rolfea

regarding therapy, something immensely valuable my wife and I stumbled on is working with a child psychologist who, rather than meeting directly with our children, does "parent training" sessions. these takes the form of hour long meetings in which we relay a specific challenge we're having with one of our kids. Our therapist asks questions, offers suggestions, and reacts to different strategies we're currently trying.

it's been so helpful to have an objective third party who can offer kind feedback on approaches we're using, give us heads-up to potential fallout of certain strategies or reactions to difficult behavior, and also offer great suggestions on new or altered approaches to take based on our own family values.

I wonder about the practicality of complementing that stage of the decomposition with a free-range poultry operation. Bringing in chickens, the birds eat the larvae, and generate more fertilizer along the way.

When I was tutoring music theory, some students who had a similar experience had "aha" moments when we tried to focus more on how the harmony of a piece of music is linked to the meter.

So I wonder, how much do you hear harmonic changes in a given piece of music? Maybe a better way, for you, to develop an ear for rhythm is to focus on the regularity of those harmonic movements, which are what really "suggest" a meter in the first place. In most music, rhythm really is just the subdivisions of those larger "beats" implied by the harmony, and discussions like the OP end up being more or less "Oh, this is interesting because it doesn't line up with the expectations that accompany rest of the surrounding music"

Yes, exactly! I have a couple of "expensive music degrees" and in my experience, most folks within the academy who are applying western-tradition theory and analysis on non-western-tradition practices are doing it full well knowing it's a limited lens to use. It's usually a pragmatic move, because the alternative ways of discussing the music are sometimes not very clear, or you end up using time stamps generated in audacity to try to demonstrate "they kind of rush this 5/8 bar, but it still sounds cool and carries a lot of energy with it."

I've had similar experiences trying to transcribe non-western folk music, like Bata drumming from Cuba. You can definitely notate it, but the formal structure of the songs doesn't fit well into traditional notation, so it is necessarily an incomplete technique that more or less HAS to be married to audio recordings or videos if you want to learn the music at a later point.

Typically in music theory, we would talk about a hemiola as a rhythmic technique in which a rhythm in a simple (2) metric division is introduced in the context of a compound (3) division of the beat, or vice versa.

What the parent post describes isn't an isolated gesture like that, but a sustained state of overlapping meters, if I'm understanding correctly. In the case of the ICM described, as well as math rock/meshuggah/etc, I would describe the technique as "Polymetric" or maybe a "Sustained polyrhythm," and not a hemiola.

I think you are exactly correct. My big revelation in graduate school (music performance) was the idea that vocalizations of music "short circuit" our learning process and tend to get a performer closer to what we'd call an "expressive" or "musical" rendition. Notated music's function is simply to give a systematic way to for people to reproduce/recreate an aural experience, but it is a "lossy" format that western classical musicians have to spend years training in performance practice and interpretation to adequately recapture the expressive elements that are not easy to capture in notation but are vital for engaging performances.

Promise?

I think there are some operations that are trying to do this well. Granted, I'm probably pretty susceptible to their marketing efforts, but I find White Oak Pastures Farm in GA a really exciting example of an establishment that is pushing back against industrial farming practices. https://whiteoakpastures.com/

The prices reflect this, of course, and I think the economics of more people adjusting their household budgets to eat in an affordable but also environmentally-sustainable way is really pivotal to seeing major change on this front in the future. They also claim to be carbon negative which is really interesting: https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/blog/carbon-negative-grass.... https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019....

I'd expand that even more broadly to say, if you are going to raise children at all, I would strongly encourage you to start therapy asap.

Some of the best parenting advice I ever got was, before you try to raise a kid, you need to get your own shit together.

You can watch the meeting from this morning here: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/02/03/2022/executi...

The discussion on the EARN IT act starts around 1:42:00

Any mention of concerns over encryption are with a really incredulous, dismissive tone. I have a hard time understanding whether that's actual ignorance on the part of the Senators, or if it's some kind of theatrics that plays into the broader politics of the situation.

I think the problem with your thinking, and something that I've been trying to figure out as I sit on/direct more interviews myself, is that this doesn't actually tell you that the candidate can't code, but just that they couldn't code in that setting with that problem in the way you chose to frame it for the interview.

Meaning, I often sit with candidates who come in with 3-5 years experience in industry who can't do a relatively simple programming task. That can either mean that we consistently are drawing applicants who have been pulling the wool over the eyes of their past employers for 1/2 a decade, but actually can't program. Or, it could mean that they get incredibly nervous coding in front of strangers, aren't used to doing more abstract problems, and once they realized this, experiencing a "snow ball effect" of nerves, wherein they train wreck in the interview.

here's the man himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLQSjzt3vnY

maybe you've come across it, but Silverman's biography does a good job tracing how Cage came to a lot of his compositional convictions.

