
John Brock
Verne Foster MacKinnon <fm4...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>John Brock wrote:
>> In article <20000721181415...@ng-cb1.aol.com>,
>> Larry Fletcher <larryin...@aol.comnojunk> wrote:
>> >What do you hear when you play new age music backwards?
>> >
>> >New age music.
>> Cute, but kind of unfair. New Age music does have a real tendency
>> to slide towards the insipid if not done well, but I think some of
>> it is pretty decent.
>As long as .you. enjoy it ... I, for one, would be open to any specific
>examples you might recommend. {Realize that a drift toward the insipid,
>especially in performance or *realization* <cough>, is hardly exclusive
>to any one genre - thus, 'tis to be disdained/fought on all fronts!}
Well, I would recommend Liz Story, for one. She strikes me as more
technically accomplished than is typical, and her music more nuanced
and articulated. The "Part Of Fortune" album might be a good place
to start with her. If we are talking about music which is available
both on CDs and in sheet music form I would suggest the Narada
Piano Solos album (with performances by 10 pianist/composers), and
the companion sheet music book from Hal Leonard. I also like
Suzanne Ciani, much of whose piano music is available as sheet
music. Popular New Age pianists that I consider mediocre include
Yanni and David Lanz, and I think John Tesh is quite dreadful.
>> In particular I appreciate the New Age
>> pianists, who I consider to be writing the sort of light classical
>> salon music that "serious" composers haven't bothered with since
>> the beginning of the 20th century. (How many amateur pianists
>> today are combing through the works of Milton Babbitt hoping to
>> find music they can play and enjoy?)
>How many pianists {of any description} on this ng own the works of MB,
>let alone comb through them, would be my musing; not I. Could you have
>picked a more obscure example, John < g > I'm not quite sure about the
>point you are trying to make re composition in/of the 20thC; examples
>...
Babbitt is hardly an obscure figure in 20th century classical music.
In the New York Times there has been a series of articles and
letters recently discussing how academic serialists and their allies
tyrannized University music departments from the 50's into the 70's
and 80's; how this sort of "difficult" abstract music was considered
by them to be the only legitimate classical music of the 20th
century; and how composers and students who wanted to write tonal
music were treated with condescension and contempt. I don't want
to argue this case, since we would simply be reproducing the debate
in the paper, but I will say that this certainly fits with my memory
of that time.
I used Babbitt as an extreme example, but my point was that prior
to the 20th century classical composers wrote a great deal of light,
pleasant classical music with ties to popular styles, suitable for
amateur pianists. This is what I meant by "salon music," although
I am not sure my usage is completely accurate (I know that some
salon music was very difficult and showy). In any case I consider
this to be a useful kind of music, and 20th century composers
certainly haven't written much of it, if any. Can you think of
any? I think that New Age piano music comes close to being a
revival of this genre, and I think that's a good thing.
>> The fact that much of this
>> music is technically easy is a big plus for incompetent pianists
>> like myself.
>If less-stressful tech demands are what you seek, fine. However, you
>need not forsake solid melody, form, development etc in order to find
>same. Just post!
???
>> And I get a kick out if seeing pianists making money
>> playing their own solo compositions! How long has it been since
>> we saw *that* in the orthodox classical music world? :-/
>Do climb out of that box, John - "the orthodox classical music world".
>Actually, you may just be surprized! Look/listen around you, in your own
>neighborhood, the local art galleries, the public library recital halls,
>...
I really don't think I'm wrong about this. I don't know about local
recitals, but I can't recall seeing any CDs in the music stores by
classical pianists playing their own compositions in a modern
classical style. Can you give me any examples? I'm talking about
someone who actually has an audience for his own music, not just
someone who occasionally manages to stick one of his own pieces in
with other people's music.
>I do have a terrible time with some titles and adjectives - the present
>examples in this thread simply pointing to the widespread plague - which
>are used to describe {pigeonhole? ghettoize?} music's varied shapes.
>"New Age" ? "orthodox" ? "classical" ?
>There's music, and then, there's something else. {a very bad paraphrase}
Again, I disagree. Music seems to naturally fall into various
styles and genres, and I think that reflects some sort of underlying
musical reality. As evidence, consider the difficulty that composers
often have when they try to mix styles, for example Classical and
Jazz. It just seems to be intrinsically difficult, and failures
are more common than successes. Mixing does happen of course, and
sometimes leads to new styles, but it isn't easy.
--
John Brock
jbr...@panix.com
Glenn L
John Brock wrote:
> Well, I would recommend Liz Story, for one. She strikes me as more
> technically accomplished than is typical, and her music more nuanced
> and articulated. The "Part Of Fortune" album might be a good place
> to start with her.
I would recommend "Speechless" from Liz. The melodies and harmonies in
the music is great. I also think the disc has a good continuity and
layout from song to song. I didn't appreciate "Hermes Dance" until I
tried to play it! I think it is on the Narada label and maybe harder to
find. "Solid Colors" is a must have too. "Unaccountable Effect" is
also great but not to be bought until you have an appreciation for Liz.
> I also like
> Suzanne Ciani, much of whose piano music is available as sheet
> music. Popular New Age pianists that I consider mediocre include
> Yanni and David Lanz, and I think John Tesh is quite dreadful.
Suzanne Ciani's "Pianissimo" and "Pianissimo II" discs are very good.
They are solo piano recreations of her electronic music. Not as good as
Liz Story but good. I don't particually care for David Lanz (or his
playing) and obviously John Tesh's music is awful.
Glenn
LstPuritan
>I really don't think I'm wrong about this. I don't know about local
>recitals, but I can't recall seeing any CDs in the music stores by
>classical pianists playing their own compositions in a modern
>classical style.
Why do you expect "modern classical" music to re-embrace diatonic tonality long
after its death and produce salon trifles or their modern equivilant, "new age"
music, instead of pioneering the relatively unknown realms whose exploration
was begun (but far from completed) by Liszt, Debussy, Satie, Stravinsky, Berg,
Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Cowell, Cage, Glass, et al.?
There is a trend here, and there will always be a place for accessable and
popular music, but I don't think that discounting any music for being
"academic," "difficult," or "abstract" is necessarily a good idea. Especially
when trying to determine what "serious (classical?) music" actually _means_ in
the present.
Why do you expect the "modern classical style" to involve pianos at all, which
are no longer at the upper limit of the capacity of a single human being to
produce music, having [perhaps] been replaced by computers?
--Justin
**************************
www.mp3.com/justin_d_scott
**************************
Liszt, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Bach
Fractal Composition, Original Works
Debussy Orchestrations, and More
John Brock
LstPuritan <lstpu...@aol.com> wrote:
>John Brock wrote:
>>I really don't think I'm wrong about this. I don't know about local
>>recitals, but I can't recall seeing any CDs in the music stores by
>>classical pianists playing their own compositions in a modern
>>classical style.
>Why do you expect "modern classical" music to re-embrace diatonic tonality long
>after its death and produce salon trifles or their modern equivilant, "new age"
>music, instead of pioneering the relatively unknown realms whose exploration
>was begun (but far from completed) by Liszt, Debussy, Satie, Stravinsky, Berg,
>Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Cowell, Cage, Glass, et al.?
I expect composers to write for an audience larger than their fellow
composers and a tiny cadre of enthusiasts. What are you doing
putting Liszt and Webern together in one list anyway? Some of the
composers in your list do have an audience, and their music will
continue to be played. Others, particularly in the last 50 years
(and *especially* the "serialists"), have written sterile, failed
music that not only is never going to be "the music of the future"
(what a joke that idea was!), but is never even going to get to be
the music of the past. I brought up Milton Babbitt as a particularly
egregious example of this kind of composer, but many other "important"
20th century composers will be as justly forgotten, while Listz
continues to be played and enjoyed.
Incidently, I used the terms "light classical" and "salon music"
because I didn't want to make any unwarranted claims for the musical
worth of New Age piano music, but what I was really talking about
is accessible classical piano music with ties to the popular music
of the time and which can be played by by pianists who are not
professionals. This category does include some "salon music", but
it also includes an enormous amount of important piano music by
the great composers of the past (for example the dance music of
Bach, or the mazurkas and polonaises of Chopin). But few (if any)
"important" modern classical composers of the last 50 years have
bothered to write this sort of music, and this is a great tragedy
and loss for amateur pianists.
>There is a trend here, and there will always be a place for accessable and
>popular music, but I don't think that discounting any music for being
>"academic," "difficult," or "abstract" is necessarily a good idea. Especially
>when trying to determine what "serious (classical?) music" actually _means_ in
>the present.
Well, time is going to be a better judge than I can ever be. Music
does not follow any "laws of history", any more than history does,
and we always end up taking one road out of the many possible. I
could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that 50 years from now most
of the "difficult" music that was treated as so important in the
last century will be almost entirely unplayed, and to the extent
that it is thought about at all it will be as a ghastly mistake,
a costly wrong turn which tied classical music to the ground at a
time when advances in sound reproduction technology were expanding
the audiences for other genres of music enormously. Economics has
the concept of "opportunity cost", which is the value of what you
could have done with your money if you didn't do what you actually
did. I think there has been a huge opportunity cost associated
with the misguided musical experimentation of the 20th century,
and that the Western classical tradition will probably never fully
break even. But of course, I could be wrong. Do you think that
any of the composers of "12 tone" or "serial" music are going to
take places in the musical pantheon in the next century alongside
Beethoven and Bach, or that any significant number of people in
the future will ever play the music of Milton Babbitt and his allies
for pleasure?
--
John Brock
jbr...@panix.com
Yogi Panda
> with the misguided musical experimentation of the 20th century,
I agree with your long posting, just a comment. I doubt that the
opportunity cost could have been avoided at all, the misguided musical
experimentation is still going on!
After the great Tang dynasty, some say that China has gone into a
'cultural vacuum' until today, more than a millenium later. I believe
that's true for classical piano music as well, it is in a 'cultural
vacuum' and will be for some time to come. The vacuum is literally
filled with noise!
Yogi
LstPuritan
>I expect composers to write for an audience larger than their fellow
>composers and a tiny cadre of enthusiasts.
Then listen to Kenny G., Backstreet Boys, and Notorious B.I.G. and rejoice in
the fact that people are still writing music catering to the demands of the
larger audience.
That music is not a reflection of serious composers, though.
Composers with strong morality write for no one.
It's rather disheartening to hear that in this statement you have also just
blasted Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue, examples of the most
expert craftsmanship in history, off the face of the earth. Fugues were
terribly unpopular in Bach's time; his contemporaries were writing music more
along the lines of the Italian Concerto, and criticized Bach for continuing to
write all those ridiculous fugues. If Bach had written for a larger audience
instead of letting his composition be guided by the convictions of his inner
self, then we would not have the hundred or so masterpiece fugues that we do.
If artists acted the way _you_ "expect" them to act, working for the external
validation of a larger audience, then most of the world's great art would not
exist.
>What are you doing
>putting Liszt and Webern together in one list anyway?
Liszt and Webern were both composers who successfully employed complete
atonality to produce effective, influencial, and revolutionary pieces of music.
Liszt and Webern both wrote highly individual and developed music outside the
conventions of society and tonality. In fact, of the two, Liszt may be the
more commendable morally for abandoning diatonicism, because doing so caused
him to be considered an outcast from the world of music yet Liszt did not
attempt to conform to anything but what his artistic self demanded. Webern was
also a genius, but faced less moral challenges being part of a "movement" of
similarly minded composers; in this way, Webern was not writing music which was
truly "against the grain." Furthermore, Webern did not have a career as a
respected composer and concert pianist to "sacrifice" for the sake of art.
Liszt was the most respected musician in the Western world, and he _did_
sacrifice his reputation, his fame, and his living for the honest sake of being
true to his musical convictions.
Liszt is "The Father of Modern Music." That phrase has been used to describe
Liszt for over 75 years. You seem to be oblivious of that.
>Some of the
>composers in your list do have an audience, and their music will
>continue to be played. Others, particularly in the last 50 years
>(and *especially* the "serialists"), have written sterile, failed
>music that not only is never going to be "the music of the future"
>(what a joke that idea was!), but is never even going to get to be
>the music of the past.
I agree completely that there has been a lot of gimmicky, ridiculous, or just
plain bad music written in the last 50 years that tried to pass itself off as
"art." We may, however, disagree about which composers and pieces should be
included in this list of "sterile, failed music." No music of the future?
What a joke *you* are! I predict that Webern, Krenek, Schoenberg, Bartok,
Babbitt, Debussy, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Berg, Stravinsky, Shostakovitch, and
Barber will be remembered as the most important composers of the 20th century.
Stockhausen, Cage, Cowell, Ives, Hindemith (unfortunately), Crawford, Ruggles,
Saylor, Carter, Glass, and many others I may not remember off the top of my
head likely will not be remembered as anything but obscure names in history
books. Of course, that is a careful prediction based on what I know now, not a
prophesy.
>I brought up Milton Babbitt as a particularly
>egregious example of this kind of composer, but many other "important"
>20th century composers will be as justly forgotten, while Listz
>continues to be played and enjoyed.
You know little, if anything, about Babbitt.
Milton Babbitt developed modern music greatly with his advancement of theories
such as rhythmic serialization, rhythmic inversion, variation through dynamic
and register determinants, defining lines not as voices but combinations of
background and foreground pointillism, and finding new applications of
Schoenberg's idea of combinatorial sets.
You know little, if anything, about Liszt.
The mature works of Liszt were not played and enjoyed in Liszt's day, and they
are rarely played and enjoyed today.
Granted, lots of people play and enjoy Liszt's immature early and middle period
music, but historical revisionists have chosen to ignore the innovations,
theories, and especially the *music* of Liszt's mature late period.
Liszt gave up on the piano as his means for communicating music in the mid
1870s. Having outgrown his need to display excessive virtuosity, gain fame,
and satisfy his own ego, he renounced the Paganini whom he once admired and
emulated. Liszt wrote music which was not possible to play on the piano, had
no possibility of acceptance by society, and had no outlet for production.
Thus, after several attempts to present his musical ideas, finding only
ridicule and scorn among his peers and former audience, Liszt withdrew from the
world. He wrote, but showed no one his music.
Liszt was repeatedly requested during the late period of his life to appear and
play his old repertoire of pieces which were adored by the public and
considered in good taste.
Liszt responded, "Taste is a negative thing. Only genius affirms and always
affirms."
They said Liszt *was* a genius; his former acceptance as one of the greatest
pianists and composers proved his genius.
Liszt responded, "What the world sees in Liszt is talent; the world knows
nothing of genius." Then, quoting Schopenhauer, he said, "Talent is like a
marksman who hits a target that others cannot reach; genius is like a marksman
who hits a target that others cannot even see."
They asked what type of music is a type of thing others cannot even see.
Liszt responded, "I fear it will soon be necessary to face complete destruction
of our current music by the forthcoming death of the tonal system and admission
of half and quarter and half-quarter and quarter-quarter tones until something
better turns up demanding even further genius. Behold the abyss of progress
into which abominable *Musicians of the Future* precipitate us! Shall it be
possible to write or play or listen to such things?"
They said Liszt was misunderstanding the meaning of the "rising norm of
consonance."
Liszt responded, "I understand the future emancipation of dissonance. Call it
what you like for now. Ich kann warten."
Ich kann warten="I can wait"
They said Liszt was wasting away.
Liszt responded, "I calmly persist in staying stubbornly in my corner, and just
work at becoming more and more misundstood."
They said there would never be a place for such complex music and difficult
composers.
Liszt responded, "There are no difficult composers. Only difficult listeners,
and they can be cured." Liszt continued to work with his "Music of the Future"
which involved 12 tones of equal importance using chords labeled not by which
chromatic tones were included in the chord, but rather by which tones were
*excluded*. There is nothing in Schoenberg's so-called "revolutionary" 1906
First Chamber Symphony that Liszt had not already used in his Third Mephisto
Waltz 21 years before. In fact, the music from Liszt's final years are
indiscernable from the music of Schoenberg's early years unless the listener
knows the pieces already. There is a *direct* continuity of genius from Liszt
to Schoenberg to Berg and Webern to Krenek, who died in 1991. There are no
doubt composers continuing this chain of musical development right this moment
currently unknown to the world.
They said that Liszt would be responsible for a lot of nonsense which is bound
to be written someday.
Liszt responded, "That may be. I have not published because the time is not
yet ripe. Ich can warten."
One of the great coincidences in history is that Liszt's "Csardas Macabre" (an
atonal play on Dies Irae, the Church Latin term for Judgement Day [lit. day of
anger]) was discovered and published long after Liszt's lifetime:
It was published the year of Schoenberg's death. Liszt waited to publish his
theoretically outrageous music, which proclaimed that the "Judgement Day" had
arived, until after his own death when the time was ripe. In 1951, the time
was ripe.
>Incidently, I used the terms "light classical" and "salon music"
>because I didn't want to make any unwarranted claims for the musical
>worth of New Age piano music, but what I was really talking about
>is accessible classical piano music with ties to the popular music
>of the time and which can be played by by pianists who are not
>professionals.
Oh. We have that today. Try Tori Amos or Ben Folds Five or the piano part to
some of today's popular hip-hop. Try "Killa Bees." The words are "Wu-Tang
Clan ain't nuttin' to fuck with" and you alternate C and Ab two octaves above
middle C in rhythm. This is what popular music is today; there is no "modern
classical" music with ties to popular music. Yanni and Tesh and newagers are
pretending, using clichés from music of the past you call "classical" and
simplifying it even further to be "accessable."
>This category does include some "salon music", but
>it also includes an enormous amount of important piano music by
>the great composers of the past (for example the dance music of
>Bach,
Dance to the minuets or gigues or allemandes from the partitas? I think not.
You must be thinking of something more along the lines of dance pieces by
Mozart that he wrote as a slave of nobility. Is enslavement of art what you
are advocating? That's the only way to make composers write music for the
masses.
>or the mazurkas and polonaises of Chopin).
Which are examples of dumbing down the mazurkas and polonaises of *Poland* to
write for the masses. Is dumbing down everything so everyone likes it what you
are advocating?
>But few (if any)
>"important" modern classical composers of the last 50 years have
>bothered to write this sort of music,
Wars. Liberation. Freedom.
Composers write what they want.
Communism failed; no man is "entitled" to one loaf of bread and one piece of
digestable easy to play music per day, no more, no less.
Maybe communism is what you are advocating?
>and this is a great tragedy
>and loss for amateur pianists.
And that's their problem, no one else's.
>I
>could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that 50 years from now most
>of the "difficult" music that was treated as so important in the
>last century will be almost entirely unplayed
I think people will play music from the last century, the last century being
the 19th century, for a few hundred more years.
>and to the extent
>that it is thought about at all it will be as a ghastly mistake,
>a costly wrong turn which tied classical music to the ground
I agree.
Eventually, the mistakes of the 19th century will likely be realized as a
"costly turn which tied music to the ground."
>Economics has
>the concept of "opportunity cost", which is the value of what you
>could have done with your money if you didn't do what you actually
>did. I think there has been a huge opportunity cost associated
>with the misguided musical experimentation of the 20th century,
>and that the Western classical tradition will probably never fully
>break even. But of course, I could be wrong.
An interesting opinion. Of course, I could be wrong.
As a side note, the opportunity cost of your complaining about music being too
difficult is the time you could spend practicing so that more music would be
"accessable" to you.
>Do you think that
>any of the composers of "12 tone" or "serial" music are going to
>take places in the musical pantheon
alongside
>Beethoven and Bach
Yes, I do. As well as certain composers who perhaps used even more difficult
concepts than 12-tone composition or serialism: microtonal
harmony/counterpoint, generative algorithmic stochasticism, fractional time,
cyclic vibrations, organic symmetry, and—who knows?—just _*maybe*_ even the I
Ching oracle of changes which advised John Cage cage to write nothing but rests
for four and a half minutes.
Zeno was an intuitive genius regarding the physical world. He wrote that if
"space is equal to itself" and everything is either "moving or not moving,"
then for the period in which an "always in the instant" object moved "in the
instant," in reality "a moving arrow is unmoved." He extends this by stating
that if two objects "pass each other traveling in opposite directions at equal
velocity," since "a moving arrow is unmoved," the illusion of of "traveling
past" despite the fact that "there is no motion" is explained by the fact that
"half a time is equal to a whole time." But if the two objects are not "two
rows of bodies, each composed of an equal number of bodies of equal size," then
"in the instant" of passing there "exists neither motion nor time."
Zeno wrote this around 530 BC. He had a few disciples who continued, as he
did, to write about and explain further what one might consider Zeno's
"Physical world of the future." No one took Zeno seriously: the world said
"it's all a bunch of elitist pseudo-intellectual paridoxical plays on words
which are meaningless, arbitrary, difficult, and a failed attempt to be
profound in ways that no one understands; such nonsense will not even be
remembered in the future."
The world laughed at Zeno in 530 BC.
The world laughed at Zeno in 300 BC.
The world laughed at Zeno in 500 AD.
The world laughed at Zeno in 1000 AD.
The world laughed at Zeno in 1500 AD.
The world laughed at Zeno in 1800 AD.
The world laughed at Zeno in 1900 AD.
The world laughed at Zeno in the summer of 1905 AD.
In the Fall of 1905 AD, the world stopped laughing.
Einstein had published his paper on special relativity.
Zeno was right. But 2500 years too soon.
No one laughs at Zeno anymore.
It's very possible that people will continue to trivialize and disregard music
that is difficult for them to understand in the present. 20th century music,
regardless of my own preferences and what I personally do/don't understand,
still leaves many questions that need to be answered in the future. It may
take 2500 years before the world considers Webern's Opus 27 Variations for
Piano a masterpiece.
But that's ok.
Ich kann warten.
Tom Shaw
dont agree with either of them wholeheartedly. However, see next nit.
Boy did I ever get flamed for making this statement on this ng a year or so
ago.
TS
LstPuritan wrote in message
<20000802114949...@ng-ch1.aol.com>...
<big snip>
>Dance to the minuets or gigues or allemandes from the partitas? I think
not.
<another big snip>
celtic...@my-deja.com
$Yy3.2...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
"Hmmm..." <blahbl...@blah.com> wrote:
> Does anyone join me in the suspicion that some
New Age pianists cannot read
> music?
>
suspicion that some New Age pianists cannot read
Liz Story had just begun recording, and like many
self-taught artists was developing some creative
ideas but realized that reading skills would be
helpful. To remedy the situation, she then
started taking sight-reading lessons from a
friend of mine who was a conductor in the South
Bay area here in Southern California.
> John Brock wrote in message <8la8g5$478
$1...@panix3.panix.com>...>In article
> <39779767...@nospam.bcpl.net>,
> >Glenn L <gli...@nospam.bcpl.net> wrote:
> >>If anyone is interested and likes Liz Story
as much as I do, she just
> >>released "Hymn" in sheet music from Hal
Leonard. The transcription is
> >>excellent! She may have even done it herself.
> >>
> >>I got to talk to her 6 months ago after a
Windham Hill concert and I
> >>talked to her about the horrible
transcription of the "Escape of the
> >>Circus Ponies" disc. She said she knew which
is why she got involved in
> >>the transcriptions of her latest disc "17
seconds..." She didn't like
> >>her work being mutilated any more than the
people who buy it.
> >>
> >>I wish more artists were like her.
> >
> >I own a number of the Hal Leonard collections
of New Age Piano
> >music, and it's very nice having both the
sheet music and a recording
> >of the composer playing it. It's never been
real clear to me who
> >was responsible for the actual transcriptions
though. I would
> >*think* that the artists would treat this
seriously and *insist*
> >on doing the transcriptions themselves. After
all, for people who
> >want to play this music on the piano -- rather
than on a CD player
> >-- the sheet music is in some sense
the "official" version of the
> >music; the version that will go up there on
the library shelves
> >next to the piano music of Chopin and Brahms.
But from some of
> >the things I read I get the sense that the
record companies just
> >send the tapes off to Hal Leonard, which hires
some joker to
> >transcribe the music, which is published
without the composer ever
> >being involved. If this is so it's kind of
sad. Does anyone else
> >have a better idea of what actually goes on?
> >
> >(I like Liz Story a lot, but it's only
recently that my technique
> >has gotten to the level where I can attempt
the pieces I want to
> >play. I have been working on "Part Of
Fortune" for a while, and
> >can almost handle it now. For some reason the
music on "17 Seconds
> >to Anywhere" seems to be a little easier than
her earlier albums.
> >Is "Hymn" a new album, or just a single piece?)
> >--
> >John Brock
> >jbr...@panix.com
>
>
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
celtic...@my-deja.com
Carl Tait
In article <20000802114949...@ng-ch1.aol.com>,
LstPuritan <lstpu...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>Zeno was an intuitive genius regarding the physical world. He wrote that if
>"space is equal to itself" and everything is either "moving or not moving,"
>then for the period in which an "always in the instant" object moved "in the
>instant," in reality "a moving arrow is unmoved."
... which sounds interesting and plausible, but it turns out that
precisely the opposite concept -- "instantaneous velocity" -- is what's
actually essential to calculus and physics from Newton onwards.
Zeno's Paradox (really Zeno's Fallacy) says that motion is impossible
because to travel any distance, an object must first travel half of that
distance. But to travel that half, the object must first travel half
of that half -- and half of that quarter, and half of that eighth, and
so on. Since this subdivision can be carried out infinitely many times,
every motion, no matter how small, must have such a precondition.
