36 hours in NYC

Cross post!

Public service article

I recently wrote an article for Pottery Making Illustrated on troubleshooting tone-production pitfalls in ocarinas, because any potter who has ever been stymied by a malfunctioning fipple deserves help. It's available online here. It's acoustically and musically serious, while simultaneously including lots of googly eyes.

The article had a word limit that I was already exceeding, so I left out my number one rule of ocarina making: 

Fipple ain't broke, don't fix it.

There you have it. Now go forth and make music.

ZYX

Long ago, after listening to a fellow grad student discuss this aspiration, I decided that like him, I should also learn to fluently recite the alphabet backwards. At the time, I gave it enough of a try to realize it was harder than I thought it would be, and then I forgot about it for the next 2.5 decades.

Gentle readers, I'm pleased to announce that I finally realized this goal this past Sunday on a roadtrip from Ocracoke to Durham. Am I a better person for it? Oh, probably.

Because I think everyone should want to be able to recite the alphabet backwards, I share my strategy below.

The effort began a week ago while I was out for a jog. I don't jog often, but when I do, I tend to think my most articulate, most brilliant thoughts, interspersed with long stretches of counting to 100 over and over and over again. I usually count in triple meter, so I can keep track of which set of 100 I'm on by noticing where the accents fall and paying attention to whether those numbers are divisible by three or have a remainder of 1 or 2. I can't explain why I do this, I just do.

I am consequently very experienced at counting while running. 

For backwards alphabetting, my grad school compatriot had recommended starting by reciting a number alongside each letter: 1A, 2B, 3C, 4D, 5E, etc. So I practiced that for a while. Then I switched things up and practiced A1, B2, C3, D4, E5, etc.

I discovered some handy mnemonics en route. Eight eight-ch (8H). Twen-tee tee. V is 22--because there are two branches in the letter. W is 23--because if you tip a W on its side, it looks like the numeral 3. X is 24--because it depicts four quadrants. G is 7 and Q is 17--because the European way of writing the number 7 has a horizontal crossbar across the diagonal line, and the serif on a capital G and the tail of the Q are kind of like crossbars.

Even though I count in threes when I jog, in the US we learn the alphabet in quadruple meter, so I counted letters in groups of four. I memorized the letters divisible by 4, so I had landmarks with which to recognize if I had gotten off track: D4, H8, L12, P16, T20, X24. 

Then I tried putting the accents on the downbeats of groups of four letters, and discovered something I had never noticed before about vowels: A1, E5, I9, M13, Q17, U21, Y25. You might be thinking "yo, M and Q are not vowels"--but I'll note that the only vowel missing from the list, O (15), is the average of M (13) and Q (17). Nifty.

Four days later, while roadtripping on Sunday, I worked on counting down from 26Z to 1A. Other than repeatedly getting the order VU wrong and occasionally forgetting to include G, this didn't take long to learn. And then it was time to drop the numbers.

I blame the Alphabet Song for making it so hard to recite the alphabet backwards: we learn the letters in the direction A to Z, reinforce that order with a melody, and there's no going back[wards]. So to combat Alphabet-Song indoctrination, the next step was obviously to set the backwards alphabet to music (click image to enlarge):

Naturally, I sang this a few dozen times, and the ending made me laugh a every time, which made the miles pass more quickly.

Then I wondered whether the tempo of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik might be too quick for those newer to backwards-alphabetting; perhaps a slower melody would be more helpful. It needed to be something familiar, a tune most USAmericans would know... and suddenly I thought of my friend Leslie, who found herself in Salzburg this summer on a bus full of Sound of Music fans who nostalgically burst into song. The choice of melody was immediately clear (click to enlarge):

I regret that I didn't start working on this when E was little, so he could have grown up singing ZYX, but maybe I'll cross paths with a bunch of musically thirsty toddlers someday.

Those of you who know more about rock music and Googling than I do probably know They Might Be Giants has already addressed this crucial issue. (Still, I think Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Edelweiss offer less mournful melodies.)

A little Trout on a little chickarina

A little Trout on a little chickarina. This reasonably well-tempered bird has 4 holes and spans a minor 7th (sol-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa, plus a few chromatic pitches, courtesy of physics).

Die Zauberkasu: An Opera in 3 Acts and 15 Minutes

My sister and I wrote an opera in 1983, when I was a first-year college student and she was in high school. We rounded up a cast and performed it at the high school's annual variety show in February 1984, and then we took it on tour to the public library and our old elementary school. The elementary school stage was in the gym. I used to have nightmares about swinging from the top of the giant rope that hung backstage; it took until I was taking college physics to realize that you can't swing from the top of a rope. I remember that before we performed at the elementary school, the cast of Die Zauberkasu asked me how big the elementary school stage was. "It's really big," I said, pointing halfway up my chest; "it's this high above the floor." When we arrived, we saw the stage didn't even come up to my knees. Apparently I had grown since 3rd grade.

