Common place books

Milton had a common place book, i.e. a notebook with headings that he could jot things down as they occured to him and easily find them again. With the tag function instead of headings, this is my common place book.

Study into how the brain adapts post-amputation

The Nuffield Trust's Oxford Centre for Enablement (OCE) and Researchers at the University of Oxford are involved in a major study which it is hoped will shed new light on how the brain adapts following hand amputation. Key people - Dr Tamar Makin and Dr David Henderson Slater.

I'm fascinated by this as I've had to relearn how to function many times. I've gradually acquired the perception that unless you can easily tangibly do something, at least for a while, you don't really develop an intuitive way of thinking about the thing you could do with it. This really changed my view point of musicianship - did funny things to it. I think I've got round it by playing all sorts of instruments with right and left hand - built up a picture of the lands beyond my limitations by shifting where the limitations are placed.

The study:
http://www.noc.nhs.uk/aboutus/news/article.aspx?id=190

cultures are structures

I'm sitting on my doorstep using my computer watching the rain. if I everyone did this more often we'd all know our neighbours.

You might even describe it as a doorstep culture.

Classical music is an aural tradition too

I met an excellent harpist who pointed out that even classical music is an aural tradition: you cannot notate phrasing completely, there is always something lacking. Phrasing and what you can do with it must be passed down ear to ear. Suddenly that music feels interesting to me again.

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.