Tradition for Tradition's Sake

I got this email today,

let's add this tune to our list as a "just in case"

All Of Me, trad. jazz style, group improv on head, gutbucket bone, ect.. (everyone find Louis' versions)

and I was dismayed. I think we all have a few standards we really dislike playing and All Of Me in a "trad. jazz style" is 3-10 minutes of boredom for me. It's one of those songs where the ride cymbal sounds like Ben Stein at his worst. The tempo is bad. The melody is mad. The harmony is interesting, but the harmonic movement is pitiful. And no doubt the lyrics are worthy of a better tune. In short All of Me strikes me as a gray-haired octogenarian musician, 5 people in the club on a Tuesday night kind of tune.

But then I listened to Louis:



Aside from the obnoxious Freddie Green comping it amazed me how much they had figured out back then, that his recording was more interesting than recordings 50 years later. I think the tune still stinks, but what Louis did with it was great. He takes out all the boring stuff! It's genius. His trumpet playing is magnetic, so why bother focusing on anything else! It makes me think a ballad, block-chord solo piano method might be a good way of presenting this tune. Sometimes Louis made so much sense... and that's why tradition for tradition's sake makes young jazzers dread All of Me.

The Golden Proportion

I had a literature/philosophy teacher who claimed that the golden proportion unlocked the meaning to the universe. And the kids who didn't care thought he was nuts and the kids who cared tried to mathmaticly disprove his golden callipers. I've come around though. Maybe I can provoke a blog post on the whole subject out of him, but here is my rather poor presentation.

So the golden ratio is about 1.618:1. See it exactly here (if your much smarter than I can can understand wikipedia articles about math...). And you can make golden calippers that maintain that proportion:

And then really cool stuff happens (I like the fig leaf. Mathematicians are always so modest. It's great!):

And shells:


And flowers:

And coffee (from the movie Pi. I've never watched it because supposedly it ends with the guy drilling a hole through his head). The golden ratio bit is at the end:



And in the human body! And face!

It goes on forever. The Marquardt website (the "face" link) is awesome! I really hope young girls aren't running out to get their face shaped to the golden proportion but I suppose that's at least marginally better than getting it shaped to be like Paris Hilton.

Grace is free

I was on the treadmill when I remembered a scene from my 10th grade literature class. One of the students completed her quiz and asked (in that brown nosing kind of tone that only serves to make the teacher-student relationship less amicable) "what should I do", now that she was done with her quiz, and without warranting her even a quick glance my teacher responded, "sit quietly and contemplate your sins". So then I figured it would be an opportune time for me to run quietly (I am one of those hopelessly loud treadmill users) and contemplate my sins. But because the devil is so witty and cunning I quickly started thinking about popular culture's sins, which soon turned to the trampling at the Wal-Mart today, which soon turned to pondering what has become a complete commercialization of Christmas. But since God is more witty and more cunning than the devil he reminded me that grace is free!

And from that I realized that grace will get any human farther than something from Wal-Mart. I was about to say that Jesus being born was the best gift any man could receive but then I remembered another story from school. One of the first days of history class the teacher asked in his intellectual British accent what the most important historical event was and somebody said "the birth of Jesus". He commended them in his across-the-pond way of commending students and then asked what the second most important historical event was. Nobody raised their hand so I figured I'd start off the year strong and be the only one to answer, so I said "the death of Christ" and the whole class stared at the teacher, who was unjustly faced with the theological decision of which aspect of Christ's life was most important. Apparently the correct answer was much simpler: the agricultural revolution.

But remember that this Christmas season. If you don't have any money to buy somebody a gift, pray for God to give them grace! It's a big paradox: it is priceless and costs nothing! It's something so much better, so much cooler, so much awesomer than anything that can be wrapped up. And praying for somebody else helps you too. Sometimes when it snows my family wakes up early and my mom makes breakfast while the rest of us go shovel the neighbors driveways, and my dad used to always say that we were doing it because of the maxim do good things for others, but me and my sister always knew that 2 of the neighbors were going to pay us very handsomely, and if we tried to give it back they would have none of it. Praying for somebody is kind of the same way. You do it because it's really good to pray for other people, but in the back of your head you know that it will help you too.

