Musical Interludes in the Mystère du Siège d'Orléans

Celeste Hutchins

Proseminar

Final Paper

 

In the spring of 1429, things looked bleak for Orléans. The English had nearly encircled the city. They held several defensive fortifications, including a tower on the bridge, Tourelles. They had constructed several fortifications called boulevards. Efforts to free the city, such as the Battle of the Herrings had ended disastrously. The duc d'Orélans was in an English prison, awaiting ransom. "By March 1429, Orleans seemed ready to fall at he next serious push." (Pernoud 9) When the city of Orléans fell, the entirety of the French loyalist side would collapse with it. It seemed only to be a matter of time before the English were victorious over all of France.

 

On April 29th of that year, supplies and troops were sent to the besieged city. Among them was an unusual young woman, known as the Pucelle. Only a few days later, on May 8th, the English withdrew from the city, after a series of decisive battles. These victories were attributed to La Pucelle. Pernoud writes, "At the moment that the English were raising the siege and withdrawing from Orléans, the inhabitants of the city organizes solemn processions to thank god and the patron saints of the city, Sts. Aignan and Euverte. This spontaneous thanksgiving celebration became a procession that continues today, every May 8." (p 243)

 

The raising of the Siege of Orléans was the beginning of the end for the English. By the end of 1453, the hundred years war was finally over and Charles VII was king. Orléans continues to celebrate its part in this victory through its annual festivities and La Pucelle who aided them. Today, Orléans is home to many statues and monuments of Jeanne d'Arc. The cathedral that she prayed at in between battles has an altar dedicated to her and series of stained glass windows depicting scenes from her life. There is a Rue d' Jeanne d'Arc, a Jeanne d'Arc cafe, a Jean d'Arc Chocolatier, and the academic Centre Jeanne d'Arc.

 

At some point, a mystery play, Le Mistere du Siege d'Orléans, was composed about the raising of the siege. Mystery plays are a genre depicting history. Knight writes,

The Mystery plays, taken as a whole corpus, dramatized universal history from creation to doomsday . . .. [T]he mystery plays were historical in sense that they were externally referential and that their linear model of time had displaced the cyclical model of time in the liturgy. They were the collective memory of late medieval Christendom . . . (p 19)

True to its genre, the Siege depicts an actual historical event. However, Hamblin notes, "the creation of such a play based on contemporary historical events still burning in the memory of the participants and the spectators, represents a true departure from standard subject matter." (p 59-60) Bertrin writes in the Catholic Encyclopedia that the Siege is only one of "only two profane mysteries which have been preserved." However, this is a modern distinction. Knight writes, "the religious-profane dichotomy constitutes a methodological error" (p 14) and that medieval people did not "make the same distinction between religious and profane that we make today." (p 14) The main generic differentiations between dramas thus does not hinge on the holiness, but in this, case, on historicity.

 

This play Le Mistere du Siege d'Orléans has never been performed in its current form, according to the staff at the Centre Jeanne d'Arc. Hamblin writes that it "is nowhere mentioned in fifteenth-century writings." (p v) However, its roots may lie in the May 8^th festivities, specifically in 1435. Hamblin writes, "Undoubtedly, some kind of dramatic presentation did occur in 1435 . . .. This presentation . . . took place 'durant la procession,' as part of the celebration." (p 26) The 1435 presentation indicated "a growing secular interest in the celebration." (p 27) This interest may have been partially financed by Gilles de Laval, seigneur de Rais, otherwise known as Bluebeard. "Depositions taken from his inheritors reveal that Rais financed several mystères, one of which was in Orléans, where he spent nearly the entire year of 1435." (p 28-9) Hamblin goes on to note that Rais' involvement with the play, could explain why "no more mention is made . . . of any re-enactment of the Tourelles battle after 1439," (p 29) as Rais was executed in 1440.

 

The authorship of the Siege is also uncertain. Hamblin writes, "no single author stands out as the most likely source of the Siege" and there is a "possibility that the work is rather a compilation of the endeavors of several writers, and perhaps several different time periods." (p 16) Thus, the play possibly commissioned by Rais may have evolved into the Siege as it now exists. The writer or writers was probably a resident of Orléans. "The author would have had to be either native to Orléans or very familiar with and very dedicated to this final stronghold of Loyalists in the Hundred Years’ War." (p 10) The Siege names "locations which only local residents would have recognized." (p 46)

 

Thus, we have an obscure play with a processional background. It is not a small play, however. Hamblin writes, "It is a mystère of considerable length, involving more than 120 speaking roles in twenty different sites." (p 4) Later, she says, "[In] order to recreate the Siege in its present form, we would need ships, fortresses, tents, break-away towers, walls, a bridge with detachable parts, a river and an ocean, a means for hovering saints above the stage, canons and various dead bodies (one of which can lose its head at will)." (p 54) It's no wonder that the present form of the play has never been produced.

 

There is only one extant copy of the Siege. It "is preserved in a single paper manuscript, now in the Regina collection of the Vatican, but formerly in the library of Fleury." (Frank 203) "There are no embellishments or adornments whatsoever in the manuscript." (Hamblin p 83) Frank writes, "Our manuscript betrays much interest in the complicated staging and music required by the play . . .. Detailed rubrics . . . also indicate exactly which instruments are to be played during the intermissions." (p 206) Despite this attention to musical detail, there is no sheet music with the manuscript.

 

The Siege, however, does mention one chant by name, in folio 354r. Hamblin summarizes the action at this point in the play:

On Saturday, May 7, the French attack the defense line of the Tourelles. A heavy battle ensues, and the Pucelle is wounded. She encourages the soldiers, who go on to victory. Glasidas and others fall into the Loire and drown. The French enter Orléans victorious and celebrate the English loss. (92)

This is the high point of action in the play and the victory considered most miraculous. According to audio in the Maison de Jeanne d’Arc, the French forces were about to quit the attack for the day, when a badly wounded Jeanne came rushing back to the battle, waving her standard and leading the French to victory. She had also made a prediction that "Glasidas" [sic] would die without bleeding. The day after this battle, in the play and historically, the English retreat to the nearby town of Meung. Therefore it is the battle of Tourelles that raises the siege. It is also the battle that was re-enacted as a part of the annual thanksgiving procession. This may be the oldest part of the Mystère and if so, the author probably remembered the battle.

 

In line 13638, the last line on the night of May 7th, La Pucelle orders the town to chant Te Deum laudamus: "Toute la nuit faites sonner Toutes vos cloches en tous lieux, Et à forte voix sans reserve Chantez Te Deum laudamus." (Gros 821) The people must play their bells and chant in a strong voice and without reserve all through the night. Te Deum was a widely known and a widely used chant in the Middle Ages, "sung at the end of Matins on Sundays and feast days . . .. It has also been used as a processional chant, the conclusion for a liturgical drama, a song of thanksgiving on an occasion such as the consecration of a bishop, and a hymn of victory on the battlefield." (Steiner) This usage is clearly as a hymn of victory on the battlefield as far as the rubrics of the play are concerned. However, since the play also has a processional background, the chant is doubly appropriate. The Siege is certainly not a liturgical drama, but the signing of Te Deum may still have been recognized as a dramatic cue. The play does not end at this point, but it lacks mentions of specific points to break off for the night. Perhaps this is a logical place to quit until the next day. The usage of Te Deum thus arises not only naturally out of the rubrics and out of history, but exists in other contexts as well.

 

In actual fact, the historical document, the Journal of the Siege of Orléans, reports that "All the clergy and the people of Orléans devoutly sang Te Deum laudamus and rang all the city bells, very humbly thanking Our Lord for this glorious divine consolation" (Pernoud p 48) Thus, the Mystére, as the name - and the genre - implies, presents history as the writer and the intended actors would have remembered it.

 

The rubrics of the play in a pause immediately below La Pucelle’s lines state, "Alors ici il y une grande pause et un grand bruit dans la ville, de joie et de vif plaisir; toute la nuit sonnerie de cloches, sonnerie de trompettes et cris: 'Noël!'" (Gros 821) Here is a large pause and a great joyous noise in the city: all night bells are rung, trumpets are sounded and people cry, "Noël!" The play looks like a historical document here, unless the playwright actually expected people to blow trumpets all night, or perhaps, as speculated above, he was envisioning putting a break for the night at this point.

 

The performance practice of Te Deum would have used the sort of instrumentation contained in the rubrics of the play and recommended by La Pucelle. "[A] festive performance of the Te Deum was normally accompanied by instruments (in particular organ and bells), the normal concomitant of which would be polyphony of some kind. Nevertheless, such polyphony was essentially improvised . . .. 15th-century settings are rare." (Steiner) Although, she goes on, there is a setting by Binchois. Thus, historically, the bells of the town were rung, but in the rubrics of the play cloches, defined by Pocket Manual of Musical Terms as "chimes" (Baker p 56), were used to improvise polyphony. This is the only playing of cloches in the play.

 

The bells of the village are indicated in the play in other pauses. There is a typical usage after line 2414, "le beffroi de la ville sonnera sans cesser durant l'assaut." (Gros p 165) The bells of the village ring unceasingly during the attack. The beffroi always function in this play as indicators of battle. They need not indicate that a battle is happening, but can also ring when a battle is about to occur, as a cue for the army to assemble. For example, after line 5242, "Alors le beffroi de la ville sonnera et ceux de la ville sortiront." (Gros p 349) The bells, or belfry, of the city will sound and the citizens will leave. They are leaving, of course, to go fight a battle.

 

Another particular type of battle bell is the tocsin, or the alarm bell. In the pause after line 12174, "Et à Saint-Loup une cloche sonnera le tocsin, et l'on criera: 'Alarme!'" (Gros p 775) And in the fortress of Saint-Loup an alarm bell will sound and someone will cry, "Alarm!" This is the only tocsin in the Siege. The ringers of it are the English, who are occupying Saint-Loup and whom the French are attacking.

 

Also linked to armies and battles is the clairon, the instrument called for second most often. What sort of instrument is meant by "clairon" is not clear. Non-musicians, when commenting on the Siege, translate this as bugle. This is a logical translation because the clarions are so often associated with the army in the play. However, since the subject matter of the play is a military victory, most things in it have at least some association to the army. If this was a bugle, then it was a signal horn, made out of a cow’s horn. (Baines) It would have played bugle calls, such as signals to attack, retreat, assemble, etc. As a natural horn, it only would have been able to play overtones of the fundamental pitch, just as modern bugle calls only use harmonics.

 

Gros, when translating the Siege from Old French to modern French, leaves the old French word clairon intact. The modern French word clairon unequivocally refers to a bugle. The Old French word may have had a different meaning. In fact, there existed a separate term for bugles. Baines begins his bugle article with the entomology for the world 'bugle', "In the Middle Ages a not very common Old French word (also cor buglèr, bugleret) for a small bovine signaling horn." Thus there existed, although not in wide usage, a term that specifically referred to bugles. 

 

Another possible definition of clairon is "The high register of a trumpet; in its variant forms, the term also designates a kind of trumpet." (Dahlqvist) The Pocket Manual of Musical Terms defines it as "a small, shrill-toned trumpet." (Baker p 55) This term has it’s own entomology. It comes "[f]rom the medieval Latin clario and claro, the French form 'claron' was developed, and in the 14th century such forms as 'clairin', 'clarin', 'clerain', 'clerin', 'clairon' (with the diminutives 'claroncel', 'claronchiel' etc.) began to appear. 'Clairon' became the most common of these." (Dalhqvist) The term 'clairon' is the one used by the playwright or the Siege.

