Jan 2, 2022

Lunch is prepared in the garden

 

In the bleak midwinter -- Jacob Collier (and Andrew McGregor)

. 

 And here is what Andrew McGregor has to say about this (scroll down for the lyrics):

Musical notes are a really, really, really complicated subject:

The base standard of western music, now, is A=440 Hz, and equal temperament, that is that there are 12 other tones related by powers of the 12th root of two, meaning 12 distinct tones in each octave.

That is a convenient approximation to a set of tones you can make out of the harmonic series, which was known to the ancient Greeks… except that if you actually try that, you discover as your music gets more harmonically complex that things sound pretty bad in some combinations, and musicians start wanting to correct them so they sound ‘right’ despite being wrong.

If you tune by ear with voices, or instruments that are not entirely fixed in their tuning, you end up using something called just intonation, and as you change key the frequencies you use for certain notes change slightly. That can mean that you can change key several times, change back to the key you started on, and end up at a different pitch (shifted by an interval called a comma).

Yeah, it’s complicated all right.

Around about the 16th century several people worked out that you could do what we now call equal temperament, it seems to have been simultaneously invented in China and Holland. It became standard in the 18th century in Europe.

But… lots of contemporary music uses tuning based on guitars, and they don’t play in exact equal temperament.

Not only that, lots of contemporary music is based on blues scales, which contain a note that isn’t one of the regular set.

Arab, Japanese and Indian music each use a different set of intonation schemes… except when they don’t because they’re incorporating Western instruments (or guitars)… except when they do something like just intonation around what the equal-tempered instruments or guitars are doing to make it sound right in their heads… yeah. Complicated.

So, any attempt to define the exact frequencies of musical notes is just the start of a long, complicated journey. People have written books on the subject, and there have been several published on this subject every year for at least four hundred years. It’s that complicated.

Using different intonation schemes can be astonishingly beautiful.

Check this out… there’s an impossible modulation in this arrangement:

At one point he smoothly modulates into a key a quarter tone sharp (in exact quarter-tone equal temperament)… by stepping through something like the just intonation commas on the way there. By ear, multitracking with himself.

Lyrics

In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan

Earth stood hard as iron

Water like a stone

Snow had fallen

Snow on snow on snow

In the bleak midwinter

Long, long ago

Angels and Arc Angels

May have traveled there

Cherubim and Seraphim

Thronged the air

But only his Mother

In her maiden bliss

Worshiped the beloved

With a kiss

What can I give him?

Poor as I am

If I were a shepherd

I would give a lamb

If I were a wise man

I would do my part

But what I can I give him

Give him my heart

Give him my heart

Christmas eve...

 

This afternoon

We were on our habitual afternoon walk which gets us downtown and back in an hour.

Note the December flowers on the right. The white Lego House atop the hill got recently repainted; before it looked like Dr. No's residence. There's a dog kept in a cage next to the house (extreme left of the picture), and he barks less since the paint job was done.

Yesterday on the beach

September was a bit rainy, but the summer is back.

October is the season for big waves...

...which has started now (the season).

Forte de São Miguel Arcanjo (Fortress of Saint Michael the Archangel) the locus vivendi for surfing championships.

The street view of our house this (Sunday) morning

 

Note the bamboo on the deck to the left of the gate (click on the pic for enlargement)

Alle reden vom Wetter (2)

Wasn't it prescient, our last post? Here, the climate change in Verviers, Belgium, on July 16, 2021, where the flooding water stacked cars on a roundabout:

 

Alcobaça, this morning...

...or, to be more specific, a view of the eastern environs of Alcobaça seen through the haze of a very cold, very charming morning, as usual from our house. Note the outline of the Serras de Aire e Candeeiros on the horizon.

Spring has arrived -- updated

 

Our garden, as yet untended, on Feb 12, at 11 AM; we are at: 39°32′30.7″ N, 8°58′54.3″ W in Alcobaça, PT

The same garden on Feb 15, at 11:30 AM, now under reconstruction by Louis, our trusted gardener

The view this morning

 

 

Yesterday, on the beach...

...of Caldas da Rainha, half an hour to the south of Alcobaça:

 

To the triumph of Logic...

So we went to Porto de Mos, the nearby town that dominates the Parque Natural das Serras de Aire e Candeeiros, where we shot our Christmas Card: 

And inside the castle, there was an exposition of contemporary inlay stonework (Porto de Mos prides itself on its stonework). And what do we find? Haven't we founded and run the Applied Logic Laboratory at the University of Amsterdam in our days?

So, we found this:

It's a bit difficult to read, despite some photoshopping, but it says: "To the triumph of logic over the disruption of the truth." A bit optimistic perhaps, this congratulatory shoulder-pat, but now it's set in stone, and we'll hang it on our new walls as soon as we find a printer nearby.

Bürchen again -- Switzerland

We're posting this for our Australian friend, Alex Hogan, the famous editor of Gay Flash Fiction -- as usual, we spend the summer here, and we're concerned she'll get the wrong impression if we don't post enough.

Bürchen, the "Chalet Zone", where we are staying

The farmers get together during the summer and have their cows grazing on the communal ground of the village.

In the background: the Dom, the third-highest mountain of the Alps 

Sunset, picture taken from the house of a neighbor nearby

(All pictures taken during the last 14 days by Chang)

Back in Switzerland

House is rented, we're back in Switzerland. Picture taken by Chang yesterday afternoon:

Portugal (21) -- This afternoon, on the beach

Portugal (20)

A rainy day on the beach of Nazaré (still house-hunting):

Picture, as always, by Chang 

Do you believe in the devil?

Yesterday evening in St. Raphael

Snow on the Mediterranean

This is a photo from my afternoon walk. Friends of this blog will know that we live in Le Trayas, not far from Cannes, in a settlement of 200 houses nestled into the Domaine forestial de l'Esterel, a small, protected, natural park. Snow is rare at our latitude, but not unheard of:

And the dog? Yes, that's Tara. She belongs to the neighbors, and often joins me for my walk.

See how she stares at the pine cone in front of her? She is playing with me. She puts the cone there, stares at it, and I am supposed to kick it in her direction. She grabs it with her maw, trudges ahead, drops it again, stares at it again, I kick again, and so on...

And while we are at it. Here's a picture I took the other day depicting excavation work for the fiberglass internet connection that has been on the cards since ten years: 

Please don't miss the post about verse repair. Thanks.

What happens when your travel documents expire...

...and you live in France, and you have a Dutch passport, and it's late November...

Photo (as always) by Jason Yoon

...you have to go to Paris, to the embassy. It's the only place where you can renew your passport, and you have to show up in the flesh, you can't do it per mail. Fortunately, the Eiffel tower was in walking distance.