Ergo, motion is impossible. Q.E.D.
The subtle flaw in Zeno's reasoning is that it is possible to perform
an infinite number of tasks in a finite amount of time if the tasks are
infinitesimally small (in the mathematical sense). The entire idea that
"a moving arrow is unmoved" is wrong, though certainly imaginative.
>He extends this by stating
>that if two objects "pass each other traveling in opposite directions at equal
>velocity," since "a moving arrow is unmoved," the illusion of of "traveling
>past" despite the fact that "there is no motion" is explained by the fact that
>"half a time is equal to a whole time." [...]
If I'm reading this correctly, he's saying that the relative motion
of two bodies can be validly expressed by assuming that one of the
bodies is fixed in place. If X moves west at 30 MPH while Y moves
east at the same speed, a fixed observer on X will observe Y to
zoom by at 60 MPH: "half a time is equal to a whole time." Again,
though interesting, this isn't particularly startling: relative
motion could be observed by anyone riding an animal, for example.
Imagine Euripides and Elmer riding side by side; Elmer might
say, "Hmm, to me it looks like Euripides isn't moving, while
that guy on the ground -- Plato Mackenzie, I think -- moves right
past us. But from Plato's point of view, we're moving past *him*!"
More importantly, this is sheer hand-waving in defense of the
false belief that "there is no motion." Saying that the motion
can be expressed relative to a fixed observer doesn't make the
motion go away!
>Zeno wrote this around 530 BC. He had a few disciples who continued, as he
>did, to write about and explain further what one might consider Zeno's
>"Physical world of the future." No one took Zeno seriously: the world said
>"it's all a bunch of elitist pseudo-intellectual paridoxical plays on words
>which are meaningless, arbitrary, difficult, and a failed attempt to be
>profound in ways that no one understands; such nonsense will not even be
>remembered in the future."
>
>[...]
>In the Fall of 1905 AD, the world stopped laughing.
>
>Einstein had published his paper on special relativity.
>Zeno was right. But 2500 years too soon.
Well ... not really. "There is no [instantaneous] motion" had already
been rejected hundreds of years earlier. And special relativity didn't
invent the idea of relative motion, which dates back to the first time
two people passed each other in the street and gave it more than a
moment's thought. The two keys of SR were (1) there is no absolute
frame of reference for motion; *all* frames of reference are equally
valid, and (2) the speed of light is a constant for all observers,
regardless of their relative velocities. (2) was the real shocker,
flatly contradicting Zeno (not to mention Newton!).
--
Carl Tait IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
cdt...@us.ibm.com Hawthorne, NY 10532
Alejandro Kálnay
news:20000802114949...@ng-ch1.aol.com...
> I predict that Webern, Krenek, Schoenberg, Bartok,
> Babbitt, Debussy, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Berg, Stravinsky, Shostakovitch,
and
> Barber will be remembered as the most important composers of the 20th
century.
> Stockhausen, Cage, Cowell, Ives, Hindemith (unfortunately), Crawford,
Ruggles,
> Saylor, Carter, Glass, and many others I may not remember off the top of
my
> head likely will not be remembered as anything but obscure names in
history
> books. Of course, that is a careful prediction based on what I know now,
not a
> prophesy.
I'm curious about how you feel regarding Lennon-McCartney.
AK
LstPuritan
Ok, open this message window to full screen, use the restroom, drink some
coffee, and enjoy:
Carl Tait wrote:
>"a moving arrow is unmoved."
>
>... which sounds interesting and plausible, but it turns out that
>precisely the opposite concept -- "instantaneous velocity" -- is what's
>
>actually essential to calculus and physics from Newton onwards.
Motion was impossible until special relativity.
Part of the problem is one of causality. If motion is conveyed through a
series of discrete indivisible time-slices in succession, and in each given
instantaneous time-slice there is no motion, then when progressing from one
time-slice to the next, how does a moving body know that it is moving? How
does anything know that anything is moving? If there is no observable
difference between a moving body and a non-moving body in any particular one
instant, then how is the very idea of motion conveyed through a series of
instants in each of which there is no difference between moving and not moving?
The way this was refuted to allow for "instantaneous velocity" before special
relativity was to claim that although the *value* of a function f(t) is
constant for a *given* t, the *function* f(t) may be non-constant at t. That
is fine for all practical purposes in the classical model of space and time,
but still ignores the real question regarding time causality. Continuous
functions such as those of time are in themselves _static_ completed entities,
so this actually affirms that physical motion cannot exist except as an
_illusion_, or psychological rationalization, of experiences within static,
motionless, unchanging instantaneous reality.
>Zeno was right. But 2500 years too soon.
>
>Well ... not really. "There is no [instantaneous] motion" had already
>been rejected hundreds of years earlier.
Rejected wrongfully, which was my whole point. We only know now that in the
classical model of time and space, motion is not possible.
>The entire idea that
>"a moving arrow is unmoved" is wrong, though certainly imaginative.
Not wrong in Newton's universe! If everything is just a big hunk of space and
there is no way to discern a moving arrow from a non-moving arrow in an
instant, motion is _impossible_. Something which does not exist in any
indivisible instant (and therefore, does not exist at all in Newton's Universe)
cannot be made to exist simply because many instants follow each other in
succession; even causality and continuity cannot create the "existence" of
motion that *never* "existed"!
>If I'm reading this correctly, he's saying that the relative motion
>of two bodies can be validly expressed by assuming that one of the
>bodies is fixed in place.
Yes, but keep in mind that Zeno's logic extends into the notion that for any
motion to occur in light of the fact that motion does not exist when time
consists of many successive infinitely small segments of time, then the only
alternative is that instants of time are *not* infinitely small. But however
non-infinitely small or large these alternative instants are, there will always
be a limit to how fast something may actually travel because if space and time
are independent, in an instant of non-infinitely small time only a certain
amount of space could conceivably be travelled through in that instant. Thus,
there must be an upper bound to velocity.
>If X moves west at 30 MPH while Y moves
>east at the same speed, a fixed observer on X will observe Y to
>zoom by at 60 MPH:
>"half a time is equal to a whole time."
Yes, that is why "half a time is equal to a whole time." But if there is an
upper bound to velocity, there must be an upper bound to relative velocity.
What Zeno was *stating* is that in absolute space and absolute time, for the
fixed observers on X and Y, half a time is equal to a whole time. What Zeno
was *meaning* is that _if_ space is absolute, _if_ time is absolute, then there
would have to be a standard (the stationary observer) by which to observe X and
Y and determine the "correct" velocities of X and Y. Let's call the uppermost
limit of Zeno's "bounded velocity" Z. If X moves west at Z while Y moves east
at Z, then to the "true" stationary observer X and Y would be approaching _each
other_ at 2Z, twice the maximum possible speed. This is a contradition as
nothing can move twice the maximum possible speed, and even if they could, then
through the same experiment they would be able to travel twice _that_ maximum
possible speed.
So if half a time is equal to a whole time for those on X and Y, then to the
stationary third observer "half a time" is actually equal to "TWICE a time,"
and *that* is the real point. To further illustrate that what is observed is
not in agreement with the idea of a universe where space and time are not
related, Zeno gives us the idea of "two rows of bodies with an equal number of
bodies of equal size." What is this supposed to mean, and why is this
amendment even included?
I can only assume that he had the following in mind. Here is an illustration
of how the two rows of bodies move in opposite directions equaling "twice a
time" from the perspective of a third stationary observer.
Three snapshots taken by the observer at the smallest possible equal time
intervals in the classical model of the cosmos, with clocked time:
--------------------------------
2 1 0 -1 -2
-2 -1 0 1 2
--------------------------------
3 2 1 0 -1
-1 0 1 2 3
--------------------------------
0 1 2 3 4
4 3 2 1 0
--------------------------------
Zeno knew that something was wrong with the idea of time and space as
independent because half a time cannot equal twice a time when time equals the
bounded relative velocity in periodic non-infinitely small instants of time.
The observer experiences two instants, but the two moving rows of bodies
traveled through four instants! And the clocks of those moving tell them that
they have traversed into the future without ever having experienced the
necessary time in between! Did the observer travel into the future? Or would
the observer be seen, even though he exists only in the past? How can things
experience different amounts of time and end up in the "wrong" space, yet still
be aware of the existence of the other things which should, by Newtonian law,
only exist either in a different space and same time, or else different time
and same space? The numbers above show how the clocks would read for those in
motion _IF_ time and space are absolute and independent. Logically, in this
model whatever the observer "clocks" must necessarily be the same as what those
in relative motion "clock"傭oth with relation to one another and the stationary
observer傭ut in one instant of possible motion, to the stationary observer the
rows of bodies have travelled twice as far as theoretically possible. Although
Zeno was not able to provide the correct values of the clocks in Einstein's
Universe, he was able to use the fact that "a half time is equal to a whole
time" as proof that to each observer, the clocks of the others must be running
slow or else maximum speed can always be doubled in the eyes of a stationary
observer "clocking" two things moving in opposite directions at maximum speed.
The only alternative is that there is no motion at all, ever. Either way, the
notion of the Classical model of the Universe was challenged.
>Again,
>though interesting, this isn't particularly startling
If Zeno had known the speed of light, he would have been suggesting speeds
faster than the speed of light. That's pretty startling.
>relative
>motion could be observed by anyone riding an animal, for example.
>Imagine Euripides and Elmer riding side by side; Elmer might
>say, "Hmm, to me it looks like Euripides isn't moving, while
>that guy on the ground -- Plato Mackenzie, I think -- moves right
>past us. But from Plato's point of view, we're moving past *him*!"
Yes, that's something that a lot of people could easily observe, and nothing
profound. But, as explained above, there was a lot more to Zeno than
"A-Durr... When I walk it sorta looks like that there ground is movin' and I'm
kinda sittin' still."
>More importantly, this is sheer hand-waving in defense of the
>false belief that "there is no motion."
Without Special Relativity, there is no motion.
>Saying that the motion
>can be expressed relative to a fixed observer doesn't make the
>motion go away!
Two separate concepts which you are combining into one idea erroneously.
1. The Arrow proving there is no motion.
2. If there were motion and instants were successive but not indivisible:
Objects would be able to attain a velocity of twice their maximum possible
speed, and bounded speed would have no uppermost limit at all.
>And special relativity didn't
>invent the idea of relative motion, which dates back to the first time
>two people passed each other in the street and gave it more than a
>moment's thought.
That's right. Special relativity didn't invent the idea of relative motion; it
made *possible* the reality of motion *itself.* Before that, motion was
impossible.
>The two keys of SR were (1) there is no absolute
>frame of reference for motion; *all* frames of reference are equally
>valid, and (2) the speed of light is a constant for all observers,
>regardless of their relative velocities.
Yes, all true. But what special relativity also asserts is a re-structuring of
the fundamental means by which space is related to time; in this model, to the
extent that objects with relative motion are existing simultaneouly but on
different planes of dimensions of conjoined space/time (a microcosmos of causal
events within the context of the discrete instant) which are inseperable from
their relativistic consequences as evident by the contradition of classical
space and time. Motion is only possible in a universe where to a moving
object, the world looks different AND to the world, a moving object looks
different. The best one can do in Newton's Universe is assume that an object
gives the illusion of motion (like a flip-book, with no actual motion of a
stick figure on any given page, but the illusion of motion suggested by rapidly
viewing the pages in succession) because one experiences a psychological event
which suggests motion. Since moving and non-moving objects are identical in
the indivisible instant and a series of instants (none containing motion),
motion in the classical model of the cosmos is no more real than the motion
perceived in a flip-book. However, in special relativity there is an *actual*
instantaneous difference between a moving and a non-moving object because they
occupy separate places in space _and_ time depending on their instantaneous
velocity, producing a simultaneity on different dimensional planes unique to
their position as well as motion.
>(2) was the real shocker,
>flatly contradicting Zeno (not to mention Newton!).
Zeno's theories, especially The Dichotomy, The Achilles, The Arrow, and The
Stadium all are assertions that instantaneous velocity and motion itself did
not correspond to observable reality; he stated that time and space could not
be completely absolute and separate or else not only would motion not be
possible, the universe itself made no sense with its inconsistancies. Whether
the instant is continuous or discrete, physical reality did not conform with
assumptions about motion and especially instantaneous velocity until special
relativity. It was Newton who got booted. Zeno was correct, and it's been
said that if Zeno had been understood and taken seriously, relativity would
have followed very shortly after Newton. Newtonian laws would have been seen
as unable to explain certain phenomena and demanded an immediate search for the
"other half" of reality, relativity. Instead it took until 1905 because people
did not understand, or simply rejected as absurd, Zeno's premature expounding
of the truth.
------------------------
>Zeno's Paradox (really Zeno's Fallacy) says that motion is impossible
>because to travel any distance, an object must first travel half of that
>distance. But to travel that half, the object must first travel half
>of that half -- and half of that quarter, and half of that eighth, and
>so on. Since this subdivision can be carried out infinitely many times,
>every motion, no matter how small, must have such a precondition.
>Ergo, motion is impossible. Q.E.D.
This is unrelated to what I was talking about, but I'll still address it, as
Zeno again was right.
Two different points to address:
1. Continuous absolute motion in space and time.
2. Continuous relative motion in space and time.
What you are describing is the finite sum of a geometric series. The analogy
in physical terms would be a photon or some type of particle bouncing off a
series of mirrors alternating on the floor and ceiling in a long hallway which
has the ceiling and floor slowly converging. The end of the hallway represents
the final sum of the convergence of the geometric series. Therefore, since the
sum is finite the photon must eventually emerge at this sum. So which way will
the photon be traveling after hitting the last mirror, up or down? The photon
must eventually emerge, and the direction in which it would be traveling would
be dictated by the last mirror it hit. But there is no "last mirror" in a
geometric series, so there is no rational or logical way for the photon to
reach "the other side" of the converged hallway or escape from the mirrors.
Therefore, infinite divisibility and continuity are impossible, and motion is
impossible because the universe which would allow a photon to escape from a
geometric series at a finite sum would be scale-invariant and completely
irrational (Like a fractal, which has no size and exists only in a hypothetical
realm of invariant scale and no space at all.) So at some level, the universe
must be both finite, rather than continuous, and indivisible.
But if the universe is proven to be _not_ continuous (by the photon "stuck" in
the maze of mirrors when it theoretically "should" be able to get out) and the
universe is also proven to be _not_ discontinuous (by the arrow which would be
"stuck" in the motionless instant if there were no causal time relationship)---
Then the universe would have to be something completely different from the
classical model. We now know that the universe *is*, indeed, very different
from the classical model. Zeno shows us that there is no rational model of the
universe as continuous or discontinuous unless time and space are not
independent.
Time and space are not independent, so Zeno was correct.
Blast you, Carl! What the bloody hell are you trying to make me do... think???
; }
Carl Tait
LstPuritan <lstpu...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>This post is on topic if you play the piano really, really, really, fast.
I'll buy that....
I want to give this a longer response than I have time for right now,
but a couple of items have relatively (pun intented) brief answers.
Justin, if you want to post quick responses, I can incorporate them
into a later post (which I'm sure everyone is dying to read).
>Motion was impossible until special relativity.
>
>Part of the problem is one of causality. If motion is conveyed through a
>series of discrete indivisible time-slices in succession,
... and that's the main problem right there. The *slices* are
discrete, but the *function* is continuous. If you think that's
not true, please give me a method for enumerating all the real numbers
between 0 and 1. It's easy enough for the rational numbers, which *do*
form a discrete-but-infinite set: first list all the fractions with
numerator and denominator totaling 1, then totaling 2, and so on forever.
You obviously can't write out the whole list explicitly, but you can
(with a little thought) figure out the Nth number in the list -- or,
alternatively, figure out where any rational number between 0 and 1
falls in the list.
If you can work out an enumeration like this for the real numbers -- i.e.,
a discrete-but-infinite list of all possible time values between 0 and 1 --
you will have proven Zeno's ideas. (You will have also destroyed set theory
and most of modern mathematics in the process....)
>The way this was refuted to allow for "instantaneous velocity" before special
>relativity was to claim that although the *value* of a function f(t) is
>constant for a *given* t,
... it would hardly be a function otherwise!
>the *function* f(t) may be non-constant at t.
What?! "Instantaneous velocity" (the first derivative of a function
that gives the position of an object) is just the limiting value of
the velocity as elapsed time approaches 0:
lim ( f(t+dt) - f(t) ) / dt
dt->0
(The ghost of my physics teacher is reminding me that I should
really be saying "speed," not "velocity.")
>[...] there will always
>be a limit to how fast something may actually travel because if space and time
>are independent, in an instant of non-infinitely small time only a certain
>amount of space could conceivably be travelled through in that instant.
>Thus, there must be an upper bound to velocity.
That's not a valid conclusion. "X is finite" does *not* imply that there
is an upper bound on X. For example, every integer consists of a finite
number of digits, but there's no upper bound on the number of digits
an integer can contain.
That's all the time-slices I have for the moment....
LstPuritan
>
>AK
???
Christof Pflumm
WARNING! Completely off topic post following, but I couldn't resist ;)
lstpu...@aol.com (LstPuritan) writes:
> This post is on topic if you play the piano really, really, really,
> fast.
Especially when you try approaching light speed.
> Ok, open this message window to full screen, use the restroom, drink
> some coffee, and enjoy:
Ah, well, as phycicist...
> Carl Tait wrote:
> >"a moving arrow is unmoved."
Moving = not moving? Isn't there a difference between standing in
front of a wall and running against it?
> >... which sounds interesting and plausible, but it turns out that
> >precisely the opposite concept -- "instantaneous velocity" -- is
> what's
"Instantaneous velocity", now what's that? Velocity is a function of
time and one of the variables describing a mechanical system. It's
always there and it changes over time.
> >actually essential to calculus and physics from Newton onwards.
New to me. Never heard about "instantaneous velocity", neither in my
calculus nor in my mechanics courses.
> Motion was impossible until special relativity.
So when did all things start moving? Around 1900?
> Part of the problem is one of causality. If motion is conveyed
> through a series of discrete indivisible time-slices in succession,
Which is not the view of standard physics. There is no evidence that
time is discrete, but there have allready been thoughts about
that. Not a very useful concept, though.
> and in each given instantaneous time-slice there is no motion, then
> when progressing from one time-slice to the next, how does a moving
> body know that it is moving? How does anything know that anything
> is moving? If there is no observable difference between a moving
> body and a non-moving body in any particular one instant, then how
> is the very idea of motion conveyed through a series of instants in
> each of which there is no difference between moving and not moving?
Not a big problem. Move infinitely fast in an infinitely short time
and do it so that the product of time and velocity gives you the right
distance.
> The way this was refuted to allow for "instantaneous velocity"
> before special relativity was to claim that although the *value* of
> a function f(t) is constant for a *given* t, the *function* f(t) may
> be non-constant at t.
"Constant for a given t" has no meaning, because a function has, by
definition, exactly one value for each value of t. What you could mean
is that the function is changing around t.
> That is fine for all practical purposes in the classical model of
> space and time, but still ignores the real question regarding time
> causality.
Well, in special relativity you have to be within the lightcone to
have causality. Outside the lightcone, nobody knows what's
happening. Whether causality is fundamental, this can't be decided
easily. I don't know if it is violated. If you are really interested,
ask in an appropriate newsgroup (sci.physics or something).
> Continuous functions such as those of time are in themselves
> _static_ completed entities, so this actually affirms that physical
> motion cannot exist except as an _illusion_, or psychological
> rationalization, of experiences within static, motionless,
> unchanging instantaneous reality.
As I allready pointed out, even
> >Zeno was right. But 2500 years too soon.
The paradox of Zeno is the one with the turtle that is never overtaken
by a sprinter? That one is easily resolved. Zeno was not right.
> >Well ... not really. "There is no [instantaneous] motion" had already
> >been rejected hundreds of years earlier.
>
> Rejected wrongfully, which was my whole point. We only know now
> that in the classical model of time and space, motion is not
> possible.
I don't.
> >The entire idea that
> >"a moving arrow is unmoved" is wrong, though certainly imaginative.
>
> Not wrong in Newton's universe! If everything is just a big hunk of
> space and there is no way to discern a moving arrow from a
> non-moving arrow in an instant, motion is _impossible_.
Just because there is no way to discern something doesn't mean it
doesn't exist.
> Something which does not exist in any indivisible instant
Why should there be an indivisible instant?
> (and therefore, does not exist at all in Newton's Universe)
What has indivisibility of time got to do with Newton? There is no
physical theory that treats time as indivisible.
> cannot be made to exist simply because many instants follow each
> other in succession;
Why not? Jumping around from one place to another is motion. By
definition. How you get from one point to the other is unimportant.
> even causality and continuity cannot create the "existence" of
> motion that *never* "existed"!
If you believe so...
> >If I'm reading this correctly, he's saying that the relative motion
> >of two bodies can be validly expressed by assuming that one of the
> >bodies is fixed in place.
Aha! Now there's something interesting. Relative motion versus
absolute motion. In Newtonian mechanics it is assumed that there is
something like absolute motion. Problem is, in respect to what? If you
stand still on earth, you are moving around the sun, the sun orbits
the center of the milky way, the milky way moves in the local
group. It was special relativity that got rid of this concept, because
you run into funny notions about how the world behaves (Aether as
light carrying medium etc.)
> Yes, but keep in mind that Zeno's logic extends into the notion that
> for any motion to occur in light of the fact that motion does not
> exist when time consists of many successive infinitely small
> segments of time, then the only alternative is that instants of time
> are *not* infinitely small.
So you have time instants that have a duration? That's a bit paradox,
no? What do this finitely small instants consist of? And, btw, what's
in between the instants? Nice philosphical question, IMO.
> But however non-infinitely small or large these alternative instants
> are, there will always be a limit to how fast something may actually
> travel because if space and time are independent,
Which they are not.
> in an instant of non-infinitely small time only a certain amount of
> space could conceivably be travelled through in that instant.
No.
> Thus, there must be an upper bound to velocity.
That's an observed fact and can't be deduced logically. It seems to be
a property of nature. And be *VERY* careful what you define as
velocity. There is, for example, no upper limit for the phase velocity
of a wave.
> >If X moves west at 30 MPH while Y moves
> >east at the same speed, a fixed observer on X will observe Y to
> >zoom by at 60 MPH:
> >"half a time is equal to a whole time."
That's wrong. Look in a special relativity book for the correct
formula to add velocities (for 60 MPH the error you make by just
adding the velocities is very small).
> Yes, that is why "half a time is equal to a whole time."
1 second = 0.5 seconds. Perhaps that's why some people can play at
such blinding speed! I really have to figure this out ;)
> But if there is an upper bound to velocity, there must be an upper
> bound to relative velocity.
Velocity IS relative.
> What Zeno was *stating* is that in absolute space and absolute time, for the
> fixed observers on X and Y, half a time is equal to a whole time.
> [Zeno snipped]
Would you mind explaing the Zeno thing to me? It seems I don't
remember it correctly.
> How can things experience different amounts of time and end up in
> the "wrong" space, yet still be aware of the existence of the other
> things which should, by Newtonian law,
Which is proven wrong.
> only exist either in a different space and same time, or else
> different time and same space?
Well, that's resolved in special relativity. Space and time are not
distinct. Definition of only the spatial position does not define a
body's position. You also have to know the time. That's why special
relativity is working with a four dimensional space.
> [snip]
> Without Special Relativity, there is no motion.
Why? What have I missed in my courses about classical mechanics?
> >Saying that the motion
> >can be expressed relative to a fixed observer doesn't make the
> >motion go away!
>
> Two separate concepts which you are combining into one idea
> erroneously.
Let's see...
> 1. The Arrow proving there is no motion.
I didn't get this arrow thing. You can't prove there is no motion to
me. It's obvious to me that there is motion.
> 2. If there were motion and instants were successive but not
> indivisible:
IF, that was true
> Objects would be able to attain a velocity of twice their maximum
> possible speed, and bounded speed would have no uppermost limit at
> all.
Ir could be that's not impossible.
> That's right. Special relativity didn't invent the idea of relative
> motion; it made *possible* the reality of motion *itself.* Before
> that, motion was impossible.
Special relativity threw away the concept of absolute motion and
introduced a barrier on the speed of information propagation.
> >The two keys of SR were (1) there is no absolute
> >frame of reference for motion; *all* frames of reference are equally
> >valid, and (2) the speed of light is a constant for all observers,
> >regardless of their relative velocities.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
> Yes, all true. But what special relativity also asserts is a
> re-structuring of the fundamental means by which space is related to
> time; in this model, to the extent that objects with relative motion
> are existing simultaneouly but on different planes of dimensions
Plane of dimension? This sounds like bad scifi.
> of conjoined space/time (a microcosmos of causal events within the
> context of the discrete instant)
Why do you think there are discrete instants? That's a rather exotic
point of view.
> The best one can do in Newton's Universe is assume that an object
> gives the illusion of motion
Could you please define motion?
> Since moving and non-moving objects are identical in the indivisible
> instant
Why? They could have some property that relates to motion which is not
identical. Acceleration, for example.