 

There are reasons to believe that the rubrics of the Siege could have been intended to refer either to a short, shrill trumpet, or to the high register of a normal trumpet. "During the Middle Ages trumpeters played in the low register. Johannes de Grocheo wrote (De musica, c1300) that only the first four partials of the harmonic series were used, a fact corroborated by the earliest surviving trumpet music." (Tarr, 'Trumpet') Thus, if the trumpets in the Siege are only playing in the low register, and the playwright wanted a sound in the higher register, he would be able to so indicate in the rubrics by specifically calling for a clairon sound. Or, perhaps, it was a separate instrument, "Very often clairon and trompette (or the like) are mentioned in pairs, suggesting two distinct instrument forms. In 1468, for example, Margaret of York was greeted 'à son de trompes et de clarons'." (Dahlqvist) Similarly, "trompettes et clairons" is oft repeated in the rubrics of the Siege. In fact, the clairon is never mentioned without also calling for trumpets. Untangling exactly what instrument the playwright intended to specify is probably impossible, or at least, beyond the scope of this paper. Dahlqvist states, "The precise meaning of these terms may never be understood completely."

 

One example of the clairon being used as a signaling instrument occurs in lines 5595-5. Talbot says, "Allons, trompettes et clairons, Sonnez pour assembler l'armée." (Gros p 371) Go trumpets and clarions, sound to assemble the army. Interestingly, the rubrics immediately following Talbot’s speech call for trumpets to be played – but not clairons. "Alors sonneront les trompettes des Anglais, et ils s'assembleront pour venir assaillir Orléans." (Gros p. 371) Then the trumpets of the English will sound and they will be assembled to go attack Orléans. This may be an error on the part of the copyist. Hamblin documents many copyist errors and notes that it is the nature of hand-copied documents to contain errors. However, if it is not an error, it shows that trumpets alone are enough to signal the army, and thus casts doubt on translating “clairon” to “bugle.”

 

A similar omission occurs around line 15907. La Pucelle says, "Allons! trompettes et clairons! Pour donner courage et vigueur Aux Français très loyaux et bons . . .." (Gros p 875) Go trumpets and clairons! To give courage to the very honest and good French . . .. The pause immediately below however calls for " . . . trompettes et d'autres instruments." Trumpets and the other instruments. If clairons refer to army bugles, it is perhaps unlikely that they would be played during an instrumental break, since their function is to play signal calls. The "other instruments" could refer to organs, stringed instruments, bells or other instruments not specifically mentioned in the rubrics of the play. These might make an unlikely paring with bugles.

 

Clairons are also played during military parades. For example, after line 12198, "Alors elle viendra à Orléans: une pause. - Et tous en bon ordre - clairons, trompettes -, amènent foison de prisonniers avec les croix rouges, ligotés;" (Gros p 777) Then La Pucelle will come to Orléans: a pause. And with trumpets and clairons playing, bound English prisoners will enter in good order. Thus, the French are triumphantly marching English prisoners (with red crosses) into Orléans. In a pause after line 12678, the French again march with clairons, "Alors, ici une pause de trompettes, clairons. – Et tous, en ordre harmonieux, leurs étendards déployés, partent; ils iront, descendre de cheval au droit des Bouterons, et là se rassembleront tous." (Gros p 795) Then, here a pause of trumpets, bugles. - And all will leave, in harmonious order, with their standards unfurled; they will go, down from their horses, to the right of Bouterons, and will all gather there.

 

The English army also marches with clairons. The pause after line 8954 indicates, "Alors ils arriveront joyeusement avec trompettes, clairons; Talbot et d'autres vont au-devant d'eux." (Gros p. 569) Then they will joyfully arrive with trumpets and clairons. Talbot and others will go ahead of them. In addition, battles and other military actions, such as gathering their arms or putting on armor also call for clairons.

 

Because the clairon is never played without trumpets, trumpets fill the same roles as the clairons. Trumpets alone may be specified in contexts that in other pauses call for trumpets and clairons. For instance, sometimes trumpets alone are played to assemble the army. Trumpets, however, are called for far more often than clairons, sometimes in contexts where clairons are not used. No less than forty-seven pauses specifically indicate that trumpets should play. As noted above, trumpets were played in the low range. "Medieval trumpeters puffed out their cheeks when blowing and produced a tone that was described as airy and trembling, not unlike the vibrato produced by a boy soprano." (Tarr, 'Trumpet') The trumpets of the time were sometimes straight and sometimes folded. “Shortly before 1400 instrument makers learned to bend brass tubing . . ..” (Tarr, ‘Slide Trumpet’)  It is possible that, in order to get more pitch variety, the playwright may have intended to use - or at least not objected to – slide trumpets. "The single-slide trumpet seems to have been introduced . . . – according to Polk (1997) between 1400 and 1420, probably first in Burgundy, then in the Cologne-Flanders area – and was soon ubiquitous. It was used until the invention of the double slide around 1490." (Tarr, 'Slide Trumpet') Of course, the Burgundians sided with the English during the Hundred Years War, making it tempting to speculate that the instrument may have been tainted by this association. The playwright simply calls for "trompettes," but what other name he might have used to refer to the new instrument is not clear to modern scholars. "Terminology and nomenclature in a period of transition are always problematic. Early mentions of 'pusun', for example in Basle in 1410, could refer to either the long straight trumpet or perhaps the slide trumpet; 'trompette saicqueboute', in Burgundy in 1468, probably meant a slide trumpet . . .." (Tarr, 'Slide Trumpet') 

 

One place that trumpets are called for, but clairons are not, is to play some specific signal calls to the army, such as sounding a retreat. For example, in the pause following line 2950, the rubrics indicate, "Ensuite ici les trompettes des Français sonneront une retraite . . .." (Gros p 197) Then, here, the French trumpets will sound a retreat. This use of trumpets and not clairons to play a specific signal call is additional evidence that the clairons were not bugles. This usage of trumpets is part of the action of the play. Instead of providing a musical pause, the trumpet playing advances the plot. There are other examples of this sort of usage, for instance, heraldry. In line 15665, Lord John instructs his herald to quickly take his trumpet and make an announcement to the town. "Héraut, prenez votre trompette Vite, et veuillez écouter . . ." (Gros p 861) The following pause indicates that the herald plays the trumpet and then makes the announcement. "Alors il sonnera la trompette; ensuite il dit:" (Gros p 861)

 

For the most part, trumpets are played alone in the same contexts that they are paired with clairons. That is, they are played during battles, marches, and to assemble the army.  They also appear in victory celebrations, for example, when the town chants Te Deum and during the plundering of the defeated town of Jargeau in the pause after line 16642, "les trompettes sonneront, et la ville de Jargeau sera pillée: vaisselle d'argent, étain, lits, meubles meublants, draps, couvertures et tous autres ustensiles de ménage . . .." The trumpets will sound and the town of Jargeau will be plundered: silver plate, tin, furniture, cloths, covers and all other household utensils. This rubric, like one that calls for trumpets and clairons, also calls for prisoners to be marched out by the army.

 

The third most-oft appearing musical instrument is the organ. Unlike, bells, clairons, and trumpets, the organ fills a purely musical role and is not part of the action of the play. It is first called for in folio 171. Hamblin summarizes the action at this point in the play: 

Charles kneels and prays to God that He have pity on France. Nostre Dame, Saints Michel, Euvertre and Aignan convince God that Charles is sincere. He sends Michel to Barrois, where a young girl will be given the mission of winning the siege of Orléans. The French, because of their loss of faith, will have no personal glory in the victory. (p 90)

The pause occurs after God speaks on line 7066, ordering St. Michel to go to La Pucelle. The rubrics say, "Pause d'orgues. Et il vient auprès de la Pucelle occupée à garder les brebis de son père et à coudre du linge." (Gros p 459) Pause of organs. And then he goes to the Pucelle, who is occupied keeping her father's ewes and sewing linen. Thus the organ plays while Michel descends from heaven, possibly a separate stage from where La Pucelle is spinning wool, or, at the very least, requiring a scene change. Gros attaches a footnote to "orgues," where he states, "Pour le première fois, dans le Mystére, ce sont les orgues qui se font entendre durant la pause Aussi bien le ciel rend-il alors visite à la terre: le veritable nature de la mission de Jeanne se précise." (p 459) For the first time in the play it is the organs which we hear in the pause. It is at this time that the heavens visit the earth and reveal the precise nature of Jeanne's mission. Thus Gros implies a connection between the organ and themes of holiness.

 

As this scene was most likely not intended to be performed in a church, the organ called for is a portative organ. These small, "easily transported organ[s]," (Seay p 73) have "a keyboard of up to two octaves." (Owen) Seay describes the portative as, "[s]mall and capable of being worked by one man without assistance, it carried none of the religious overtones associated with its larger [church organ] brother." (p 73) However, the rubrics only call for organs on four occasions, all of which invoke God. The playwright clearly intends his choice of instrument to convey religious overtones, as Gros states.

 

Seay goes on to describe the performance practice of the portative organ. "Since one hand of the executant was occupied in building up the air pressure, its position was not that of a polyphonic instrument, but one used in group performance, as a member of chamber combinations." (p 73) Hence, the playwright specifies multiple organs for the pause.

 

Finally, string instruments are mentioned once in the rubrics of the Siege. The pause after line 17614 says, "Pause de trompettes, de musiciens jouant d'instruments à cordes, et d'autres instruments. - Puis après, le messager arrive devant le roi et dit:" (Gros p 911) Pause of trumpets, musicians playing of string instruments, and other instruments. - Then after, the messenger arrives in front of the king and speaks. In her summary of the action in this folio, Hamblin writes, "A messenger reports to Charles on the progress made by the French army." (p 93) This scene takes place at court. The unique mention of strings and other instruments helps distinguish court musically from outdoor scenes with the army. Of course, the court scene would be performed outdoors along with the rest of the play. The music helps provide cues to the audience about the scene.

 

At the very end of the Siege, "Jehanne again admonishes the citizens to thank God for these victories, and to conduct processions in memory of the victories granted them for God." (Hamblin p 93) Loyal to Jehanne’s wishes, the citizens of Orléans have not forgotten the procession, but unfortunately, have neglected the play. The recent publication of Gros' translation into modern French may spark popular interest. Perhaps the Siege, after so many centuries, will finally have a performance.

Medieval drama

I seem to have misplaced one of my souces. Particularly, one I was planning on quoting in my conclusion. More disturbingly, it was a library book. The writer's last name is Frank. I know I brought it to Paris with me. I wonder if it made it all the way back, of it got abandoned along the trip? I bet it's against the rules to take libary books out of the country.

I bet the book is out of print

Ms Word

Every time I type "clairons" into Word, it "corrects" it to say "clarions." Arg! Ok, so they refer to the same thing, but one is the word I mean, and one is not! One is english, the other is French. Ever heard of a "clarion call," maybe just as a metaphor? It's a short, narrow-bore trumpet. Of course, the modrn trumpet is narrow-bore and short, so that's why the word only exists now in metaphor. Old trumpets were long and wide bore. Valves didn't exist, so if you wanted to get a lot of chromatic notes, you played upper overtones on a big horn. You know hoe you need fewer and fewer valves as you get high pitch on trumpets? this was how they were played, back in the day. (the day here means the renaissance) Alphorns are played like this, incidentally.

why would i insist on using the french spelling? well, clairons might also mean bugles made out of cow horns, used to signal armies. Or, the might mean the upper range of a (medieval, and thus long and wide bore) trumpet. Dahlqvist states, “The precise meaning of these terms may never be understood completely.” so if the meaning of the damn word is in dispute, I want to spell it like it's spelled in the play!

