Chess

Current Music: "Argument", Chess

[FLORENCE]
I would have thought in the average affair
That the first hint of trouble would be
Oh so small; barely perceptible, easy to miss
Why is ours on TV?

[THE RUSSIAN]
Listen -- you know as I do
Nothing's altered at all
I have no intention --

[FLORENCE]
Your personal life's
The lead on the news!
How do we ignore that?

[THE RUSSIAN]
I do and I must because otherwise I say
Goodbye to my hopes of retaining my title
If I should succumb to emotional blackmail I'm done --

[FLORENCE]
Looking after number one!

[THE RUSSIAN]
What do you mean?

[FLORENCE]
I mean it's always I this and I that
What happened to us?

[THE RUSSIAN]
All that I'm saying is I must make certain
That nothing distracts me from chess
When I've won
Then I'll attend to the secondary things --

[FLORENCE]
Things like me I suppose!

[THE RUSSIAN]
No, no -- you're reacting
Exactly the way that they want

[FLORENCE]
It's the way I have to
If I feel concerned I can't put it off
And come back to it later

[THE RUSSIAN]
Well if you're determined to jump when they tell you
Then maybe it's best that you do it alone
Watch TV, read the papers, have the miserable time of your life
You could even call my wife!

Creativity Dragon

Current Music: "Fernando", ABBA

Benny Anderson on composition: "Being an artist, or being in the creative process, it's like there's a dragon in the cave, right? And you know it's in there but it's never coming out. So you have to sit outside and wait for it, and you know if you sit there long enough its gonna come out. If you go home and take a nap, you'll never see it because that's when it's coming out, you know? And that's the way it works: sitting here, waiting, trying to pretend that you're working."

Catastrophe Theory (a.k.a. "a squalid little ending")

Current Music: Vivaldi Violin Concerto 1, Op. 4 / "Nobody's Side", from Chess

I read some of this book called Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan (author of Nexus), a popular science book on the tendency of natural systems to self-organize into near-critical situations, across all realms of physics and social situations. It was a fascinating premise. A basic example: snow falling on mountains leads to these snowpacks that can be just on the edge of avalanche and the tiniest thing can set them off. But avalanches are common, not rare... and in general "catastrophes" like this are not rare at all... indeed he postulates it's like a law of nature, this *tendency towards near-criticality*. The book has tons of examples (like the stock market crash in '87) and, amazingly, WWI, where the force setting off the avalanche was simply the wrong-turn of Archduke Ferdinand's driver and his subsequent assassination. But it wasn't just 10 million dead due to a single wrong-turn: the system of society had self-organized into this near-critical mass.

It's interesting to think of how this might apply to smaller social settings, and moreover to consider using the idea to prevent critical situations from developing in the first place. In Chess, Tim Rice writes "And how the cracks begin to show!" as the critical fight happens between Florence and The American. There's probably something to be learned from Ubiquity about avoiding social catastrophe and preventing invisible critical situations from developing (e.g. could the problem with Playing God in Yellowstone re fire management be mapped via analogy to personal relationships?) A starting point is the moral given by Tim Rice in the chorus to "Nobody's Side" as some sort of solution, but it's too bleak for my taste:

No lover's ever faithful
No contract truly signed
There's nothing certain left to know
And how the cracks begin to show!

Never make a promise or plan
Take a little love where you can
Nobody's on nobody's side

Never stay too long in your bed
Never lose your heart use your head
Nobody's on nobody's side

Never take a stranger's advice
Never let a friend fool you twice
Nobody's on nobody's side

Everybody's playing the game
But nobody's rules are the same
Nobody's on nobody's side

Never leave a moment too soon
Never waste a hot afternoon
Nobody's on nobody's side

Musicals Ranked

Current Music: "Any Dream Will Do", from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

This seems silly, but I'm going to rank a bunch of musicals from best to worst, by composer.I'll keep the separate composers separate though, so we'll have four parallel lists. But we can rank the composers overall, again from best to worst:

1. Boublil & Schoenberg
2. Benny & Björn (the guys from ABBA)
3. Anderew Lloyd Webber/Sondheim (it's not fair to compare these two, so they tie for 3rd)

Boublil & Schoenberg

1. Les Misérables
2. Miss Saigon
3. Martin Guerre
4. La Révolution Française

Benny & Björn

(an aside: I just discovered a CD called Benny Anderson's Orkester, which I must buy ASAP! Also, November 1989 seems like it must be amazing, but it's a very expensive import!)