> Zeno's theories,
What a pity I don't know what these are about. Or perhaps I mean
something different than you, but I'll try. Zeno said, take a turtle
and a runner. The runner can do double the turtle's velocity. They
start a race with the turtle a bit ahead. Now in the time the runner
catches up with the turtle, the turtle has gone a little bit further,
so the runner has to catch up again. In this time the turtle again has
gone further and so on. So, the runner never overtakes the
turtle. This conclusion is OBVIOUSLY WRONG, because the time steps
between catching up get smaller and smaller and if you add them up,
they DO NOT ADD TO INFINITY. They have a limes, which means that in
this picture you are only looking at part of the race! If you look at
the whole race, the story is quite different.
> Zeno was correct,
I don't know about his philosophical viewpoint, so I don't dare to
comment on that.
> Newtonian laws would have been seen as unable to explain certain
> phenomena
Which ones? The effects of special relativity are very subtle and
direct confirmation was not possible without sophisticated technology.
> >Zeno's Paradox (really Zeno's Fallacy) says that motion is impossible
> >because to travel any distance, an object must first travel half of that
> >distance. But to travel that half, the object must first travel half
> >of that half -- and half of that quarter, and half of that eighth, and
> >so on. Since this subdivision can be carried out infinitely many times,
> >every motion, no matter how small, must have such a precondition.
> >Ergo, motion is impossible. Q.E.D.
Why should motion the be impossible? I really don't see the logic. Why
shouldn't there just be a continous set of those preconditions? I have
no problem with that.
> This is unrelated to what I was talking about, but I'll still
> address it, as Zeno again was right.
Why?
> Two different points to address:
>
> 1. Continuous absolute motion in space and time.
> 2. Continuous relative motion in space and time.
>
> What you are describing is the finite sum of a geometric series.
> The analogy in physical terms [snip]
For an infinite sum, you need infinite many mirrors, so the particle
doesn't emerge.
> Therefore, infinite divisibility and continuity are impossible,
Invalid conclusion.
> and motion is impossible because the universe which would allow a
> photon to escape from a geometric series at a finite sum would be
> scale-invariant and completely irrational (Like a fractal, which has
> no size and exists only in a hypothetical realm of invariant scale
> and no space at all.)
Why should a fractal not have a size? There are weird things in
mathematics! There are fractals that have a well defined size.
> So at some level, the universe must be both finite, rather than
> continuous, and indivisible.
> Time and space are not independent, so Zeno was correct.
If it rains, the street gets wet. If the street is wet, does it have
to rain? Only an equivalence can be read in both ways, but not a
conclusion.
> Blast you, Carl! What the bloody hell are you trying to make me
> do... think??? ; }
Try giving philosphy courses! That's should be real fun for you!
Bye,
Christof
M.R.E.
> >I expect composers to write for an audience larger than their fellow
> >composers and a tiny cadre of enthusiasts.
> That music is not a reflection of serious composers, though.
> Composers with strong morality write for no one.
May I ask: are you a composer?
I know that I write for people... I'm a person, and I like to hear what I
wrote.
I also hope that people will like to hear what I like to hear,
by consequent liking hearing my music.
No composer creates in a vacuum.
Experimentation for experimentation's sake is not art, it's experimentation.
Composition is communication.
A successful composer will be able to communicate his/her thoughts or
emotions to as wide an audience as possible while still remaining true to
his/her own artistic ethic.
<snip>
>In fact, of the two, Liszt may be the
> more commendable morally for abandoning diatonicism, because doing so
caused
> him to be considered an outcast from the world of music yet Liszt did not
> attempt to conform to anything but what his artistic self demanded.
Webern was
> also a genius, but faced less moral challenges being part of a "movement"
of
> similarly minded composers; in this way, Webern was not writing music
which was
> truly "against the grain." Furthermore, Webern did not have a career as a
> respected composer and concert pianist to "sacrifice" for the sake of art.
> Liszt was the most respected musician in the Western world, and he _did_
> sacrifice his reputation, his fame, and his living for the honest sake of
being
> true to his musical convictions.
Thus, in your mind, the only way to be a great composer is to sacrifice some
element of one's "moral" life?
The greater the sacrifice, the greater the art?
> I agree completely that there has been a lot of gimmicky, ridiculous, or
just
> plain bad music written in the last 50 years that tried to pass itself off
as
> "art." We may, however, disagree about which composers and pieces should
be
> included in this list of "sterile, failed music." No music of the future?
> What a joke *you* are! I predict that Webern, Krenek, Schoenberg, Bartok,
> Babbitt, Debussy, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Berg, Stravinsky, Shostakovitch,
and
> Barber will be remembered as the most important composers of the 20th
century.
I like your list, though I'd replace Webern by Berg and drop Krenek and
Babbitt... but what about Britten? Copland? Honegger? Lutoslawski? Martinu?
Poulenc? Ravel? Or Rachmaninov? Schuman? Sibelius? Szymanowski? Vaughan
Williams?
> Stockhausen, Cage, Cowell, Ives, Hindemith (unfortunately), Crawford,
Ruggles,
> Saylor, Carter, Glass, and many others I may not remember off the top of
my
> head likely will not be remembered as anything but obscure names in
history
> books. Of course, that is a careful prediction based on what I know now,
not a
> prophesy.
And WHY exactly would Hindemith become an obscure footnote in history? He
was certainly one of the most distinctive musical minds of the 20th century.
<snip>
> You know little, if anything, about Babbitt.
<snip>
> You know little, if anything, about Liszt.
And for the sake of good manners... let's avoid reading each others' minds?
How exactly do YOU know what someone else knows or does not know?
I close with this:
Art can not exist in the sterility of vacuum. IMHO, an "artist" who produces
without the intent of sharing this art can not produce great art. Great art
is communicative art (not to be confused with "being popular"). Music, more
so than any other art form, needs both the performer and the audience for it
to come to life (yes, at times the performer IS the audience).
Bach might have written incredibly abstract fugues and technical pieces, but
they were written "to the greater glory of God"... now THERE'S a demanding
audience! I believe, and no one will change my mind about this, that Bach
was searching for beauty in the complex patterns he used. I think he
succeeded rather well, no? Well, that's also my goal as a composer: seeking
beauty.
--
Michel R. Edward, Compositeur
Montréal, Québec
<<Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast>>
eromlignod
>I know that I write for people... I'm a person, and I like to
>hear what I wrote.
>I also hope that people will like to hear what I like to hear,
>by consequent liking hearing my music.
>No composer creates in a vacuum.
>Experimentation for experimentation's sake is not art, it's
>experimentation. Composition is communication.
>A successful composer will be able to communicate his/her
>thoughts or emotions to as wide an audience as possible while
>still remaining true to his/her own artistic ethic.
I, too, compose and I must agree with you wholeheartedly. Music
is art and art is a form of entertainment. To me, the object
(and the extremely hard part) of creating is to excite emotion
in the listener like rapture, exhileration, or sadness. This is
truly a difficult thing to do and to do originally and/or
consistently. Just look at the huge bodies of works of some of
the great composers and at how few pieces are really top-notch--
the kind you can listen to over and over and never grow tired
of. It takes a true artist indeed to create these.
Don
-----------------------------------------------------------
Got questions? Get answers over the phone at Keen.com.
Up to 100 minutes free!
http://www.keen.com
Tom Shaw
However I always seem to fall just short of understanding the various parts
of it. This feeling is akin to what I used to get trying to read the
various "popular" books of explanation of Einstein's ideas. But in those
cases it was always clear that the authors didn't know what they were
talking about. So, Justin and Carl, please dont stop until you are done.
TS
Carl Tait wrote in message <8mb8iu$h...@diamond.cs.columbia.edu>...
>
>
>
Tom W. Ferguson
> I love this thread!!!!!
Me too, though I believe there is a short version that begins: "If a tree
falls in a forest . . . "
LstPuritan
>I want to give this a longer response than I have time for right now,
Considering that now is t=0, you are stuck right where you are. If you plan to
move, then explain how you plan to initiate your movement. There are only two
ways you can move from where you are.
1. Infinite acceleration.
2. Acceleration by continuous function everywhere two-times differentiable.
If you are anywhere other than at the computer, then the fact is that you never
wrote this message. When t was approaching the 0 which is your "now," it must
have bounced off rmmp before determining with more precision where you are
physically.
If you are reading this, then the previous paragraph is either a lie or else
the reality of *this* post may not exist but as an illusion, or simply an
instantaneous verbosity from an imaginary negative t that is clearly wrong,
since right now t=0. So I'm stuck too... _unless_ I am actually moving along
with my computer, in which case I could *keep* moving but never stop because I
would always be moving in smaller and smaller units of time for all of eternity
just trying to make it to the refrigerator I cannot logically ever get to.
>Justin, if you want to post quick responses, I can incorporate them
>into a later post (which I'm sure everyone is dying to read).
This subject has applications in musc (fractal, generative, stochastic) and
that is interesting. But if we can't get there maybe everyone is dying for
this to move to e-mail. For those who only skim this post quickly, though, a
half a time will equal a whole time and to an observer, these words may appear
to move at twice the speed of light.
Everyone set your clocks after reading this thread. Otherwise, you might not
realize that you read this post yesterday, earlier today, or perhaps tomorrow.
Or is this post actually reading *you*?
Of course, no one will ever escape from my infinite number of words in a single
finite post, even if I used increasingly less words and smaller text as my
words approached infinity. The unsuspecting reader would make steady but
incrementally smaller progress down the page but wouldn't ever get to the point
or find his way out of the maze of words.
>>Part of the problem is one of causality. If motion is conveyed through
>a
>>series of discrete indivisible time-slices in succession,
>
>... and that's the main problem right there. The *slices* are
>discrete, but the *function* is continuous.
The *function* is an abstract model for determining every possible and
impossible behavior in and around time until an average and likely reflection
of the real world near t is _projected_ onto the artificial *slices*. Do we
agree that only a hint of the real world is evident in such models, an approach
of something that describes not only the "slice" when t gets near zero, but the
increasingly probable histories which brought the "slice" into its current
state?
>If you think that's
>not true, please give me a method for enumerating all the real numbers
>between 0 and 1.
Nice try. How about I enumerate the non-denumerable portion of the transfinite
real number continuum between 0 and 1 *if* you start me off by telling me what
to call the value between 0 and 1 closest to zero? Of course, I don't think
we'll get very far.
Then again, we can't _move_ anyways. Can we iterate around instead?
>>the *function* f(t) may be non-constant at t.
>
>What?! "Instantaneous velocity" (the first derivative of a function
>that gives the position of an object) is just the limiting value of
>the velocity as elapsed time approaches 0:
But it says nothing about what is *happening* when elapsed time is exactly
zero. All instantaneous velocity means is that for any real number (speed)
greater than zero, there is some other real number that, as long as greater
than the change in time, assures that the change in distance divided by the
change in time is less than the real number (speed) from above. It can't be
called the speed something is traveling frozen in time at t, but rather the
convergence of average speeds from many times to explain with increasing
accuracy the limit of how fast something *could* have conceivably traveled
leading up to, but not including, a given "real" time, represented by the
abstract and artificial "t" itself, which is not real.
>>[...] there will always
>>be a limit to how fast something may actually travel because if space and
>time
>>are independent, in an instant of non-infinitely small time only a certain
>>amount of space could conceivably be travelled through in that instant.
>
>>Thus, there must be an upper bound to velocity.
>
>That's not a valid conclusion. "X is finite" does *not* imply that there
>is an upper bound on X. For example, every integer consists of a finite
>number of digits, but there's no upper bound on the number of digits
>an integer can contain.
To us, it's not a valid conclusion. However, both of Zeno's cosmic models, the
continuous and the discrete, contradicted physical reality by suggesting that
if *any* motion is possible at all, then there would be no limit at all to
relative velocity.
If time is infinitely divisible, then if one is at rest in one instant and in
the next instant is moving, then the closer one gets to a time increment near
zero, no matter what the velocity, the *acceleration* during the interval from
non-motion to motion would near infinity. Since physical reality did not
validate that traveling at infinite speed was what actually happened when
"moving:"
The only other possibility would be to assume that there was a limit to
velocity, although his "half a time equals twice a time" shows that for as long
as time and space were separate, it would not be able to experience the world
without considering the fact that certain traits of the physical "real" world
did not seem very "real" at all.
This post is a logarithmic function. As t approaches my signature the value of
my instantaneous verbosity will cross the x-axis and turn negative, at which
time negative verbosity will erase what I wrote from the bottom up. Therefore,
be certain to jump off this post at the end or else be stuck approaching the
limit of negative functionality.
LstPuritan
>I love this thread!!!!!
So far, it's been a series of very integral exchanges which appears to be
strange attractor.
>However I always seem to fall just short of understanding the various parts
>of it.
Calculus or Relativity?
>This feeling is akin to what I used to get trying to read the
>various "popular" books of explanation of Einstein's ideas.
Akin to what I get when I read most newer books which try to explain anything.
At least you understood the "plate ringing" thread. I heard a ringing in my
piano and spent about 45 minutes looking for a V-Tech or a V-Type or something
like that. It turned out a pen fell into the piano.
>But in those
>cases it was always clear that the authors didn't know what they were
>talking about.
Carl wrote "The Harmony of the Cubes" and other piano music for pianists in
gorilla costumes and employing "the sound of three hands clapping." I wrote
about "textual metanarrative deappropriation assaulting protorevisionist
cartofeminist postcapitalist music." *I* hope that I know what I'm talking
about. The next time 4/3 music ever comes up, people are going to thing I'm
parodying when I'm serious.
>So, Justin and Carl, please dont stop until you are done.
Fractals converge forever in non-proportional space with no scale of reference
for size; the more they approach something the more detail is revealed and no
matter how far one dives in, one is still just as far and just as close to
anything else as before, and can dive deeper to reveal more details yet.
>TS
------------
Police officer: Do you have any idea how fast you were going?
Me: Yes.
Police officer: I could arrest you for driving 100 mph.
Me: I wasn't driving 100 mph.
Police officer: I've been following you for half an hour, and you certainly
_were_ driving 100 mph. I have the radar log.
Me: What your radar log doesn't know is that I was driving at 30 mph for a half
hour before I saw you.
Police Officer: So?
Me: In the last hour, I drove 65 miles. Therefore, my speed for the last hour
was 65 mph.
Police Officer: You still can't go 100 mph.
Me: I can't? You mean it's not possible? How could I have driven at a speed
you say is impossible?
Police Officer: I meant you can't go 100 mph because it's against the law.
Me: There's no law about instantaneous velocity limits. The signs state not to
travel more than 65 miles per hour, and I didn't travel more than 65 miles per
hour.
Police Officer: I think you should come down to the station.
Me: I think I should report you for driving at 200 mph for the last half hour.
Someone could get hurt.
Police Officer: Step out of the car.
Me: Look at that! We've been talking for 30 minutes, which means in the last
hour I've been going 50 mph. Now I'm well under the speed limit. If I were
going 50 mph for the last hour, and you were going 200 mph since you saw me,
then you should have passed me up long ago and we can't be having this
conversation because you are currently 150 miles up the road.
Police Officer: Here's what we are going to do. I'm going to go find wherever
I really am, get myself back, and you stay put until I return.
Me: Is there really any difference in what we experience whether you drive
foreword or I drive backward? Since it's the same to you, why don't you take a
nap in your car, I'll drive away backward, and you can _pretend_ you are going
foreword to catch up with your body.
Police Officer: I *am* pretty tired. Thanks, pal.
LstPuritan
>> I love this thread!!!!!
>
>falls in a forest . . . "
. . . "A logger gets his wings."
Chris Aher
This discussion is really a hoot! If you take it email, I would enjoy being
copied.
A question: What is the difference between a mathematician and an engineer?
Answer: The(male) mathematician sees a beautiful woman across the room and
starts walking toward her. He gets half way across the room. He then walks
half of the remaining distance. He then walks half of the remaning distance
and so on. Upon reflection he realizes that he will never actually arrive
and decides to give up.
The engineer sees a beautiful woman across the room and starts walking
toward her. He gets half way across the room. He then walks half of the
remaining distance. He then walks half of the remaning distance and so on.
Upon reflection he realizes that sooner or later he's CLOSE ENOUGH!!
I suspect that both Larry and Yogi are engineers in this context and
wouldn't worry about ringing plates. <GRIN>
Regards,
Chris
PS Justin, I've been listening to your CD during my commute. I particularly
like the "Strange Attractors" piece. BTW, did you know Jana Silverman at
NYU?
PPS Carl, I work in Rye Brook, just a few miles from you. Hasn't the
weather been just a thrill?
Larry Fletcher
>wouldn't worry about ringing plates. <GRIN>
>
>Regards,
>Chris
Not exactly. I see a beautiful woman across the room and I start walking toward
her. I get about halfway there, and SWIRTO (she who I refuse to obey) sees me
and AHBL ( I think you can figure this one out). The only math I'm thinking
about is the velocity of the hand that is about to land across the back of my
head. ;-)
Larry Fletcher
Pianos Inc
Atlanta GA
Dealer/technician
"It's not pollution that's harming out environment. It's the dirty air and
water that's doing it." Al Gore 6/97 (And they made fun of Dan Quaile?)
Yogi Panda
> piano and spent about 45 minutes looking for a V-Tech or a V-Type or something
> like that. It turned out a pen fell into the piano.
LOL
Radu Focshaner
>
> This post is on topic if you play the piano really, really, really, fast.
No, I don't. Bye
PS. Short on pills, I assume.
Radu Focshaner
Zeno says that a pen falling into your piano could cause a
short-circuit.
> no matter how far one dives in, one is still just as far and just as close to
> anything else as before, and can dive deeper to reveal more details yet
which proves Zeno's point or does not.
Radu Focshaner
> Ah, well, as phycicist...
Thanks, thanks Christof for jumping in ! (this is evidence that God
exists ! This is the ultimate authority : a German physicist (with no
speller on his computer).
> "Instantaneous velocity", now what's that? Velocity is a function of
> time and one of the variables describing a mechanical system. It's
> always there and it changes over time.
Christof lying under the tree, hooked to his MP3 player (Beethoven 6th),
waiting for the apple to fall on his nose...
> The paradox of Zeno is the one with the turtle that is never overtaken
> by a sprinter?
When I thought of the turtle I was ashamed of being , probably, the only
one "simpleminded" in this ng. Christof, you made me regain my self
confidence. Thanks !
> Why not? Jumping around from one place to another is motion. By
> definition. How you get from one point to the other is unimportant.
Mr. Zeno, beam me up, please !
> > Yes, that is why "half a time is equal to a whole time."
>
> 1 second = 0.5 seconds. Perhaps that's why some people can play at
> such blinding speed! I really have to figure this out ;)
No, on pre-piano instruments (harpsi/clavi/digi - chords), the "actual"
duration of a note was half of its marked one.( OT OT OT )
LstPuritan
>> Composers with strong morality write for no one.
>
>May I ask: are you a composer?
I write lots of music.
I might be tempted to answer: Yes.
But I normally reserve the term for the composers I respect.
I still have a lot of hedonism to shed before I can get there.
But as far as the simple criterion of "one who writes music:" Yes.
This would have to include Scarlatti, Beethoven, Chopin, and Cage.
I wouldn't want to be associated with any of them. So: No.
Yet my composers were still composers through all their stages.
So the answer is Yes. Or perhaps No. I give up.
Feel free to draw your own conclusions, if you want.
My Website is in my sig with mp3s.
>I know that I write for people...
How can you decide which people for whom to write?
>I'm a person, and I like to hear what I
>wrote.
That seems justifiable.
>I also hope that people will like to hear what I like to hear,
>by consequent liking hearing my music.
What if people don't like to hear the same things?
Would you change what you write so that it is liked?
>No composer creates in a vacuum.
The literal isolative vacuum can only be the ideal.
It's impossible to escape destructive influences;
A mental vacuum devoid of all aesthetic judgement is needed.
>Experimentation for experimentation's sake is not art, it's experimentation.
If I agree with that statement, then for what thing's sake would
experimentation be art?
>Composition is communication.
Communication could be with society, friends, a cat, or one's own self.
Perhaps not even through sound.
>A successful composer will be able to communicate his/her thoughts or
>emotions to as wide an audience as possible while still remaining true to
>his/her own artistic ethic.
How very Hegelian to define your "artistic ethic" by the idea that the
"successful" way to be a "composer" is through making sure music is accepted by
"as wide an audence as possible," in other words, society as a whole. There
can be nothing abstract or innovate if society is catered to as a whole;
neither can there exist anything truly individual or original because the
composer is just a channel through which the general will of society gratifies
itself by dictating the morality of the composer at the cost of art and
integrity.
>Thus, in your mind, the only way to be a great composer is to sacrifice
>some element of one's "moral" life?
If you replace the "of" with "for" then I would say that is a true statement.
But that shouldn't come as any surprise; any skill, knowledge, or art demands
_some_ type of sacrifice, whether it be the sacrifice of bodily comfort while
learning to ski, sacrificing time that could be spent with spouses,
girlfriends, friends, and family to study a new language, or sacrificing work
to make time to practice the piano more. If such positive things come from
sacrifice, and morality is even more of a positive thing than skills,
knowledge, or art then it would follow that morality requires sacrifice.
Consider Richter playing Bach instead of Chopin's funeral march at the funeral
of Stalin because a government official convinced Stalin to have Richter's
father assassinated so that this official could leave the country with
Richter's mother after burning most of Richter's birthplace. Apparently art
demanded that Da Vinci sacrifice an ear. Schoenberg sacrificed his
professional reputation for his 12-tone work, Mozart sacrificed his childhood
(perhaps not voluntarily) to music, and we could extend this idea to things
like the Berlin wall, reformationists, anyone who maintained the world was
round during persecution, Christ, Socrates' hemlock悠 think the point is made.
Don't make me mention the end of Terminator 2 because I can't think of any more
examples.
>The greater the sacrifice, the greater the art?
I would not hold that as a constant, but often that seems to be the case.
>I like your list,
Thanks. I made it myself. : }
>though I'd replace Webern by Berg
They weren't in order from best to worst.
>and drop Krenek and
>Babbitt
I play and am fond of Krenek's 3rd sonata. Babbitt may be remembered as more
of a theorist because he doesn't have a grand opus or any large pieces most
people know. But those who took serialization to the extreme often wrote brief
pieces and sparse textures; he just might pull through.
>but what about Britten?
Maybe remembered in certain parts of Britain.
Like his old neighborhood. ; }
Britten is known mostly for his operas and songs. But although I have heard
some of the songs, I can't name any operas. Furthermore, he was basically a
Romantic writing in the style of Schubert with a harmonic language far inferior
to Schubert. Personally, I didn't like the Romantics in the 19th century, and
I welcome them even less in the 20th. With the exception of Berg. Berg was
certainly inclined toward Romanticism, but it was a type of morbid attitude
which destroyed Romanticism by employing it to its own logical end, i.e., the
Opus 1 Sonata. And unlike whatever operas Britten wrote, regardless of what
people think about Berg most people know of Wozzeck.
>Copland?
I'm not familiar enough with his music. What do you think? The piano music is
not a huge output, most of it seems rather trivial and almost popular, a
Gershwinadian combination of jazz, classical, and whatever else was in style.
>Honegger?
Never heard it before. He was Swiss, no? What is his music like?
>Lutoslawski?
Reminds me of Chopin. And for those who like Chopin, his music would probably
not be tasteful to them; Chopinaddicts are very picky. So I don't see anything
special.
>Martinu?
I've only heard his "Fantasie and Impromptu" (?) and it was interesting in its
virtuosity while still maintaining a good deal of melodic lines and
counterpoint. This is someone I should look into. Any other works besides
that you know/like?
>Poulenc?
>Ravel?
Deliberately not included. I don't know whether or not they will be obscured
by Debussy, who appeals to listeners and pianists of all levels. Ravel is
difficult playing and I'm not sure many who just listen would not rather hear
Debussy's Reverie than Ondine, although pianists especially value Ravel as much
as Debussy, generally. Poulenc I'm not too familiar with, and have never
played. What I heard sounded like the salon miniatures of Satie, although
since I heard only a few pieces and can't say much more about him.
>Or Rachmaninov?
That's a big question. I have no idea. He was a bit behind his
contemporaries, yet still has a broad audience. Whether this will catch up
with him and he will be forgotten to make room for Prokofiev, Bartok, and
Schostakovitch is anyone's guess.
>Schuman?
I saw one piece years ago. It was only one page long in simply was a series of
different triads played against each other, but I don't remember the name. Did
he write anything better than this?
>Sibelius?
Oh yes. I'm not sure how that slipped my mind.
>Szymanowski?
Early works like Wagnerian Chopin, and late works pretty much incomprehensible.
I've played 2 of the 4 op. 4 etudes and liked them, but looked at his later
music and that stuff will offend the Chopinaddicts greatly. I don't think the
late stuff itself is of that much merit.
>Vaughan Williams?
Who? I've never hear the name. Is he any good?
>And WHY exactly would Hindemith become an obscure footnote in history?
I'll e-mail you, if you like, a previous post I wrote about why Hindemith
wasn't known, isn't known, and won't probably be know. Simply erased from
history.
>He
>was certainly one of the most distinctive musical minds of the 20th century.
Agreed.
>And for the sake of good manners... let's avoid reading each others' minds?
>How exactly do YOU know what someone else knows or does not know?
New feature of aol. It provides footnotes to all usenet messages telling me
exactly what anyone is thinking. Hey! Get your mind out of the gutter and get
back to music.
