I’ve decided I’m going to start blogging here on a regular basis. I’ve been doing daily writing in my journal for nearly a month now, and I think I’m ready to start sharing a little writing again. Today’s post is a bit of a mish mash but I think it’s as good a place to start as any.
good habits / It has now become a habit to sit down on the couch with my coffee, read a little bit of a nearby book, and then when I open my MacBook the first thing I do is start Ulysses (my writing app). It opens to my journal and I begin writing. This is a habit I’m glad to have established. On my upcoming trip I’m going to have to try and do the same thing with the iPad (I’ll be leaving this laptop behind.)
Ravi Shankar / Another habit I’ve established is putting on some music the moment I can. This morning I am listening again to Ravi Shankar’s experiments from the 60s and 70s in blending classical Indian and classical European music, a 2-CD set from EMI that I have borrowed from the library. It’s fun and interesting stuff, but it mostly just makes me think of old Bollywood music, to be honest. (A genre I’m a fan of.) The one thing on this 2-CD set that really draws me intellectually is the single example of a classical raga. While listening to it somewhat attentively, I was thinking about how much it reminded me of a jazz track. Of course that’s not accidental, but the influence went in the other direction. It was the sitar music of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan that had an influence on John Coltrane (primarily) whose work was subsequently so influential as to change the entire character of jazz.
I wondered if I was drawn more to the classical raga just because of that underpinning influence. Coltrane was the first jazz artist I got completely obsessed with and couldn’t stop listening to, especially those long quartet improvisations on the Impulse! label that were recorded in the years before the album *Ascension* inaugurated a period of (relatively) more-chaotic, large-group, free improvisation. They usually had an arc like a classical raga, with a lower energy opening featuring a recognizable theme, gradually building into a frenzied climax. It was interesting though listening to the raga and noticing the implicit structure involved from minute to minute. No matter how intense the music got, it seemed completely clear to me when a new formal section began. From what little I understand, although ragas can sound completely improvised to the Western ear, each section in a raga is defined by very specific melodic and rhythmic figures or groupings, what in the west are called scales or cells, which belong to those formal sections and are only used at those times. Jazz of course is about self-expression and, in the music I’m comparing it to, collective expression, so the only formal boundaries are those of the “head” (the theme) and the “solos” where one player is featured, and the figures are only arrived at by the performers’ choices from moment to moment.
At any rate, this CD set has been interesting but I’m not going to listen to it again, I don’t think. I may well seek out more of Ravi Shankar’s classical Indian albums though.
math review / It has turned out that the geometry course on Wondrium is entirely inadequate to my interests, so I purchased the book *Geometry for Dummies* as an e-book after borrowing a copy from the library for a while. However, just this morning I learned about a platform called Brilliant.org, which looks promising, especially as I’m planning to pursue this math review all the way through calculus, which I expect will take a year or two at this point.
Python / Speaking of this area of my interests — I don’t know if I ever posted it here, but I did eventually code a working version of my text-file-to-midi-clip Python script. I’m not totally happy with the implementation, in that I dealt with outlying data points mostly with randomness, and given how many outlying points there were, it represents quite a bit more chance than I really want to involve, ultimately. (With so much chance I may as well skip the text file analysis.) But it was the simplest way to deal with the issue and just get it working, and I got some cool results from it. I’ve written long enough for now so I’ll go into my ideas for the next version in a future post.