twelve-tone gay parade
I love it when you masked anonymous folks blog for me, and thus relieve me of the duty to tell you about my latest feelings of inadequacy, or how the cat's head gets wet when she drinks out of the bathtub, or whatever.
The "big truck" reminds me of an experience I had while working at Kindercare. (FYI: don't.) At recess, I was talking to a VERY precocious 3-year old girl. For a 3-yr-old, it was a fairly deep, probing conversation. She told me she missed her mother during the day, but she understood she had to work. We were interrupted by a four-year old boy pointing at the road and shouting, "Look look! Truck! BIG truck!" Reminded me of the differing developmental rates for boys and girls.
Secondly, an Argentinian physicist dude has done some statistical analysis with note distribution in tonal music and found that it follows patterns similar to word distribution in language, while our atonal pal Schoenberg has a flat curve. I would expect that some of this is just because diatonic works will inevitably have a preponderance of certain notes because, like, that's what a key is; while the atonal composers have to do a great fancy dance of pants, constantly shifting their thematic content, in order to avoid creating the impression of a tonal center. I tend to side with those who think that Schoenberg succeeded in spite of the serial method rather than because of it. Sure, he needed some framework to get his troops across, but I for one have never shouted "Ah, there's the tone row!" at the start of a serial piece, then eagerly followed the inversions and retrogrades and what have you through the rest of it. I love Schoenberg, but I can't hear that stuff at all.
Finally, my sources inform me that Krakow, which indeed I will be visiting in August, has the world's best painting of a ferret!