1. Chess
2. Kristina från Duvemåla
3. Mamma Mia
4. The Girl with the Golden Hair

Andrew Lloyd Webber

1. Aspects of Love
2. Phantom of the Opera
3. Jesus Christ Superstar
4. Evita
5. Sunset Boulevard
6. Song & Dance/Tell Me on a Sunday
7. Starlight Express
8. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
9. By Jeeves
10. The Woman in White
11. Whistle Down the Wind
12. The Beautiful Game
13. Cats

Sondheim (incomplete list)

1. Into the Woods
2. Sunday in the Park with George
3. Company
4. Assassins
5. Sweeny Todd
6. Passion
7. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
8. Saturday Night
9. Evening Primrose
10. Bounce
11. A Little Night Music
12. Pacfic Overtures
13. Follies
14. Marry Me a Little
15. Anyone Can Whistle
16. Merrily We Roll Along
17. The Frogs

Limerence

Current Music: "Standing Outside the Fire", Garth Brooks

I learened a great new word yesterday, which affected me so much it seems to give more evidence for that Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Limerence:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence
• http://www.isi.edu/~brian/elbows/limerence.html

So, for instance, knowing the concept of limerence allows me to completely reevaluate and reexperience the Garth Brooks song:

We call them cool
Those hearts that have no scars to show
The ones that never do let go
And risk the tables being turned

We call them fools
Who have to dance within the flame
Who chance the sorrow and the shame
That always comes with getting burned

But you've got to be tough when consumed by desire
'Cause it's not enough just to stand outside the fire

We call them strong
Those who can face this world alone
Who seem to get by on their own
Those who will never take the fall

We call them weak
Who are unable to resist
The slightest chance love might exist
And for that forsake it all

They're so hell-bent on giving, walking a wire
Convinced it's not living if you stand outside the fire

Standing outside the fire
Standing outside the fire
Life is not tried, it is merely survived
If you're standing outside the fire

There's this love that is burning
Deep in my soul
Constantly yearning to get out of control
Wanting to fly higher and higher
I can't abide
Standing outside the fire

(repeat chorus)

Sapir-Whorf

I just read a great Wikipedia article about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics as well as linguistic determinism, which is an idea that seems to come up quite often.

Plus, the term Sapir-Whorf reminds me of another cool thing: a Farhi-Guth Universe.

Charm

Current Music: "If I Could Only Dream This World Away" from The Woman in White, Act II (By Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber)

"Charm" is the right title, predestined for this entry, because as soon as I wrote the Current Music bit above and typed in the title "Charm", Michael Crawford sang "You could try some charm" on the recording, which I'm listening to for the first time right now. But I was really referring to the passage below by Dr. Hofstadter. I woke up this morning feeling like I believed in determinism and that free will was an illusion, so that the morning shower really felt like a meaningless routine -- "going through the motions", as it were. This is my punishment for reading some John Searle before bed -- I was ruminating about certain topics that led to the question of free will, so I started reading the free will section of his book Mind: a brief introduction. But now I'm hoping that the old quantum brain thing turns out to give hope for free will. I haven't read anything about it but I've imagined such a thing before, so the term "quantum brain" conjures up neat ideas that imply that there is "room" for consciousness and free will and all to be "squeezed in" to the "spaces" in the physical universe based on smaller scales than the Planck distance, where there's still hope for a non-discrete universe, etc. etc. I probably sound really silly, so I'll read up on this at some point. The trick is that we can't rely on random elements of quantum mechanics to provide real free will (Searle writes "Quantum mechanics gives us randomness but not freedom" but then disagrees with it in the next sentence), but rather consciousness itself has to be based in the quantum world in a very signficant sense. Or something.

