My hosting service was DOWN for about 7 hours today. Sorry for the outage.
One of my clients’ email addresses also went DEAD today.
Even mybrinks.com was down for hours today.
Is this the World Wide Web, or the World Wide WTF?
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I suddenly remember a day in the spring of 1978. Roger and I drove up to Roanoke for a meeting, where the NAPA warehouse rep gave us each a fine cigar. We smoked them on the way home, flying along highway 40 with the windows of my old orange Chrysler rolled down, wearing our NAPA cowboy hats, while the 8-track player blasted out Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
I looked over at Roger through my mirror aviator shades and said, “You know, someone who didn’t know us might think we were crazy.”
Roger replied, “Man, you are crazy.”
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Today, Johann Sebastian Bach would be 323 years old, if he had survived. What a year 1685 turned out to be for composers! Handel was born in the previous month, and Scarlatti was born that October.
I read once somewhere that when the famous organist Buxtehude died, both Bach and Handel applied to replace him. They were both just 22 years old, and neither of them got the position.
Bach had visited Buxtehude just a year or so before, traveling on foot about 250 miles each way. Now that’s a passionate musician!
Bach learned a lot from Buxtehude, and also from other earlier composers such as Pachelbel and Vivaldi, whose works he studied fervently and borrowed from liberally. His music was therefore considered a bit old-fashioned during his lifetime.
But as a performer Bach was exceptionally famous. Many stories have been recorded about his prowess on the keyboards. In one, Bach was said to have been traveling incognito when he came upon a country church. Receiving permission from the organist there to play upon the church’s organ, he launched into one of his famous improvisations. When he finished, the usual organist exclaimed, “Sir, you are either an angel of God or Sebastian Bach!”
In another story, Bach was scheduled to face Louis Marchand in a musical competition — a “dueling harpsichords” if you will. Right before the competition, Marchand skipped town. Bach went ahead with the performance, in which he improvised for hours to the delight of the audience.
The emerging trend in music in the early eighteenth century was to abandon complex counterpoint in favor of a more unified harmony. Rather than seeing a composition as a set of distinct voices that occasionally end up together on a chord, the theory of harmonic progression as put forth by Jean-Phillipe Rameau defined music as a series of chords, in which the independent voices (if any) merely partake.
The genius of Bach, which was largely unappreciated because of his use of counterpoint, is that he combined both approaches to music. His counterpoint is flawless — you can easily sing along with any individual voice — yet a sampling of any set of bars will yield the most beautiful chordal progressions as well. He appreciated full harmony so much that it was said that he sometimes held a ruler in his mouth to press the keys for the extra notes for which he hadn’t enough fingers and feet.
After his death, Bach’s music was largely forgotten. We can thank the 19th century composer Felix Mendelssohn for reviving interest in Bach. I read once that Mendelssohn discovered the pages of Bach’s original manuscript for St. Matthew Passion being used as jelly-jar lids by members of the Bach family.
The name “Bach” means “brook” in German. Apparently some of Bach’s keyboard compositions were still being used in the late eighteenth century as exercises. Upon playing one of these, the young Beethoven remarked, “nicht ein Bach, aber ein Meer” — “not a brook, but a sea”.
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Walking the dogs this morning, I heard the call of a songbird. Such a happy sound, charged with the expectation of Spring. Then I realized that the interval between the two notes was a minor third. We usually think of music in the minor mode as having a sad or eerie sound, yet this little bird sounded quite happy to me.
But this association of major => happy, minor => sad has not always held. In ancient Greek music, the modes that were similar to our major mode (Lydian and Ionian, for instance) were according to both Plato and Aristotle only good for drinking songs and silliness. They favored the Dorian and Phrygian modes, both of which sound minor to our modern ears primarily because of their diminished third. Of course we must realize that neither of these philosophers universally represented typical Greek thinking. Here’s an interesting and different take on the ancient Greek modes, while we’re on the subject.
Middle Eastern music almost always sounds minor to me — yet is often joyous, as demonstrated by the art of belly dance. Though this music includes many tones that lie in between notes on the chromatic scale, our western ears tend to hear them as sharpened or flattened versions of their nearest semitone neighbors. Yet more often than not they seem to approximate the minor rather than the major scale.
Apart from music that imitates nature, the way we hear a particular piece of music has less to do with any innate qualities of the tones themselves than with the idioms to which we have become accustomed to associating specific meanings. Those idioms, like the idioms of language, evolve over time through gradual changes in usage.
The first time I listened to Bach, I found him oppressive — because my experience and understanding of classical music at that time was defined by a superficial appreciation of Mozart and Rossini. But after I became more accustomed to listening to Bach, I began to realize that he was one of the most joyful composers to have ever lived. The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (which Bach wrote as a very young man) is probably the closest thing to multiple orgasms that can be expressed musically — albeit sublimated to a “spiritual” plane. Yet most modern first-time listeners would only hear “Phantom of the Opera”.
This also explains why every generation generally fails to appreciate the music of the next generation — they’re using a new idiom, and we’re quite happy with our old one. After all, you have to be able to whistle a tune in order to consider it “catchy”.
To many eighteenth century listeners, Beethoven sounded like noise — full of gratuitous dissonance and booming drums. To the nineteenth century he sounded divine, combining a mastery of Enlightenment-era forms with the raw emotion of the nascent Romantic period.
When I first heard the music of Gustav Mahler, it seemed to me nothing more than a jumble of unrelated symphonic textures. But each time I listened to one of his symphonies again, I would marvel “How could I have not heard that before?” This happened with each of his ten (or eleven) symphonies, even after I was already a fan. Each one introduces new idioms that have to be grokked before they can be appreciated.
In Alma Mahler’s biography of her husband, she told a story that I’ll probably mangle because I can’t locate the book right now. But it went something like this: Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler were walking through the woods near Vienna and discussing the current state of music. Brahms was of the opinion that the newer composers were ruining everything. The two arrived at a little bridge, where they stood and looked out across ripple following ripple on the brook that flowed beneath them. Mahler pointed to the successive ripples and asked, “Which one is The Last?”
There can never be a final style of music, because the needs for human expression keep changing. The same thing goes for human language, and it’s also true of programming languages. A programmer becomes an expert in a few languages and comfortably expresses any solution in the idioms those languages provide. But the next generation will always produce something new that better expresses what they need to do. The older programmer may resent these innovations and try to point out the flawed theory behind them, but the younger crowd will ignore this and continue to sing right along. And no matter how old you are, if you are young at heart you can join in, too.
Now that I think about it, since my songbird’s call is only two notes a step and a half apart, it’s also possible to hear them as the major fifth and third. If you then imagine the tonic two steps beneath the lower note, it fills the little tune with joyful anticipation — the anticipation of Spring.
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blogstrappingBlogstrapping is Chad Perrin's development blog, focusing on Lump development, software design, and the philosophy of programming.
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