That's how I know God exists: only somebody who created this world and continues to govern it could be the overarching theme to three completely unrelated stories about post-quiz time, history and shoveling.

I can't stand it!

I've never been angry a Do The Math blog post, but I just don't get it (the stereotypical 1800's German is Karl Marx). Hasn't history pretty well shown that once you drink the socialist stew your country has about a 30 year life span before it collapses? And I'll remind you that American GDP is 60 times Venezuela's. It's be a hard case to make that those 30 years are really fruitful years. And hasn't human reason pretty well ironed out that private property is good and necessary. I repeat: PRIVATE PROPERTY IS GOOD AND NECESSARY! If any of my readers really despise private property I invite you to share your favorite jazz CDs with my high school band room. Coltrane would be much appreciated. The address is here.

I have an uncle who champions Marx and out of love I can't help but try to convert him at Thanksgiving dinner. I try to remember that Jesus tried to help everybody out of love and they killed him so I suppose that's why you don't talk about politics with relatives. But seriously! I can't even get my mind around the idea of championing out right socialism. If you rejected original sin the argument would work easier, but the story they cite is a prime example of original sin. I can at least comprehend those who just want a little socialism here and there under the title "advanced capitalism".

I find the historical evolution funny: Somehow we go from bartering to legal tender to abolishing the whole system as if abolishing the system makes man smarter. It's like a little kid who is given a spoon to eat his food with but decides that the environment would be saved the metal to make the spoon so he will use his fingers. Abolishing age old systems does not make you better. I can just imagine how eloquently C.S. Lewis would have given the last 3 lines... I suppose economic insanity was a bit before his time. I wish I was a genius sometimes. And rich so that I could help people intellectually and economically. I could be the ultimate good samaritan if original sin didn't make me greedy and self-loving. God loves us so much he doesn't give us money.

Tradition to Relativism

It's become strikingly clear to me that in the last 5 centuries a striking pattern from rigid tradition to relativism has occurred in Western classical music, philosophy, jazz, art, politics and more.

Western classical music moved from Palestrina and Bach to Shoenburg and Berg
Philosophy moved from St. Thomas Aquinas to Nietzsche
Jazz moved from Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman
Art moved from Leonardo DaVinci to Jackson Pollock
Politics moved chivalry and the rule of Christendom to the current American political scene

I don't wish to blatantly criticize any of the latter parties, but it certainly is apparent that this trend occurs. And it is seemingly not cyclical. It would be incredible if not impossible for music to return to the sounds of Palestrina, or for jazz to sound like Louis Armstrong.

I'd say I'll write a more comprehensive post later, but all that'd mean is that I don't have the time or knowledge to do it now so I need to research and find time, both of which have rarely happened in the history of my saying "I'll write more later" on this blog.

Homosexuals

I think I might have hit on something somewhat unwittingly a while back. I said

"As if these guys are smarter than this guy."

And it has now become more apparent to me that the sheer ridiculousnesses of some of the members of the homosexual movement isn't helping it any. Look at all the leaders of social change in history who acted with honor, dignity and class. Rosa Parks was wearing a business suit when she was arrested. Martin Luther King was in a suit when he was shot. What do you think Susan B. Anthony showed up to the Syracuse Convention in? Not like this!

Maybe this is just another example of my outdated traditional western ideals coming out, but I for one could take homosexuals more seriously if they found some way to fit in with the rest of society in dress and decorum. And if that would in any way defeat the purpose of the movement I think we have conclusive evidence that the gay rights movement has little to do with homosexual marriage.

I see no reason why gays couldn't lobby for rights the same way blacks and women did if they are searching for the same kind of rights blacks and women did.

Yikes

Amid all of the Minnesota election controversy I can't help but wonder why it is that we want those why can't even fill out the ballot correctly to be able to vote. What kind of knowledge do they have of the candidates or the issues if they can't fill in a clearly defined circle? I don't find any reason to rejoice over high voter turn out either. Every other election has been important enough to vote in and if it took the media hype or some other special element of this election to get you to the polling place, I don't want you voting!

This could never be implemented (and I'm glad) because just as soon as we require voters to know about the candidates we can all to easily impose other restrictions. But wouldn't it be nice if they only people who showed up on voting day really knew about who they were voting for? I would be much more at ease with the process if I knew that the guy who can't read directions wasn't going to vote.