Back to the macroscopic world: I opened up Le Ton beau de Marot to look up Searle in the index, but in S I got distracted by the entry "sexuality: awakening of, 350; on neutron star, 307, 331-332"

Page 350 actually gets back around to free will... and astoundingly I started thinking about free will last night due to a similar chain of thoughts... which itself makes me wonder some more about free will! Ugh. So at long last, here is the passage by Hofstadter, including the word "charm":

It is meant to be a natural awakening that happens in most people in adolescence. And yet, when this marvelous awakening takes place in a particular one of us, it feels so unique and individual, it feels like it springs from our own innermost, most private, personal desires and not at all from some kind of general, abstract, impersonal force. The people on whom our attraction focuses seem simply to radiate charm and vivacity and mystery, and those qualities seem to be the reasons behind our fascination, not some kind of biological destiny programmed in our genes. This tension between homey, comfortable reasons and reasons that stretch out into a past so far beyond our comprehension that we need to ignore it to stay sane becomes ever greater as we delve more deeply into questions about free will and biological and physical determinism. Putting one's finger on the ultimate source of one's identity is a very tricky thing.

Sans Cell, Sans Souci

Current Music: Haven in the Sky, from Tell Me on a Sunday

I am currently cell phone-less, because the fine print indicated that to get the big $250 rebate from Amazon.com, I had to cancel my service before re-signing up for a new 1-year service contract. Unfortunately, although my old phone was turned off successfully, the new one is not able to connect to the network... it was supposed to do this itself automatically within 15 minutes, but nothing has happened for an hour, and I can't even call tech support to ask what's going on. I might drive to a pay phone, but I sent an email and it's probably ok to be out-of-touch for a night.

That's related to the point, incidentally, of this most bizarre Lloyd Webber song, one of the other new ones from Tell Me on a Sunday. It's about the paradise of trans-Atlantic flight. Maybe Lloyd Webber is used to flying 1st class, because it sounds a lot nicer in the song than I remember from flying to France. The music is weird, it would be equally fitting in Starlight Express, The Beautiful Game, or a softcore soundtrack. Amazon's editorial review calls it a "quasi-dance track with a trip-hop beat". Huh. Anyway, it's such a weird premise for a song, but it's nice how it describes getting away from it all for 8 hours in a plane:

This is more than a flight, it's a haven
Let us take care of you on our haven in the sky
Just sit back and relax, take things easy
Watch the ground disappear, wave your worries goodbye

Up here, everything's clear
You just sit and they grant you your every wish
Angels in uniform
Smile and ask
"Would you rather the meat or the fish?"

No big decisions
No binds and no ties
I love this limbo up in the skies
Eight whole hours my life's not in my hands
Better sort my head out for when this plane lands!

Nothing matters when you're here in limbo
Watch the clouds underneath, lift the weight off your mind
Here the sun's always shining above you
Leave whatever old baggage you don't want behind


Unexpected Song is refreshing on this recording because of the new orchestration. It uses a smaller orchestra, but perhaps more piano, reminding me of the changes in the second Martin Guerre recording. The piano part has these new doubled sixteenth notes all over the place: the final two 16ths of most bars in the piano part are the same note, which adds a crazy amount of intensity. This little detail is worth the price of the recording. The song sounds more mellow at first but the piano really starts rocking as it progresses. The whole piano accompaniment feels like it's in a higher register and it's more varied and interesting than before. The crucial harmony on the words "unexpected song" is unexpectedly different in the last half of the piece-- at least I think it's a different chord. Hopefully I haven't been tricked by crazy sound of the piano part. The big syncopated chords in the last verse or two now sound different as they are more subtle drum hits, but still great fun. You Made Me Think You Were in Love has also been reorchestrated to good effect: this time it sounds more like "On Your Own" from Rent than the frenetic 70's thing it was before. Finally, in the title song Tell Me on a Sunday, the orchestration is about the same as before, but the piano performance really rocks here too, especially starting on the big accented dominant octave for "Don't run off in the pouring rain/Don't call me as they call your plane/Take the hurt out of all the pain." These three measures are incredible with that unsubtle breaking-the-strings fortissimo.

