The Bassoon Section Goes Rogue

Hey, it worked for Sarah Palin.
I just hope they're all Harley riders.

No Thanks. I Think I'll Take the Elevator.

From stair porn. Yes, it's an architecture site devoted entirely to stairs. The site was suggested by Eric J. Heels, a patent attorney who's in the same building I work in, and who is always great to run into in the cafeteria. He is an encyclopedia of odd websites, Exhibit 'A' above.

How to Drive Traffic

"It's not a good blogging strategy to represent the things you link to with a principal of proportionality."
—Ann Althouse.

Damn! That's exactly my problem. So far I've been blogging about boring things that don't make good controversy. All I've been doing is saying, "Look at this!"

As an employee of a well-known company who has some dealings with customers, it is not my place to offend people. So, I've avoided controversy in the musical world, and, of course, say very little about politics. And, yes, I adhere strongly to the principle of proportionality in what I write. I may emphasize one thing and not another, but I have zero interest in an Itchy and Scratchy Show. Believe me, that's easy to do even, or especially, in the musical world. You don't WANT to know about flute politics.

So, what to do? If I had Althouse's freedom and Althouse's desire for fame, I think I might be able to get a little more attention. But why? Here's Dennis the Peasant on the subject:

These days I always wince when I get a link from someone. At present I have, I suspect, a regular readership in the low hundreds, which is exactly the level I feel comfortable with. You see, there is such a thing as bad traffic. For me, bad traffic consists of people who do not know this site coming here solely for the purpose of validating their own, pre-existing opinion on whatever matter happens to be at hand. They don't care about who I am or what I am about; they're all about finding someone to tell them they're smart and they're right.

Yes, that's right. So I suppose being uninterested in stirring the pot almost guarantees my failure as a blogger. But, really, what does that mean? Contrasted to being a "success" as a blogger?

Ha ha! I feel better already. I've been pretty stressed lately, and I KNEW if I saw the words "success" and "blogger" in the same sentence it would cheer me right up.

Carry on.

ADDED: If you haven't been there already, check out Trooper York's latest installment of Laura Bush's Diary. Dr. Kill is in the comments. No need to say more.

Butterflies are Free

Blog posting time will be limited for the next few days, but I thought I'd put up another early piece of color work, this time part of a 1907 Italian movie, "Farfale," or "Butterflys," as it was misspelled on the title card. They managed to misspell it in two languages, as my Italian dictionary has "farfalle" for "butterflies." Unlike true color photography, the scenes in this film are hand-colored, lending it an ephemeral, special-effects quality in places, although not on this particular clip. This section has something of Disney in it, if for no other reason than the coloring techniques were similar to the classic Disney cartoon films. The colorists were apparently paid by the metre when this was made, and I believe they were paid by the frame by Disney.

The full version of the film is on the irritating but fascinating site, Europa Film Treasures. It's a charming place if you don't mind long delays, Javascript that doesn't work, including endless go-arounds with stuck and unresponsive dialog boxes, etc., and the inability to download or embed their videos. They also have a fetish for wildly inappropriate music for many of their silent films, although the music for this one is quite good. I'm in favor of advanced music whenever possible, but it sounds like the Ministry of Culture had some extra money that had to be spent, and they threw it at whomever had a piano and a bad case of the incompetent ironies.

In any event, here's their description of this film and its genre:

Early films were mainly experimental, without a narrative framework. The dancers performed cinematographic experiments that attempted to render body movements in space and time. Dance scenes (here a serpentine dance, known as a Butterfly Dance) represent a third of the films produced.

This film, produced by the Italian company Cinès, presents viewers with one of many imitations of the serpentine dancer Loïe Fuller. The fathers of cinema all made their contribution to this essential genre. Edison and Dickson, as well as Louis Lumière and Paul Nadar propelled the first serpentine dancers to fame: Annabella (1897), Crissie Sheridan (1897), and Ameta (1903).

As the Autochromes from the previous post illustrate, it's interesting how quickly people sought color in photography, including cinema. I'm starting to explore the subject myself, looking around for further early color films, and I will put them up if I can find them on YouTube or otherwise embed them.

11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month

Color Pictures of the Great War.