I don't think it would convince you to enjoy his work, but I found it to be a really good read, regardless!

https://www.amazon.com/Begin-Again-Biography-John-Cage/dp/08...

It really depends what time period you're referring to. Maybe broadly we could say that it's music that is either notably ahead of it's contemporaries in terms of innovation or that intentionally breaks out of stylistic models of its time to do something new.

So in those terms, Beethoven was at one point "avant-garde" in that his some of his compositions were so strikingly progressive compared to those of his contemporaries that they stood out. They were "at the front" of musical innovation in that sense.

John Cage started to compose music that intentionally and radically diverted from the trajectory of traditional western art music, so that was considered "avant-garde," although it was so influential, that I'd say much of it has become "canonized" in a way that performing it isn't really innovative of "edgy" in the way it was at it's original reception.

Today I think it's hard to pin down because there aren't really any established traditions that composers are breaking away from like they were at the cusp between the 19th and 20th centuries. I've seen and performed pieces for amplified fluorescent light bulbs, 4 screaming men in loin clothes, and for a solo performer articulating gestures in ASL to a pre-recorded musical track. None of it was scandalous, and some of it was quite good.

I really understood early Glass a lot more when I got the chance to visit a Richard Serra sculpture in LA. Literally walking in the piece helped me understand this idea you're talking about - when I listen to that music now it's a helpful framework to think of exploring a sonic space, rather than tracking linear music like I would with other composers.

post-Cage I think it's gotten a bit hard to pin down what it means to be a significant contributor to "Western art music." How do you define that? Has Glass been influential (yes), popular (yes), and tried things compositionally that others hadn't (arguable). Is Steve Reich's music "better"? I think so, both as a listener and a performer, but Glass being potentially more popular doesn't really do any harm to anything. It just is what it is.

But I've had as many (and honestly, more) arguments with "anti-contemporary music/art" folks about Berio and Feldman, for example. What is late Feldman doing compositionally? Just shifting around simple chords surrounded by loads of silence while stuffy audiences in turtlenecks nod sagely and compose tweets in their mind for later about how "serene and haunting" this performance was? (I love Feldman, for the record)

Well sure, most of Feldman's work could be described as "minimal" but saying it is part of the body of work that is typically referred to as "minimalism" is a little disingenuous, in my mind.

But maybe it just makes it more obvious that these categories aren't particularly useful. I think it's interesting to talk about those early works in the 70s and compare them to minimalist art, like Judd's or Serra's sculptures or paintings by Sol Lewitt, Stella, etc., but it's just a component of a much broader conversation that needs to be based in listening first.

It's interesting to me that Glass' early music didn't really click for me until I had stood inside of one of Richard Serra's Bands sculptures at LACMA. It gave me a different mental (and metal, haha) framework to engage with the music through. That's probably why the Berio/Feldman comparison was so surprising to me in the first place, because I feel like the music from those composers both demand different kinds of engagement to find them enjoyable that Glass' early music, both as a listener and a performer.

I'm very interested in what minimalist tropes you would say Berio and Feldman explored in any of their work.

I feel like with this music it's hard to separate the dance, song, and religious context. Have you experienced trance states in the sense that practioners do with Orishas embodying participants, or do you mean something else by "trance?"

I think it's also interesting you indicate listeners, rather than the drummers getting into that state - my memories of learning bata drumming are largely of going into a hyper-focused state that I wouldn't describe as trancelike, but also very different than the mindset I was in playing something like orchestral music.

Abbilona has recorded a lot of these sacred Afro-Cuban "liturgies"

https://sunlightsquare.bandcamp.com/album/masters-of-bat

interesting you bring this up as it shares many roots with the Afro-Cuban diasporic music associated with bata drumming

The site these are hosted on, carrothers.com, is the website of an incredible jazz pianist, Bill Carrothers. I would highly encourage folks to check out his playing, in particular his albums with Bill Stewart, such as "Duets with Bill Stewart" (1999)

Mark Levine's book is a great resource and the way he presents much of the theory behind jazz improvisation and actually ties it to practice is very useful.

Regarding ear training - I think it's worth mentioning that learning to identify intervals in isolation won't have major returns on investment unless you're main goal is to transcribe by ear 20th century music that is divorced from "common practice" harmonic approaches.

Instead, I'd recommend taking an approach of build up aural comprehension of harmonic idioms from whatever style of music you're interested in learning about - so for classical music, recognizing the difference between tonic and dominant and when we've moved from one to the other is more valuable (and easier) than knowing whether the soprano voice in an chord moved a third or a second.