I think about the intellectual work of the world, and I wonder if it doesn't just distance us from what it means to be alive rather than connects us to it. I feel that trad music has something very special to offer: a demonstration of the viserceral, the physical, the engagement over the intellectual.

I feel a magic infinity in the connection with the body, as if there is as much here to be learnt about what it means to be alive as there is within scholarship. This does not mean I disapprove of study, thorough research and passionate argument, quite the opposite. It's just I feel they cannot capture all of life.

I feel that life itself is not necesarrily that intellectually interesting as a commidity but it is engaged, lived, experienced, connected, magical. It is the unbounded unknown, even if it does not carry satisfaction in the way that the vast glaciers of intellect do. But what is anything if it does not serve to connect to the further reaches of the world? What is beyond us is the only interesting thing.

That doesn't mean that I don't get pissed off that I can't absorb and manage information as well as I want. Oh no. that pisses me off totally.

Keys, operations, intersections, bendy notes in tunes

This is also what I vaguely remember from Ros.

Something about...
Take a scale. do something to it. compare it with your first scale. what's interesting?

Also something like:
Take a 10 note cycle of fifths. take 2 out. Then there's something interesting left over.

Also something observed:
the above somehow relate to where keys are most bendy chromatic runs in baselines under predominantly diatonic or modal music - backing trad.

Most bendy places are:
3rds, 6ths, 7ths, 9ths or 2nds,

e.g. in G:
Bb, B, Eb, E, F, F#, Ab, A

Organised by fifths: A, E, B, F or 9ths/2nds, 6ths, 3rds, 7ths

Steph note: within the four common modes that get used in trad, these are the points in the key that give it it's emotional colour. The notes that do not bend include 1, 4, 5 and create the structure.

** Compare this with where a blues scale gets bent ??

Meta structures

One of my favourite things...
Something Ros said in the car about...

a structure turning up in quantum physics, in linguistics, in music - the organisation of tones within a key, in maths http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantale

Other idea to look up - look at Euler's theory relating vertices to sides of a shape.