Taking leave of wife and child, perhaps to be educated before Verdun:

Camaraderie in the trenches:

René Hemery, an officer with the 48th French Infantry Regiment, was in St. Dizier on the Marne that day when the Armistice was finally signed a little north in Compiégne.  In St. Dizier, as elsewhere in the victor nations, the churchbells pealed and the the streets filled with singing and dancing crowds.  But Hemery, like most veterans, found it difficult to indulge in any form of celebration, and as dusk fell, he walked in search of better air toward the edge of town, where stood a small cemetery.  As he approached the burial ground he heard sobbing.  He moved closer.  And finally he could see figures.  One was a little boy playing with a flag, a Tricolor.  The other was a woman, on her knees, forehead to the ground, overcome with grief.  Clutching his "emblem of glory," as Hemery described the flag in his diary, the child suddenly shouted: "Papa, c'est la Victoire!"

—Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Rise of the Modern Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1989, pp. 237-238.

The historic Medieval town of Rheims, après la Victoire:

The beautiful Cathedral of Soissons, ennobled like millions of the Dead, by Victory:

ADDED:  A lovely place.  The woods lend a refreshing air to this country château with its charming filigreed iron gates:

Nightpiece

Gaunt in gloom
The pale stars their torches
Enshrouded wave.
Ghostfires from heaven's far verges faint illume
Arches on soaring arches,
Night's sindark nave.

Seraphim
The lost hosts awaken
To service till
In moonless gloom each lapses, muted, dim
Raised when she has and shaken
Her thurible.

And long and loud
To night's nave upsoaring
A starknell tolls
As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,
Voidward from the adoring
Waste of souls.

   —James Joyce

Ichthyology Today, or Fishy Psychoacoustics

Wherein Nana Boots holds sentry over all of Taylorham-Chickasaw Pants West, while Uncle August’s new age band, Cloud Cover, upsets the nervous systems of fish.

I think the fish would be just as happy to hear this aptly-named but foreboding piece as any Scandinavian death metal, assuming, of course, that members of the Schola Cantorum Chickasawiensis had to get night cleaning crew jobs to support their music habit. I'm in favor of the most subtle music possible for any occasion, and it's obvious the fish are too. They also seem to like dramatic music. If that's the case, what better than Lully, who would also elevate and enoble them whilst they await that fate to which they have become reconciled.

The Taming of the Overtones

Annamia Eriksson plays Siegfried's Horn Call. She's the co-principal of the Stockholm Opera, and a mere 29 years old. Quite a contrast to the mostly lumpy guys, also Swedish, of the Malmö Symphony in the previous post.

Some people have called her the greatest living French horn player, the Jimi Hendrix of the horn, etc.

All I can say is, be still my heart.

More Fun With Overtones

The four horn players from the Malmö Symphony Orchestra use garden-hose-and-funnel "horns" to play the first movement of Leopold Mozart's Hunt Symphony.

I made a similar thing in high school and it gave me a great impetus to learn more mathematics. It was all about the harmonic series, Fourier transforms and such. Otherwise, calculus bored me silly. A standard trick of teaching: Tie the material in to what the kids are interested in. Make it "relevant." Trouble is, there aren't too many kids like me, who thought calculus was cool only to the extent it could be used for acoustics.

Obsessed as I am with the harmonic or overtone series, one of my first blog posts was about this phenomenon and Fun with Alphorns.

But I am glad to see this video, having long since lost my own length of garden hose, and wondering if anyone else had gotten similar results.

All that music, funky as it may be, is waiting in the hose to be squirted out. It's as much a part of Nature as the Pachysandra you might otherwise use the hose on. The notes are implied by the very existence of a column of air of the dimensions of the garden hose, ideally drained of water, although if you play it long enough, you will add your own from your breath, the perennial trial of wind instrument players.

But there is one very real Organological issue here (Organology is the study of musical instruments): Those garden hoses are not, strictly speaking, "horns."

Yas, yas, I know. They can't be horns; they're made of rubber. No it isn't the material. It's the shape. So, can anyone venture a guess as to why those rubber tubes cannot be considered, from our Organological point-of-view, "horns?"

Where Have the Years Gone?

Not quite three years ago. They weren't teenagers yet.