When I was in 1st grade I thought I was pretty smart and I would rush ahead and do the worksheets in record time and inevitably I would miss some pedantic detail that had no didactic purpose and I would get half a point taken off on every problem and my teacher would look down on me with her reading glasses on the tip of her nose and say "you need to read the directions young man". I figured it out by the 2nd grade, and if by then I had figured out that I had to do what the directions said, regardless of how inane they were I think it should be a bare minimum that anybody who partakes in one of the greatest freedoms given to any man living today have figured that out too.

I can't resist, which is actually the big problem in society.

A really old family was found... which is more important than it seems.

If from the time of cavemen until about the 20th century marriage was between a guy and a gal (and they had kids) I have to question the folks that came along and reinvented the wheel... I don't doubt that there are examples of homosexuality in the past but I don't think you could find a society that endorsed the practice.

I at least like to think I'm a humble man, which only lends evidence to my pride, but if there was a humble person in America, don't you think they might defer to all of the people who were smarter than them (and there had to be a few, especially considering American education these days) that condemned many of the things popular society champions.

For all his immense intelligence (I put down his books because I knew he's wrong, but he was too convincing... I'm not there yet) and philosophical searching for the truth (though the comment that he was fueled by a need to be different holds some merit), I think we have to acknowledge something wrong with Nietzschean Philosophy (1, 2, 3)...

Man just can't resist the temptation to think he's on to something that the rest of the rest of the world neglected. As if these guys are smarter than this guy. Or the guy who did this.

Then again it all comes apart when somebody has the guts to say I am smarter than everybody else and God doesn't exist. It's just those holier than though Catholics who think gay marriage is wrong.

Oddly enough, for all the stereotypes surrounding Catholics they recognize the sin of pride and try to eradicate it. In an odd way other religions put their founders above Jesus, who founded the Catholic Church. Lutherans either have to say that Jesus didn't found the Catholic Church (which seems false, according to the bible) or that Martin Luther was on to something that Jesus wasn't. Somehow I find it hard to believe that by the 1520s man was smart enough to tell Jesus what he meant to say.

But now it's just become a long babble... I should have ended this three times already.

Aergia

I never understood why bloggers announce periods of inactivity, or apologize after the fact. It is as if they believe that there are readers hanging on their every post. It is as if they think people actually care what they have to say, that they are somehow important, so they waste hours on end writing everything they think they have to offer the world. Of course this doesn't happen here at Maria's Music where days are looking good, with readership skyrocketing and a flood of insightful comments; no doubt millions of readers really are hanging on my every keystroke. But even with that in mind I formally announce a period of intense blogging scarcity, until the new year. If you were stranded in the desert and my posts were glasses of water, you will surely die. The quantity of my posts will closely resemble the number of plausible economic policies of our President-Elect. If you take the number of readers of this blog and divide it by the population of the civilized world you get (π^2)/10 (≈ .9869604), which is very close to the quantity (in bits) that I will contribute to the incredible waste of electronic storage we euphorically title the blogsphere.

It is common to become addicted to euphoric, epiphanic, euphonious, enlightening, and generally exciting blog writing. If you suffer from this ailment I recommend a brand new medicine, Let The Children Come to Me (pending FDA approval).

Schoenberg

The man of the hour was a pretty smart guy:

For 'education' means today: to know something of everything without understanding anything at all.

Here we can see most distinctly what the prerequisite of comfort is: superficiality. It is thus easy to have a 'philosophy', if one contemplates only what is peasant and gives no heed to the rest.

Curiously enough, people of our time who formulate new laws of morality (or, even more to their liking, overthrow old ones) cannot live without guilt.

All in a preface to a book about music theory...

You can see a good portion of the book here (maybe the whole thing). Some of the later chorales make my spine tingle. I love Bach but Schoenberg is so much cooler. Bach's harmony is amazing, but he didn't have 500 years of harmonic evolution to work with. Nobody rags on Louis Armstrong because he wasn't playing like Wynton Marsalis. Schoenberg was able to dig himself the most beautiful of holes and construct an equally beautiful way of getting out of them, somehow going from a C major triad to a V-I in F# in less that 16 chords... you can't help but smile.