It's due tomorrow. I'm in the middle of page 6. i need ten pages.

I want an alphorn. they're fun.

Procrastinating

I posted this as a comment in vince's blog:

Ah, the role of high art in pop culture. in american movies of the 50's, when people go to see the symphony or opera, it's used as a kind of a backdrop. the symphony itself is rarely shown. often a conductor (who really is obviously not conducting) in tux waving his arms around provides the only cues that the symphony is there. the symphony atendees are wealthy. they sit up properly and siltently in straight back chairs as if they are at church. Opera and high art is not to be enjoyed, it is a duty of their class to attend.

In soviet symphony, as a contrast, high art was considered culturally valuable to the masses. They symphony would be shown in movies playing along with their real-life conductor. the views were (obviously) not wealthy and were shown enjoying the music. For music deemed "romantic" (not the era, the mood), such as one of chopin's themes, that i can't recall the name of, couples in the audience might look at each other and smile, and perhaps snuggle into each other or males might but their arms around females. the soviet movie audience is thus encouraged to enjoy the symphony, rather than see it as an eltist (and boring) symbol of the upper class.

the idea of an eltitist nature of high art in the us is a persistent one. It can show up in carol's experiences in gifted and talented programs, so that Opera is considered soemthing that an elite group would be suited to enjoy, wheras a regular group would not. Or it can show up in the anti-art rhetoric of republican senators, vowing to destroy the NEA.

the anti-high art movement has commercial roots. It's been encouraged extensively by hollywood. Radio stations, such as the mormon-owned KDFC, portray calssical music as something to fall asleep by. Miami currently has no classical music radio whatsoever. thus corporate-owned radio has no desire to broadcast lively and current high art, or in some cases, no desire to broadcast high art at all.

the reasons for this are beyond the scope of this procrastination. however, the consistent mediocrity of pop culture may be a factor. Pop culture is insipid. It is not thought-provoking. It is easier to control than a complicated and thoughtful piece of art.

Universal Healthcare

Dean is right. Universal healthcare is a moral imparative.

Well, he didn't actually say it that way. In fact, when he was asked about UHC, he said he's "not your guy." His "position paper," (which is actually just a flyer and has a larger picture of him than a discussion of any issues) says his plan will offer healthcare to every unisures American for cheaper. that doesn't mean "healthcare for everybody." That means, "buy your own."

I really don't want to turn this into a Dean-bashing blog. Dean would still be better than Bush. Hell, the stuff growing in my fridge would be better than Bush. the only thing worse than bush would be Joe Lieberman. but if you think Dean's going to get you UHC, well, he's not. He doesn't want to. and if you think he's going to be pro- freedom to marry, well, he's not. He says "civil unions" (he won't even go as far as marriage) are a states rights issue. That's like saying that integration is a states rights issue.

I'm not saying he never did anything for gay people. Civil unions are a nice little seperate but equal system. It is seperate. It is equal. And the "but" still applies, as it doesn't have the nice federal rights or mobility of real marriage. and I'm sure his healthcare system is better than Bush's. But it's not UHC and it's not equal rights.

ABM Treaty?

We don't need no stinkin ABM Treaty.

This audio file has been modified from the original. It has been resized to fit your TV. Some extraneous comments about the world caring about our opnion were nuked . . . er . . . removed. Anyway, the world had better care about our opinion, or we'll drop bunker-busters on them!

Kucinich vs. Dean

Issue by issue.

It's the primary. Vote for the person who you agree with most. If you want to vote for somebody who is not a liberal, then go ahead. Then, if you're a democrat, vote for whoever wins the primary when the general election comes around. It's just the primary. If 'anybody but Bush" is your motto, well, you can compromise your ethics in the general election, instead of starting now. If you simply support who you think will "win," you can't complain when they don't represent your interests.

I don't care. I'm just procrastinating. I have a piece of music due Wed (mostly done. Needs to be fine-tuned for 4 channels of audio), A half hour presentation on La Koro Sutro on thursday, which I haven't started preparing for, and A ten page paper due friday, for which I have just used google to translate all of my primary source material from French to english. That alone is 23 pages. there may be something very interesting in there about Ascention sunday, but there might not be. at the very least, there are a lot of pauses for trumpet playing.

I do care, actually. the more I know about Dean, the less I like him. I wish that the Greens weren't the "major" leftist party in the US. We have the conservative party and the ultra-conservative party. Plutocrats rule this country and settling for a less bad plutocrat just to get out the current despot is a defeatist strategy. We need to work for a progressive government, rather than celebrating if we get one that is less bad. which is why I want Kucinich to be President 2004.

mostly, i want to be where Christi is, instead of in the snowy, cold, dark, grumpy New england where Christi is not.

Dean in the free press

Eat the State

More More More

the catholic encyclopedia, specifically, The Te Deum atricle at newadvent.org notes that:

The general rubrics (titulus XXXI) of the Roman Breviary direct the recitation of the Te Deum at the end of Matins: (a) on all feasts throughout the year, whether of nine or of three lessons, and throughout their octaves. It is said on the octave day of the feast of the Holy Innocents, but not on the feast itself unless this should fall on Sunday; (b) on all Sundays from Easter (inclusively) to Advent (exclusively) and from Christmas (inclusively) to Septuagesima (exclusively); (c) on all ferial days during Eastertide (namely from Low Sunday to Ascension Day) except Rogation Monday.

Guess what day le Mystère du Siège D'Orléans (erroneously) states is the day that the English left Orléans! Guess!

Ascension Day!!!!

since the writer of the play certainly knew that the English left on the 8th and not the 9th, s/he must have had a reason for writing in the wrong date. Is there symbolism involved? Since the play is closely tied to the annual thanksgiving procession and celebration, the establishment of that process, described here as Joan of Arc direction the town to sing Te Deum may have had very very strong import to the writer. It might have been the point of writing the whole play.

It sure would be a lot easier to tell if I could read French...

in other news

(still news about the MdsO) Slobin thought that kids here would be really excited to stage the play. So I asked some kids about it, and they were really excited. hopefully, they can be excited long enough to translate it. Putting it on for all 4+ days that it would take is probably overly ambitious, so i'm thinking: pick one day. and i can write music for the pauses (using the correct instruments were directed). and undergrads can take the 129 speaking parts. and maybe the SCA could help out with the battle stuff. i just need a vision and an army of excitable undergrads.

It would be the first ever staging too, which could add to the excitement.

too much excitement!!!!

Joan of Arc mentions the name of a song in line 13638! She orders the town to chant Te Deum laudamus! The name of an actual piece of music, for which the words and melody are known! Actual, real music! Not just, "Then here is a pause of trumpets. then the messanger says:" No, real, actual music that I can listen to. And right after that, "then, here is a large pause, etc" with musical instrument mentioned! Not only does it say what song to play, but how to orchestrate it! with bells and trumpets and loud voices!

And what does grove music say about this song? It has "been used as a processional chant, the conclusion for a liturgical drama, a song of thanksgiving on an occasion such as the consecration of a bishop, and a hymn of victory on the battlefield." there it is! A song of thanksgiving on a battlefield! As a part of a (nonliturgical) drama!

I'm going to go jump up and down now . . . or sing Te Deum

Still snowing

Went out last night and played with dog for a long time. Then wandered around with some undergrads and went and got some simulation of a soy hot chocolate at the town café. Tried throwing snowballs, but the snow was too dry. Also, apparently too dry for a snowperson. someone suggested snow angels, but it seemed cold. I missed both concerts I was going to go to.

Today, snow continues to fall. I dunno how much this stuff weighs, so I brushed it off the roof of my car. I might have to get Aaron at the train station tomorrow, so I'm hoping I can get somebody who has experience driving in snow to come with me, so s/he can warn me if I'm about to do something stupid.

I want to try to make a snowperson, but I'm supposed to do reasearch. The east coasters all seem to want to pat me on the head and send me on my way when I act amazed/confused. Except for the undergrads, since many undergrads are perpetually amazed/confused. I wish Christi were here.

It's snowing!

they do crazy things with precipitation in these eastern states, man.

Apparently, i'm expected to help shovel the driveway....

bracing for it

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/12/05/national1021EST0520.DTL

My dog ate my research

Came home last night to find part of a dissertation (that i've been using as source material) torn up and full of bite marks. What's worse is that the post-it notes had been systematically removed. Fortunately, I own the copy that I was using and so don't need to pay fees to the library.

bad dog

9 years

christi and i have now been together for nine years. well, we're not "together" per say at this very moment, but you know what i mean. gosh, i miss her.

Dean defends second class citizenship

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/12/02/DEAN.TMP marriage for hets only, says dean. he went on to state that allowing blacks and white to intermarry was a an issue for the states to decide. "what is appropriate in a northern state, just might not fly in the deep south." he continued "what's important is to give more or less equal rights to people, even if they happen to be seperate rights."

Kucinich for president

arg

Joan of Arc presentation on Wednesday. final project in supercollider demo tomorrow. final presentation in pedagogy tomorrow. gamelan concert thursday.

if i don't throw myself in the connecticut river first. it's much too cold for that tho. snow flurries at lunch time.

no food in the fucking filthy house.

Homework homework homework

Listening to George Bush say, "I beleive that marriage is between a man and a woman" over and over again is kind of depressing, even if it's for the sake of art. This and many other Bush sound bites can be found at http://www.daveross.com/audio/.

the score for La Koro Sutro arrived today. well, i got it today. fortunately, i've been granted a reprieve, so the LKS presentation isn't until a bit after my Joan of Arc paper is due.

Thanksgiving in Paris

Air France is a much nicer airline than US airlines. Rmemeber the old days before everyone was terrified that the person next to them had a shoe bomb and you could stand up and stretch without being eyed nervously and people did crazy things like walk around and stand in line for the bathrooms? Air France is like that and the stewards are polite. Downsides were that they kept waking me up for things like food or to warn me that airturbulence might break my neck is I sleep with me head pitched forward on my tray table. I've never heard of that before. Is it because US-based airlines don't care if I break my neck? Is it a special feature of french airplanes?

Arrived v. tired in Paris. Took a nap. then went out to see the world Priemere of a LaMont Young piece. I don't know the name of the piece. Christi insisited that we arrive one hour early to listen to the talk. The talk was in French, of course, so I didn't understand a word of it. "Blah blah blah John Cage blah blah serialism blah blah." Well, I got a few words. I didn't mind because I know Christi has extensive experience listenign to and understanding lectures in French about music. But then she slipped out and went to a bar without telling anyone, while I and her mom (who also doesn't understand French) stood respectfully and listened to the lecture.