Other new songs: Speed Dating is quite annoying, although it's funny that I just heard about the concept, here in Bloomington. Tyler King is about the same. Fourth Letter Home (out of five), however, is good because the lyrics are so realistically naive.. It provides a great segue into the next track: "I think I've found my soul mate... One ready made life..."

Finally, Somewhere Someplace Sometime is growing on me, although the old endings of Song & Dance were much superior. I'm still not sure what to feel about the pop orchestration.. the background stuff reminds me abstractly of "Amigos Para Siempre". It's mostly spanish-sounding guitars, keyboard pads, bass, and cheesy drum kit:

Somewhere Someplace Sometime
You can put yourself
Through all kinds of hell
When good love goes bad
Or you can just say
That what comes and goes
Is meant to happen
Time to move on now
Even though each step
Will be hard to climb
But I still believe
Love will come along
Somewhere, someplace, sometime

Something good will come
Out of this I'm sure
I know who I am
If it's up to me
Then I'll be just fine
I don't break easy
I won't count the days
I won't fall apart
No, not anymore
And I won't let go
Of the dream in me
Maybe I'm crazy
Longing for love is not a crime
Keep your heart alive
And love will arrive
Somewhere, someplace, sometime

Tell Me on a Sunday (on a Sunday Night)

Current Music: Tell Me on a Sunday (with Denise van Outen)

Strangely, I am listening to this because someone was complaining about being bored by this performance in London. I do prefer the earlier versions like the Bernadette Peters recording of Song & Dance. However, this version is worth listening to because of the new versions of the songs: there is a new finale, oddly called "Somewhere Someplace Sometime", which title should remind anyone of West Side Story. [The song itself is impossibly "pop"-sounding, even for a modern musical... the "orchestration" here is to blame.... At least one moment, on the words "Longing for love is not a crime", sounds like the bridge from "If I Loved You" in Carousel ("Longing to tell you but afraid and shy"), so all is not lost in the finale, but it's funny that "longing" is set to such similar music...]

There are some lyric changes, many seemingly made to modernize the show, such as references to email and cell phones. The best piece ever written in 5/4 time according to me ("Nothing like you've ever known") became a little more serious, as the following lyrics were replaced:

Something new that is all it was, you know
But when you need someone any love will do, sad but true
And nothing like we've ever known

with the more poignant:

This was more, more than just a brief affair
There seemed to be nothing standing in our way, 'til today
And nothing like we ever dreamed..."

This song seems to go through a lot; here are older version 1, version 2, and version 3 of the song, not counting the change made above (to "version 1").

Among the new songs, the most notable is "Ready Made Life". I love the song... first there is a nice quote from Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat: she sings "A new day's dawning" to the tune of "the world was waking" from "Any Dream Will Do". This little motive appears a few times with other lyrics in the song.

Now, I don't mean to complain -- I do love the song & I'm happy to get to listen to it -- but I love it because it sounds so similar to "Tell Me to Go" or "Don't" from the two recordings of Martin Guerre by Boublil & Schoenberg. The words "ready made life", and many many other 4 syllable pieces of the song, are set to exactly the same notes, harmony, rhythm, etc. as "tell me to go" or "don't let it start". The characters are even singing about vaguely related topics: Ready Made Life is about wanting to be married with a family, the lyrics even explicitly mention "a new start" (à la Wildhorn) and "moving on" (Sondheim) etc etc., while Tell Me to Go/Don't are also about the main characters' desire to be married and start a family; however, it's tempered by the reality that prevents them from being together. So the Boublil & Schoenberg version is still a much deeper, serious piece, but it's fun to hear the Lloyd Webber version of one element of the situation -- all based on that same 4-note motive! At least we also get that extra dose of harsh reality two tracks after "Ready Made Life" in "Nothing Like You've Ever Known (Married Man)".

The lyrics to Ready Made Life are below, with the Tell Me to Go motive in italics -- notice how often it occurs! With just another font style or two the lyrics would be nearly enough information to sing the song without ever hearing it or seeing sheet music.

