Tim Summers, violin

I wonder about the appearance of -ism in so many contexts. I can’t quite figure out what it means. Capitalism, evangelicalism, racism, pacifism, antidisestablishmentarianism, etc.

It seems to provide some ghost of an idea with the weight of reality — a ghost which then becomes a fact or movement because people act on it.

I suppose we have to identify things, but often -ism seems to bring along with it an excess of concreteness. It is not as though when we talk about ‘Realism’, that we know what we are talking about…

Or terrorism.

There is a problem with having audio in and audio out in the same room.

As we know, the amplification takes from the microphone, the microphone takes from the amplification, and the world collapses. I recently read about what exactly makes that ‘feedback’ sound, but I’ve forgotten what it is, how exactly it works. It is a bad sound.

And of course if you’re devising an environment-aware music system, there’s the problem that the machine will play along with itself, creating its own environment. It’s like the opposite of garbage in the system: there’s no difference between the garbage and the food. The recent past becomes the near future becomes the recent past, and they have to be different in order to move… forward.

And if you’re playing with a person… how is that person understanding his separateness?

The person is not making an echo, and not playing the same ‘thing’ as you, which helps. But he’s not depending only on sound, either. And he’s deciding what features to respond to — not to your sound, necessarily, but to you, through some combination of features and imitations.

Making a machine respond musically to a gesture is not in itself so problematic… but picking out something to play with? In an engaging way? The question is open.

When we listen to each other, we do not necessarily respond to the sound we hear, at least not as a physical sensation. We can store the sound as an idea or shape, remember it, draw from it, vary it, put it on our own terms, and then respond to it (or not).  We actually require ourselves to do something different. We separate ourselves in order to establish our own selves.

And what would you do to have a machine remember itself — its own sound — as different from yours?  Well, first it would have to have ‘a sound’. It’s not clear that it does, if it doesn’t physically resonate across space. But of course, synthesis is plenty successful on the large scale, so why exclude it?

I’ve made a vow to begin writing in a clear enough style that I can understand what I’ve written.

For a long time now I’ve had a mistrust of etymologies.

I like them, but they have a funny way of making you think/feel that you really know what you’re speaking of because you found a ‘root’.

In fact, they are even more merely inventions than the usual sort of history, since an etymology is a history of description rather than a history of an event.

On the other hand, the more of them you know, the more you feel that there aren’t actually that many words, when it comes down to it.

(Today on Sendung mit der Maus they made a field trip to Greece.)

So it seems there is a new building going up in Frankfurt called ‘Frankfurt Flare’.  Am I missing something?

Why would you call a building ‘Flare’?

I’m getting old, and had no deeper thoughts today.

Every day the current president remains president is a day to downgrade your estimation of humanity.

And there were these excellent tree/shadows from Alessandro Lupi, that I ran across, having met him in Berlin.

It is for me an extension of the idea of ornament — a musical idea. Is the ornament frozen? Is it the past leaves or the potential leaves? What is the light source?

There are more questions. It’s like the opposite of Plato: the shadows contain more than the thing.

 

There are a lot of steps to be taken before a historical step, or any event, or document, may be confidently identified. Fundamentalists skip these steps. There is a nice account in ‘Original Meanings’ from Jack Rackove, about the making of the US constitution, of just how many angles there are to be considered in the identification of intent in a document:

… their real challenge did not involve solving theoretical dilemmas posed by Hobbes or Locke or Montesquieu; it instead required efforts to accommodate the conflicting interests of different states and regions on such matters as the apportionment of representation and taxes, the regulation of commerce, and the extension of the slave trade. (p. 15)

How cleanly could a document so formed be read for original intent and meaning?  (The book goes on, it doesn’t just trash the prospect of meaning. But the question stays strong.)

The constitution is not a score, of course, and its authors were many, not a solitary genius-type. But the obstacles between a performer and a score, if not so numerous, are at least also infinite.