In the European classical tradition, the piano, with its twelve precise divisions of the octave—inflexible, immovable—has dictated musical thinking for several centuries. Once developed, the piano quickly became a machine of almost tyrannical influence throughout the Western world. Its division of the octave into twelve intervals, each mathematically equidistant from its neighbors, forces one to regard pitches as discrete entities, like nations with strictly policed [borders]. A piano-generated melody goes from point to point with no expressive sliding in between. This is not a fault—Bach and Mozart built their entire work on the notion—rather, it is a stylistic choice. Since the advent of the black-and-white keyboard… Western instrumental music has had to state itself according to the twelve discrete, individual pitches of the scale, resulting in a more limited universe of emotional expression.
—John Adams, Hallelujah Junction, ch. 10, “The Machine in the Garden”
Month: March 2010
At the park: 32
Over the weekend I did some field work at Huntley Meadows for my tree ID class, and I previewed conditions for the upcoming nest box season. There are still substantial patches of slush on the trails and boardwalk, and lots of downed tree limbs. The fast-growing trees suffered the most damage from winter storms. Lots of chunks of Red Maples and Viriginia Pines were on the ground; I clipped twigs from snapped boughs of Sassafras albidum (thanks, Elizabeth!) and Black Gum (Nyssa sylvatica). The most spectacular wreck was the top half of an Eastern Redcedar that you see, permanently separated from its bottom half.
Walking the dog
Language Log contributor Geoff Nunberg explores new crannies of curmudgeonliness. My kind of guy:
I have this notion that “gingerly” shouldn’t be used as an adverb, as in, “She hugged the child gingerly,” because there’s no corresponding adjective “ginger” — you wouldn’t say, “She gave the child a ginger hug.” I’ll concede that “gingerly” has been used as an adverb for 400 years, and nobody’s ever complained about it before. But so much the better: Every time I see the word used as an adverb, I can take a quiet satisfaction in knowing that I’m marching to a more logical drummer than the half-billion other speakers of English who haven’t yet cottoned to the problem.
Now let me explain how to pronounce the names of the years of this past decade…