>I believe, and no one will change my mind about this, that Bach
>was searching for beauty in the complex patterns he used. I think he
>succeeded rather well, no?
That is exactly what I would say. Both about Bach and Webern. But in light of
the statement you ended with which I won't quote so this ends on a positive
tone, do you not see the difference in the non-instrument-specific ear pleasing
intellectually stimulating music of bach as one of the more "complete" examples
of musical beauty, when compared with, say, Beethoven's Waldstein or Chopin's
Nocturnes? I would go so far as to say that the beauty of Bach is so subtle to
affect on a very subconscious level rather that attempting to cater to one
instrument or that audience, and so well-crafed that it pleases to read as much
as to hear as much as to play, that this music is something of much more
"authentic" worth beyond hedonic aesthetics and "beauty."
Take Care,
LstPuritan
>Zeno says that a pen falling into your piano could cause a
>short-circuit.
Zenith says to unplug its TVs before opening it up. Or not.
>which proves Zeno's point or does not.
I agree. Or not.
Play some music.
LstPuritan
>> I heard a ringing in my
>> piano and spent about 45 minutes looking for a V-Tech or a V-Type or
something
>> like that. It turned out a pen fell into the piano.
>
That's exactly what the people I called at the Yamaha Customer Support phone
number said. They were no help. The Fire Department eventually came and saved
the pen. I still can't find any V-Treck metal things in my piano, though.
Maybe they escaped? Are they visible to the naked eye?
:thinks the tech threads are too confusing and people should come over and talk
about relativity:
Christof Pflumm
> Christof lying under the tree, hooked to his MP3 player (Beethoven
> 6th), waiting for the apple to fall on his nose...
No MP3 player, never heard the 6th up to now (I only know the 5th
which I like very much and a bit of 4 and 9) and I prefer to throw the
apples at people passing by to prove that motion is possible! You
REALLY have to move or otherwise momentum might hit you hard :)
> > The paradox of Zeno is the one with the turtle that is never overtaken
> > by a sprinter?
>
> When I thought of the turtle I was ashamed
The earth is standing on pillars that stand on a big turtle!
> of being , probably, the only one "simpleminded" in this
> ng. Christof, you made me regain my self confidence. Thanks !
No problem. I'll do that whenever you need it. You own a Samick, no?
;)
Bye,
Christof
M.R.E.
heard
> some of the songs, I can't name any operas. Furthermore, he was basically
a
> Romantic writing in the style of Schubert with a harmonic language far
inferior
> to Schubert.
To paraphrase.. or is it quote?
You OBVIOUSLY don't know Britten!
"In the style of Schubert"??????
Peter Grimes, The Turn of the Screw, etc... his operas are FAR form being
post-romantic.
> >Honegger?
> Never heard it before. He was Swiss, no? What is his music like?
How can you speak about 20th century music and know so few of its greatest
composers?
> >Lutoslawski?
> Reminds me of Chopin.
HUH? Are you referring to his early music? His mature works are completely
atonal... I don't think Chopin ever went there!
> >Poulenc?
> >Ravel?
>
> Deliberately not included. I don't know whether or not they will be
obscured
> by Debussy, who appeals to listeners and pianists of all levels. Ravel is
> difficult playing and I'm not sure many who just listen would not rather
hear
> Debussy's Reverie than Ondine, although pianists especially value Ravel as
much
> as Debussy, generally. Poulenc I'm not too familiar with, and have never
> played. What I heard sounded like the salon miniatures of Satie, although
> since I heard only a few pieces and can't say much more about him.
I know that Ravel will never be eclipsed by Debussy... they are diametrical
opposites.
As for Poulenc, his Piano Concerto(s) and Concert Champêtre (for
harpsichord) are definately not "salon music".
> >Or Rachmaninov?
>
> That's a big question. I have no idea. He was a bit behind his
> contemporaries, yet still has a broad audience. Whether this will catch
up
> with him and he will be forgotten to make room for Prokofiev, Bartok, and
> Schostakovitch is anyone's guess.
Somehow I knew you'd say that... but from what you're saying about the other
composers I've listed, I can understand your attitude.
> >Schuman?
>
> I saw one piece years ago. It was only one page long in simply was a
series of
> different triads played against each other, but I don't remember the name.
Did
> he write anything better than this?
How about 10 Symphonies?
> Early works like Wagnerian Chopin, and late works pretty much
incomprehensible.
> I've played 2 of the 4 op. 4 etudes and liked them, but looked at his
later
> music and that stuff will offend the Chopinaddicts greatly. I don't think
the
> late stuff itself is of that much merit.
I guess one needs some sort of musical maturity to appreciate most
composers' later works.
> >Vaughan Williams?
> Who? I've never hear the name. Is he any good?
Please tell me you're joking!
> >And WHY exactly would Hindemith become an obscure footnote in history?
> I'll e-mail you, if you like, a previous post I wrote about why Hindemith
> wasn't known, isn't known, and won't probably be know. Simply erased from
> history.
Well, from the rest of your post, I understand why he isn't known by you...
He's pretty well known in the musical circles I move in. As well as heartily
appreciated.
Christof Pflumm
> Carl Tait wrote:
> >I want to give this a longer response than I have time for right now,
>
> Considering that now is t=0, you are stuck right where you are. If
> you plan to move, then explain how you plan to initiate your
> movement. There are only two ways you can move from where you are.
>
> 1. Infinite acceleration.
That's no way because it's impossible. Infinite acceleration and
finite mass leads to infinite force.
> 2. Acceleration by continuous function everywhere two-times
> differentiable.
Continous is not necessary. It needs to be integrable.
Ever heard about Quantum Mechanics? There are other ways. He could
make his probability amplitude to have a peak somewhere else and then
have his position measured.
> If you are anywhere other than at the computer, then the fact is
> that you never wrote this message. When t was approaching the 0
> which is your "now," it must have bounced off rmmp before
> determining with more precision where you are physically.
There is no uncertainty relation between position and time!
> [snip]
You make my head spin. I need a rest without movement after this post.
> This subject has applications in musc (fractal, generative,
> stochastic) and that is interesting.
Can you explain this? I can't imagine how to use fractals for
music. How do you transform those numbers into sound?
> [snip] these words may appear to move at twice the speed of light.
No.
> Everyone set your clocks after reading this thread.
Doesn't work. Everyone would have to be at the same spot for this to
make sense.
> Otherwise, you might not realize that you read this post yesterday,
> earlier today, or perhaps tomorrow.
I look at the date of the posts and compare it to my watch. Is that
wrong?
> Of course, no one will ever escape from my infinite number of words
> in a single finite post, even if I used increasingly less words and
> smaller text as my words approached infinity. The unsuspecting
> reader would make steady but incrementally smaller progress down the
> page but wouldn't ever get to the point or find his way out of the
> maze of words.
Depends if contents is approaching a finite value or if it becomes
infinite.
> call the value between 0 and 1 closest to zero?
Doesn't exist. Neither in the real nor in the rational numbers.
> Of course, I don't think we'll get very far.
If it's fun, that's unimportant.
> All instantaneous velocity means is that for any real number (speed)
> greater than zero, there is some other real number that, as long as
> greater than the change in time, assures that the change in distance
> divided by the change in time is less than the real number (speed)
> from above.
A derivative is NOT a division of numbers!
> If time is infinitely divisible,
Then there are no distinguishable instants.
> then if one is at rest in one instant and in the next instant is
> moving, then the closer one gets to a time increment near zero, no
> matter what the velocity, the *acceleration* during the interval
> from non-motion to motion would near infinity.
No. Only if you have a non differentiable velocity.
> This post is a logarithmic function.
So your writing velocity goes like -1/x. You can write backwards in
time! Do you always start writing at the end of your posts? And you
begin at infinite typing speed! That's fascinating! I know a guy who
can write as you see it in a mirror. But writing end to beginning,
that's a whole new world :)
Bye,
Christof
Radu Focshaner
> never heard the 6th up to now
Now you dissapoint me ! The 6-th, also known as the Pastoral, you know -
serenity now, storm (the apple falls on your forehead), serenity
again...
> You own a Samick, no?
That was mean...You own a Schimmel ? Is yours bigger ?
Chris Aher
Just because the SWIRTO/AHBL factor adds additional boundary conditions to
your personal equation doesn't mean that your approach to the subject (in
theory, of course!) isn't fundamentally Engineering as opposed to
Mathematical, does it? <BIG GRIN>
You belie your orientation (E vs. M) discussing velocity. A mathematician
wouldn't have to worry about AHBL, would he?
In spite of his amazing ability to produce prodigeous amounts of
intelligent, interesting, amusing and well thought out bovine excrement in
his humorous (as opposed to his serious) postings, I suspect when push comes
to shove, our epee fencing friend also takes the Engineering approach.
This is not to say that the Mathematical approach in not valuable. I spent
most of this week reviewing a statistical analysis (performed by my very
hard headed system engineers) and having to convince them that their
mathematical reasoning was fundementally flawed and that in this case,
linear regression wasn't valid or meaningful until after the second
derivitave had been of one of the base assumptions had been applied to the
source data. My head hurts! They didn't teach this stuff to music majors
at CCNY. I had to learn it on my own. I am looking forward to some
Engineering this weekend. (With SWMBO of course!)
BTW, SWMBO (Decidedly not to be confused with BIMBO in this case) of twenty
years won the gold medal in the Women's Epee event at the Nutmeg State Games
last weekend. She has only been fencing two years and I am really proud of
her.
Regards,
Chris
"Larry Fletcher" <larryin...@aol.comnojunk> wrote :
Larry Fletcher
>your personal equation doesn't mean that your approach to the subject (in
>theory, of course!) isn't fundamentally Engineering as opposed to
>Mathematical, does it?
>
Well, in situations like this my reactions would tend to be poorly planned and
not very structured, but my actions would be very calculated. (just kidding)
> She has only been fencing two years and I am really proud of
>her.
>
>Regards,
>Chris
As you should be!
By the way - what button did you push to print so big?
Larry Fletcher
Pianos Inc
Atlanta GA
"Good evening Mr. President, Mrs. President, and my fellow astronauts," (Al
Gore at a NASA speech)
Carl Tait
I can now plunge back into Lake Zeno. This discussion is already
so long that I've tried to prune back everything to the major points;
if anything important got left out, please stick it back in.
Also, many thanks to Christof for his lucid comments. It sounds
like he's about 10^97 times more competent to argue the physics side
of this than I am, so I'll stick mostly with the math.
[Justin wrote:]
>>[Carl wrote:]
>>[...] please give me a method for enumerating all the real numbers
>>between 0 and 1.
>
>Nice try. How about I enumerate the non-denumerable portion of the
>transfinite real number continuum between 0 and 1 *if* you start me off
>by telling me what to call the value between 0 and 1 closest to zero?
As strange as it may sound, I find this the single most astonishing thing
you have said. You have no problem with Cantor's notion of different
orders of infinity and you *still* believe Zeno?! Cantor was the
absolute, final, nail-in-the-coffin for Zeno's paradoxes. Every one
of the (very few!) Zenophiles I've run into or heard about has rejected
Cantor's ideas with considerable horror. "There's only one type of
infinity: you know, 1, 2, 3, and so on forever! Anyone who says otherwise
is insane!"
The reason that Cantor's ideas are fatal to Zeno's notions of a "flip book"
universe is that they show *why* you'd run into problems if you tried to
model things Zeno's way: you're leaving out infinitely many data points.
An uncountable infinity of points, in fact. Now there's nothing wrong
with using a simplified model of the world if it makes routine tasks
easier by pushing unnecessary complexity to the side. Even a "flat earth"
model works just fine most of the time -- most of us don't suddenly stop
and think, "Oh, damnation, I forgot the world was round; I'd better
take a different road home today."
There's a *big* problem, however, when the simplified model is used
to "prove" wildly counterintuitive claims -- especially when those
claims evaporate under a more accurate model. The flat earth model
is fine for planning a walk through the park, but it's not a very good
basis for asserting that cities beyond the horizon don't really exist.
"Zeno was concerned with three problems... These are the
problem of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity...
From his to our own day, the finest intellects of each
generation in turn attacked these problems, but achieved
broadly speaking, nothing... Weierstrass, Dedekind, and
Cantor,...have completely solved them. Their solutions...
are so clear as to leave no longer the slightest doubt or
difficulty. This achievement is probably the greatest of
which the age can boast... The problem of the infinitesimal
was solved by Weierstrass, the solution of the other two was
begun by Dedekind and definitely accomplished by Cantor."
-- Bertrand Russell,
in International Monthly, Vol. 4 (1901)
>But [the first derivative] says nothing about what is *happening*
>when elapsed time is exactly zero.
Then you have nothing but a data point: a pair of numbers (x, f(x)).
It's not that motion "stops" within the point, any more than time
"stops" at that moment. Using Zeno's logic, one could just as easily
conclude that *time* is an illusion! (It wouldn't surprise me a whole
lot if he actually did claim this -- or was that left to the competing
school of Onez?) Talking about motion, time, or change of any sort
*within* a single data point is meaningless.
>>>[...] in an instant of non-infinitely small time only a certain
>>>amount of space could conceivably be travelled through in that instant.
>>>Thus, there must be an upper bound to velocity.
>>
>>That's not a valid conclusion. "X is finite" does *not* imply that there
>>is an upper bound on X. For example, every integer consists of a finite
>>number of digits, but there's no upper bound on the number of digits
>>an integer can contain.
>
>To us, it's not a valid conclusion. However, both of Zeno's cosmic models,
Zeno's cosmic models aside, I was responding to what you wrote above.
From comments you made elsewhere, Zeno seems to have fallen into the
same trap at least once. To recap: knowing that a quantity must be
finite does *not* imply it has an upper bound. Ever.
>If time is infinitely divisible, then if one is at rest in one instant
>and in the next instant is moving,
What is this "next instant" stuff? Points can be sequenced
only in countable infinities -- and sometimes not even then
(e.g., rational numbers).
>What you are describing is the finite sum of a geometric series. The
>analogy in physical terms would be a photon or some type of particle
>bouncing off a series of mirrors alternating on the floor and ceiling
>in a long hallway which has the ceiling and floor slowly converging.
>The end of the hallway represents the final sum of the convergence of
>the geometric series. Therefore, since the sum is finite the photon
>must eventually emerge at this sum. So which way will the photon be
>traveling after hitting the last mirror, up or down?
This is an entertaining paradox usually called "Thompson's Lamp."
You turn a lamp on at one minute to midnight, off at 30 seconds
to midnight, on at 1/4 minute, off at 1/8, and so on. Is the lamp
on or off at midnight?
You can also phrase the problem in a purely abstract way. The
terms of the series 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32... have denominators
that end with the repetitive sequence of digits 2, 4, 8, 6, 2, ....
When you sum the series, what is the final digit of the last
denominator just before the sum finally reaches 1?
The abstract statement reveals the hidden problem most clearly:
there is no "last term" in an infinite series; trying to determine
its attributes is pointless. This doesn't mean that such series
are useless or self-contradictory or (heaven help us) illusory;
it's just that certain seemingly basic questions have no meaning
in that context.
>The photon must
>eventually emerge, and the direction in which it would be traveling
>would be dictated by the last mirror it hit. But there is no "last
>mirror" in a geometric series,
Right!
>so there is no rational or logical way
>for the photon to reach "the other side" of the converged hallway or
>escape from the mirrors.
Wrong! Suppose the hall is one mile long and the photon is moving at
the (ludicrously slow) speed of one mile per hour. If the mirrors in
the hall follow the series 1/2^N, the photon will hit the first mirror
in 1/2 hour, the second 1/4 of an hour later, the third 1/8 hour after
that, and so on. The photon will emerge from the hall after exactly
one hour, cheerfully unaware it has done anything spectacular. It is
possible -- even trivial -- to perform an infinite number of tasks in
a finite amount of time, provided that the time required for each task
grows increasingly tiny.
But is the last mirror up or down? Is the lamp on or off?
Is the last digit 2, 4, 8, or 6? As reasonable as those questions sound,
they're all meaningless, since they're isomorphic with querying the
attributes of the mythical "last term" of an infinite series. (If you
don't believe me, just write the numbers on the mirrors and ask the
photon to tell you the last one it saw.)
(There are even stranger cases where the *sum* of the series is undefined:
what's the sum of 1+1-1+1-1+1-... ?)
A quick comment on Zeno's stadium paradox (two lines of people moving
in opposite directions while observed by a third party standing in place):
I don't see this as a paradox at all. It's just an interesting observation
on how one's frame of reference affects perceived speed. It's not that
mystical changes are being wrought in the space-time continuum; the
statement that "N the time is equal to 1/M the time" is just a comment
on the various speeds that the lines of people appear to move from
different perspectives.
Postscript: I ran across an old list of Stephen Wright jokes,
several of which were on-topic for this off-topic thread:
On Justin's fictional discussion with the policeman:
*
I was going 70 miles an hour and got stopped by a cop who said, "Do you
know the speed limit is 55 miles per hour?" "Yes, officer, but I wasn't
going to be out that long."
*
I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights,
so it looks like I'm the only one moving.
On the nature of time:
*
I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time."
So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
*
I put instant coffee in a microwave oven and almost went back in time.
On causality:
*
Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?
*
I was going to tape some records onto a cassette, but I got the wires
backwards. I erased all of the records.
On twisted semantics:
*
At the all-you-can-eat barbecue, you have to pay the regular
dinner price if you eat less than you can.
*
It takes money to make money because you have to copy the design exactly.
*
I bought a dog the other day... I named him Stay. It's fun to call
him... "Come here, Stay! Come here, Stay!" He went insane.
Chris Aher
Larry Fletcher <larryin...@aol.comnojunk> wrote
>
> By the way - what button did you push to print so big?
>
Damned if I know! What is printing so big?
Regards,
Chris
Larry Fletcher
>
>Regards,
>Chris
>
Hi Chris,
When I read your post, the first paragraph was normal sized. After that, it was
in *huge* letters and in a rust color (the best I remember).
LEC
Hmmm, you might want to see a neurologist about that. Or perhaps Justin can
work a little of that treppaning magic on you ;-)
(I haven't seen anything unusual, but there's all sorts of ways to embed
formatting in messages and maybe your mail agent is more perceptive than
others) (Or maybe, you are like those people who see color in musical notes,
just that it's Usenet notes instead)
<snip>
Hi Chris,
>
>When I read your post, the first paragraph was normal sized. After that, it
was
>in *huge* letters and in a rust color (the best I remember).
>
>
>Larry Fletcher
<snip>
Dwain Lee
Story Sheet Music, and passing it by. Finally, I knew that it had been
active way too long to still be the same discussion, and expanded the whole
thread...geez, what I've been missing!
Dwain
Chris Aher
I don't think that I did anything special on this end. I suspect some AOL
strangeness on your end. Or maybe Yogi has performed some voodoo. ;)
<just kidding>
Regards,
Chris
Larry Fletcher <larryin...@aol.comnojunk> wrote in message
news:20000805113816...@ng-ci1.aol.com...
> > What is printing so big?
> >
> >Regards,
> >Chris
> >
>
> Hi Chris,
>
> When I read your post, the first paragraph was normal sized. After that,
it was
> in *huge* letters and in a rust color (the best I remember).
>
>
> Larry Fletcher
Larry Fletcher
>just that it's Usenet notes instead)
Would you call that "perfect vision"?
Seriously, it did come up as big colored letters. Must have been an AOL thing.
Larry Fletcher
Pianos Inc
Atlanta GA
Doing the work of three men.........Larry, Moe, and Curly
Yogi Panda
Not me, Erica Glue did it ... Yogi ;)
Christof Pflumm
> > You own a Samick, no?
>
> That was mean...
Really didn't want to be mean >;-)
But seriously, I really hope you'll be able to get a piano that you
like someday!
> You own a Schimmel ? Is yours bigger ?
No, I'm one of those pseudo-piano players. I only own a digital (Kawai
MP9000), though I hope I'll buy a nice Schimmel or something similar
one day. But my income is not that big yet :(
Bye,
Christof
Radu Focshaner
> But seriously, I really hope you'll be able to get a piano that you
> like someday!
As I already said, I had a german J.L.Duysen as a kid and until my
SAMICK I wasn't aware that pianos can be bad.
Radu
LstPuritan
>PS Justin, I've been listening to your CD during my commute. I particularly
>like the "Strange Attractors" piece. BTW, did you know Jana Silverman at
>NYU?
Oh, thanks... The fifth and sixth fractal pieces were a combination of the
things I was just starting to find in music in the pieces that came before. On
their own, 1-4 are pretty experimentally successful but not entirely what I
wanted.
The first one I wrote was entirely sequenced and calculated by hand with a
whole lot of graph paper. Nothing new: just 'birdsong' self-similarity that
existed before anyone knew what they were doing and what it meant. Turns out
that in Bach's inventions, sinfonias, and fugues, one may explain the music in
fractal terms; in fact, fractals _approach_ predicting Bach's music.
Webern's music actually IS a fractal sometimes, were it possible to extend
patterns to infinity. He knew it intuitively, but I don't know where the quote
is...
The next three pieces explored some single way of using simple tasks executed
over and over until it comes close to "chaotically" predicting a very definite
system. If the variables are chosen carefully, and a logical way is found to
allow for slight deviations, the patterns in sound can adhere to any certain
harmonic scheme you want and approach any level of complexity you want and have
any level or no level of chaos. I'll write more later since Jon and Carl (And
maybe Christof) were interested in the subject.
There are a lot of compelling fractal *graphics* that most everyone knows
about, but to get those pictures to look the way they do takes a lot of
planning and understanding and, with chaos, eventually intuition. I only had
some degree of intuition in the 5th (the one you liked) and the 6th pieces.
Both are Mandelbrot-based, which is still the most famous and debated by the
rather obsessed fractal people out there. Hear the high violin that repeats a
note at intervals? That is why the piece is called "Strange Attractors." A
"Black Hole" seen when you increase the scale factor enough (10x?
1000000000x?). Everything is drawn toward void, but not all iterations will
necessarily be close enough to the "launch pad of fractal death" to actually be
pulled in, at which point something moving in rational patterns may launch to
infinity instantly and die: escape velocity. Since there is no scale,
depending upon how close the first iteration coordinates for a given iteration
constant is to the "event horizon of the black hole" (infinitely close is
possible...) the expected values become less and less predictable.
The violin part was iterating just close enough to that place so that chaos
kicked in, but only during successively proportional intervals. Like drawing a
spiral, but every time you get to, say, the point closest to the top of the
page, your pencil jumped out of your hand and made part of the top of the
spiral OFF THE PAGE and then returned to your hand until you got to the next
top of the smaller spiral part.
The balance between fully controlling music and using chaos to emerge as
patterns in music is why fractal music interests me. When you hear the 5th and
6th pieces, do you think it sounds like computer music? Could a human have
done it alone? What about the tonality, or lack of?
The 6th piece added a z coordinate, creating an object, and then I slowed
everything down to time-slices and used those to create a 4th spacial
dimension. After watching time slices from different angles outside the set,
by watching the object in iteration from different reference points, I derived
a single relationship of variables that for all iterations from ALL outside
reference points, differed only by a scale converging to zero. When
approaching zero variance, as the fractal is _actually_ iterating coordinates
in four *4* spacial dimensions, as viewed from certain places is 4 dimensional
space, I created:
Theme and variations, microtonally, with subvariations approaching infinity as
the initial starting point iterates and generates new iterations for each point
of rest. The complexity is determined by how many iterations you want before
telling time to stop and everything to stop moving. Slice by slice of time,
from start time to stop time, that's the piece "Microtonal Iteration." It
named itself.
Oh yeah... I don't know that person at NYU.
Better fractal explanation soon. That didn't say much.
Here: Paradoxes were to get CHRISTOF to not say that a function may be a model
of a given system, but other functions produce the same model. BUT the given
system may just be a way to represent one way the function is correct, but
other models may represent the function equally well.
So... when all the variables remain the same for a fractal--
It could be modeled as computer art.
Or music.
Or a rock formation.
Or a cloud.
etc.
The thing is: you can tell that they are the same.
Everything carried out in the same manner, the music sounds like the rocks
look.
And the rocks look like the flat computer art.
Piano Pian Pia Pi P Pi Pia Pian Piano
LstPuritan
>>Just because the SWIRTO/AHBL factor adds additional boundary conditions
>to
>>your personal equation doesn't mean that your approach to the subject (in
>>theory, of course!) isn't fundamentally Engineering as opposed to
>>Mathematical, does it?
>>
>
>Well, in situations like this my reactions would tend to be poorly planned
>and
>not very structured, but my actions would be very calculated. (just kidding)
Well:
If the "end result" is not very far, like one, it is perfectly reasonable to
say: "It may have seemed like one, but it actually took an infinite amount of
time to finish and get to this one. We should rejoice in the paradoxical
reality that I'm here; logically, because I'm here and finished when I should
still be going approaching finishing, I will always finish and reach the end
although you can't logically ever finish because to you, the end will forever
be approaching but never reached until I am already there."
Wait, what were you guys talking about? Math, right? Me too.
Everyone talks to turtles.
LstPuritan
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
> >>Honegger?
>> Never heard it before.
>How can you speak about 20th century music and know so few of its greatest
>composers?
lol
<snip>
<snip
>>I know that Ravel will never be eclipsed by Debussy... they are diametrical
>opposites.