Ready made life

One ready made life, fancy that
A child and husband now
I'll soon become, a ready made mum

Our ready made home, big red barn
A porch with soft wind chimes
There was just me, but now we are three

I'll teach her how to draw and dance
And do cartwheels as well
I haven't done them in a while
She probably can tell

One day I'll show them London
I can't wait to get back
Bet dad will put the flags out
Stars and Stripes and Union Jack

My ready made life, moving on
Got it together, yes, it's a new start
It's true cross my heart

My ready made world, lucky me
A new day's dawning, or as they say here [both these phrases use the Joseph motive]
A whole new ball game [so does this one!]
Mother and wife, my ready made life

Books & Math

A collection of books lying about the house that make me happy:

• Le Ton beau de Marot: Hofstadter
• Eugene Onegin: Pushkin/Hofstadter
• Einstein's Dreams: Lightman
• Reunion: Lightman
• Letters to a Young Poet: Rilke
• Perfume: Suskind
• Buddhism Plain & Simple: Hagen
• Little Book of Wisdom: The Dalai Lama
• Fundamentals of Musical Composition: Schoenberg
• Nexus: Buchanan
• Ubiquity - Why Catastrophes Happen: Buchanan
• Chaos - An Introduction to Dynamical Systems: Alligood, Sauer, & Yorke

I just opened up this last one to a random page: first a definiton of Lyapunov Exponents, then the 2D Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem, and finally a definition of a chaotic orbit. I love this book for many reasons, especially how the authors explain Li and Yorke's result from their paper "Period Three Implies Chaos": in a "challenge" exercise the reader is gently guided through 10 steps resulting in a proof of Sharkovskii's Theorem, an even more general result. And here is a definition of Chaos itself.

Here is a nifty little site with great explanations and, most importantly, pictures of chaos-related concepts:

• Introduction
• Bifurcation
• Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions

Double-Vie

I just finished watching The Double Life of Veronique (La double vie de Veronique) with msalim. It had a georgeous score and reminded me quite a lot of Bleu, especially considering it's from the same composer (Preisner) & directing/writing team. The music, especially the choral music towards the start of the film, was amazing, at least as good as the best moments of the Bleu soundtrack. The plot was a bit surreal and not suited for late-night movie watching due to the paucity of dialogue but the movie was quite enjoyable.

There was a funny moment towards the end of the film: we both were getting sleepy, as were the characters in the film. Watching the characters falling asleep and crawling into bed was just too much and knocked us out as well.. it's an amusing image, thinking of real people asleep in a room while watching a movie where the characters have also fallen asleep.

In other news, I had a fun dinner evening with my married friends L & M, involving much talk about music theory. They told me about Persichetti's symbols describing the gradient between consonance and dissonance for the different musical intervals. It reminds me of Hindemith's chord quality categories.

Consciousness Explained?

An old friend recommended a few things for me to check out:

• A book: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, by Antonio Damasio
• Another book: The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Representation and Mind), by Jose Luis Bermudez
• Sculpture: Kenneth Snelson

I still need to finish reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.

Where am I?

Here is a collection of my URLs, so I can keep track of myself:

• My home page: www.cs.indiana.edu/~epnichol
• My nonexistant alternate home page: aimusic.net
• My blog: ai-music.blogspot.com
• My research: seekwell.org
• My facebook: facebook.org
• My music: sibeliusmusic.com
• My throwaway page used in teaching: mypage.iu.edu/~epnichol

Surreal

I just got back from surreal movie night, where five of us + a dog watched The Hudsucker Proxy and Brazil, two very fine movies with excellent soundtracks.

More cool free web stuff:

• geourl.org lets you put a geographical stamp on your website and find people nearby.
• Everyone knows the Internet Movie Database, but it doesn't hurt to have a little reminder of how great it is.
• Test your typing speed!
• Get cool desktop widgets at konfabulator.com, such as todo lists and current weather displays. It's extremely cool.
• Free Sheet Music: mutopia

Cool Free Stuff

Today I tried out Google's free new image software, Picasa: it was love at first sight. Truly amazing.... highly recommended for organizing, editing, publishing, and viewing photos.

I also ordered a new cell phone, the Motorola V600, which cost -$75 on Amazon... better than free.