The piece was three hours long and seemed to involve a few different tuning schemes, but I couldn't tell you more than that, as I didn't understand the lecture. There were drony MAX-based electronic sounds, I think samples of cello and a solo cello player with a couple of pedals. The auditorium was about 90 degrees Farenheit (I come to France and I can't speak the language and I don't do metric...) and there was inscence burning and just-intoned drone-y sounds. I fell asleep twice in the first twenty minutes. then was awake for a while, then out for about 40 minutes where I had a dream that I was on an airplane and instead of the big TV screen at the front of the cabin, they had a solo cello performer. There was a while where I had my eyes closed but was not alseep. Eventually, the cellist was playing fast rythms in the sort of the same mode as the piece started out in. The same kinds of gestures were being made, but they were all ornamented with fast notes, also in the same sort of gesture. It was sort of fractal that way. It was exciting, but then it was drony again and I'm afraid I dozed off again. Finally, the peice was over and the cellist just sat at the front and looked stressed and beat. He didn't do the full relaxing thing that's a clue that the piece is over. There were tentative claps here and there. People waited. Clapped quietly once, sort of testing if anyone else would join in. For four or five minutes.

Spent yesterday working on SuperCollider project. It crashes the server. Christi and her momed cooked and I coded. Now they're out doing something interesting and I'm working on my Joan of Arc paper (and updating my blog, of course). Two French folks that Christi is friends with came over for Thanksgiving dinner. They were dubious about the holiday and about American food. But all went well. Christi ran out to get extra tomatoes (ah the convience of celebrating a holiday in a country that doesn't recognize it) and found a computer out at the curb which has a DVD player and a CD burner, so she dragged upstairs.

I must get back to work

SC final project plan

the plan:

I want to take audio buffers and divide them up into tiny piecves and then play all the pieces sequential, in order, but the pieces themselves are played backwards. then i want to repeat this process several times, with the pieces getting larger every time, until finally the whole buffer is once piece and is played backwards.

the rationale:

The reason for this plan is because I've read that when speech is processed this way, most people do not hear the reversal until the reversed pieces are pretty large, so i hope to slide by the threshhold of people's perception.

the method:

I'm looking at help files for buffers. I will also be looking at the SC2 help file on granular synthesis. I have to write this project in SC3, because the computer that I can use over break is OSX only. My idea for how to do this (note that I am not asking you to respond in any way that would get me a D in the class), is to create an array of integers that represent start (and end) frames, then play them backwards one right after another with an envelope. then the array is recomputed.

and

it's the 25 anniversary of the slaying of the US's first openly gay politician, Harvey Milk, a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors. Dan White, the killer, also killed Mayor Moscone. The gay community responded by having a candle-light march. White, a former police officer, plead temporary insanity and his plea became erroneously known as the Twinkie Defense. Although it mentioned ho-ho's and whatnot, it didn't hinge on junk food. The jury was selected to be pro-death penatly, as White might have been sentenced to death. The conservative, pro-police jury, widely described as homphobic, sentenced White to eight years in prison, of which he served five. The gay community responded with a somehwhat angrier march. Some marchers wanted to commit vandalism. The march leaders had formed a human chain keeping the rowdier deonstrators out of trouble. the overwhelmingly homophic police department promptly arrested all the leaders and provoke the crowd, which responded to the provocation. The police then went into the Castro (the city's gay neighborhood) and started pulling people out of bars and arresting them. Gay folks in bars were as apolitcal then as they are now. Guys just looking to drink and cruise were beaten by police. The police joked about getting cute guys and boyfriends as they assaulted bystanders. A riot thus errupted. Police cars were overturned. This eventually became known as the White Night Riots. Queers do fight back.

Yay ILL

My Inter Library Loan book was just granted a renewal! I can keep it until January. I love ILL. I love the librarians.

This is all very good, becuase I got little work done yesterday as I woke up at 4:00 or 4:30 pm. I guess I might have been running something of a sleep defecit. Also, I really do not wake up without an alarm.

I must go do work now. work work work. I have one paper due the 8th, another one the 9th and my supercollider final project is due a week from thursday. arg arg arg

First the Bad News

This in the mail this morning:

Public Safety would like to notify the community that this morning Saturday, November 22, 2003 at approximately 2:50am a male student reported he was assaulted on High Street near Huber Ave.

The male student was walking by himself when he was approached by a male who made a homophobic comment and struck him. The student continuing walking a short distance and then was approached by the same suspect and four others who began punching and kicking him. The suspects then left the area on foot and headed north on High St. The student was brought to Middlesex Hospital for treatment.

that's the opposite side of campus from where I live, about a 5 minute walk from the CFA. I have walked home from the CFA by myself at such an ungodly hour. In the future, I'm going to either bicycle (it's downhill going home) or take Xena with the hope that she might intimidate somebody. High Street is a major enough street that I would have thought it was "safe."

and

I will not be going home during winter break. A mis-reading of schedules lead me to beleive that there would be time for christi and i to spend a week at home. but this was in error. i won't be home for thanksgiving either. my thansgiving day tickets are non-refundable, so i'm not going to be able to change them, even in the unlikely event that i could book a flight home at this late date.

however, I have a two week spring break, at least one week of which will be spent in California. Possibly (hopefully) both weeks.

Good news

the good news is not as good as the bad news was bad, but i felt that if i just said "bad news" and "other news," that would come off as too pessimistic.

I went to the Music in Sacred Spaces symposium and head many lectures about church architecture and a little bit about music. Nothing came up that was useful for my paper, aside fromthe notion that processions create a sort of temporary sacred space, through the music used and the objects carried. but my paper, while it involves processions, is a bit more secular.

Went to a concert of 17th cenutry sacred chamber works afterwards. the program notes seem to be very interresting. i'll read them later. the trio used a 17th centure tuning system, which was not meantone. it was closer to equal temperment, so more keys sound better, but was period appropriate.

after the concert, several symposium participants and grad students went to the organizer's (prof Jane Alden)'s house for drinks. The party didn't break up till like 2:00 am. she served some sort of apple brandy. it's two nights in a row that i've perhaps gotten a bit loopy in a social setting, but rest assured, a trend is not starting.

One interresting thing is that all the musicologists there can look at a score and hear how the harmonies work. none of the composers there (grad students) have that skill, although aaron can read rhythms very well, as he's a percussionist.

I think I'm missing a fundamental musical skill.

Concert

Tonight was the Graduate Composition Seminar concert, officially titled Five Minute Wonders. We all wrote five minute pieces. A lot of people came to hear them. Really a lot. I was impressed.

We started setting up at noon. I finally left the building at about 11:30 pm, after striking. (Striking as in, striking the stage, not as in doing a walkout to protest long hours).

My piece seemed to be well-received. I'll have a recoding of it to post later. I would like to hear it again, perhaps played by a pianist who had more time to practice it.

the second half of the concert was a performance of John Cage's songbooks. It is an extremely silly collection of "songs." I can probably be burned at the stake at Wesleyan for calling it silly. For one of my songs, I was to attack a microphone to my throat and drink cognac. I got concerned about drking cognac without eating immediately beforehand. Fortunately, one of the songs in songs books says eat or drink three things. Jascha made an arrangement with a local pizza place, so that they would deliver pizza during the performance. the pizza delivery guy was actually Neely (the professor in charge)'s grandson.

when the pizza guy came on stage and I handed him cash, the audience was luaghing like crazy. I could barely stop giggling. So I ate some slices of pizza and then sipped my cognac. I had been practicing drinking cognac the last few evenings, with the idea that it would be good to know how to pace myself and build up my tolerance a bit before the concert so as to not be drunk by the end of the performance. So at the end of the performance tonight, I was disturbingly sober.

this problem has sicne been fixed.

tomorrow is a symposium about sacred spaces. Most about medieval christian music. so i'm going to most of it. hopefully it will somehow aid my paper.

speaking of my paper, i realized last night that the dissertation-copy of the play (the one I'm writing about) that I have is in medieval french, instead of modern french. I don't speak modern french either, but i really don't stand a chance with old french. But I have a book out of the library which has it in side-by-side translation into modern french. joy! but that book was due today with no renewals. I knew I had no time to do anything about this. with a heavy heart, I went to plead with the Inter Library Loan office.

I am dedicating my next piece to the ILL office, especially Kate. She told me just to hang onto the book. I've never had a librarian tell me to just let something get overdue. So Sunday, I'll be photocopying all the pages with musical pauses. Fortunately, this is only about 400 pages or so. arg.

I couldn't get a paper today, so i dunno if they printed my letter. i wonder how i would find out?

Alaxander Nevsky Paper

Celeste Hutchins
Proseminar
Nevsky Paper

I read Eisenstein's explanation of how the Nevsky images and sound work together and I remain unconvinced. However, what was clear both in his writing and his film were strong issues of Russian identity.

These were very obvious in the film, where the characters openly discuss what it means to be Russian and the importance of the homeland. This was contrasted with the German other. Today's Colloquium speaker noted that the music used for the Russian themes in the film were based on Russian folk modes. Thus it is somewhat similar to Stravinsky's Svadebka, as they both use folk elements to re-imagine folk life.

I recognized other things common to Svadebka including that the female love interest had her hair parted into two braids, thus indicating her status as an unmarried woman. However, at the end of the film when the two couples pair off, neither woman starts singing a platch, but instead look happy with their future husbands. However, the matchmaker (mentioned early in the movie) has not yet been sent, so perhaps the platch would be premature and might interfere with the happy ending.

Russian identity is obvious in Eisenstein's writings as he quotes Pushkin. Pushkin's poetry is strongly linked to Russian identity. He is widely quoted and revered.

Despite the obvious and strong Russian identity in the film, certain American film conventions were used. For example, as one of the Germans fell through the ice and slowly slipped in and drowned, there was a Mickey Mousing downward trombone slide matching his action. Eisenstein goes so far as to claim that all of the score in the waiting scene is Mickey Moused, drawing diagrams and making claims of eye motion. Some scenes had music pre-written for them and Mickey Moused in reverse, so that the action was made to mirror the score.

This type of Mickey Mousing however, goes far beyond anything that would be found in an American film. The score, with it's folk modes and choral works is distinctly Russian. These Russian identities in the film are contrasted with the film's portrayal of German otherness. The creepy bucket-style helmets make the Germans look like aliens. Issues of religion also figure in very prominently.

The Germans have crosses on their uniforms. They have crosses on their shoulders. Even the eye holes in their helmets are cross shaped. Many scenes show the German holy leaders raising crucifixes. The religious leader goes so far as to say that there is only one world emperor and he must bow to the Pope. The Germans are in Russia on a religious crusade to impose Catholicism.

In contrast, there was only one scene showing Russian Orthodoxy. It was a short shot of some people standing, one of them holding an icon. The Germans are evil Catholics and the Russians are practically atheists by comparison, but they do have this other religion, which they get to keep, at least until the revolution.

Musically, Catholicism is represented by the organ that the priest plays. Also, since the trumpets are first blown at a church service, they also represent catholicism as much as they represent the threat of the knights. It is hard to draw a distinction between Catholicism and the Teutonic threat as Catholicism is the Teutonic threat. It is their motivation for coming to Rus and their justification for committing atrocities. Religious baiting is a tired old form of propaganda, but probably useful in a legally atheist society, as it helps build national religious (or irreligious) unity.

There is also a single character who was probably supposed to be a Jew. This character tells the angry nationalist mob that nationalism is not as important as money. Some nobel character kicks the Jewish man and calls him a cur. Because of the diasporic nature of Jewish peoples, they were viewed as stateless. In the Soviet era, Jews were not considered Russian citizens, but rather resident aliens. Their legal nationality was Jewish.

This possible Jewish character does not get a musical theme. He has about the same amount of screen time as the Russian Orthodox church, maybe a bit more. He is represented by stereotypes and carries no iconography. Thus religions in Russia are barely present in the film, whereas German religion is threatening, gets a lot of screen time and has musical themes and instruments associated with it.