Yet stole music music from each other and then argued about who had the idea
first.
lol
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
<snip>
>> >And WHY exactly would Hindemith become an obscure footnote in history?
>> I'll e-mail you, if you like, a previous post I wrote about why Hindemith
>> wasn't known, isn't known, and won't probably be know. Simply erased
>from
>> history.
>
>Well, from the rest of your post, I understand why he isn't known by you...
>He's pretty well known in the musical circles I move in. As well as heartily
>appreciated.
I've studied and played Hindemith.
Your musical circles may appreciate Hindemith, but if they believe he was
influencial or significant, they are wrong. He was in direct competition with
Schoenberg, and Hindemith lost. Do you remember his "Equation" which proved
that his music's tonality would be the model for future composers?
Neither does the world.
LstPuritan
>> 1. Infinite acceleration.
>
>That's no way because it's impossible.
I know.
>> 2. Acceleration by continuous function everywhere two-times
>> differentiable.
>
>Continous is not necessary.
Acceleration would have to be definable for any value between rest and
velocity.
>Ever heard about Quantum Mechanics? There are other ways. He could
>make his probability amplitude to have a peak somewhere else and then
>have his position measured.
>> If you are anywhere other than at the computer, then the fact is
>> that you never wrote this message. When t was approaching the 0
>> which is your "now," it must have bounced off rmmp before
>> determining with more precision where you are physically.
>
>There is no uncertainty relation between position and time!
Jokes, on the other hand, apparently are uncertain regardless of position and
time.
>> [snip]
>
>You make my head spin. I need a rest without movement after this post.
Snip doesn't make it go away. ; }
>> This subject has applications in musc (fractal, generative,
>> stochastic) and that is interesting.
>
>Can you explain this? I can't imagine how to use fractals for
>music. How do you transform those numbers into sound?
Sound, landscapes, computer art, music, numbers.
All the same. See other Fractal Music thread.
>> [snip] these words may appear to move at twice the speed of light.
>
>No.
>
>> Everyone set your clocks after reading this thread.
>
>Doesn't work. Everyone would have to be at the same spot for this to
>make sense.
>
>> Otherwise, you might not realize that you read this post yesterday,
>> earlier today, or perhaps tomorrow.
>
>I look at the date of the posts and compare it to my watch. Is that
>wrong?
You need rest.
>Depends if contents is approaching a finite value or if it becomes
>infinite.
1/2+1/4+1/8........ = 1 = infinity. We went over this. c and Aleph.
>> call the value between 0 and 1 closest to zero?
>
>Doesn't exist. Neither in the real nor in the rational numbers.
This is absolutely vital. Newton called this number infinitesimal. However,
infinitesimal=0. Einstein called Newton's bluff.
Newton knew this. He lied. He was also insane and a con man.
>> If time is infinitely divisible,
>
>Then there are no distinguishable instants.
Sounds just like reality, and Einstein.
I guess God didn't give math based on discrete instants to Moses, who gave it
to the Egyptians, who hid it in Hyroglyphs until Pythagoras discovered it,
veiled it under false teachings which Newton discovered when he changed himself
into gold and talked to Zeus in the Sun to make sure Newton was correct.
That's what Newton said.
>> then if one is at rest in one instant and in the next instant is
>> moving, then the closer one gets to a time increment near zero, no
>> matter what the velocity, the *acceleration* during the interval
>> from non-motion to motion would near infinity.
>
>No. Only if you have a non differentiable velocity.
Regardless, if the next instant is infinitesimal, acceleration from nothing to
something in non-continuous time needs infinite velocity. But there is no
infinitesimal, as Newton was wrong. Oh wait, he proved he was right:
"That all matter consists of atoms so small as to witness the very seperation
between time was a very ancient secret. This was the teaching of those who
preceded Aristotle, namely Epicurus, Democritus, Ecphantus, Empedocles,
Zenocrates, Heraclides, Asclepiades, Diodorus, Metrodorus of Chios, Pythagoras,
and the nameless mystics I encountered before the Trojan War, who explained the
tradition of the monads. For the mysteries of numbers equally with the rest of
the hidden tradition had regard to the transcendent philosophy."
Am I the only one hearing spooky music? I'll leave out Newton's
self-transmutation into an atom.
>> This post is a logarithmic function.
>
>So your writing velocity goes like -1/x. You can write backwards in
>time! Do you always start writing at the end of your posts? And you
>begin at infinite typing speed! That's fascinating! I know a guy who
>can write as you see it in a mirror. But writing end to beginning,
>that's a whole new world :)
What are you talking about? Oh, the above quote. I also read bottom to top.
LstPuritan
>After a long-awaited project review (which went well, happily),
>I can now plunge back into Lake Zeno. This discussion is already
>so long that I've tried to prune back everything to the major points;
>if anything important got left out, please stick it back in.
>
>Also, many thanks to Christof for his lucid comments. It sounds
>like he's about 10^97 times more competent to argue the physics side
>of this than I am, so I'll stick mostly with the math.
Welcome back. Christof didn't know what instantaneous velocity was, and claims
the fundamental basis of Newtonian law was NOT discrete instants. I worry
about him.
We're on to fractal music, in another thread, BTW, but my fractional relativity
has no audience in the other "metaphorical" thread. Oh well. I shall explain
any of the metaphors, but the point is to get them by thinking in unnormal
ways. Being told makes them seem trivial and easy, in sight but not seen until
getting rid of a blind spot.
>>>[...] please give me a method for enumerating all the real numbers
>>>between 0 and 1.
>>
>>Nice try. How about I enumerate the non-denumerable portion of the
>>transfinite real number continuum between 0 and 1 *if* you start me off
>>by telling me what to call the value between 0 and 1 closest to zero?
>
>As strange as it may sound, I find this the single most astonishing thing
>you have said. You have no problem with Cantor's notion of different
>orders of infinity and you *still* believe Zeno?!
This was also the first thing I said that was my thinking, and not trying to
explain to Christof why Zeno's Paradoxes were paradoxes. I don't believe Zeno;
but I understand why he would have problems like the infinite series "reaching"
one but "adding" forever. There are many orders of infinity. How could a
fractal have no size yet the Mandelbrot set never reaches a distance further
than 2 away from the origin? An image on a plane with depth? Of course. Take
it another step and you have a Mandelbrot solid iterated to infinity. Zeno was
just a good early observer of the physical world. And proves a lot of Newton
wrong.
>Cantor was the
>absolute, final, nail-in-the-coffin for Zeno's paradoxes. Every one
>of the (very few!) Zenophiles I've run into or heard about has rejected
>Cantor's ideas with considerable horror. "There's only one type of
>infinity: you know, 1, 2, 3, and so on forever! Anyone who says otherwise
>is insane!"
No Zenophile here. Relativity in a diffusion fractal states that the constant
is the speed of diffusion, so many things may travel faster than the speed of
light and mass distribution prevents horizon clusters. No one believes me, of
course, but it works; even if my reasoning was wrong. For some, if an equation
works, end of story. I'm already talking about the music, so this kind of
thinking is not too helpful. I do like Cantor, though.
>The reason that Cantor's ideas are fatal to Zeno's notions of a "flip book"
>universe is that they show *why* you'd run into problems if you tried to
>model things Zeno's way: you're leaving out infinitely many data points.
>An uncountable infinity of points, in fact. Now there's nothing wrong
>with using a simplified model of the world if it makes routine tasks
>easier by pushing unnecessary complexity to the side.
>Even a "flat earth"
>model works just fine most of the time -- most of us don't suddenly stop
>and think, "Oh, damnation, I forgot the world was round; I'd better
>take a different road home today."
Pushing everything aside except for what works in three dimensional space and
never wondering why is fine if you're working at a nuclear plant and don't have
time to say "hmm... this place is gonna blow in 5 minutes, but that old Greek
says that it can't happen because of something about turtles. What should I
do?" But if fractional relativity involves differentiation and integration
depending on the value of the dimension, and c is not the speed of light, it
takes more than number crunching to understand N=c/r^D as the basis of an
infinite number of accurate constructions of music, dazzling graphics, cracks
in sidewalks, car traffic, brain activity, etc... there's no more saying "it
just works."
>>But [the first derivative] says nothing about what is *happening*
>>when elapsed time is exactly zero.
>
>Then you have nothing but a data point: a pair of numbers (x, f(x)).
>It's not that motion "stops" within the point, any more than time
>"stops" at that moment. Using Zeno's logic, one could just as easily
>conclude that *time* is an illusion! (It wouldn't surprise me a whole
>lot if he actually did claim this -- or was that left to the competing
>school of Onez?) Talking about motion, time, or change of any sort
>*within* a single data point is meaningless.
But with special relativity one may place information like velocity or
acceleration within a single data point on an object which destroys the faith
needed to believe Newton, and Christof: that things just "jump around" and how
they got there is meaningless as long as it conforms to the math. That was my
point.
>Zeno's cosmic models aside, I was responding to what you wrote above.
>From comments you made elsewhere, Zeno seems to have fallen into the
>same trap at least once. To recap: knowing that a quantity must be
>finite does *not* imply it has an upper bound. Ever.
What I wrote above was about Zeno. I know that. His paradoxes were not so
easily resolved, yet Christof thinks they are trivial and "it just does." Of
course, a paradox resolved is not a paradox, and THAT is a paradox. ; )
>>If time is infinitely divisible, then if one is at rest in one instant
>>and in the next instant is moving,
>
>What is this "next instant" stuff? Points can be sequenced
>only in countable infinities -- and sometimes not even then
>(e.g., rational numbers).
Newton based everything on the infinitesimal next instant. But nothing is
infinitesimal, and even the next value after zero can be shown to equal zero by
eliminating the repeatings in .9999999(repeating) through multiplication twice
and subtraction (you know the method): what you get is 1-.999999999(repeat)
9-9=0.
>The abstract statement reveals the hidden problem most clearly:
>there is no "last term" in an infinite series; trying to determine
>its attributes is pointless. This doesn't mean that such series
>are useless or self-contradictory or (heaven help us) illusory;
>it's just that certain seemingly basic questions have no meaning
>in that context.
At some point, enough is enough, and you just say it's close enough. But in
Mandelbrot iteration, enough is never enough, as even converging is very
meaningful when scale is taken to an enormous level.
>Wrong! Suppose the hall is one mile long and the photon is moving at
>the (ludicrously slow) speed of one mile per hour. If the mirrors in
>the hall follow the series 1/2^N, the photon will hit the first mirror
>in 1/2 hour, the second 1/4 of an hour later, the third 1/8 hour after
>that, and so on. The photon will emerge from the hall after exactly
>one hour, cheerfully unaware it has done anything spectacular. It is
>possible -- even trivial -- to perform an infinite number of tasks in
>a finite amount of time, provided that the time required for each task
>grows increasingly tiny.
If it's a photon, of course, we have a whole other set of problems....
>But is the last mirror up or down? Is the lamp on or off?
>Is the last digit 2, 4, 8, or 6? As reasonable as those questions sound,
>they're all meaningless, since they're isomorphic with querying the
>attributes of the mythical "last term" of an infinite series. (If you
>don't believe me, just write the numbers on the mirrors and ask the
>photon to tell you the last one it saw.)
>
>(There are even stranger cases where the *sum* of the series is undefined:
>what's the sum of 1+1-1+1-1+1-... ?)
What about the right triangle with two sides with length one? What is the
third side? Not what it looks like on a graph. There are strange cases...
>Postscript: I ran across an old list of Stephen Wright jokes,
>several of which were on-topic for this off-topic thread:
Thanks... the one I always liked was "Why isn't the word phonetic spelled like
it sounds?"
Are we on to math and music, if Christof stops warping around space to wherever
the equations say he should be? I don't know if he believes in fractals yet.
Brief outline of math and music:
--Pythagoras, cosmic scale; Euclid, human scale
--Bach, Byrd, Haydn, Early Mozart, etc. Absolute music, mostly contrapuntal.
Cosmic.
--Newton and his deceiving the world with the discrete instant. In other
words, Vertical harmony in the instant takes priority because continuity of
horizontal time and music is not relevant. Cosmic narrows.
--Romanticism (in several parts)
--Early Revisionist Romantic Hermetic Bach-cults try to save Bach by likening
him to Euclid to avoid the so-called "Romantic Paradox." Cosmic narrows to
human.
--Middle Romantic: Goethe epitomizes Bach as the ultimate Romantic whose
perfection needed no sensory input; like thought exercises for the elite few.
Performers of Bach are deified, Bach is deified, Composers are deified, "The
Artist as God class" is born." Human narrows to SELECT human.
--Beethoven retitles "Buonaparte" to "Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare
il suovenire di un grand' uomo" and narrows select human to A human; Beethoven
begins the destruction of the Western Musical Tradition.
--Wagner can only save music by alluding back to the cosmic with such scope
that he plans to phase music out so that it may be rebuilt after his life.
Grand drama based on mythology. Individual elitism grows a bit to elitism of
the concert hall: "music is not for everyone, nor everyone for music." Musical
snobbery, but music expanding *without* relativity. Artist's mass is subject
to Newtonian Gravity.
--Late Romantics: Mahler's 9th symphony reaches the ridiculous bounds of
overwhelming sound. Romanticism is calamity. The musical calvinism and
snobbery of the Romantic had reached its end. Composer and performer's ego had
filled the entire cosmos, and if the entire cosmos is the ego, there is nothing
more to yearn for; impossible to transcend a universe defined by the self. And
no exit because the GOD artist sucked up every bit of space and time was up.
Music is on no scale... almost dead.
--1905/1906: Last Romantic/Revolution. 1905 Special Relativity brings back
continuous time and abrogates the lies of Newton; HORIZONTAL! COUNTERPOINT!
UNIFICATION OF SPACE AND TIME! DESTRUCTION OF VERTICAL NEWTONIAN KEY
SIGNATURES! NUMBERS! Music may be saved but still subject to the "Romantic
Paradox" whereby no matter what the composer does, he cannot be a composer.
1906 Schoenberg Kammersymphonie 1, op.1. "Tonality does not serve: it must be
served." Harmony=melody Space=Time all continuous and not Newton's discrete.
Einstein fits events into nonexistant instants and Webern fits the bare
relevant music in the shortest time possible. Berg serialises time to contract
with relation to the constant row.
--Modern: Hindemith defends Newton and tonality with Die Harmonie der Welt to
compete with Moses and Aron, but loses. Hindemith, last tonal proponent, dies.
Stravinsky, Cage, Krenek, Berg, Webern continue Schoenberg and Einstein's
work. Prokofiev, Bartok treat the piano as truly percussive... quantum music
with uncertainty over time but mean probability intact.
--Now: Although music was freed from expansion, Fame of artists has not.
Avant Garde fails, distance between performer and artist is irreconcilable.
Search for unified field theory and search for unified Jazz/Classical/Popular;
to play or write "classically" is snobbery... to perform is to hate to
public... to create new ideas is egotistical and arrogant... to do nothing at
all is selfish.... To write music for pure music is ecstatic joy and musical
calvinism.... The idea of the Artist and Public is so hated that composing
"classically" is no longer ever a living. Chaos in Avant Garde, strange
subatomic behavior: John Cage 4'33", too silent to hear yet subject to random
and strange sounds from offstage. The Renaissance manner of thought is no
longer possible as all of music history is now Romantic. Being a model
Pythagorean is needed for cosmic music, but pure music deifies the composer as
hermetic, and Euclidian music is to shun society.
The epitome and height of egotistic separation of "artist as god" against
"public as servant" also illustrating the Romantic quest for glory encompassing
the entire universe and leaving nothing but emptiness inside is alive today in
rmmp, in the form of the following poem on the hypothetical webpage of
"someone" attempting to transcend that which has already been all-encompassed
by musical elitism combined with sorrowful yearnings to be greater than the
imagined greatest already thought acheived:
"Trapped in the cage of my own personality, I feel an urgent and personal need
to communicate through music, which liberates me and stops the inner dialogue.
In music I find the self of which I can be conscious only in performance, when
consciousness expands. I work out my destiny onstage. The destiny is mediated
by notes. I must perform so they are transparent to the music. And the music
must be transparent to the emotion. In performance, I have been conscious at
times of neither notes nor music, but only of being a locus of activity, a
streambed for a torrent of feeling. I am greedy to spend all possible time
like this. Everything of which I can normally be conscious must be mastered to
clear the way for the magic which appears only in performance. From the hidden
source of musical ideas, deepest feelings, magic visions beyond words, comes
the call to voyage; and I must be ready." Hypothetical Bames Joyk from
hypothetical webpage of hypothetical TalCech.
-Trapped in personality=Ego fills the universe
-Personal need to communicate=Human-elite calvinistic scale. Music is to be
"granted" to others.
-Liberates and stops the inner dialogue=Feeling the eyes of others removes
being alone as Artist God.
-Finding self in music=Hermetic interpretation of Pythagoras as Euclid.
-Only conscious in performance=Further inclusion of music as performance
history, not pure ecstatic music. Fleeting joy.
-Conscious expands=Becoming more like God and hating the public.
-Destiny mediated by notes=Must perform notes to reach fame
-Conscious of neither notes nor music=anthrocentricity, disregard for public
but striving for the way the public makes him feel. Paradox.
-Being a locus of activity=containing all atoms of the cosmos, ruling over the
self which encompasses all.
-A streambed for a torrent of feeling=Goethe; streambed has no senses; to feel,
and move the feelings in a "torrent," it must transcend all consciousness with
NO performance or sound. Pure music experience.
-Greedy for doing that=Guilt for having to disregard and forget music to feel
good in performance, hatred and love for audience. Must rule over them, but
must please them. Wish for pure music experience; carnal need for the "fix" of
public.
-Clearing the normal for magic in performance=Nietzsche-the masses (audience)
is needed only so that certan men may destroy and rise above them to a superior
level-he called this the passage by will to power, ready to sacrifice the
masses to become the UBERMENSCH.
-From the hidden source=Hermetic secret knowledge available to the chosen.
-Deepest feelings=Interpretation through feeling overtakes wishes of composer.
-Magic visions beyond words=Kant's inability to reconcile aesthetic philosophy:
"Purposiveness without purpose giving...Admiration and awe filling the starry
heavens and the moral law within." -Foundation of Metaphysics. The inability
to satisfy self and others at once. Allusions to Kant's manner of recognizing
things in themselves, and a priori Gifts.
-Comes the call to voyage, and I must be ready: Hegel; that which is moral is
that most pleasing to all. Magic is fleeting and explained by trickery, like
performance pride. A seemingly noble task but personally unfulfilling and
expressing unsurpassable creative self-criticism.
I couldn't have written a better poem illustrating the Romantic Paradox.
Thanks.
T.S. Eliot says "The end of all of our exploring is to arrive where we
started." With Romanticism all-encompassing, the return to Pythagoras seems
impossible without letting music just die and start anew. Maybe it happened or
maybe it is happening now or not yet...
Pythagoras... Renaissance.... 12-tone... serial... FRACTAL?
One of the favorite pictures I own is Einstein and Schoenberg standing together
at Carnegie Hall on April 1, 1934. Neither of them are looking at the camera.
I think they are looking at camera we may not even see.
M.R.E.
"LstPuritan" <lstpu...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20000807161810...@ng-ch1.aol.com...
I didn't realize that I was in the presense of divine inspiration... the
ultimate answers to all musicians' questions... the absolute truth about all
things musical.
BTW, you may think you know the truth about the whole Ravel/Debussy thing...
guess what? You don't.
Christof Pflumm
lstpu...@aol.com (LstPuritan) writes:
>>> 2. Acceleration by continuous function everywhere two-times
>>> differentiable.
>>
>> Continous is not necessary.
>
> Acceleration would have to be definable for any value between rest and
> velocity.
I think we've got a simple misunderstanding here. With continuous I
meant the mathematical property of a function that the limit when
approaching a point from left or right is the same.
>> There is no uncertainty relation between position and time!
>
> Jokes, on the other hand, apparently are uncertain regardless of
> position and time.
Especially when they are about science...
>> You make my head spin. I need a rest without movement after this
>> post.
>
> Snip doesn't make it go away. ; }
But it helps! Snip, snip, snip...
> You need rest.
Who doesn't need that?
>> Depends if contents is approaching a finite value or if it becomes
>> infinite.
>
> 1/2+1/4+1/8........ = 1 = infinity. We went over this. c and
> Aleph.
1 = infinity. What kind of mathematics are you using? Is this a joke?
>>> call the value between 0 and 1 closest to zero?
>>
>> Doesn't exist. Neither in the real nor in the rational numbers.
>
> This is absolutely vital.
I really can't see what you would need it for.
> Newton called this number infinitesimal. However, infinitesimal=0.
The infinitesimal is not the correct way to define calculus in a
concise manner. Normally, it works to use infinitesimals (that's all
that dx stuff), but it is not the way one learns calculus.
> Einstein called Newton's bluff. Newton knew this. He lied. He was
> also insane and a con man.
He invented a mathematical tool that was later proven to be
mathematically correct. That's quite common in physics. Rigorous
mathematics is too slow sometimes.
>>> If time is infinitely divisible,
>>
>> Then there are no distinguishable instants.
>
> Sounds just like reality, and Einstein.
Relativity is based on continuous (vs. discrete) time and space. But
it is only a model and we don't know yet if space or time is
quantized. Might be or not, who knows?
> [snip]
> That's what Newton said.
I have to admit that I don't know what Newton actually said. I only
know his theory of mechanics and it works pretty good when velocities
are not to big and distances are not too small.
>>> then if one is at rest in one instant and in the next instant is
>>> moving, then the closer one gets to a time increment near zero, no
>>> matter what the velocity, the *acceleration* during the interval
>>> from non-motion to motion would near infinity.
>>
>> No. Only if you have a non differentiable velocity.
>
> Regardless, if the next instant is infinitesimal, acceleration from
> nothing to something in non-continuous time needs infinite velocity.
But the whole point is that you don't stop at some small number. You
take the limit as you approach zero! And what you wrote need not be (I
assume you switched accelaration and velocity by mistake at the end of
the sentence): If you accelerate to infinitesimal velocity in
inifinitesimal time, accelaration can be finite. But always remember
that the infinitesimals are not the way one does calculus nowadays.
> Am I the only one hearing spooky music?
Jon seems to be another one.
> I'll leave out Newton's self-transmutation into an atom.
Sounds good as title for a piece! How about using mechanics to make
music? Movement in phase space is quite interesting (Phase space for a
particle in one dimension would be using the particle's position as
x axis, it's momentum (relates to velocity) as y and time as the
parameter of the curve).
> What are you talking about? Oh, the above quote. I also read
> bottom to top.
I have to write some code for my newsreader that turns my posts upside
down when I reply to you ;)
Bye,
Christof
Christof Pflumm
> Welcome back. Christof didn't know what instantaneous velocity was,
Just because it is not in the standard terminology.
> and claims the fundamental basis of Newtonian law was NOT discrete
> instants.
I prefer the way where Newtonian mechanics is derived from Hamilton's
principle using the Lagrange formalism. Nothing discrete here. As well
as in the whole Newonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics is based on
three axioms. Do you know them?
> I worry about him.
Though I don't know why you worry, thanks for the sympathy.
> We're on to fractal music, in another thread, BTW, but my fractional
> relativity has no audience in the other "metaphorical" thread.
Well, I'd like to hear about it. But state it in a precise, compact
form without philosophy. Otherwise I won't read it.
>> As strange as it may sound, I find this the single most astonishing thing
>> you have said. You have no problem with Cantor's notion of different
>> orders of infinity and you *still* believe Zeno?!
>
> This was also the first thing I said that was my thinking, and not
> trying to explain to Christof why Zeno's Paradoxes were paradoxes.
> I don't believe Zeno; but I understand why he would have problems
> like the infinite series "reaching" one but "adding" forever.
Have you ever really tried to learn calculus? I mean, starting from
point zero with the simple axioms and then working all the way up to
differentiation, integration and all that stuff? I somehow never had
"problems" with these things (I had problems understanding some of the
things, but not with the concepts). Mathematics is strictly
thinking. Nothing that can be observed or relates to reality can
interfere with mathematics.
> There are many orders of infinity. How could a fractal have no size
Why should it have no size? I'm quite sure the area of a Mandelbrot
set can be defined quite fine.
> yet the Mandelbrot set never reaches a distance further than 2 away
> from the origin?
IMO, no problem. I don't know why you have a problem with such things.
> An image on a plane with depth? Of course.
A plane has no depth. By definition. So what do you mean with that
statement?
> Take it another step and you have a Mandelbrot solid iterated to
> infinity. Zeno was just a good early observer of the physical
> world. And proves a lot of Newton wrong.
Newton is wrong. But there's no problem with this. Einstein is also
wrong. Quantum mechanics is wrong. A theory is never correct. That's
not a requirement. It has to work. Of course, if you use mathematics
as a tool to formulate a theory, it has to be mathematically correct.
> No Zenophile here. Relativity in a diffusion fractal states that
> the constant is the speed of diffusion, so many things may travel
> faster than the speed of light and mass distribution prevents
> horizon clusters. No one believes me, of course, but it works; even
> if my reasoning was wrong.
Depends on what you want to do. I can only say something that is the
final test for a physic theory: Can it be tested empirically? If not,
it's worth NOTHING physically. Another thought: If the theory doesn't
predict something new, it has to be very much easier than the existing
theories, otherwise, it's useless.