Schoenburg for the Soul

When ever I'm posting on this blog (or really everywhere in life) I try to not sound like an angry teenager. It's ability to be discredit any idea and the general annoyance it causes is legendary. I'd rather wake up tomorrow 30 years old, but I'm stuck being a teenager in body at least. I really hope what I see as a real problem isn't seen as some kind of "nobody understands me" rant that you can find all over the internet these days. See, I like my atonal music. I say tonality is dead and even if your in C it is not only possible, but it behooves you to dispense with the idea of harmonic and non-harmonic tones. I was a bit angered today at a certain discussion in class.

It started by a student asking what type of music the teacher listened too. He discussed his appreciation of 70's rock in his teens, and his move, as he got older, to exclusively classical music, which (and here's the problem) "is

Publish Post

music written anywhere from as early as 1300 to, really, 1800." Maybe I will confirm my ignorance, but I don't know too many composers from 1300. In fact Palestrina (1500s) seems to me to be one of the first really enduring composers. But that really isn't the problem. I have no doubt that you can find music written at and before 1300 on those awful authentic instrument recordings that pop up all too frequently these days. The 1800 date got me wild. How can you neglect Chopin, Brahms, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Schoenberg, Shostakovitch and Stravinsky? And thats only the big names, and not even all of them!

But it continued. He continued to say that atonal music was "bad for your soul". Now I thought that this could have been a fluke; he didn't really mean that, he was joking, his mind was clouded. Hopefully. But I raised my hand a clarified the statement. With a solemn face and grave words he repeated "yes, atonal music is bad for your soul." I was incensed! Worst of all, his argument revolved around the idea that atonal music is featured in horror films. It's a bad argument for a host of reasons that you can supply on your own. Simply bad logic.

I don't really mind that he doesn't like atonal music or that he even thinks it's bad for his soul. What bothers me is that he is telling a class of kids that atonal music is bad for your soul; essentially that listening to atonal music is a sin. Most of these kids don't know about classical music aside from their CKC Music class in middle school. And he is telling them that this kind of music, which is in some ways the culmination of over 5 centuries of harmonic evolution is bad for their souls. Any desire they may of had to listen to atonal music, or really anything written after 1800 is going to be called into question.

I cannot believe that atonal music is, in and of itself, bad for the soul. In fact I think it is good for the soul. If any music is going to bring me closer to God it is going to be Shostakovitch, not Bach or (please no!) Vivaldi. Maybe the aging classical audience is, maybe just among these 20 kids, due to the belief that their soul will be harmed by Schoenberg. Then again maybe I'm no different than the kid who will ardently defend My Chemical Romance as a real addition to the musical archives. I will comment my teacher on at least one front in this article. He said, "I don't understand how upper class white boys have a desire to emulate lower class black boys." Speakt da trut daug.

The Education System (The Cram And Forget Philosophy)

Over at ScribbleBibble, Abecedarius choses his words well. He said:

As I walked out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the school this afternoon, the warm southern breeze blew a scent from the south that was instantly recognizable.

S.E. Hinton said in her "Outsiders":

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house

And other than a point of departure (it was too good to resist) I want to wipe Mr. Rex clear from this whole discussion. These are my views, and as his occupation is "education of youngsters" I don't want to criticize his chosen profession and more importantly the way he goes about it, but rather the way that educators as a stereotypical group go about it. I'm going to speak of educators as homogeneous individuals but everybody has that favorite English teacher, or horrible science teacher that makes the stereotype a stereotype.

With these disclaimers in place (I feel as if I need to end with my approval of this message) I'll take my first jabs. American education seems a lot like a movie. Only a movie with a test at the end of it. The dark movie theater provides a great piece of art, but as time passes unless the movie is re-watched frequently, the viewer is left with a vague plot line, not a great piece of art. The education system of today is no different. When your average kid studies trigonometry he is going to learn the formulas by making flashcards, remembering it all for the test and in a year they couldn't recall it. I don't think we can blame the student for this. The cram and flush mentality is almost forced on a student. They learn those trig formulas in a 2 week long unit, and don't see them again for another year. Their education isn't nailing them into their brains. But shouldn't the student take charge of his education! Absolutly! But how can they? New material is flooded over them. It's only trig for 2 weeks and then it's conic sections. Not to mention that we expect students to excel in reading, righting and rhythmatic!