Russian identity is thus defined, both as what it is and what it is not. Russian identity uses folks modes, quotes Pushkin and is forever optimistic. Enemy identity is religious, faceless and threatening, with odd instrumentation of bassoons and strange trumpets. Most horrible of all is the traitor to Russia who gets killed by an angry mob. Real Russians - the ones not kicked to death by the proletariat - love their country and will fight for it.

Letter to the Middletown Press

Dear Editor,

I was overjoyed to read that the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage rights for same sex couples. Gay people should not be considered second class citizens anywhere in the US. Hopefully, other states will soon follow suit. I married my partner in Canada over the summer and I look forward to the day when every state will recognize it.

Celeste Hutchins
Middletown

Errata

I said that Mass was the first and only state to rule that dscriminating against the marriage rights of same sex couples was unconstitutional. Yahoo news says that Hawaii decided that first. Actually, I was in Hawaii in 1998 when all of this was happening. christi, I and her parents went, hoping that we would be able to get married. while the case was pending, Hawaiians voted to amend their constitution to specifically discrminate against same sex couples. So any court decision was automatically moot and iirc, the later court decisision just said as much.

Alaska also amended it's constitution, I believe also in the face of a pending court decision, but I don't remember as much about this one. The Hawaii one really went down to the wire. It wasn't certain how they would vote and there was the possibility of a ruling coming at any time and then being reversed only a few days later after the election. Alaska's situation must not have been so close, or it would have been on my radar.

Yahoo says that Mass can't amend it's constitution until 2006. The Mass legislature, however is unhappy.

It is important that the pro-freedom to marry viewpoint is as visible as possible. I'm going to look into possibilities for direct action in Mass. Other things that can be done include writing letters to the editor of your newspaper supporting the Mass court ruling. That is an extremely useful thing to do. Also, posting approval other places, such as your blog or wherever. you could use the same letter for both. I highly encourage you to do this. this is the first civil rights struggle of the 21st century. writing a few paragraphs and emailing it off to your newspaper (and posting it on your blog) seems to me to be the best way for a non-citizen of Mass who lives far away to affect the process in a positive way. If you have other ideas, I'd like to hear them.

Sleep

Since I am endless facinated by my own sleep schedule, I'll post it for your enjoyment as well. I slept yesterday afternoon from 2:00 - 5:00. I slept this morning from 5:00 - 7:00 (I went to bed before 5:00, but couldn't sleep immediately). I slept again this morning from 9:00 - 11:00. And I drifted off in class this afternoon (alas!) from 3:00 - 4:00. So why am I so tired?

Not a Second Class Citizen in Massachusetts

the mass supreme court ruled that laws interfering with same sex couple's right to marry violate the mass constitution. They are the first and only state in the US to reach this conclusion. Christi and I are already married in Canada, which, by international law, ought to be recognized anywhere in the world. The EU will recognize it. California and the US Federal government specifically do not.

Motivation

Avoiding being yelled at is a motivating factor, but prolly not the best one. Actually, it's deeply de-motivating as far as asking for help, etc goes. Get suck and endure paralyzing dread while reading buggy help file after incorrect help file. It has been indicated (yelled, even) that insufficient digging through said "documentation" will result in a D grade for the class.

And getting less than 4.0 means that I flunk out.

alas

Picture of Xena

Taken from a cell phone. Technology is taking on too many things at once these days.

No comments for the last several days. i move away and then i'm forgotten!

Hacking to the break of dawn

I would like to report that I'm nearly-angst free. I don't post often enough when I'm happy. Not that doing homework at the last second on a system that I don't really understand is a cause for celebration, but i feel mellow nonetheless.

I'm also procrastinating

Drama Free Zone

I've decided, as of this morning, as my mind was clearing from the smoky haze and beer of the biker bar I was at last night, to avoid people that make me feel stressed. I can keep my own stress in check by not thinking about it. Two giant papers due at the end of the term that I haven't yet started or even know how to begin? not thinking about it. those books I'm reading about medieval drama? they're pleasure reading of course. no need to stress. no need to panic. deep breaths.

But then when someone else starts ranting and ranting and ranting about how they have no idea what to write and there's not that much time left in the term and they're going to flunk out, etc, etc, etc, then I get all keyed up too. this works for other ranting subjects, as well. so I'm going to hang arund mellow people instead.

Biker Bar? Did you say "biker bar?"

What's new?

As friday was a total wash anyway, what with having an all-day long gamelan gig, I decided to not worry about working in the evening, so some folks and I went to see Love Acually, a romatic comedy staring Hugh Grant. What was I thinking? I'll never have those two hours and eight minutes back in my life. (Before anyone accuses me of a lack of accuracy, let me make it clear that I don't actually know how long the film was, but two hours and eight minutes seems like a reasonable number, any anyway, you have to factor in things like previews, leaving before the credits are finished, arriving late, etc, and it could well have been two hours and eight minutes. Anyway, you don't read my blog to find out how long movies are right? but I can give an accurate review.) What made the film even worse is that I've sat for two weeks of lectures about film scores. So the always-terrible movie of romantic comedies was especially evident. There was an unruly number of simultaneous plots in the film, something like 12. there were three main musical themes: one was the romantic angst theme, one was the triumphal theme and one was the much more rarely used dark theme. there was also a liet motif mostly attached to a comic relief cahrecter, but also present in the rest of the film. the dark theme was so rarely used, that I have forgotten everything about it except for it's existance.

the romatic angst theme was played on the clarinet. It was most certainly not in major. The clarinet, historically is used as a signifier of sexual experience. Here, it retains a connection to it's early 20th century predecessors by signifying sexual tension. In the middle part of the movie, this theme was often used as the story switched from plot to plot. So there would be some development in one of the plots, a sexual tension would develop or be made more evident, the clarinet theme would come in as the actors mimed an approximation of angst, and then the scene would switch to another set of chracters.

the trimphal theme was mostly present at the end of the movie, as all of the plots but two (more on those two later), came to a triumphal conclusion. It also appeared however, earlier in the film. For example, as the Prime Minister of the UK was calling the US a bully and otherwise dissin the President of the US in an unplanned moment in a press confrence, the triumphal theme swelled majestically. Almost all of the emotional information theme is encoded in the romatic triumphal theme. the PM's speech was controversial enough that using the darker theme would have shown it to be an unmittigated failure. The lack of a theme altogether would have been so ambigious that the audience would have been unable to gauge the PM's sucess or failure until later scenes where characters discuss the speech. The triumphal theme was the equivalent of having the press corps burst into cheers and appluase, the kind of rediculous movie contrivance that we are spared at least until the last quarter of the film.

Near the end of the film there actually is a scene where a croud bursts into applause, but it is not for something so boring as poltics, but rather when the writer asks his former maid to marry him. the entire Portugese quarter of some unnamed French city has followed him to the restaurant where the woman, with whom he has never had a convesation in a mutually-understandable language, is waitressing. the incidental music drops out. he asks her in broken Portugese to marry her. She says yes in broken english. the restaurant bursts into applause as she decends a staircase to his arms. the triumphal music swells. Interrestingly, the restaurant contained a band playing source music (source music refers to music that the characters as well as the audience can hear), who had fallen silent for the proposal. When the woman accepted, the band immediatly struck up again, but the sound track only contained the triumphal theme in it's orchestral scoring. the scoring of the triumphal theme, as well as the dark theme and the calirnet theme, never varied in scoring.

the triumphal theme is unrelentingly cheesy. More romantic than the romatics would have wirtten. It saturates the sound track at the end. Assaulting the audience, and informing them of the very happy endings.

Not all the endings are happy, however. for instance, one of the plots contains an agressive female. this plot, like all the other plots, aside from the other unhappy ending, is told from the male's point of view (the movie contains only heterosexual pairings). a woman in his office is trying to seduce him, despite his having an exceptionally wonderful wife. the other woman, like all the other characters is entirely one dminesional. One of the advantages to squeezing in so many plots is that virtually no character development is required and there is opportunity to use every romantic comedy cliche that exists. however, the other woman is even more one-dimensional than anyone else in the movie. Her motivation appears to be evil. For example, her male target is talking to his wife at the office Christmas party. his wife goes to get him a drink or perform some other small favor. the man calls his wife either a saint or an angel. then the other woman appears, wearing devil horns and a red dress. This level of (un)subtlety is used throughout the film. his story ends unhappily as his disabused wife painfully smiles at him, miming being happy at his return while the evil temptress is pictured looking evilly happy in her apartment, standing in front of her mirror in her sexy underwear, putting on the necklace that the husband bought for her.

the story of the cheating husband (who never went further than buying a necklace) is contrasted with the story of the cheating wife. this story, also told from a male perspective, involves, like all the stories except the Other Woman plot, involves an agressive male. It begins with two men in formal wear discussing the regretablity of them having recently frequented prostitutes who turned out to be men. the camera pans out and we see that one of them is getting married. the best man is angsty at the reception and iirc, someone asks him if he is in love with the groom (at least, I think that's what I heard). the man acts alarmed, but not homophobic at the question and then changes the subject. Later in the movie, the wife views the wedding video shot by the best man and discovers it is all of her, thus indicating that he loves her. he storms out of his apartment, deliberating for a while whether to go back in and speak with her, while a score ("score" refers to music not heard by the characters) pop song plays in the background. finally, he zips up his jacket and the pop song becomes louder, thus providing a stinger and signaling that he has made up his mind to leave. Near the end of the film, he goes to her house and she kisses him. At the very end of the film, he, she and the husband are pictured together whiel the triumphal music swells, thus indicating approval for him persuing her. thus a male homewrecker is acceptable, while a female one is trouble.

however, some of the conversations earlier in the film may have ben intended to convey a much more complicated relationship. In the old days, a converstaion about male prostitutes (and the shared sexual experience) and a question about his relationship woth the groom would have been enough to signify the best man as a bisexual. As romantic comedies do not tend to be on the cutting edge of film convention, it may have been the intended implication here as well. Perhaps playing triumphal music for the three of them is designed to show that they all manage to live happily ever after.

the other unhappy ending is the sole one told from the female point of view. All of the other stories end at the arrival gate of Heathrow airport, while the triumphal music swells for all but the cheating husband. this story doesn't even get to the airport. A woman, working at the same office as the cheating man, has a crush on one of her colleagues. Junior high-style, they slow dance at the office Christmas party and thus are then dating, or something. He asks her to dance, so she is passive during their plot. they go back to her apartment and are making out (his idea) when her phone rings. Her phone rings constantly throughout the movie. In this scene, it is revealed that the person she talks to is her brother, who is insane. the male is annoyed at the interruption. they resume making out when the brother calls again and she agrees to go see him. the male love interest objects. this may be one of the scenes where the dark theme is employed.

near the start of the film, the woman is encouraged by her boss, the cheating husband, to make a pass at her colleague and told that the colleague is aware of her interest in him. Despite this, she continues to act entirely passivle until she goes to visit her brother in the mental hospital, rather than have sex with her colleague. when she become active, she annoys her potential partner and their relationship is ended. During her second to last scene, she is seated, at her computer, working late, while he, the second to last person to leave the office walks by and they awkwardly wish each other a merry christmas. In the last scene, she is wrapping a scarf around the neck of her brother in the mental hospital.

the theme that plays in the mental hospital is the leitmotif theme, a major theme in the movie, but also attached to an aging rockstar, one of the few people not persuing anyone. He has re-recorded a version of his old hit song, which used to go "Love is all around us./ I can feel in my fingers./I can feel it in my toes." the new version has been changed to "christams is all around us." the movie open with him in the recording studio accidentally singing the wrong version several times before getting the right one. the song thus functions both as a love theme and a holiday theme, thus reminding us that it is a christams (and christian, really) movie.

the christmas/love theme is often source music, as the rock star frequently appears either on a television watched by one of the other characters or on the radio, however it also occurs in the score, but possibly with a different scoring in that case. It has been stuck in my head for days. the theme acts as intermediate theme, signifying love, but not sucess or angst. the 11 year old boy, while running through the airport to tell a departing classmate that he loves her, pauses for a minute to watch a television with the rocks star on it. after his pause, he runs past the final security barrier to talk to his classmate. the pause thus reaffirmed somehow his love for her and thus was worth the possibility of the persuing secrity gaurds catching him.

there are a few instances where the music is ambigious in regards to being source or score. For example, characters will be at a party where source music is playing, but then they are shown in a car with no cut in the soundtrack, so the pop song has changed from source to score. In one scene, a radio station plays a love song in honor of the Prime Minister and in movie cliche fashion, he dances all over his house until someone walks in on him. the music is assumed to be source, except that it cuts off suddenly as he is discovered, thus showing that it must be score. this is such a movie cliche, that the audience does not pause for a moment to wonder why the prime minister would be dancing around his silent house.