> For some, if an equation works, end of story. I'm already talking
> about the music, so this kind of thinking is not too helpful. I do
> like Cantor, though.
So if I understand you correctly, you try to understand why your
equations (whatever they might be) work.
> But if fractional relativity involves differentiation and
> integration depending on the value of the dimension, and c is not
> the speed of light, it takes more than number crunching to
> understand N=c/r^D as the basis of an infinite number of accurate
> constructions of music, dazzling graphics, cracks in sidewalks, car
> traffic, brain activity, etc... there's no more saying "it just
> works."
You really say that you can explain brain activity? Sorry I have to
say this, but if you are REALLY believe you can do that, you are
highly arrogant. Tell me how the processing of an image in the brain
works, tell me why some people have problems with rhythm, tell me what
happens if you have to remove parts of the brain because of a tumor
and then show me the experimental evidence for all this. Then show me
how to predict what happens if you remove a part of the brain due to a
tumor. Then show me that what you have predicted is correct within the
error bounds of the experiment and give me a statistic sample that is
big enough. After that, I will perhaps not call you arrogant but a
genius.
>> Then you have nothing but a data point: a pair of numbers (x, f(x)).
>> It's not that motion "stops" within the point, any more than time
>> "stops" at that moment. Using Zeno's logic, one could just as easily
>> conclude that *time* is an illusion! (It wouldn't surprise me a whole
>> lot if he actually did claim this -- or was that left to the competing
>> school of Onez?) Talking about motion, time, or change of any sort
>> *within* a single data point is meaningless.
>
> But with special relativity one may place information like velocity
> or acceleration within a single data point on an object which
> destroys the faith needed to believe Newton,
You don't put acceleration or something "in a data point". You take
all the coordinates and momenta of your system, and that's it. That
describes your system. Whether you have one point particle or an
extended deformable body, the principle is always the same.
> and Christof: that things just "jump around" and how they got there
> is meaningless as long as it conforms to the math. That was my
> point.
So we agree here?
> What I wrote above was about Zeno. I know that. His paradoxes were
> not so easily resolved, yet Christof thinks they are trivial and "it
> just does."
I was talking about the turtle and the sprinter. There is no paradox
there. I don't know about the other "paradoxes".
> Of course, a paradox resolved is not a paradox, and THAT is a
> paradox. ; )
But then, the paradox has never been one :)
>>> If time is infinitely divisible, then if one is at rest in one instant
>>> and in the next instant is moving,
>>
>> What is this "next instant" stuff? Points can be sequenced
>> only in countable infinities -- and sometimes not even then
>> (e.g., rational numbers).
>
> Newton based everything on the infinitesimal next instant. But
> nothing is infinitesimal, and even the next value after zero can be
> shown to equal zero by eliminating the repeatings in
> .9999999(repeating) through multiplication twice and subtraction
> (you know the method): what you get is 1-.999999999(repeat)
I don't like to say this, but you have to understand mathematics
better. THERE IS NO NEXT VALUE AFTER ZERO IN THE REAL OR RATIONAL
NUMBERS (it's even worse when you deal with complex numbers). If you
use this idea, the conclusions you make are invalid. You could of
course try to use the integers, but you can't do calculus with them.
>> The abstract statement reveals the hidden problem most clearly:
>> there is no "last term" in an infinite series; trying to determine
>> its attributes is pointless. This doesn't mean that such series
>> are useless or self-contradictory or (heaven help us) illusory;
>> it's just that certain seemingly basic questions have no meaning
>> in that context.
>
> At some point, enough is enough, and you just say it's close enough.
Not always. It IS true for example in a physical theory. If I need
something with an error bound of 10^-3, I'll not use a complicated
theory that shows differences with the easier one only at errors
smaller than 10^-10. That's why Newtonian mechanics, though
empirically proven wrong, is still used.
> But in Mandelbrot iteration, enough is never enough, as even
> converging is very meaningful when scale is taken to an enormous
> level.
That's why you need firmly grounded mathematics. But you can (often)
prove whether something converges or not. There are theorems for
infinite series that tell you whether a series converges or not. I
don't know about Mandelbrot sets.
> If it's a photon, of course, we have a whole other set of
> problems....
As a photon would not emerge...
> What about the right triangle with two sides with length one? What
> is the third side?
sqrt(2) (if you mean by "right" having a right angle)
> Not what it looks like on a graph. There are strange cases...
I can't see the strangeness here.
> Are we on to math and music, if Christof stops warping around space
> to wherever the equations say he should be? I don't know if he
> believes in fractals yet.
Why shouldn't I believe in fractals? I can see them, I know vaguely
what they are. I have in some cases even calculated the area of a
fractal (long time ago).
> --Newton and his deceiving the world with the discrete instant.
I still don't understand how you come to this conclusion.
[nice paragraph about music evolution snipped, though I have to admit
that I don't know if the mixing with Einstein and Newton is supposed
to be a joke...]
> "Trapped in the cage of my own personality [snip]
Your interpretation:
> -Trapped in personality=Ego fills the universe [snip]
Is your opinion, of course, and nothing else.
> Pythagoras... Renaissance.... 12-tone... serial... FRACTAL?
Perhaps. And perhaps we'll never know.
Bye,
Christof
LstPuritan
>> Welcome back. Christof didn't know what instantaneous velocity was,
>
>Just because it is not in the standard terminology.
It was Newton's terminology. And has never been called anything different in
any book I've seen.
>> and claims the fundamental basis of Newtonian law was NOT discrete
>> instants.
>
>I prefer the way where Newtonian mechanics is derived from Hamilton's
>principle using the Lagrange formalism. Nothing discrete here. As well
>as in the whole Newonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics is based on
>three axioms. Do you know them?
Quite.
>> We're on to fractal music, in another thread, BTW, but my fractional
>> relativity has no audience in the other "metaphorical" thread.
>
>Well, I'd like to hear about it. But state it in a precise, compact
>form without philosophy. Otherwise I won't read it.
How will you know without reading it? It's written already, though, and very
concise.
>Have you ever really tried to learn calculus? I mean, starting from
>point zero with the simple axioms and then working all the way up to
>differentiation, integration and all that stuff?
Junior Year of High School. I tutor Calculus AP now, as well as physics, and
I'm perfectly capable of just teaching or doing the math.
>I somehow never had
>"problems" with these things (I had problems understanding some of the
>things, but not with the concepts). Mathematics is strictly
>thinking. Nothing that can be observed or relates to reality can
>interfere with mathematics.
That's what Newton said. Before Einstein.
>Why should it have no size? I'm quite sure the area of a Mandelbrot
>set can be defined quite fine.
Mandelbrot never reaches a distance past 2 from the origin. It has an infinite
circumfrence. The area is fixed on the plane. One may zoom in forever and not
just see things magnified, but new things altogether. What is that called?
>> An image on a plane with depth? Of course.
>
>A plane has no depth. By definition. So what do you mean with that
>statement?
What do you think the i means in a + bi? It's an x coordinate, a y coordinate,
and the i coordinate which is projected into imaginary space INTO the plane.
That's what i is. Imaginary number. Square root of -1. A plane with depth.
INFINITE depth.
>Depends on what you want to do. I can only say something that is the
>final test for a physic theory: Can it be tested empirically? If not,
>it's worth NOTHING physically. Another thought: If the theory doesn't
>predict something new, it has to be very much easier than the existing
>theories, otherwise, it's useless.
Are fractals physical?
Science has to evolve backward or else it's useless?
>So if I understand you correctly, you try to understand why your
>equations (whatever they might be) work.
Of course I do. It doesn't mean they are accidents, though.
>You really say that you can explain brain activity? Sorry I have to
>say this, but if you are REALLY believe you can do that, you are
>highly arrogant. Tell me how the processing of an image in the brain
>works, tell me why some people have problems with rhythm, tell me what
>happens if you have to remove parts of the brain because of a tumor
>and then show me the experimental evidence for all this. Then show me
>how to predict what happens if you remove a part of the brain due to a
>tumor. Then show me that what you have predicted is correct within the
>error bounds of the experiment and give me a statistic sample that is
>big enough. After that, I will perhaps not call you arrogant but a
>genius.
I didn't discover it. Other people did.
Spatio-temporal patterns in neural networks.
Hindmarsh-Rose equations for period doubling and bursting of the neurone.
Fractal cell structures.
Neural network coupling and chaos.
Fractal models of multiple channel recordings of massed neural data: EEGs and
the whole brain.
>> and Christof: that things just "jump around" and how they got there
>> is meaningless as long as it conforms to the math. That was my
>> point.
>
>So we agree here?
On one hand, you don't believe in anything that isn't real and observable. On
the other, you believe in warping through space if the math says you should be
somewhere.
Why?
>> What I wrote above was about Zeno. I know that. His paradoxes were
>> not so easily resolved, yet Christof thinks they are trivial and "it
>> just does."
>
>I was talking about the turtle and the sprinter. There is no paradox
>there. I don't know about the other "paradoxes".
Once again, I point to the fact that the Achilles paradox is still widely
debated among physicists. I don't think you resolved the paradox; you just
rejected that it was a paradox. Try searching for articles by physicists today
who still do not agree on how, or whether, it can be resolved.
>> Of course, a paradox resolved is not a paradox, and THAT is a
>> paradox. ; )
>
>But then, the paradox has never been one :)
Which also is a paradox. ; }
>I don't like to say this, but you have to understand mathematics
>better. THERE IS NO NEXT VALUE AFTER ZERO IN THE REAL OR RATIONAL
>NUMBERS
Exactly what I said. There is no infinitesimal. There is no next value after
zero. Do you understand how to eliminate repeating decimals? That's what I
did, to show that there was no next value after zero.
>Not always. It IS true for example in a physical theory. If I need
>something with an error bound of 10^-3, I'll not use a complicated
>theory that shows differences with the easier one only at errors
>smaller than 10^-10. That's why Newtonian mechanics, though
>empirically proven wrong, is still used.
Agreed.
>That's why you need firmly grounded mathematics. But you can (often)
>prove whether something converges or not. There are theorems for
>infinite series that tell you whether a series converges or not. I
>don't know about Mandelbrot sets.
Get a Mandelbrot program. Download it. If you can't find one, I'll find one
for you. Fractals do not have scales. As you zoom in by great factors, things
converge, but off of those things new things emerge which look a lot like the
thing you thought was converging. Zoom in on any of those tiny things and new
geometric objects emerge off of converging objects. You really should see it,
if you can't picture it.
>> What about the right triangle with two sides with length one? What
>> is the third side?
>
>sqrt(2) (if you mean by "right" having a right angle)
>
>> Not what it looks like on a graph. There are strange cases...
>
>I can't see the strangeness here.
Why not?
>Why shouldn't I believe in fractals? I can see them, I know vaguely
>what they are. I have in some cases even calculated the area of a
>fractal (long time ago).
There are even online Mandelbrot applets that let you zoom as far as you want
to infinite depth within the plane. Just download a Mandelbrot explorer and
look at the equations. The area does not matter.
>[nice paragraph about music evolution snipped, though I have to admit
>that I don't know if the mixing with Einstein and Newton is supposed
>to be a joke...]
Not at all. No more a joke than the picture of Schoenberg and Einstein
together. Science does affect art, and art affects science. I was completely
serious.
LstPuritan
>1 = infinity. What kind of mathematics are you using? Is this a joke?
Cantor
>>>> call the value between 0 and 1 closest to zero?
>>>
>>> Doesn't exist. Neither in the real nor in the rational numbers.
>>
>> This is absolutely vital.
>
>I really can't see what you would need it for.
Newton's infinitesimal.
>> Newton called this number infinitesimal. However, infinitesimal=0.
>
>The infinitesimal is not the correct way to define calculus in a
>concise manner. Normally, it works to use infinitesimals (that's all
>that dx stuff), but it is not the way one learns calculus.
After learning it, you get to see all the things that work, but don't quite
seem logical.
>Relativity is based on continuous (vs. discrete) time and space.
FINALLY! :D
LstPuritan
>I didn't realize that I was in the presense of divine inspiration... the
>ultimate answers to all musicians' questions... the absolute truth about
>all
>things musical.
Translation: "WAAAAAAAH!"
>BTW, you may think you know the truth about the whole Ravel/Debussy thing...
>guess what? You don't.
Translation: "I have a secret, but I'm not telling, nah nah nah nah!"
Adam Bravo
>
1* infinty can equal 1, though.
Christof Pflumm
> Christof wrote:
>> 1 = infinity. What kind of mathematics are you using? Is this a joke?
>
> Cantor
Now that is interesting. I have to look at this when I find the
time. Sounds very strange. Has it got something to do with set theory
or some projection of infinity on 1?
>>>>> call the value between 0 and 1 closest to zero?
>>>>
>>>> Doesn't exist. Neither in the real nor in the rational numbers.
>>>
>>> This is absolutely vital.
>>
>> I really can't see what you would need it for.
>
> Newton's infinitesimal.
I never NEEDED the infinitesimal. Of course, it is used because it is
convinient in physics, but calculus can be based on some clearly
stated axioms and works all the way up to differentiation without
reference to some infinitesimal quantity.
> >> Newton called this number infinitesimal. However, infinitesimal=0.
> >
> >The infinitesimal is not the correct way to define calculus in a
> >concise manner. Normally, it works to use infinitesimals (that's all
> >that dx stuff), but it is not the way one learns calculus.
>
> After learning it, you get to see all the things that work, but
> don't quite seem logical.
But if I have proven that they work, why care about them anymore? If I
have proven that the usage of infinitesimals works in my case, I can
use them without getting into logical problems.
> >Relativity is based on continuous (vs. discrete) time and space.
>
> FINALLY! :D
As well as Newtonian physics, of course.
Bye,
Christof
Christof Pflumm
> Christof wrote:
>>> Welcome back. Christof didn't know what instantaneous velocity was,
>>
>> Just because it is not in the standard terminology.
>
> It was Newton's terminology.
That might well be so. I haven't read Newtons originals works. I
prefer a representation that is more modern and was cleared of
unnecessary rubish over the centuries.
> And has never been called anything different in any book I've seen.
I can't remeber I've read that anywhere, but it's not important what
you call it.
>>> We're on to fractal music, in another thread, BTW, but my fractional
>>> relativity has no audience in the other "metaphorical" thread.
>>
>> Well, I'd like to hear about it. But state it in a precise, compact
>> form without philosophy. Otherwise I won't read it.
>
> How will you know without reading it? It's written already, though,
> and very concise.
I read it, and it's good.
>> Have you ever really tried to learn calculus? I mean, starting from
>> point zero with the simple axioms and then working all the way up to
>> differentiation, integration and all that stuff?
>
> Junior Year of High School. I tutor Calculus AP now, as well as
> physics, and I'm perfectly capable of just teaching or doing the
> math.
So, where's your problem. IMO, there is no problem with something like
infinite series. I think you are arguing about the philosophy that's
behind all that. Of course, everyone has his own opinion about that.
>> I somehow never had "problems" with these things (I had problems
>> understanding some of the things, but not with the
>> concepts). Mathematics is strictly thinking. Nothing that can be
>> observed or relates to reality can interfere with mathematics.
>
> That's what Newton said. Before Einstein.
And it's my opinion. Of course you can argue that mathematics is also
reality because what you think is also part of reality and so on. This
can lead to interesting philosophical discussions, but still,
mathematics is not a science of observation or description of the
world.
> Mandelbrot never reaches a distance past 2 from the origin. It has
> an infinite circumfrence. The area is fixed on the plane. One may
> zoom in forever and not just see things magnified, but new things
> altogether. What is that called?
I don't know. And it's interesting that such things exist.
>>> An image on a plane with depth? Of course.
>>
>> A plane has no depth. By definition. So what do you mean with that
>> statement?
>
> What do you think the i means in a + bi?
sqrt(-1)
> It's an x coordinate, a y coordinate,
No. Using coordinates is nothing more than some representation of
complex numbers. But the complex numbers do not need such a
representation.
> and the i coordinate which is projected into imaginary space INTO
> the plane.
I don't understand what you mean by this. An x and y coordinate are
enough to describe each complex number. What is the "i-coordinate"?
What is imaginary space? Do you mean some complex vector space or
what? You have to define all those things carefully.
You can use a sphere to represent the complex numbers, you have branch
cuts if you represent them in planes, leaves that are connected by
those cuts and so on. But still, you don't NEED any of those things to
work with complex numbers.
> That's what i is. Imaginary number. Square root of -1.
And nothing more.
> A plane with depth. INFINITE depth.
I stand by statement: A plane, by definition, has no depth. If you
imagine the complex numbers as a plane with depth, you are using a
different definition of a plane. You are free to do so, of course. But
then, you are not allowed to use Theorems etc. that relate to planes
and depend on the definition of a plane.
>> Depends on what you want to do. I can only say something that is the
>> final test for a physic theory: Can it be tested empirically? If not,
>> it's worth NOTHING physically. Another thought: If the theory doesn't
>> predict something new, it has to be very much easier than the existing
>> theories, otherwise, it's useless.
>
> Are fractals physical?
IMO, no. I don't think that fractals (in the mathematical sense) exist
in nature. But they are a part of reality, because you can think about
them. And they may also be very useful in some theories.
> Science has to evolve backward or else it's useless?
Did I say that? How do you come to such a conclusion? Newtonian
physics was superseded by relativity. That was a big step forward,
IMO. But what I wrote about theories in general in the paragraph
further up applies perfectly to relativity: It is tested empirically
very well. It predicts things that are not predicted by Newtonian
mechanics, and these new predictions can be verified by experiment.
>> So if I understand you correctly, you try to understand why your
>> equations (whatever they might be) work.
>
> Of course I do. It doesn't mean they are accidents, though.
But they could be accidents.
>> You really say that you can explain brain activity? Sorry I have to
>> say this, but if you are REALLY believe you can do that, you are
>> highly arrogant. Tell me how the processing of an image in the brain
>> works, tell me why some people have problems with rhythm, tell me what
>> happens if you have to remove parts of the brain because of a tumor
>> and then show me the experimental evidence for all this. Then show me
>> how to predict what happens if you remove a part of the brain due to a
>> tumor. Then show me that what you have predicted is correct within the
>> error bounds of the experiment and give me a statistic sample that is
>> big enough. After that, I will perhaps not call you arrogant but a
>> genius.
>
> I didn't discover it. Other people did.
Did they answer the questions I asked? If not, they are speculating,
they are saying, well it might be that it is like that or like
that. They might be right or wrong. But if they claim to have found
"the explanation", isn't that arrogant if they even don't know whether
the theory really works good enough?
> Spatio-temporal patterns in neural networks.
> Hindmarsh-Rose equations for period doubling and bursting of the
> neurone.
Neural networks are fractal? I'll ask a computer scientist about
that. I never had the impression they are, but my knowledge is
extremly limited in that area.
> Fractal cell structures.
Approximate perhaps. They cannot be real fractals just because you
can't define there edges to arbitrary accuracy.
> Neural network coupling and chaos.
> Fractal models of multiple channel recordings of massed neural data:
> EEGs and the whole brain.
And the descritption of stock market with fractals. Might all be nice
examples, but still, I doubt that fractals are so terribly
important. Set yourself the following goal: Take some mental illness
where a medicamentation is known and where it is known why this
medicamentation helps. Now explain this medicamentation in terms of
fractal theory. Possible? No? Is it a good theory then for brain
activity? You don't know. In 100 years it might be possible to explain
this in terms of the fractal theory. But up to that point, I prefer
the theory that works (and even then, the fractal theory might not be
the best choice). Of course, I'm not advocating to throw away all
unproven theories. New theories are essential. Even wrong theories are
essential because you can learn from them. But I don't like it when
people think their new theories are revolutionary and can explain
everything. It's like saying: My music is better than Bach's.
> On one hand, you don't believe in anything that isn't real and
> observable.
No, you misunderstood me. I think it's difficult to discuss this. You
have to ask yourself: What is observable? I could say that mathematics
is observable, for example. It all depends on the meaning of "real",
"observable" and on what is believing. You can ask me if I believe in
this or that, and I think I can give you an answer to such questions,
but the above is too general to give a really good answer.
> On the other, you believe in warping through space if the math says
> you should be somewhere.
No. If math tells me something about physical reality, I don't believe
it necessarily. It has to be tested. At least, it has to be
reasonable. The good thing is that many others have tested a lot of
things for me allready. For example that F=dp/dt is a very good
equation within its limits.
>> I was talking about the turtle and the sprinter. There is no paradox
>> there. I don't know about the other "paradoxes".
>
> Once again, I point to the fact that the Achilles paradox is still
> widely debated among physicists.
I think you can argue from a philosophical point of view. But for me,
I can't see a paradox. If you are not looking at the point where
Achilles overtakes the turtle, he does not overtake the turtle. I
can't see the problem.
> I don't think you resolved the paradox; you just rejected that it
> was a paradox.
Yes, that's my opinion.
> Try searching for articles by physicists today who still do not
> agree on how, or whether, it can be resolved.
From the first web page I found:
"The Greek philosopher Zeno, who lived in the fifth century B.C.,
decades before Socrates, dedicated his life's work to showing the
logical paradoxes inherent to the idea of indefinite divisibility in
space and time -- i.e., that every line is composed of an infinite
number of points. One of these paradoxes is known as the arrow
paradox: If the motion of a flying arrow is divided ad infinitum, then
during each of these infinitesimal moments the arrow is at rest."
I don't think so. If you divide it, you necessarily have finite time
intervals. You don't reach zero by dividing. But you can do it
mathematically correct by taking limits.
And further:
"The sum of an infinity of zeroes remains zero, hence the arrow cannot
move."
Which is a false statement IMO. 0 times infinity has no meaning, but
in a limiting sense, it has. In this sense 0 times infinity can be a
finite number.
>>> Of course, a paradox resolved is not a paradox, and THAT is a
>>> paradox. ; )
>>
>> But then, the paradox has never been one :)
>
> Which also is a paradox. ; }
A paradox does not become a paradox by calling it a paradox. If it is
not a paradox, it is not, whether you call it one or not.
>> I don't like to say this, but you have to understand mathematics
>> better. THERE IS NO NEXT VALUE AFTER ZERO IN THE REAL OR RATIONAL
>> NUMBERS
>
> Exactly what I said. There is no infinitesimal. There is no next
> value after zero. Do you understand how to eliminate repeating
> decimals?
What do you mean by eliminating? .9999999 never equals one, no matter
how many 9s you add. But, sum(i=1..infinity) 9*10^-i = 1.
> That's what I did, to show that there was no next value
> after zero.
We agree here.
>> That's why you need firmly grounded mathematics. But you can (often)
>> prove whether something converges or not. There are theorems for
>> infinite series that tell you whether a series converges or not. I
>> don't know about Mandelbrot sets.
>
> Get a Mandelbrot program.
The program only approximates the Mandelbrot set. It is a discretized
version of the whole thing, otherwise you could not calculate it with
a computer.
> Download it. If you can't find one, I'll find one for you.
I know how Mandelbrot sets look like. With my first computer, it took
a whole night to calculate one picture.
> Fractals do not have scales. As you zoom in by great factors, things
> converge,
What do you mean by converge? What is the definition here? The
Mandelbrot set is a static thing. You can look at it, but it doesn't
change. That it seems as if it is changing is only because you are
looking at different parts of it.
> Zoom in on any of those tiny things and new geometric objects emerge
> off of converging objects. You really should see it, if you can't
> picture it.
I've done this. It's very fascinating. I also found it very
interesting that you often see "copies" of the whole mandelbrot set,
tilted a bit, when you zoom in. The self similarity is a very
interesting property.
>>> What about the right triangle with two sides with length one? What
>>> is the third side?
>>
>> sqrt(2) (if you mean by "right" having a right angle)
>>
>>> Not what it looks like on a graph. There are strange cases...
>>
>> I can't see the strangeness here.
>
> Why not?
What is strange about sqrt(2)? And what should it look like on a
graph?
> Not at all. No more a joke than the picture of Schoenberg and
> Einstein together. Science does affect art, and art affects
> science. I was completely serious.
One can argue that everything influences everything, thereby
influencing itself. The question is whether the influence is
important. I can't judge the effect of science on art, but IMO, the
impact of art on science is neither very direct nor very big.
Bye,
Christof
John Brock
churn out vast amounts of extremely pretentious verbiage on very
short notice. Don't you have a day job? After reading your reply
to my post I'm finding it very hard to take you seriously, and I
strongly suspect that you are pulling the collective leg of this
newsgroup. But what the heck -- it gives me an excuse to let loose
with another rant of my own, and isn't that what we're all here
for anyway? :-)
I have to say right up front that I was kind of startled by the
way you conceded what I considered my main point -- that serious
classical composers in the last 50 years had abandoned any effort
to write accessible piano music, and that this was a tragedy for
amateur pianists -- and then went on to say that you didn't give
a damn. Given that you are writing in a newsgroup for pianists,
most of whom are amateurs, this seems almost a parody of the
arrogance and contempt that characterize 20th century "modern
music."
Of course I suppose a certain amount of sour grapes is understandable,
given how few people actually want to listen to such music.
Modernists might feel different about audiences if they actually
had one!
It seems self evident to me that music that no one wants to listen
to is useless music. Notice I didn't say "bad" music, or that such
music lacks "musical worth" (a term with which one can play endless
self-serving games), but simply that there is no use for it. Music
is justified by the listener, and by the response it produces in
the listener. Music that no one wants to listen to fails to serve
the fundamental purpose of music, and it is useless.