The next generation isn't going to be able to tell you who the founding fathers were and what they were about but they will have a vague understanding of what they did. They won't remember geometry or Euclid, but they might keep some of the logic skills they gained. They won't know the facts, just the outline. Which is unfortunate. In essence the education system gives individuals great ideas but allows them to forget the facts that prove to those ideas. Kids are sitting in a movie theater, grabbing the general premise of the plot, but forgetting all the intricacies that make a character, or the lighting that makes the scene, and for that I'm deeply troubled. While I'm never a fan of presenting a problem without a solution I need to sleep otherwise I might fall asleep for the movie entirely.

It'd be difficult to make a convincing case that money is at the root of any schooling woes we are experiencing. There is a philosophical problem with the education system. Teachers can denounce the cram and forget mentality all they want, but until they allow the student the ability to do otherwise their exhortations are shallow to say the least. And lest it be thought that this philosophical problem only concerns students remember that students cease to attend school and begin to attend office buildings and voting booths.

Comic Relief

Bill Cosby makes a lot more sense than God sometimes.

Jazz tends to be almost equally confusing though:

(Eddie Davis)


(Jackie McLean and Phil Woods)

Fairness

I was going to write about adults who go trick-or-treating and how that is evidence of the entitlement philosophy that is prevalent in America, but I stumbled upon something much more interesting, at least in my mind.

Heres the predicament: Person A finds God, only because of His grace, fights the spiritual combat with the greatest zeal and bravery and, as far as any human can tell, defeats his enemy and reaches heaven. Now Person B doesn't find God, and lives his life ignorant of God's truths and, as far as any human can tell, does not merit eternal salvation. If we believe that the only way we can truly come to God in faith is through his grace then how is it that Person A receives this grace and Person B doesn't. The knee jerk reaction would be to say that Person B rejects God's grace, but that doesn't completely solve the problem. Original sin consisted in rejecting God and his commands, so isn't every human that is subject to original sin going to reject God unless they receive God's grace. It becomes apparent that God doles out grace in unequal ways. But that is kind of hard to grapple with. How could God do that?

I don't know that human reason can know. Seems to me that since God is all-powerful he could save everybody. Or that he'd just eliminate temptation. God doles out grace unequally. It makes sense in a way... we understand God through the world he created, in an effect=>cause way, taking things that the human mind can understand and applying it to something we can't. And when I look in the world I see great injustice, and how couldn't we. The world isn't fair, as this presidential election has pointed out. So then God isn't fair? What a horrible thought, that God doesn't, at least as evidenced in his actions, seem to really will the salvation of every single person he creates.

From time to time it's seemed pertinent to think of God like a parent. When I was 7 or so my dad was doing some yard work and I wanted to help him. He loaded up the wheelbarrow, which was probobly bigger than I was and I wanted to move it. Now he could have said, "thats way to heavy for you" and I wouldn't have lifted it, but he said "go ahead" and I tried lifting it and the episode ended with me lifting and pushing in vain. It didn't budge. My dad let me fail so that I could learn a lesson. Apparently I was a very self-confidant 7 year old. Even if God helps us by letting us fail, why is it that some seemingly fail and learn, and others fail and... well, they just fail.

The most frustrating line I've every run into as a student is "wisdom begins in bewilderment", because it lends absolutely no help to understanding the topic at hand. But that is the juncture I'm left at. God loves all of his creation with an infinitely perfect and unselfish love that man can never return. And it is clear that love is shown most convincingly and surely in action. So why wouldn't God give everybody the grace to be saved? I understand that he did in Adam and Eve and that they were allowed to reject God because of their free wills, which are a great gift, but why doesn't God give everybody such a clear opportunity to reject him? If Mother Teresa were to think of murdering somebody she would be overcome by a tremendous moral dichotomy, but a young gang member doesn't seem to have such a incredibly grave dilemma presented him. And yet he is culpable for it all, even though he didn't really make the same kind of choice Mother Teresa did.

It's just not fair that the kids get Halloween candy, and when your 32 you don't get it! But is even less fair that some people seemingly have better odds at salvation than others.