The last elemnt of the movie worthy of discussion involves body image. All of the women are exttremely skinny except for the Prime Ministers' love interest who is an average weight. Most of the other women look emaciated. the chaeting wife weights about 10 pounds, for example (this is an exagerration, please don't raise issues of accuracy). This normal-looking woman is discussed several times, being described as having huge thighs and giant butt. In my opion, she was one of the most attractive women in the movie, and she does get her love interest in the end (the Prime minister, at that), but her weight is criticized several times.

the other character to have her weight discussed it the Portugese maid's sister. the maid first brings her up as she declines an offored pastry. then the sister later appears in the film as comic relief. the writer appears at the door of the maid's father to ask for the maid's hand in marriage. the sister appears and the father orders her to marry the writer, despite never having met him, as nobody else would want to marry someone so fat. the writer asks for the other daughter. the father takes the writer to the restaurant where the maid works while more and more people follow along to see what will happen. the conversation along the way is half people wondering what will happen and half the father insulting the daughter for her weight. He calls her "Miss Dunking donuts 2003," for example. the musical cues, the comic setup inherent in the cliche of the confused follwing crowd and the predjudices fo the audience solicitted a laugh from the theatre that I attended. Other fat jokes along the way were also laughingly approved by the audience.

In conclusion, I have written far too many papers and I can't make it stop. Also, this movie, like many romantic comedies, is hetero-normative and essentially conservative, urging women to adopt conventional social roles and to be passive in relationships. Non-passive women are either evil or alone. It may even be dangerous to have a story told from your own point of view. The anti-feminist viewpoint is most prevelant in romatic comedies, a genre of films made for women viewers. why some women enjoy cheesy movie cliches, being assaulted by triumphal themes that Wagner or even Bruckner would have been ashamed to write, and being programmed to be helpless and undernourished is a mystery to me, but somehow it seems to work finacially for the studios. I'm not seeing anymore films unless they're somehow art films or the last section of the lord of the rings trilogy.

what about the damn biker bar

We decided to go bowling with angela last night, but we got lost and we called to ask for directions, the alley told us they weren't going to have any free lanes. So we went to a billard hall that we had passed along the way, but they had a cover. So we decided to go to the Red Dog Saloon. Tiffany loved it. it's a real biker bar. Jessica arrived later and was given a hard time by the bartender. She has nothing of a biker bar about her and is entirely out of place in such an establishment. Angsty conversation ensued, which was widely overheard by interested eavesdropping males. Yesterday, I also gave Xena a bath, so she smells much less offensive. And I wrote the introduction to my Joan of Arc aper. Today, I'm supossed to be creaing 12 sounds for some john cage thing, but i'm posting to my blog instead. alas.

I am going insane

Ok, I'm not really going insane.

what do grad students do when they're not studying?

I go to endless classes. I played a gamelan concert on friday at a posh private elementary school in West Hartford. It had a shadow puppet play, which went over ectremely well, but I couldn't really see it, because I was playing the kempul, a set of the second-largest gongs. There are five of them and I sit in the back, so I couldn't really see the puppets around the gongs, but even if I could, I get lost in the music when I look at them.

I write papers, but of course, that's also studying. and I eat and i sleep and often I talk to other grad students about classes or homework or concerts or music or professors or whatever. but mostly grad students talk about sex. Everytime I go out to have beers with folks, they end up talking the whole time about sex. Long angsty conversations about sex.

It's starting to stress me out. I keep having this dream that I get so stressed about classes and homework and my angsty interactions with other highly angst grad students, that my hair falls out. Almost all the men here are balding. There's only a couple of guys here that have all their hair. Is their hair falling out because they are angsty grad students or are they angsty grad students because their hair is falling out? Could this happen to me? I've been checking in the mirror and so far so good. But really, the angst around here is so palpable that I can feel my hair follicles start to tingle.

I am so glad that the semester is almost over. My desire for a break has actually become greater than my near-certainty that I'm not going to get all my projects and papers finished.

Kucinich in the news

Chronicle Story

Movie Music Paper

Celeste Hutchins
Proseminar
Movie Paper

The only thing cohesive about the movie Laura is that there are only two musical themes in it. The other, narrative themes are much less clear. Lydecker, as Kathryn Kalinak points out in her article, is clearly meant to be read as gay. This is most clear in the opening scene, which, Kalinak notes, had a different director than most of the rest of the film. He also plays what The Celluloid Closet called "the sissy" in the scene where he finds out the Laura is not dead, when he passes out. After Lydecker regains consciousness, Carpenter insults Lydecker for his lack of masculinity. In his most forceful and perhaps wittiest lines, Carpenter suggests that Lydecker should get back "on all fours." He might as well called him a fag.

If Lydecker is supposed to be gay, then what is his relationship with Laura supposed to be? As Kalinak points out, Lydecker's characterization, like everything else in the movie was disputed by the committee that assembled the film. The entire movie is just as confused and unclear as Lydecker's motivations and sexuality. The plot has holes in it. The characters never stop to ask important questions (Why isn't Laura surprised that her fiance is not shocked by her reappearance?). The characters themselves are half formed and waver between different archetypes and stereotypes. The only consistent character in the film is the overwhelmingly stereotypical Betsy.

Given this mess of inconsistency, poor writing, and ambiguous plot, it's no surprise that Raskin chose to limit the musical material. The music is the glue holding the disparate visions together as a semi-cohesive whole. Having additional themes might have simply highlighted the fragmentary nature of the narrative. Instead, by having one main theme repeating over and over, Raskin creates connections between scenes and reinforces his vision to Laura's character. Ultimately, Raskin's vision of Laura is the prevailing one, both because it's repetition gives it more time "on screen" than the actress gets and because of it's lack of ambiguity. Laura's character was clearly not resolved by the time the movie was assembled and so in the final version, if judged by non-musical cues alone, she has no real character. Is she virtuous? Is she a victim? Does she deserve her fate? Is she a "good guy" or a "bad guy?" The visual images and the dialog present no clear answer to these questions. She is just a bystander in her own story.

The music, however, changes that. The main theme is clearly and obviously connected to her. Carpenter describes the theme as "not exactly classical, but sweet." This characterization of the theme also accurately describes Laura's character. In the end, she is sympathetic: an innocent victim of bad circumstances who deserves something better. This is entirely a result of the music.

Kalinak describes the secondary, darker theme as being connected to Lydecker. This is much less obvious than the main theme's attachment to Laura. Kalinak notes that the theme often appear where Lydecker does not. She claims this foreshadows Lydecker's guilt. The connection between the second theme and Lydecker was not obvious to me when I was watching the movie. I noted that there was a second, darker theme attached to foreboding events. As a modern viewer, it seemed as if the second theme is sometimes placed with Lydecker to foreshadow his guilt. In other words, I felt that the theme did not belong to an individual, but to a mood.

Attaching a dark mood to Lydecker, also, may not soley be intended to signify his guilt, but also his possible homosexuality. Kalinak notes that unusual instrumentation was used around Lydecker. She also notes that theme heard in Lydecker's apartment is "heard in a predominantly woodwind ensemble." (p 171) This woodwind ensemble may have been used to highlight his sexuality. Kalinak writes, "Certain stereotypes evolved as a shorthand for sexual experience . . .. [T]hese conventions included brass and woodwind instrumentation, unusual harmonies and bluesy rhythms." (p 166) Here she is discussing sexual experience for women. It must also carry weight when these conventions are attached to male character. She goes on to state, "The classical score frequently encoded otherness through the common denominator of jazz. For white audiences of the era, jazz represented the urban, the sexual and the decadent . . .. [T]he classical score used jazz as a musical trope for otherness, whether sexual or racial." (p 167) While the scoring in Lydecker's apartment is not, jazz, it does use woodwinds. Also, the second theme, which may have been attached to him, has unusual harmonies. Clearly his scoring is intended to convey sexual otherness. Woodwinds, while not jazzy in this case, were associated with jazz. Homosexuality was associated with decadence. Thus the music in the apartment theme, in addition to the staging, the dialog and the blocking, also highlights Lydecker's queerness.

The opening scene makes him overwhelmingly gay (as overwhelmingly gay as one could be during the era of movie codes). What then is his attachment to Laura? What is his motivation for killing her? In asking these questions, I am making the assumption that audiences of the time would have been unfamiliar with the idea of bisexuality. If it is the case, and Lydecker is gay, then what does this mean for Laura's character? The implication seems to be that she was sleeping with him. But if he's gay, then obviously, she wasn't. Raskin's concept of Laura was of a good guy and not a "whore," as Preminger characterized her. ( Kalinak p 167) Raskin's participation in the queering of Lydecker adds credence to his vision of Laura as innocent. If Lydecker is gay, then Laura is not sleeping with him and thus perhaps is not sleeping with her other suitors and thus may be a virgin with bad luck. She thus can be "not exactly classical, but sweet" and live happily ever after. Lydecker's motivations are then utterly unclear, but he does die at the end, which is very often the fate of gay characters in older movies. The audience can then go home happy, knowing the manliest man got the girl. The girl is innocent and will live happily ever after without the homo, who got killed. Manliness, honesty (Laura is the only suspect in the movie who doesn't lie constantly), heterosexuality, and virginity thus triumph. The movie ends with a reminder to buy war bonds. With our values, how can we lose?

Tiffany is here!

Ok, so the moo -music thing is down. I had a power outage and that's what made me finally pull the plug, but also, it kept getting kicked off for being idle. it only works well if somebody logs in once a day and i haven't had time lately. also, my supercollider client thing has been crashing a LOT recently. i dunno why. it worked fine before (and thank god during) my presentation.

Ron now thinks that I should write a version of TF in supercollider, so it can play stuff directly.

Programming on the moo is really a horrible experience, btw. I mean, I want everyone to start logging on again (it's a good way to chat w/ me while i do homework), but writing serious apps in moo code is world of pain. the deleting of biglist (#13) in past years has hosed many of the set and list utils. or something has. I recently broke the property editor. I was logged in as a wiz and tried to @dig from @notedit. I'm hoping I can find out how to fix it, you know, when I have time. but the user experience is really great. really. it'll be even better after i finish this (blackbox) tf client.