It follows as a corollary that music that almost no one wants to
listen to is almost useless. This is my main complaint about the
extreme tendencies in 20th century music (which for convenience I
am here labeling "modernism", although I realize that that's a
whole 'nother debate). It's not that I don't like it personally;
it's that after all this time it has not found a significant
audience, and it appears more and certain that it never will. What
it *has* done is suck enormous amounts of talent into a black hole,
spewing out reams of music which -- whatever its "intrinsic worth"
-- will never be heard, and so might as well not exist.
What a disaster. And that's not the way it was supposed to be!
Composers normally *want* appreciative audiences, and a generation
of talented composers was sucked into this experimental "avant-garde"
by the promise that it was going to be the "music of the future."
School children were going to whistle 12-tone melodies on their
way to class. Remember?
There is nothing wrong with experimentation per se, but if you are
going to experiment it is vital that you be willing to acknowledge
when you have failed. The new music avant-garde was unwilling to
do this, and instead hardened into a defensive orthodoxy, further
amplifying the damage.
Instead of simply admitting that the road they had taken was leading
nowhere and moving on to something else, a grandiose Mythos was
created, in which the Schoenbergs and Babbitts were equated with
the Bachs and Beethovens of the previous era -- misunderstood in
their own time but certain be be vindicated by history. In this
way the avant-garde preserved its status as the music of the future,
a future is conveniently was never required to actually arrive.
Your ramblings on Zeno and Einstein are hardly worth commenting
on. When I was a graduate student in physics at Columbia University
my professors would occasionally get letters like that from various
cranks and crackpots, which would be posted on local bulletin boards
for the amusement of all. But I have to say that your personal
efforts to revolutionize physics seem to me to parallel and illuminate
the modernist crusade to revolutionize music.
Modernists, with their endless talk of experimentation and progress,
have always tried to protect their enterprise from criticism by
portraying music as though it were a science, as though the new
music were a natural and inevitable extension of the old, as
unavoidable as the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics,
with no other roads possible. But musical change is not progress.
Musical change, unlike mathematical or scientific or technological
change, is merely shifting fashion, and there are always many roads
that can be taken. If you can avoid acknowledging this, then you
can avoid acknowledging even the possibility that the road taken
was not the best road, and may in fact be a dead end.
Anyway, some comments on your comments...
In article <20000802114949...@ng-ch1.aol.com>,
LstPuritan <lstpu...@aol.com> wrote:
>John Brock wrote:
>>I expect composers to write for an audience larger than their fellow
>>composers and a tiny cadre of enthusiasts.
>Then listen to Kenny G., Backstreet Boys, and Notorious B.I.G. and rejoice in
>the fact that people are still writing music catering to the demands of the
>larger audience.
Eh? What's your point? We are talking about classical music.
You are saying that classical composers *should* be satisfied with
writing merely for their fellow composers and a tiny cadre of
enthusiasts? Why? Beethoven and Bach have substantial audiences
today. I was brought up listening to them, and I come from a rather
typical middle class family. Why shouldn't contemporary classical
composers be able to hope for decent audiences also?
>That music is not a reflection of serious composers, though.
>
>Composers with strong morality write for no one.
Wow. This sounds like crazy talk to me. Morality?
>It's rather disheartening to hear that in this statement you have also just
>blasted Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue, examples of the most
>expert craftsmanship in history, off the face of the earth. Fugues were
>terribly unpopular in Bach's time; his contemporaries were writing music more
>along the lines of the Italian Concerto, and criticized Bach for continuing to
>write all those ridiculous fugues. If Bach had written for a larger audience
>instead of letting his composition be guided by the convictions of his inner
>self, then we would not have the hundred or so masterpiece fugues that we do.
>If artists acted the way _you_ "expect" them to act, working for the external
>validation of a larger audience, then most of the world's great art would not
>exist.
No, the Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue do get listened to,
and a lot of pianists would like to be able to play them. More to
the point, they are part of a tradition which includes a lot of
simpler music, music which will naturally lead many people to
appreciate more complex music within the same tradition. Modernism
spurns such simple, pleasant, entry level music, and most likely
modernists would be incapable to write such music even if they
wanted to.
You do have a point though. Some music is more demanding than
other music, and thus will have a smaller audience. But how far
do you want to go with this?
Let me ask you a question. Suppose I were to claim that I had
just composed the greatest piece of music ever written, music so
difficult and complex that no one but me would ever be able to
appreciate it.
Leaving aside the question of my actual compositional talent (which
is minimal), would it even be *possible* for such a statement to
be true? Would it be possible for a piece of music to be "great"
if no one but the composer could appreciate it? I say no! As I
said above, music is for the listener, not the composer. Although
the composer is also a listener I just don't see how any piece of
music with such narrow appeal could ever be considered great music,
however complex and conceptually clever it might be. That's not
what music is about; it's about the listener.
Let's do another thought experiment. Suppose the entire Western
Classical tradition were reduced to five brilliant composers writing
music for each other, music that they alone could appreciate. No
matter how cleverly they justified their music, no matter what
claims they made for it, and in fact no matter whether or not those
claims were *true*, from the point of view of everybody else the
entire classical tradition would have simply vanished into nothing.
NOTHING! And that's pretty much what happened to classical music
in the course of the 20th century, although of course the numbers
were not so extreme.
>>What are you doing
>>putting Liszt and Webern together in one list anyway?
>Liszt and Webern were both composers who successfully employed complete
>atonality to produce effective, influencial, and revolutionary pieces of music.
> Liszt and Webern both wrote highly individual and developed music outside the
>conventions of society and tonality. In fact, of the two, Liszt may be the
>more commendable morally for abandoning diatonicism, because doing so caused
>him to be considered an outcast from the world of music yet Liszt did not
>attempt to conform to anything but what his artistic self demanded. Webern was
>also a genius, but faced less moral challenges being part of a "movement" of
>similarly minded composers; in this way, Webern was not writing music which was
>truly "against the grain." Furthermore, Webern did not have a career as a
>respected composer and concert pianist to "sacrifice" for the sake of art.
>Liszt was the most respected musician in the Western world, and he _did_
>sacrifice his reputation, his fame, and his living for the honest sake of being
>true to his musical convictions.
>
>Liszt is "The Father of Modern Music." That phrase has been used to describe
>Liszt for over 75 years. You seem to be oblivious of that.
Who exactly says this? My understand is that the status of Liszt
is disputed; that he has his defenders, but others consider him
overrated. In any case, has it ever occurred to you that describing
Liszt as "The Father of Modern Music" could just as well be considered
a self-serving attempt by modernists to create a false sense of
continuity between their own music and the music they feel they
have superseded? But you are right in that I am not a music
historian, so I'll just say that I hear no resemblance and see no
continuity between Liszt and Webern or Babbitt, and leave it at
that.
>>Some of the
>>composers in your list do have an audience, and their music will
>>continue to be played. Others, particularly in the last 50 years
>>(and *especially* the "serialists"), have written sterile, failed
>>music that not only is never going to be "the music of the future"
>>(what a joke that idea was!), but is never even going to get to be
>>the music of the past.
>I agree completely that there has been a lot of gimmicky, ridiculous, or just
>plain bad music written in the last 50 years that tried to pass itself off as
>"art." We may, however, disagree about which composers and pieces should be
>included in this list of "sterile, failed music." No music of the future?
>What a joke *you* are! I predict that Webern, Krenek, Schoenberg, Bartok,
>Babbitt, Debussy, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Berg, Stravinsky, Shostakovitch, and
>Barber will be remembered as the most important composers of the 20th century.
>Stockhausen, Cage, Cowell, Ives, Hindemith (unfortunately), Crawford, Ruggles,
>Saylor, Carter, Glass, and many others I may not remember off the top of my
>head likely will not be remembered as anything but obscure names in history
>books. Of course, that is a careful prediction based on what I know now, not a
>prophesy.
Actually I agree about many of your choices (all from the first
half of the 20th century, and not including Schoenberg or Webern).
I'm not writing a book here, I understand that I'm overgeneralizing
when I talk about "modernism", and that more than one type of music
has been written in the 20th century. I'm just arguing that the
extreme modernist tradition which began with Schoenberg and is
epitomized by Babbitt has no listeners and no future.
>>I brought up Milton Babbitt as a particularly
>>egregious example of this kind of composer, but many other "important"
>>20th century composers will be as justly forgotten, while Listz
>>continues to be played and enjoyed.
>You know little, if anything, about Babbitt.
>
>Milton Babbitt developed modern music greatly with his advancement of theories
>such as rhythmic serialization, rhythmic inversion, variation through dynamic
>and register determinants, defining lines not as voices but combinations of
>background and foreground pointillism, and finding new applications of
>Schoenberg's idea of combinatorial sets.
Tom Wolfe wrote an interesting book called "The Painted Word".
It's about modern art, but I think his thesis applies equally well
to modern music. His point was that modern art in the 50's and
60's was held captive by theorists (especially Greenberg), to the
point where if you didn't know the theory you couldn't appreciate
the art, and in fact eventually to the point where the art itself
was reduced to little more than illustrations of art theory. Real
art is not about theory, it's about the response evoked in the
viewer or listener.
I have an interesting anecdote about Babbitt though. On November
15, 1998 I was invited to a concert by a friend of mine, a music
professor who had actually studied under Babbitt. The concert was
in Carnegie Hall in New York City, and the program was Mozart --
Babbitt -- Ives -- Dvorak. I tried to keep an open mind, but for
all I could tell the Babbitt piece could have been the same eight
bars for plinking and thumping repeated again and again and again.
After the piece was played the audience politely applauded the
orchestra, and the conducted turned and motioned for the composer,
who was in the audience, to stand up. Then the strangest thing
happened. Although much of the audience again applauded politely,
from the back of the hall there suddenly came loud, sustained
booing. The booing ended when the orchestra rose again, and resumed
when the composer was asked to stand again. I'd never heard anything
like this before, and certainly not in Carnegie Hall.
This was not booing as in Stravinsky and the Shock of the New.
Remember, Babbitt is about as establishment as it is possible to
be. No, what was being booed was the Shock of the Same Old, Same
Old. My friend the professor talked about it with an acquaintance,
and later told me "That was the Postmodernists doing the booing.
No one under 40 is writing this kind of music any more."
My point is that Babbitt is already a fashion that has past. He
is already being rejected by the young. I find it impossible to
believe that anyone will be listening to his dry, sterile music 50
years from now.
>You know little, if anything, about Liszt.
>
>The mature works of Liszt were not played and enjoyed in Liszt's day, and they
>are rarely played and enjoyed today.
>
>Granted, lots of people play and enjoy Liszt's immature early and middle period
>music, but historical revisionists have chosen to ignore the innovations,
>theories, and especially the *music* of Liszt's mature late period.
>
>Liszt gave up on the piano as his means for communicating music in the mid
>1870s. Having outgrown his need to display excessive virtuosity, gain fame,
>and satisfy his own ego, he renounced the Paganini whom he once admired and
>emulated. Liszt wrote music which was not possible to play on the piano, had
[...yada yada yada...]
I've deleted a huge essay on Liszt here, because it's really not
central to what I am saying, and because I'm not sufficiently up
on Liszt to argue your points in detail. Let's just say I'm not
convinced.
>>Incidently, I used the terms "light classical" and "salon music"
>>because I didn't want to make any unwarranted claims for the musical
>>worth of New Age piano music, but what I was really talking about
>>is accessible classical piano music with ties to the popular music
>>of the time and which can be played by by pianists who are not
>>professionals.
>Oh. We have that today. Try Tori Amos or Ben Folds Five or the piano part to
>some of today's popular hip-hop. Try "Killa Bees." The words are "Wu-Tang
>Clan ain't nuttin' to fuck with" and you alternate C and Ab two octaves above
>middle C in rhythm. This is what popular music is today; there is no "modern
>classical" music with ties to popular music. Yanni and Tesh and newagers are
>pretending, using clichés from music of the past you call "classical" and
>simplifying it even further to be "accessable."
Again, I'm not talking about popular music, I'm talking about
accessible piano music written by serious classical composers.
This existed in the past, and I see no reason why it couldn't exist
today, but it doesn't. Why doesn't this bother you??? If classical
composers aren't willing to write music that people want to listen
to then there is a risk that the entire tradition will simply come
to an end, and then Tori Amos or Wu-Tang Clan will be the only
choices. (No, actually there will still be plenty of choices, it's
just that none of them will be direct inheritors of Beethoven and
Bach. The world won't come to an end, but I still think it will
be sad).
>>This category does include some "salon music", but
>>it also includes an enormous amount of important piano music by
>>the great composers of the past (for example the dance music of
>>Bach,
>Dance to the minuets or gigues or allemandes from the partitas? I think not.
>
>You must be thinking of something more along the lines of dance pieces by
>Mozart that he wrote as a slave of nobility. Is enslavement of art what you
>are advocating? That's the only way to make composers write music for the
>masses.
I said "accessible classical piano music with ties to the popular
music of the time". The dance music in the Bach partitas certainly
qualifies, yes?
>>or the mazurkas and polonaises of Chopin).
>Which are examples of dumbing down the mazurkas and polonaises of *Poland* to
>write for the masses. Is dumbing down everything so everyone likes it what you
>are advocating?
So you disagree when I say that some of the great music of the past
had ties to the popular music of time? I think a lot of people,
not just me, would have a problem with that position.
>>But few (if any)
>>"important" modern classical composers of the last 50 years have
>>bothered to write this sort of music,
>Wars. Liberation. Freedom.
Incoherence. Non-sequitur. You aren't making much sense here.
>Composers write what they want.
No one say composers can't write dry, sterile, dead music if they
want to. I'm just saying I think it's a shame that they haven't
also written music that people want to listen to.
>Communism failed; no man is "entitled" to one loaf of bread and one piece of
>digestable easy to play music per day, no more, no less.
>
>Maybe communism is what you are advocating?
You aren't even trying to make sense, you're just posturing.
>>and this is a great tragedy
>>and loss for amateur pianists.
>And that's their problem, no one else's.
Wow!!! You acknowledge how much of a loss modernism has been for
most pianists, and you just don't care!
>>I
>>could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that 50 years from now most
>>of the "difficult" music that was treated as so important in the
>>last century will be almost entirely unplayed
>I think people will play music from the last century, the last century being
>the 19th century, for a few hundred more years.
You know what I meant.
>>and to the extent
>>that it is thought about at all it will be as a ghastly mistake,
>>a costly wrong turn which tied classical music to the ground
>I agree.
>
>Eventually, the mistakes of the 19th century will likely be realized as a
>"costly turn which tied music to the ground."
Whistling through the graveyard.
>>Economics has
>>the concept of "opportunity cost", which is the value of what you
>>could have done with your money if you didn't do what you actually
>>did. I think there has been a huge opportunity cost associated
>>with the misguided musical experimentation of the 20th century,
>>and that the Western classical tradition will probably never fully
>>break even. But of course, I could be wrong.
>An interesting opinion. Of course, I could be wrong.
>
>As a side note, the opportunity cost of your complaining about music being too
>difficult is the time you could spend practicing so that more music would be
>"accessable" to you.
Part of the new music mythos is that it is the audience that has
failed, not the composers, and that if only the audience were as
moral as the composers then they would be crowding into new music
concerts in droves. Sorry, it's your job to write for us, and if
you have contempt for our tastes then we will ignore you, and you
will deserve to be ignored.
>>Do you think that
>>any of the composers of "12 tone" or "serial" music are going to
>>take places in the musical pantheon
> alongside
>>Beethoven and Bach
>Yes, I do. As well as certain composers who perhaps used even more difficult
>concepts than 12-tone composition or serialism: microtonal
>harmony/counterpoint, generative algorithmic stochasticism, fractional time,
>cyclic vibrations, organic symmetry, and—who knows?—just _*maybe*_ even the I
>Ching oracle of changes which advised John Cage cage to write nothing but rests
>for four and a half minutes.
But who is this music for? Who is supposed to be listening to it?
Will schoolchildren be whistling microtonal fractal melodies on
their way to class? Just what is the point of all this experimentation,
if not to eventually create music that people will want to listen
to?
>Zeno was an intuitive genius regarding the physical world. He wrote that if
>"space is equal to itself" and everything is either "moving or not moving,"
>then for the period in which an "always in the instant" object moved "in the
[...yada yada yada...]
>It's very possible that people will continue to trivialize and disregard music
>that is difficult for them to understand in the present. 20th century music,
>regardless of my own preferences and what I personally do/don't understand,
>still leaves many questions that need to be answered in the future. It may
>take 2500 years before the world considers Webern's Opus 27 Variations for
>Piano a masterpiece.
2500 years before you have to acknowledge failure? Wow, you really
do believe in giving yourself a lot of leeway, don't you? :-)
--
John Brock
jbr...@panix.com
Tom Shaw
TS
"John Brock" <jbr...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:8nfomu$d3l$1...@panix3.panix.com...
Chris Aher
Comment from the side of the piste: This is a much more skilled opponent
than the pomposity slayer. This sholud be an interesting bout.
Regards, (and good luck)
Chris
Christof Pflumm
"Tom Shaw" <a000...@airmail.net> writes:
> I STILL love this thread.
ME TOO!
But seriously: I think that all this modern music which is not
appreciated by the masses has a value, because without trying new and
perhaps unsuccesful ways, you are stuck. It is just like basic
research: The applications may come as late as 50 years after the
initial research. Perhaps someone will eventually write accesible
music based on the inaccesible stuff. The problem is that Justin seems
to take the viewpoint that this transformation from inaccesible to
accesible always leads to a loss of "musical value". I don't think
that's the case. I agree with John that the final product should be
something for the masses. But I also see the necessity of
experimentation. The problem IMO is one of balance: How much
experimentation? And that's something I can't comment on because I'm
lacking the knowledge about modern music.
Bye,
Christof
Al
> experimentation? And that's something I can't comment on because I'm
as a composer of 'modern' and very experimental music (within the range of
instruments, I'm not talking fractal type stuff) I have a wide base of
different styles to steal from, and some of my pieces work, adn some don't.
Ultimately I don't think you can argue about the balance of experimentation,
you can only write *you're* music, and everyone's covering new ground in
their own music, everything experiments a little, some of us move into
larger areas than others, but we're all generally the first to put those
chords together like that, or to play it *that* way, you get the picture.
All music is experimental, just to varying levels.
Ultimately some of the best experimentation is minimalist, it's very easy
just to add extra instruments here and there, but it's a real skill to craft
a track from almost nothing. There are very few examples which I've heard,
mostly in cutting edge jazz. And never forget that the purest of all sounds
is silence. I like lots of space in the mix, so that you can see a picture
in your mind of all the little shapes and colours and textures in the sound,
and then the gaps in between. That to me is music. Sometimes to colour it
all iun is great, but some of the best music I ever heard, was a thin yet
warm sound, harsh and soft, and lots of space around it to let it breathe
and live. That was true experimentation, it went part way into a territory
which none of us has entered, the territory of silence. It's very easy to
label and class. But for me the cutting edge will always have more draw for
me, I think that experimentation does lose something when brought into
mainstream styles, because the distances are crushed to fit narrow
specifications, and it will never sound as good when the teeny boppers have
it. Just one thing, I doubt those teeny boppers would have enjoyed that
silence...
jazz FM late at night *sigh*
forget musical orgasms, this was musical heaven
Al
experimenter
--
Life sux period
Me (having depression again. <<sigh>>)
Al
> than the pomposity slayer. This sholud be an interesting bout.
you follow the saga too???
we ought to have paid entry really
Al
LstPuritan
>LstPuritan, I must say that I am impressed with your ability to
>churn out vast amounts of extremely pretentious verbiage on very
>short notice.
That could be a compliment if by pretentious you mean ambitious. I assume you
don't mean that I am making claims of any type of excessive stature, so I'll
consider it a compliment.
>After reading your reply
>to my post I'm finding it very hard to take you seriously, and I
>strongly suspect that you are pulling the collective leg of this
>newsgroup.
Why would I do that? Just for the fun of it? That wouldn't be fun—more like a
waste of time.
>But what the heck -- it gives me an excuse to let loose
>with another rant of my own, and isn't that what we're all here
>for anyway?
Alright then. Use me for target practice.
>I have to say right up front that I was kind of startled by the
>way you conceded what I considered my main point -- that serious
>classical composers in the last 50 years had abandoned any effort
>to write accessible piano music,
I don't know any serious classical composers from the last 50 years or so.
There have been composers, and they've written music, but eras are not
generally defined from within an era. In retrospect, I think the 20th century
will probably be eraless; I don't see any solid or consensual movement by
musicians in the last 50 years that could be summed up by any label. I assume
if you are demanding this "new serious accessible classical music," then you
have already exhausted the entire piano repertoire and played everything there
is to play. Digressing from whether or not there *should* be accessable new
"classical" piano music, I don't see why you don't play what is already
composed over the last 500 years, much of which is quite accessible. If I'm
not misunderstanding, you want music "like" classical music but you want it to
be "new" and "accessable" because you don't want to play "old" classical music?
I've gotten sick of composers before, but I've never run out of new names and
music to discover and play.
> and that this was a tragedy for
>amateur pianists -- and then went on to say that you didn't give
>a damn.
Well, I don't. But whether I sympathize with those who want new accessible
classical piano music or not is irrelevant; I have nothing to do with this
fact, and I spend part of my time tutoring music and piano and introducing kids
to music they never even knew existed. It appears repeatedly that you think
the old music is not good enough for you, and you are projecting this upon me
because I said I didn't care whether composers today chose to write accessible
classical music because there's more music out there already that is both
accessible and "classical" than anyone can ever play, and I think people should
write whatever type of music they want. Why don't _you_ write some accessible
"classical" (whatever that means) music and then play it and publish it? If
you see the demand, then provide the supply.
I play and write music that interests me, and I like to share those thoughts
lest I get too overconfident on dead-end musical paths; I don't post here to
rant. I post here to give and receive feedback that influences my musical
decisions and perhaps the decisions or opinions of others. In the end, like
all composers (except for those enslaved by nobility or those whe feel the need
to play God and bestow music upon the public in Hegelian stupor), I write what
I like. When what I likes changes, I write different things; same with
playing. I have no intention of being some kind of God artist who caters soley
to the public and seeks fame for giving them musical pop-tarts to chew on. I
could probably write a Nocturne and imitate Chopin poorly, but why not just
play Chopin? Or Mozart? Or Bach? If you don't like 20th century music, no
one is forcing you to listen to it or play it; but neither can you force anyone
to spoonfeed music to anyone just because you don't like the music (I'm
assuming you do at least understand it enough to know that you don't like it).
If you didn't know, I do write a lot of different kinds of music, and record
various genres. Things like Debussy orchestrations, Liszt recording, Scriabin,
some techno stuff, fractal stuff, Schoenberg, 12-tone stuff, and some random
stand-alone pieces. All my music is free.
>Given that you are writing in a newsgroup for pianists,
>most of whom are amateurs, this seems almost a parody of the
>arrogance and contempt that characterize 20th century "modern
>music."
Do you see a newsgroup full of angry "amateurs"/beginners because they simply
have nothing at all to play? I don't. I see people of all abilities playing
the music they like, and it does vary quite a bit from person to person. But
never have I read anyone say "Hi, I'm a beginner and it really sucks that there
is no piano music for me to play. Damn the 20th century!" You assume
erroneously that becuase you don't like "modern" (whatever you mean by _that_)
music that everyone who writes music should drop whatever they're doing and
write Nocturnes in the style of whatever you think classical is. I think most
people are quite happy with the music out there, and—even if they don't like
20th century music—they can coexist peacefully with it and play what they like.
I criticize Chopin because I don't like Chopin, but i never claim that those
who like him are arrogant or show them contempt, except as a joke. And I see
no justification for your projection of your own arrogance and contempt on
people who write music now, or during the 20th century, that you happen to just
not like. So don't listen. It doesn't matter to me whether you like "modern
music" (?) or not. I couldn't care less. But it doesn't mean that I am going
ad hominem on you. I'm not forcing you to listen, and there's no reason to
attack my person because of your frustration with what you want music to be.
I'm not completely satisfied either.
>Of course I suppose a certain amount of sour grapes is understandable,
>given how few people actually want to listen to such music.
What music are you talking about?
>Modernists might feel different about audiences if they actually
>had one!
The premodern period ended around the Enlightenment, lasting through the
Renaissance and Reformation. The modern period started with the Enlightenment
and ended in the 1960s. Some say it started with the French Revolution and
ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but either way, you are not using the
right word. We are now in the postmodern period, and some call themselves
postmodernists; I'm *not* a postmodernist. Actual "Modernists" would be anyone
from Mozart until about 50 years ago.
>It seems self evident to me that music that no one wants to listen
>to is useless music
Self-evidence is all you've provided. No proof or reasoning, just assumptions.
>Notice I didn't say "bad" music, or that such
>music lacks "musical worth" (a term with which one can play endless
>self-serving games), but simply that there is no use for it.
I suggest not using the music you don't like and continuing to justify it as
self-evident so you don't have to think about it. It's much easier to throw
insults at people than it is to explain why there is no use for whatever type
of music you're talking about.
>Music
>is justified by the listener, and by the response it produces in
>the listener. Music that no one wants to listen to fails to serve
>the fundamental purpose of music, and it is useless.
