This and that...

This and that...

I spent today recuperating from my trip to Boston, followed by a Schmaltzentruber performance Friday night and MCCO concert Saturday night. It's all good, but by noon today I was happy to be home with nothing much on my mind besides the laundry, paying a few bills and cooking ahead a little for next week. Plus an ice storm made staying inside for the day trendy and wise.

While cooking this afternoon I listened to downloaded segments from This American Life. This one includes a short segment on mapping sounds. One of the comments is that the medieval church attached great meaning to intervals between notes. I had heard this before. Actually, this has carried forward to today: music with a major third is usually thought of as happier music, whereas a minor third is generally thought to be sadder or more melancholy. Anyhow, the radio story mentions that the church thought of an Augmented 4th as the sound of Diabolus in Musica, or the devil in music. This is really interesting given that gypsy music is full of Augmented 4ths. For example, I'm working on a traditional gypsy tune now that has a scale in it that goes C - D - D# - F# -G - Bb - C# - D. That C - F# is the augmented 4th and it really leaps out of the run.

I think it is a pretty safe guess that that gypsy scale goes back at least to the middle-ages. So did the church identify the interval with the devil because it was so common in gypsy music?

In other news, I've been following more of the links on John Niremberg's blog, and chasing down Naomi Wolf's 10 easy steps to fascism. If you don't have time to listen to her video, read this article from last spring. Ok, maybe I'm bordering on paranoia, but are you comfortable with what Bush and Cheney have been doing? Support impeachment!

I have no travel plans for the next two weeks. Then the day after Christmas I'm heading to Montreal to visit ma petite fille. Ok, so she isn't so little any more.