Oh yeah, and tiffany is here!

she came all the way here to see me! I wish I didn't have to spend so much time reading and coding and going insane.

More Moo junk

My advisor was not particularly thrilled with my midterm project. he said it was more of a technical demonstration than a piece of music. he had many many many suggestions for insanely complicated revisions. for some reason, instead of doing important homework, I implemented one of these.

He said that setting up mp3 streaming (something i intend to do soon) would not build community, it would just sort of be out there on the internet. The way to get users excited it to allow them to run their own copies of supercollider on their own machines.

so are you excited? you can now download a copy of supercollider and use it to play the same sounds that you would hear via mp3 streaming but as somewhat higher quality. Instructions are located here: http://www.xkey.com/~celesteh/computers/moosong.html

For those of you who have no experience with the technology: you will require mac osx. download the software and then download my program. Start the software. Use it to open my program. At the stop of the program, you will see a single open parenthesis. double click to the right of the parenthesis. The block of code encased by that set of parents with be highlighted. Hit the enter key while the text is highlighted. NOT return. enter. Ok, something should happen. after it settles down again, go to the next open parenthesis below it. It's around a synthdef statement. double click to the right of that open paren and hit enter. the window that has text messages sometimes printing in it will say something like "a synthdef." Ok, now go to the next open paren and do the same thing to send the next synthdef to the server.

Now you are ready to run the program. highlight all the text in the entire file below the closed parenthesis of the second synthdef. hit enter. my program is now running. now log into the moo and register your ip address. (instructions for this are in the link above)

Isn't this much better than mp3 streaming?

World Music Assignment

Listen to "composed world music CD" and report back

Celeste Hutchins

Proseminar

World Music Paper

 

         For my World Music listening, I chose La Koro Sutro by Lou Harrison.  I picked this piece because I thought it was obviously an example of "composed world music" and because I'm quite fond of it.  Now that I'm examining it more critically, however, I'm not as certain that it is an example of world music. 

         La Koro Sutro is composed for 100 voice chorus, harp, organ and the "American Gamelan."  The American Gamelan is not actually a gamelan, but rather a metalphone percussion instrument built out of old oxygen tanks and other scrap metal by Bill Colvig.  It has its name only because it sounds like a gamelan, but otherwise has little connection to the real thing.  This may be problematic if this piece is to be classified as world music, since the instrumentation is domestic.

         The language of the piece and the text is very definitely international.  It is an Esperanto (La Internacia Lingvo) translation of the Buddhist text, the Heart Sutra. The CD helpfully comes with the words in Esperanto and a side-by-side English translation.  It was also premiered to an international audience.  The notes with the CD explain, "La Koro Sutro was first performed for an international gathering of Esperantists in San Francisco on August 11, 1972."  The Harrison biography notes that this performance took place shortly after a Universala Kongreso in Portland, Oregon.  While certainly not every piece of Esperanta music ever written is automatically world music, this one, because of the nature of the translation, should be counted as a world music text.

         The sound of the piece also sounds like world music.  The tuning is very obviously not 12-toned equally tempered.  This is especially evident in the American Gamelan sections.  The other percussion also has a "world music" feel to it.  The singing also sounds somewhat non-western.  It is reminiscent of some chant music, especially when it has longish melismas on a single vowel.  This may be because Harrison studied and found inspiration from early music.  It may also be an imitation of a singing style found along the Pacific Rim.  Based on the sounds alone, I would certainly consider this piece to be world music.

         The packaging of the CD, however, does not convey world music.  The cover graphic pictures some grass and a large anthropomorphized flower with a goatee.  It is smiling at an insect that also has a goatee and three hearts float between them.  Eight notes in various orientations dot the background.  It says, in large text La Koro Sutro on the right hand side.  Around the edges are names of people involved in the project.  Also on the same disk are Varied Trio, performed by the Abel, Steinberg, Winant Trio and Suite for Violin and American Gamelan, featuring David Abel on violin.  The disk is published by New Albion Records.

         All of the performers, packaging, Pacific Rim aesthetics and even the record label are so very California San Francisco Bay Area, that they make me homesick.  Of course, while I lived in California, I did not think of this as purely California music, I thought of it as world music.  Lou Harrison was known not only as a California composer, but more so as a world music composer.  I did not think of his music and especially this piece, as indigenous, but looking at it now, it very obviously was.

         In conclusion, while this CD is very obviously a California phenomenon, I still would count it as an example of composed world music.  The international Esperanto community is eager to embrace it - the best Esperanto vocal work ever written - as coming from Esperantio, and the music synthesizes so many ideas and cultures that I would count it as a world phenomenon.

         (Esperantio is the name of a fictional Esperanto homeland.  It is essentially international in nature.)

Sleep is a new religion

Those of you who have talked to me lately may have noticed that i sound kind of . . um . . . angsty. Those who have not talked to me may have noticed that I haven't posted much to my blog. So I got somewhat behind on school work and decided that I should spend more time being social, because I like to be social and at the same time I decided that coffee was the Best Thing Ever. Yeah, so I didn't sleep very much the last week or two. I'm not sure.

Yesturday I slept 12 hours. I feel mellow again. I'm quitting coffee as it is EVIL, since it temporarily allows one to go without sleep, when one should not go with out sleep.

So I think I'm more or less up to date on my school work. Everyone is still talking to me. I have memories of angst that don't make sense, but that's ok I guess; I think I didn't fling too much drama around, or not everyone would be talking to me. Um, and I have a purple mohawk. Well, it's clairol burgundy color, which is like a subtle brownish purple. I woke up from a strange dream and my pillow was missing. No, my hair was changed.

My advisor says that first year grads push themselves to the edge of a nervous break down and then become apathetic and stay that way for the remainder of their program. Maybe apathy is like a form of composer student nirvana? I don't actually care. Sleeping makes me feel so much better that I'm considering taking a nap.

Sorry if I dumped angst on you. Next time (godess help me if there is a next time), just tell me to sleep it off.

Writing MOO themes

Ok, so my moo theme playing thingee works. it's not mp3 streaming yet, but it will be very soon. (i hope. depending on how hard it is.) why not prepare for the web radio launch by writing your themes now?

Notes

Notes look like "4c#3". the first number is the length of the note. '4' indicates a quarter note. '8' and eighth note. you can use any number at all that you want for the duration. bigger numbers are shorter than smaller numbers.

the 'c#' is the pitch. The '#' can go before or after the letter. You can't currently specify a flat, so use a sharp if you want an accidental. using sharps, is, of course, optional. note names go from a-g.

The '3' is the octave. the lowest octave is '0'. the highest octave is as high as you want to make it, but if you get too high, you won't be able to hear it. Octaves start with c, so the note below 4c3, is 4b2.

What notes to use? Just make some up. Or you could have your theme say something about your player or object in SolReSol. AOL_USER's theme is SolReSol for "girl, I want your body." seriously. Also, astute cell phone users will note that this is the same format for notes used by nokia, so you could go to a ring tones web site and copy some notes from a pop song or something

Adding the notes

you've got yer notes all picked out, now you want to add them.

@property me.theme "4c#3, 4c3, 3b2, 4c#3"
@chmod me.theme +r

That example puts a theme on your player object and marks it readable. you need to make it readable, or the program won't be able to read it. If you want to add a theme to some other object, just replace "me" with the name of the object.

If you finally hear your theme and can't stand it, you can change it.

@set smoothie.theme to "8a#2, 8#a2, 4c#3, 8a#2, 2d#3, 2f#3, 4c#3"

You could also write some verb to change your themes periodically. in the future, there will be support for a get_theme verb, so that you can modify your theme every time the verb is called.

More moo documentation

I have docs! check out http://www.xkey.com/~celesteh/computers

Other News

Dispatch from Paris

Christi seems to have broken her nose.

She was recopying all of her music, in preperation for gradschool applications (this is my fault, I said that most of it needed recopying), for ten hours in a row, from 7pm-5am. And she sat up and looked at the clock and notes that her back was crunched in and she was utterly exhausted. shortly atfter that, she says, she misjudged the distance between her note and a blunt object

I wish I could send flowers.

Xtain Pacifists

So right before fall break, I happened upon a very small peace vigil in "downtown" Middletown. It was a few old guys with peace signs standing in front of the episcopal church. So I stood with them for a while, holding a sign with a pro-peace message on it and decided to come back the next monday after fall break. Being active is important. Maybe more so in tiny towns than in big cities where everyone expects you to be.

today I came back and it was raining, not hard but apparently enough to make the ink run on their signs, so they were standing in the church door, instead of down on the sidewalk. They were all fired up about the march on Washington, which they had gone to, but I did not. I stuck my bike in the vestibule and went to stand with them. Only one guy was holding a sign and it said "Jesus is the Prince of Peace." I picked up some sign about the administration lying and we stood in the church door while they stood around and dissed the Green party. The Greens in CT are apparently less together than they are in CA and are apparently looking to get some of the peace crowd to join the party. These guys were tired of the Greens trying to convert them, especially since they're so inneffective (because they have so few members) blah blah blah. Uh, yeah. I'm a Green. they've been tremendously successful in Germany. then the subject switched to SUVs. A woman there was talking about how tiny women drive SUVs. tiny women! They have no buisiness driving that kind of car! they get in accidents!

I switched the subject to SUVs as a symptom of class warfare, lest I start defending the right of tiny women to drive any car they damn well please. and it went around for a while until the Quaker woman standing next to me said that she was uncomfortable with the Jesus sign. I pointed out that it was impossible to tell whether the guy holding it was a pacifist or a bible thumper. He got adamant about how this was a religious peace group and he was not taking Jesus out of it. It was bad enough that they had to quit carrying the pro-Palestine signs because the local Rabbi had complained. and then the subject wended around to Jews.

It's a small town. folks in a small town might not know the difference between Zionists and Jewish people as a group. The problem with Jews . . .. Oh but that one guy that spoke at the march was Jewish . . . blah blah blah. yikes. So I ran away.

As I was retrieving my bike, they seem to have come back to their religious (Christian) identity. "We're a religious group!" the guy with the Jesus sign was saying. Quakers. Catholics. etc. "Actually, I'm an atheist." I said as I snapped on my helmet. yes really. maybe, indeed I would turn to God on my deathbed, who can know the future?

they want me to come back next week, maybe so they can convert me back to being catholic, or maybe so I can convert them all to being Green.

I reported all of this to Aaron, my housemate, and he said, "wow. Greens. Women. Athesists. you're lucky they didn't start talking about gay people."

indeed. I need a new peace group.

Research status

The manuscript of the play, La Misterie du Siege d' Orleans, does not have any sheet music with it, nor any ornamentation of any kind. However, it does have many, many pauses that were intended to be filled with music. Many of these pauses contain instructions for orchestration. The most common instruments mentioned are trumpets, bugles and organ. No 15th century document even mentions the play. The librarian at the Joan of Arc center says that it has never been performed in it's current form. some scholars believe that it is not really a play, but rather a collection of smaller action vignettes associated with the annual May 8th festivities commemorating the raising of the siege. This hypothesis seems logical, given the evidence above and also because no-one has really been able to date the manuscript. Parts of it seem to be written right after the siege and other parts appear to date from later years.