What is the fundamental purpose of music? Right now I don't want to listen to
Bach's E major fugue from book II of the WTC, but I'm thinking about the
composition and how all the parts fit together. This produces a favorable
response in me; but you're telling me that Bach's E major fugue is useless
because I don't want to listen to it. I like a lot more about music than just
the sounds. I like the puzzle of a good fugue, the challenge of Wagner's
harmony, the baffling guessing game of analyzing atonal music. Listening is
passive, and passivity does not please me musically; I need to be active with
the music or else I'm just being assaulted with sound, whether it be writing or
following the score or simply critiquing the music as I listen. If I ever
wrote music that no one else in the world wanted to hear, if I like it then
it's not useless to me.
>It follows as a corollary that music that almost no one wants to
>listen to is almost useless. This is my main complaint about the
>extreme tendencies in 20th century music (which for convenience I
>am here labeling "modernism", although I realize that that's a
>whole 'nother debate).
It is not currently the modern period. Modernism ended.
>It's not that I don't like it personally;
>it's that after all this time it has not found a significant
>audience, and it appears more and certain that it never will.
So peer pressure prevents you from listening to 20th century music. And causes
you to call anyone who likes it arrogant and displaying contempt; did the
significant audience tell you to call me that too?
>What
>it *has* done is suck enormous amounts of talent into a black hole,
So if Schoenberg hadn't been so gullible as to write what he wanted to write,
then he would have necessarily written nice preludes all in the key of C major
so everyone else would be happy?
>spewing out reams of music which -- whatever its "intrinsic worth"
>-- will never be heard, and so might as well not exist.
I'm pretty big on that intrinsic worth stuff. Especially since eventually the
human race will die out and and nothing will be heard anymore; at that point
all music, heard or not, is in the same boat. I doubt Gibbons or Sweelinck are
heard much, or even known by most people (yes, there was music before Bach),
yet they are two of my favorite composers. I don't know what other people
hear, but I hear them and I like them; that's why I tell people about them.
>What a disaster. And that's not the way it was supposed to be!
>Composers normally *want* appreciative audiences,
Bach didn't. Mozart just wanted to get paid. Beethoven was an ass to people.
Debussy was misunderstood and didn't care. Only the Paganinis and early Liszts
were stuck in that "artist as God" mode where they fed their egos with public
admiration. What is a *pity* is that had Liszt realized his mistakes earlier
on, there's no telling what he might have accomplished. Do you want musicians
to be Glam Stars? I don't.
> and a generation
>of talented composers was sucked into this experimental "avant-garde"
I have avant garde.
>by the promise that it was going to be the "music of the future."
Liszt said that.
>School children were going to whistle 12-tone melodies on their
>way to class. Remember?
No. I was born in 1978. But I still should have tried to write Krenek before
he died in 1991.
>
>There is nothing wrong with experimentation per se, but if you are
>going to experiment it is vital that you be willing to acknowledge
>when you have failed.
Are you addressing me or just empty space from this soapbox? Personally, a lot
of my compositions have sucked, and some on my webpage I did upload I don't
like much anymore. Success and failure are subjective, of course. Society
doesn't decide if a musician fails; only a musician can know whether he has
succeeded or failed at whatever it was he set out to do. John Cage SUCCEEDED
in writing a piece of music that was silent for 4 and a half minutes; if he
thinks he succeeded, then so be it. I think it's just silly.
>The new music avant-garde was unwilling to
>do this,
I don't know what this new music avant garde is. Are you talking about me?
Someone else? Someone dead? Why do you project your discontent at old Arnie
12-tone on me? If don't think you've heard any of my music, so you're trashing
music when 1. it's not mine. 2. it's not "moderism" 3. and it doesn't matter to
me if you like it or not. If you want to talk about the music, then talk about
the music; I am not the subject, unless you are talking about my music. But
the only 12-tone music on my site is hidden within a techno piece and you might
not even realize you're being corrupted by the evil modern monsters.
> and instead hardened into a defensive orthodoxy, further
>amplifying the damage.
Defensive orthodoxy to amplify damage? If by orthodoxy you mean that 12-tone
and serial composition is a return to Renaissance "orthodox" (?) thought,
you're right. Calm down; they were just writing what they liked. They weren't
burning tonalists on crosses.
>Instead of simply admitting that the road they had taken was leading
>nowhere and moving on to something else,
You assume they were covering up their ashamed failures. They weren't. They
weren't ashamed.
>a grandiose Mythos was
>created,
By you. It was self-evident.
>in which the Schoenbergs and Babbitts were equated with
>the Bachs and Beethovens of the previous era -- misunderstood in
>their own time but certain be be vindicated by history.
Schoenberg has a lot in common with Bach. Babbitt's music I could live
without, and there isn't a whole lot of it, so he can go sit on the sidelines
with Beethoven.
> In this
>way the avant-garde preserved its status as the music of the future,
>a future is conveniently was never required to actually arrive.
Liszt coined the phrase music of the future. Schoenberg went back to writing
some tonal stuff after opus 25 and 33, and Schoenberg also gave us one of the
most important books this century on musical analysis, "Structural Functions of
Harmony."
>Your ramblings on Zeno and Einstein are hardly worth commenting
>on.
You haven't really commented on much. Especially not music or Zeno or
Einstein.
>When I was a graduate student in physics at Columbia University
>my professors would occasionally get letters like that from various
>cranks and crackpots, which would be posted on local bulletin boards
>for the amusement of all.
Letters like what? I didn't send anything to any professor. I scribbled some
thoughts in a newsgroup; there's a difference. And you didn't comment on
anything I said about fractals or physics, so the amusement is mine alone as
you sit and talk about me for God-knows-what reason.
> But I have to say that your personal
>efforts to revolutionize physics seem to me to parallel and illuminate
>the modernist crusade to revolutionize music.
1. I have no intention of revolutionizing physics.
2. We don't live in a modern period. We live in a postmodern period.
3. I am not on any crusade.
4. I don't intend to revolutionize music.
If you're comparing me with Schoenberg and aren't picking your words correctly,
then thank you. I'm flattered.
>Modernists,
Like Voltaire? Beethoven? Goethe?
>with their endless talk of experimentation and progress,
>have always tried to protect their enterprise from criticism by
>portraying music as though it were a science,
It is. It's a craft and is based on math when it comes down to it.
>as though the new
>music were a natural and inevitable extension of the old,
Return to polyphony. Yes. Rejection of modernism and the 19th century.
>as
>unavoidable as the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics,
>with no other roads possible.
I have a picture of Schoenberg and Einstein at Carnegie Hall standing together
after a concert on April 1, 1934. They influenced each other greatly, and
science was inseperable from music. Newton's universe emphasized the vertical,
the harmony, the instantaneous velocity. Einstein's universe brought back the
horizontal, the counterpoint, the negation of harmony. Rather, harmony FROM
the interplay of melodies. Harmony and melody and related, not separate. Space
and time are related, not separate.
1905-special relativity
1906-Kammersymphonie No.1 op.9—no key signature to provide harmonic coherence.
Harmony equals Newtonian physics. Counterpoint equals Einstein's physics.
Chaos is conquerable.
"Tonality does not serve: it must be served." He did not serve harmony and
went on to perform the Kammersymphonie, and a riot ensued in Vienna when he
stated that it was "the perfect amalgamation of melody with harmony, vertical
space with horizontal time, in that both of them participate equally in melting
down more outlying tonal relationships to form a unity, and draw logical
conclusions from the solutions to the problems from which we have availed
ourselves."
The other road was Hindemith. He wrote Die Harmonie der Welt, it challenged
Schoenberg's Moses and Aron, flopped, and most people have never even heard of
Hindemith's grandiose effort to save tonality using the life of Kepler as a
means of introducing 8 characters and 8 planets and trying to keep up with
science by stating "I can go even further and substitute for the equation
'tonality = emotional state' a more far reaching one, namely 'tonality = group
of concepts', so as to widen enormously the field of tonal symbolism." Poor
guy.
>But musical change is not progress.
>Musical change, unlike mathematical or scientific or technological
>change, is merely shifting fashion, and there are always many roads
>that can be taken.
Musical change (aside from pop music) is quite related to philosophical,
mathematical, scientific, and technological change. Is it clear yet with the
Schoenberg<->Einstein connection, or do I have to give even more examples?
>If you can avoid acknowledging this, then you
>can avoid acknowledging even the possibility that the road taken
>was not the best road, and may in fact be a dead end.
Ever hear Mahler's 9th? That was Romanticism as it was about take most of
western music with it. IMO, Einstein and Schoenberg saved music, although it
may be a while before we see full recovery.
>Eh? What's your point? We are talking about classical music.
Like Mozart, Haydn, and CPE Bach?
>You are saying that classical composers *should* be satisfied with
>writing merely for their fellow composers and a tiny cadre of
>enthusiasts?
Mozart, Haydn, and CPE Bach didn't do this.
>Beethoven and Bach have substantial audiences
>today. I was brought up listening to them, and I come from a rather
>typical middle class family. Why shouldn't contemporary classical
>composers be able to hope for decent audiences also?
Contemporary classical composers? I don't know any.
>>Composers with strong morality write for no one.
>
>Wow. This sounds like crazy talk to me. Morality?
Yes.
>No, the Well-Tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue do get listened to,
>and a lot of pianists would like to be able to play them. More to
>the point, they are part of a tradition which includes a lot of
>simpler music, music which will naturally lead many people to
>appreciate more complex music within the same tradition.
The WTC and Art of Fugue are two of the most complex and brilliant examples of
musical craftsmanship in all of history. Counterpoint is far more difficult
than writing songs or waltzes or nocturnes. You don't know counterpoint, do
you? Chopin failed counterpoint. He later hired a counterpoint tutor and it
still did him no good. It's quite easy to splash arpeggios and big chords
around, but it is a craft, science, and art to write a fugue.
>Modernism
>spurns such simple, pleasant, entry level music, and most likely
>modernists would be incapable to write such music even if they
>wanted to.
Schoenberg wrote many tonal piano pieces, songs, and other works before moving
to free atonality, minimalism, and then 12-tone, and then back to
semi-tonality. Again, he wrote *the* book on traditional harmony this century.
Webern had a degree in music composition; he learned all of his basics; so did
Berg.
>You do have a point though. Some music is more demanding than
>other music, and thus will have a smaller audience. But how far
>do you want to go with this?
Until someone plays the Appassionata. Then I leave.
>Let me ask you a question. Suppose I were to claim that I had
>just composed the greatest piece of music ever written, music so
>difficult and complex that no one but me would ever be able to
>appreciate it.
I'd say that your communication skills need work to explain to others what you
are trying to do. Lots of people understand and enjoy Stravinsky, Scriabin,
and Prokofiev, and they all fall into your "experimental black hole" of
atonalism or pantonalism or whatever it happens to be. You must think the Rite
of Spring is useless. Too many time changes! Serial implications! Odd
rhythms! Modernists!!!! [sic]
>Leaving aside the question of my actual compositional talent (which
>is minimal), would it even be *possible* for such a statement to
>be true? Would it be possible for a piece of music to be "great"
>if no one but the composer could appreciate it? I say no!
Let me know when a composer ever states that no one but he can appreciate the
music. He's probably lying and doesn't have a clue, like Cage and Stockhausen.
Piano lid slamming and string strumming is just silly; THAT is avant garde
nonsense. I don't think you know enough about atonal/12 tone/or serial works
to pass any judgement on their worth or use.
>As I
>said above, music is for the listener, not the composer. Although
>the composer is also a listener I just don't see how any piece of
>music with such narrow appeal could ever be considered great music,
>however complex and conceptually clever it might be. That's not
>what music is about; it's about the listener.
As I said above, no composer I trust has ever claimed that only he can
understand the music.
>Let's do another thought experiment. Suppose the entire Western
>Classical tradition were reduced to five brilliant composers writing
>music for each other, music that they alone could appreciate. No
>matter how cleverly they justified their music, no matter what
>claims they made for it, and in fact no matter whether or not those
>claims were *true*, from the point of view of everybody else the
>entire classical tradition would have simply vanished into nothing.
>NOTHING! And that's pretty much what happened to classical music
>in the course of the 20th century, although of course the numbers
>were not so extreme.
I agree with you there.
>>Liszt is "The Father of Modern Music." That phrase has been used to describe
>>Liszt for over 75 years. You seem to be oblivious of that.
>
>Who exactly says this?
Read Walker's three volume biography of Liszt. It should be there.
>My understand is that the status of Liszt
>is disputed
He was a real person. What status is disputed?
> that he has his defenders, but others consider him
>overrated.
Like any composer.
>In any case, has it ever occurred to you that describing
>Liszt as "The Father of Modern Music" could just as well be considered
>a self-serving attempt by modernists to create a false sense of
>continuity between their own music and the music they feel they
>have superseded?
I suppose aliens at Roswell started that myth and then swayed the course of
history by telling composers to write silly crap instead of nice salon music.
You sound very paranoid. Liszt is quoted many times, in his biographies, in
his letters, in articles in the Journal of the American Liszt society, and his
late works are widely available at your local music store, with information
about Liszt's late life. Liszt wrote Atonal music. He almost wrote 12 tone
music. His late works are much like early Schoenberg: the Third Mephisto
Waltz, for example.
>But you are right in that I am not a music
>historian, so I'll just say that I hear no resemblance and see no
>continuity between Liszt and Webern or Babbitt, and leave it at
>that.
Go buy Leslie Howard's CD "Liszt: the Late Works." Get ready for minimalism,
atonal, "MODERNIST" [sic] music you'll hate.
>Actually I agree about many of your choices (all from the first
>half of the 20th century, and not including Schoenberg or Webern).
>I'm not writing a book here, I understand that I'm overgeneralizing
>when I talk about "modernism", and that more than one type of music
>has been written in the 20th century. I'm just arguing that the
>extreme modernist tradition which began with Schoenberg and is
>epitomized by Babbitt has no listeners and no future.
Extreme modernist tradition is Goethe. You are not only overgeneralizing
talking about "modernism," you don't know what it is, or what you mean.
If you want to argue that Schoenberg and Babbitt have no future, then do it
already. I already provided you with links between Einstein's Science and
Schoenberg and the neo-classicists.
>Tom Wolfe wrote an interesting book called "The Painted Word".
>It's about modern art, but I think his thesis applies equally well
>to modern music. His point was that modern art in the 50's and
>60's was held captive by theorists (especially Greenberg), to the
>point where if you didn't know the theory you couldn't appreciate
>the art, and in fact eventually to the point where the art itself
>was reduced to little more than illustrations of art theory.
If you lived in 1300 AD, a minor triad would sound horribly abrasive and
dissonant to you. You have been conditioned to the theory of tonality. What
would Mozart have thought about Wagner? Probably he would think that Wagner
was so chromatic and dissonant that no one could ever actually like listening
to the Prelude from Tristan; that one had to know the "theory" of Wagner to
listen to such horrid noise. You just need to open your eyes. I think we both
agree that Cage, Cowell, Stockhausen, etc. are cheap gimmicks, but there is
substance there that you haven't even considered enough to dismisss.
>I have an interesting anecdote about Babbitt though.
>Although much of the audience again applauded politely,
>from the back of the hall there suddenly came loud, sustained
>booing. The booing ended when the orchestra rose again, and resumed
>when the composer was asked to stand again. I'd never heard anything
>like this before, and certainly not in Carnegie Hall.
Richter was booed off the stage at Stalin's funeral and taken away by police to
Moscow for playing Bach. Another reason why the general public should have no
bearing on the course of music.
>My point is that Babbitt is already a fashion that has past. He
>is already being rejected by the young. I find it impossible to
>believe that anyone will be listening to his dry, sterile music 50
>years from now.
I find a lot of Babbitt boring, too. That's why I don't include him in the
chain of Schoenberg->Berg/Webern->Krenek. I like listening to their music.
Babbitt is a bit of a bore, but somewhat interesting to study with his
"rhythmic inversions" and serialization of note values and rests. However,
Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, opus 19, Berg's Wozzeck, the Webern opus 21
symphony, the Krenek third piano sonata... are all pretty widely accepted as
mainstream masterpieces of the 20th century even by those professors I had who
did not like 12 tone music very much.
>I've deleted a huge essay on Liszt here, because it's really not
>central to what I am saying, and because I'm not sufficiently up
>on Liszt to argue your points in detail. Let's just say I'm not
>convinced.
Liszt wrote atonal music. He coined the term Music of the Future, and Nuages
Gris is often called the "gateway to modern music." You don't know enough to
be convinced or not. You just ignore what you don't know and don't want to
know; all because you won't take the time to sit down and figure out something
to actually say about music.
>Again, I'm not talking about popular music, I'm talking about
>accessible piano music written by serious classical composers.
>This existed in the past, and I see no reason why it couldn't exist
>today, but it doesn't.
We don't live in the classical period.
>Why doesn't this bother you???
Because there is plenty of music from the classical and baroque period I enjoy;
more than I'll ever have a chance to play, most likely. I'm glad people are
trying new things, and returning to counterpoint.
>If classical
>composers aren't willing to write music that people want to listen
>to then there is a risk that the entire tradition will simply come
>to an end, and then Tori Amos or Wu-Tang Clan will be the only
>choices.
I'd like a fractal tradition for a while. Then maybe some more 12-tone, and
then some microtonal fugues. I don't need any more Ballades or Classical
Sonatas. I have plenty.
>(No, actually there will still be plenty of choices, it's
>just that none of them will be direct inheritors of Beethoven and
>Bach. The world won't come to an end, but I still think it will
>be sad).
Seeing that our current state is partly Beethoven's fault, I'm surprised you
aren't more angry with him. I am.
>I said "accessible classical piano music with ties to the popular
>music of the time". The dance music in the Bach partitas certainly
>qualifies, yes?
No. I don't think so. They were among the very few works Bach published in
his life, but I highly doubt anyone danced to the partitas. They'd practically
be moshing to the 5th.
>So you disagree when I say that some of the great music of the past
>had ties to the popular music of time? I think a lot of people,
>not just me, would have a problem with that position.
No, I agree. Liszt transcribed the popular opera themes for solo piano and
also the songs of Schumann and Schubert. That was a tie to popular music of
the time.
>>>But few (if any)
>>>"important" modern classical composers of the last 50 years have
>>>bothered to write this sort of music,
>
>>Wars. Liberation. Freedom.
>
>Incoherence. Non-sequitur. You aren't making much sense here.
The musician or pianist is not the slave of society anymore, not in the servant
sense nor the ruling God-artist sense. Science, World Wars, Philosophy are
factors which seem to rule out the possibility of there being any important
modern classical composers spoonfeeding pop tart music to the public.
>No one say composers can't write dry, sterile, dead music if they
>want to. I'm just saying I think it's a shame that they haven't
>also written music that people want to listen to.
That *you* want to listen to. But it is true that I write in a lot of genres
and I'm in no way stuck in any "modernist" [sic] black hole; not that I'm
suggesting you'd necessarily like any of it, but i do like to branch out.
>>Communism failed; no man is "entitled" to one loaf of bread and one piece
>of
>>digestable easy to play music per day, no more, no less.
>>
>>Maybe communism is what you are advocating?
>
>You aren't even trying to make sense, you're just posturing.
Posturing as what? I'm telling you that whining about lack of modern classical
music that happens to be to your liking and be accessable to you is not going
to make any music come your way, because you think you're entitled to something
from musicians you hate for not writing music for you. But you're not.
>>>and this is a great tragedy
>>>and loss for amateur pianists.
>
>>And that's their problem, no one else's.
>
>Wow!!! You acknowledge how much of a loss modernism has been for
>most pianists, and you just don't care!
We are not in the modern period. Why would I care? There's lots of great
music out there. Even if I did care, why would that be relevant? Am I
supposed to do something about it? I wrote about music, and Liszt, and
Schoenberg, and the philosophy and science behind music. You whine because you
can't or won't talk about music unless it's tailor made for you.
>Part of the new music mythos is that it is the audience that has
>failed, not the composers,
Not new. Liszt said that: "There are no difficult composers--only difficult
audiences. And they can be trained."
>and that if only the audience were as
>moral as the composers then they would be crowding into new music
>concerts in droves.
The concert hall is dead. Being a concert pianist does not pay even rent, from
what I've heard. I prefer recordings, and not live concert recordings.
>Sorry, it's your job to write for us, and if
>you have contempt for our tastes then we will ignore you, and you
>will deserve to be ignored.
Know what my job is? Going to grad school and getting my teaching credentials
in Greek and Latin. I also majored in music, but like you I don't care for the
environment right now in universities' music departments, and I don't see much
future in that. If people like my music, great. If they have comments to make
it better, that's more great. if they don't like it, oh well. But you don't
know... you haven't heard my music and you tell me my 'job' is to write music
for your tastes when not only do you not know your own tastes, you don't know
what I've written!
>But who is this music for? Who is supposed to be listening to it?
>Will schoolchildren be whistling microtonal fractal melodies on
>their way to class? Just what is the point of all this experimentation,
>if not to eventually create music that people will want to listen
>to?
It's only experimentation until you nail a method that works. When it works,
most often such "experimental" methods once solidified as a real working
process produce ear-pleasing music. I have a 12-tone techno piece on my page
and no one's ever even known that I was using a kind of 12-tone counterpoint
with the combinatorial sets, etc. etc. The process, however odd, should not
necessarily be glaringly obvious to even a careful listener. I think Scriabin
was able to build his chords with 4ths and not 3rds and use his "mystic chord"
and *still* produce music pleasing intellectually and aurally. A few of my
peices have been #1 on the experimental classical, symphonic electronica, and
minimalist charts, and I get e-mail from people about my music from my
webpage—mostly positive. So someone listens. My music is not useless, by your
definition, yet. But don't blame me for the 20th century; blame Beethoven. I
write accessible music when I'm not fractalizing (fractal music sounds very
good; I've heard other composers create great works with fractals--except for
my latest one I haven't uploaded yet. I *DARE* someone to sit through it once
it's up). It's important to me that I try to be versatile and not stuck in
any one system. I'm no modernist, no postmodernist, no tree hugging hippie, no
blob art lover, no elitist trying to obfuscate music. I'm just me.
>[...yada yada yada...]
Snip all you want, I'll make more.
>2500 years before you have to acknowledge failure? Wow, you really
>do believe in giving yourself a lot of leeway, don't you? :-)
I like Webern a lot. >: }
In all honesty, if you like science and music, I recommend purchasing:
The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the
Universe.
Jamie James
ISBN 0-387-94474-5
LstPuritan
>appreciated by the masses has a value, because without trying new and
>perhaps unsuccesful ways, you are stuck. It is just like basic
>research: The applications may come as late as 50 years after the
>initial research. Perhaps someone will eventually write accesible
>music based on the inaccesible stuff. The problem is that Justin seems
>to take the viewpoint that this transformation from inaccesible to
>accesible always leads to a loss of "musical value".
What music is inaccessible?
Greg Presley
> .
>
> What music is inaccessible?
When it's so loud that I have to put my hands over my ears, it has become
inaccessible to me, anyway. This applies to some Stockhausen pieces and
some music by other new composers as well as most live rock music. Greg
LstPuritan
>> than the pomposity slayer. This sholud be an interesting bout.
>
>you follow the saga too???
>we ought to have paid entry really
>Al
And you get to vote one of us off the island.
LstPuritan
Al
really? I find that music has to be played loud to produce true distinction
between the parts, and a real bass response, but then I listen to prog metal
over a small PA in a small room, I no longer have a normal hearing level.
But seriously, I find that for music to have a full impact it has to be
played loud, there's more to music than just vibrating ear drums, you can
also feel it through the rest of your body, which not only excites you, it
adds to your perception of the music, and really gets you moving, but again
I'm dealing in the non-classical styles.
Al
> And you get to vote one of us off the island.
what island??
can we apply this to ammsavage-garden, and vote mia off??
can we vote people into coventry for two weeks instead?
can we rig it so that me and adam win enough money to get our 88note
hammer/weighted action digital pianos???
it's a good cause....
ish
Al
donations to my musical development should have your credit card numbers,
and all the details to fill out a direct debit from your acocunt to mine
thankyou......
it was worth a try
qigo...@gmail.com
My name is George and I write from Spain. I love music of Liz Story and got back to play the piano after 25 years.
I'm looking for the sheet music for Hymn and I can not buy in any store. We would be very grateful if you share with me.
My disposal to scores of Solid Colors and Wedding Rain, both songs lp Solid Colors.
With kind regards to everyone
El jueves, 20 de julio de 2000, 9:00:00 (UTC+2), Glenn L escribió:
> If anyone is interested and likes Liz Story as much as I do, she just
> released "Hymn" in sheet music from Hal Leonard. The transcription is
> excellent! She may have even done it herself.
>
> I got to talk to her 6 months ago after a Windham Hill concert and I
> talked to her about the horrible transcription of the "Escape of the
> Circus Ponies" disc. She said she knew which is why she got involved in
> the transcriptions of her latest disc "17 seconds..." She didn't like
> her work being mutilated any more than the people who buy it.
>
> I wish more artists were like her.
>
> Glenn
begoni...@gmail.com
Hello,
To the thread of this conversation, could someone give me a score of scape of the circus ponies? I love this song and I can not find it anywhere.
I'm not good enough to touch her by ear.
I would be very grateful.
have a nice day
Begoña