The play (or series of processional events) seems to have been written for the entire town to take part in. entire battles are re-acted out. It calls for thousands of actors. Part of the town is supposed to be set ablaze for it. It would take several days to stage it in it's entirety. and it has over a hundred "major" characters.

The play certainly grew out of the May 8th processions, whether or not it was just a collection of past processional events. It's possible that musical sources for it were battle songs, hymns and some courtly processional music. the librarian at the Joan of Arc Center (whose name I wish I had gotten), says that all of these sources are lost. there is some evidence around the music at the cathedral, however.

For my paper, I intend to analyze the instrumentation in connection with the action. I'm going to read _Aspects of Genre in Late Medieval French Drama_ by Alan Knight and talk to Professor Alden to figure out what to do with this.

over draft protection

check it out. you can slack and let your bank account drop to zero and if you have overdraft protection, you can continue to get money out of atms and pay all your bills without the check bouncing, and so, say, if my joint checking account with christi were at zero dollars right now, she ought to be able to get euros out of the atm while the check mailed today wends it's way through the mail system and becomes part of the available balance. so says the customer service rep who wouldn't do a transfer from another bank. (if for some reason, this turns out not to be the case, i can wire money to wells fargo on monday)

la la la

Kids say the darndest things

Alvin likes to tell folks about his undergrad seminar that he teaches on Esxperimental music. His goal is to inundate the kids with thousands of musical examples and not much discussion. he wants them to understand structure and not talk about emotional reactions to music.

this stance has led to speculation on the part of the grad student population as to what motivated him to limit discourse in this way. One of the vetran students said that the undergrads here will say bizarre things trying to describe their reaction to a pice. really, really strange, he said.

Today, in the class I TA, the students were playing their midterm projects and the class was discussing them a bit. One of the students played a really good project. Very nice. Very tonal (as in, it used them, verses being musique concrete), very thoughtful. It was lovely. Ron gave some feedback and then the class was asked if they had comments. they're a quiet bunch. half the time, they won't say anything. But this one kid, who was very impressed, started speaking, kind of slowly about it. "The beginning sounded like robots who were in love, but who were fighting, like, on top of a carribean restaurant . . ." [pause] "that was full of aliens."

took the words right out of my mouth

502 lines of perl code

and it still doesn't work

all i have to do now is figure out how to open a OSC receiver socket in super collider, parse the incomming arrays and handle the timing. the durations come in ahead of the pitches. maybe i should do a different thing where every other one is a pitch so it's /player pitch, dur, pitch, dur, pitch dur, etc. that might be better. it would be an easy change.

i think once i take the useless comments, the print statements and other debugging junk out of my perl program, it will only be 350 lines are so. that's a lot of perl though. and if you add up all the junk i already removed, i probably generated over 1000 lines, of which less than half are useful. that's depressing

anyway, i have the instruments to play already written.

i must sleep in the six hours before class. my project isn't done. i'm sure that welsyean will flunk me out over this and my as-yet still unwritten stravinsky paper

It was snowing outside a few hours ago. i hope it's warmed up. i knew i should have brought a warmer jacket with me

good god. snow.

Perl? Why the hell would i know perl?

Just because I spent two years as a perl programmer is no reason at all to think i ight know how to store data in it. what a silly idea. i think i'll spend days trying to figure out how to dereference arrays. after all, it's not like i have anyhting better to do. it's a good thing that i'm such a mellow person or i might get the urge to kill the undergrad in here who keeps asking me for help with his midterm project even though i'm not the ta for this class, i'm just a fucked up student and his project is working.

Status: Jetlagged

My midterm project for MUSC 222 is 66% done, or thereabouts. Remember, the first 90% of a project takes the first 90% of the time and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time. Due Date: tommorrow, 12:10 PM EDT. I've got a thermos full of pre-brewed mate (I know I'm doing it wrong) and a french press at home in the fridge with three inches of mate leaves in the bottom. I'm staying in the electronic music lab until the prohect is finished, xena needs a walk, i run out of mate, or somebody sees me collapsed and carries me out.

Bartok Paper

I read the Bluebeard article with great interest. When I was at the Joan of Arc Centre in Orleans, one of the things I learned is that the real-life Bluebeard may have been the commissioner of the play, La Misterie du Siege d'Orleans, which I am researching. While the man who became famous for his misdeeds is a character in the play, none of his future misdeeds are mentioned and he is treated as a hero. Some suggest that this is evidence that he paid for the play to be written. Others believe that this is useful information for dating the year that the play was written. In either case, Bartok and the anonymous fifteen century playwright share a commonality for casting Bluebird, a real life serial killer of children and folk-tale murderer of wives, as a hero.

Frigyesi's interesting research suggests that Balazs' and Bartok's heroic casting of Bluebird does not use stereotypical and harmful gender roles, but is almost a proto-feminist piece. Unlike the fairy-tale, where Judith is punished for her disobedience, here she just runs into the essentially solitary nature of the soul. Frigyesi acknowledges that other critics feel that the original fairy-tale interpretation is present in the opera and then unearths a mountain of evidence to support his own, contrary, claim. Some of this evidence, however, is underwhelming. For instance, when analyzing the Gulacsy painting The Magician's Garden, Frigyesi suggests that female figure's partial disrobement indicated openness and hence masculinity. While I'm not familiar with the the painting conventions of turn-of-the-century Budapest, I can say with certainty that more recent western images of partially unclothed women with fully clothed men have not intended to convey anything but femininity and submissiveness on the part of the pictured female. While certainly The Magician's Garden is more complicated than a modern Budweiser ad, I require more context to be convinced of Frigyesi's interpretation. Similarly, I am not fully convinced that the ending of the opera, like the folk-tale, is not a punishment Pandora-like for Judith being too curious.

That said, the context Frigyesi provides around the opera greatly increased my understanding of the piece. Otherwise, it would have been hard to know what to make of it other than a very strange retelling of the folk-tale. The nihilistic context is immediately familiar to anyone who was a pretentious highschool student during the time that I was in school. I used to frequent a cafe where all the young patrons wore black clothes and propped up their Nietzsche tomes so that others would be able to see the author's name on the binding of the book. We drank lattes and talked about meaninglessness and how our words could never adequately convey our angst. Had I been aware of this opera during that time, I'm sure that I would have become a great devotee.

The angst, isolation and nihilism that this opera portrays, us teenagers experienced as a facet of modernity. The Kafka story, The Metamorphosis, which was also extremely popular around Coffee Society, takes place in an explicitly modern setting and our highschool english teachers instructed us about the modernist content. Kafka, of course, lived in Prague when he wrote that, but Frigyesi talks about nihilism as a social force throughout eastern and western Europe at the time.

Bluebeard's Castle was also written around the time that the Esperanto movement was gaining steam. The language was invented in Poland and it's "national library" is currently in Budapest. It became extremely popular in France and Germany, but it's strongest staying-power has been in Eastern Europe, especially in Hungary. It's ironic then, that Bartok and other members of the intelligentsia where fretting about the utter inability of words to convey meaning that the same time that others were trying to bridge gaps between people of different languages.

i'll see christi very very soon

yay!

It's a quarter to 4:00! yay!

Huzzah!

There is sheet music for the surviving manuscript of the Joan of Arc mystery play! So says a book on Medieval French Drama that I just checked out of the library!

For those of you who may have been concerned, I did not turn in my Stravinsky paper.

new last paragraph

It was also interesting to read about how the modes in Svadebka were related to Medieval modes, something that Taruskin assumes his audience to be familiar with. I look forward to re-reading that section as my research project progresses. Actually, I'll probably never re-read any part of this paper because it is incredibly long and boring. There is nothing to say about it because Taruskin has already said everything anyone might possibly want to say about Svadebka and said it with examples over many, many pages. I cannot possibly imagine being this interested in Stravinsky. And all of this is for one single work. It boggles the mind to think about the amount of research that went into this book. Didn't Taruskin have anything better to do? I can't imagine dedicating that much of my life to somebody else's work. On his deathbed, he'll be able to think that he knew more about Stravinsky than anyone else, but he's created nothing new. He has only analyzed. He has not worked to make the world a better place, only pointed out how someone else has. This book is emblematic of all the problems of academia and academic writing.

not in my paper

My paper will not say, "On the othe rhand, this paper, by contrast, is not very long and has not been overly researched at all. It may still be boring and not creative, unfortunately. fortunately, I spend a bit of time when i'm not doign homework by writing music." My paper will not say, "I am not an ethnomusicologist. I am not here to write papers." My paper will not say, "I am counting the minutes until I get to the airport."

bad paper

try as you might, you cannot imagine how long and boring the 300 pages are about this one stravinsky piece. the piece is only a half hour long. that's ten pages a minute. ok, myabe it's less than 300 pages, but it feels like 300 pages. the author has figured out where every single note came from and how the plan to include it changed over time and he wants to tell you all about. Stravinsky miscopied a note from a melody that he was stealing. But when he realized it was wrong, he didn't fix it, he exploited it. That note appears in the following 50 locations where it is surrounded by the followign 50 things. Also, people used to think all peseant songs and powems had the following stresses and here are the stresses and here is how every major russian composer before stravinsky transcribed the stresses, but then some guy figured out that they weren't stressed that way at all and look, stravinsky didn't use the odl stressing pattern and he put in rests in the music wherever he felt like it and here's 789362562345796892345 examples of where he put rests with long discussions of the stress patterns of the 23801641036735 poems he may have been quoting.

fall break starts thursday night . . .

Celeste Hutchins
Proseminar
Stravinsky Paper

As a composer, I found Svadebka to be very interesting. Specifically, I was intrigued by Stravinsky's use of source material and how his plan evolved as he worked on the piece. This is a compositional model that I would like to employ with my project around Joan of Arc, by using material that an expert in the field (or a person from that time, or in Stravinsky's case, a peasant) would recognize as appropriate. Stravinsky had an easier time collecting source material, as the tradition that he taped was within the memory of living people and because of the giant book of collected wedding songs that he was able to draw upon.

Taruskin goes into perhaps too much detail regarding to origins of the motifs of Svadebka. It was interesting to read about how Stravinsky became so familiar with the source material that he was able to write prototypical folk songs, but perhaps this could have been expounded upon at less length.

I watched a tape of this piece with new choregraphy and I watched it before I did any reading, so I do not know how much of the "acting" originally written was present in the production. The music, however was superb. This piece has some rythmic motifs that are similar to those in Rite of Spring, but since they both cover similar themes of "virgin sacrifice," this seems appropriate.

(While I question the notions connecting virgin sacrifice and marriage, I understand that they may have been connected Stravinsky's mind.)

The diversity of source material is apparent in the piece. The first clear instance of chanting is somewhat surprising, but also wonderful and perhaps my favorite part of the piece.

It was also interesting to read about how the modes in Svadebka were related to Medieval modes, something that Taruskin assumes his audience to be familiar with. I look forward to re-reading that section as my research project progresses.

The BVM

I just saw the abbreviation "BVM" in a scholarly work.

"the Blessed Virgin Mary. don't you watch The Comish?" - Mitch

where have all the Moo-ers gone?

To log into the moo, simply type at the unix prompt % " telnet xkey.com 3333 " (without the quotes) or, you can use some software, like tf (Mac Version) or some other client.

I generally log in the afternoons, when I am working on my MooMusic project. there is no sound yet, but there is a deadline of next thursday, so there will be sound by then. it should be streaming to where you can tune in some short time after that.