As part of the snail's-pace Great Purge of 2018-2019, I decided it was time for my tape collection to move on--but what to do with The Magic Kazoo? The Kaesekaiser suggested I purchase a cassette-to-mp3 converter online.

Consequently, here, for your listening pleasure, gentle readers, is Die Zauberkasu: An Opera in 3 Acts and 15 Minutes. (Blogger doesn't allow mp3 uploads, so you have to click on the link if you want to hear it.) The libretto is below, for those who would like to sing along.

Die Zauberkasu: An Opera in 3 Acts and 15 Minutes
Libretto and music by Elizabeth Paley and Nina Paley (1983)

Original cast performance: "Big Show," 2/11/1984, University Laboratory High School, Urbana IL
Kaesekaiser: Peter McDowell
Heinrich: Andrew Reisner
Velveeta: Becky Davidson
Fondue: Richard WIlliams
Magic Fairy Elves: Lark Huang, Emily Osborn, Cynthia Chow
Ensemble: The 1984 cast of "Big Show"
Piano: Elizabeth Paley
Kazoos: Nina Paley, Sarah Baldwin
Percussion: Rick Burkhardt

[Optional: Explanatory Introduction as Orchestra Tunes]

Overture

Act I. The town of Macroni

1. Chorus: Lo Here Cometh the Kaesekaiser (Ensemble + Kaesekaiser)

Ensemble: 
Lo here cometh the Kaesekaiser, 
riding upon his royal Philly; 
he shall visit our town of Macroni 
and taste our Macronian cheese. 
[Ahh] O it would bring us nothing but bliss 
if he were to like our Swiss, 
but he may shoot it full of holes, 
oh he may shoot it full of holes.

Ensemble + Kaesekaiser: 
Lo here cometh the Kaesekaiser, 
riding upon his/my royal Philly; 
it will bring us great joy and pleasure 
to meet one as Gouda as he.

2. Chorus: Bow to the Kaesekaiser (Ensemble + Kaesekaiser) 

Kaesekaiser:
Bow to the Kaesekaiser, 
I am the Kaesekaiser, 
King of all the cheeses. 
I'm here to inspect the cheese, 
I'm here to look at Heinrich's cheese--
and other things of Heinrich's too. 
Especially the other things, 
the other things of Heinrich's too.

Ensemble + Kaesekaiser:
Bow to the Kaesekaiser, 
he is/I am the Kaesekaiser, 
King of all the cheeses. 
He's/I'm here to inspect the cheese, 
he's/I'm here to look at Heinrich's cheese--
and other things of Heinrich's too. 

3. Duet: O Velveeta/Fondue (Fondue + Velveeta)

Kaesekaiser:
Heinrich, shall we discuss the German cheese industry?

Heinrich:
Okay.

Fondue:
O Velveeta, I love you, 
I love you with all my heart. 
To me you're better than Port Salut, 
or Brie, or Cammembart.

Velveeta:
O Fonduuuuue, 
I love youuuuuu tooooo.

4. Melodrama (Heinrich, Velveeta, Kaesekaiser)

Heinrich:
Young man, my daughter is not to be cavorting around with the likes of you! Depart at once!

Velveeta:
[gasps]

Kaesekaiser:
Heinrich, shall I inspect your cheese?

Heinrich:
Okay. Here's some cheese.

Kaesekaiser:
Mmm, good.

Heinrich:
Here's some cheese.

Kaesekaiser:
Mmm, yummy.

Heinrich:
Here's some cheese.

Kaesekaiser:
That looks real tasty.

Heinrich:
Here's some cheese.

Kaesekaiser:
A little on the moldy side.

5. Recitative (Kaesekaiser + Heinrich)

Kaesekaiser:
O Heinrich! I'm willing to give your cheeses the highest of ratings--if you give me Velveeta's hand in marriage!

Heinrich:
Sure, why not? Okey fine. Alrighty. OK.

Act II. The woods outside of Macroni

1. Aria doloroso: Voe ist mich (Fondue) 

Fondue:
Voe ist mich. Mein Velveeta 
ist betrothen to the Kaesekaiser. 
Vas shall ich do? 
Ich don't know. Ich don't know. 
She ist the fairest in the land. 
How ich vish ich could vin her hand. 
How ich veep. Ich bin drowning in mein tears.
Ich bin drowning in mein tears.

2. Trio: This Is a Charmed Gold Kazoo (Magic Fairy Elves)

Magic Fairy Elves:
This is a charmed gold kazoo; 
it will bring good luck to you. 
Put your lips to it and play; 
the whole town will run away.

Act III. The town of Macroni

1. Aria: All the Town Is Happy and Joyous (Velveeta)

Velveeta:
All the town is happy and joyous, 
but I am without their glee, 
for my love is with young Fondue, 
and the Kaiser is betrothed to me. 
And my father hates my love Fondue, 
for he is better at his Kraft; 
yes, Fondue is better at his Kraft.

2. Melodrama: The handing-off

Heinrich: 
My congratulations on your happy and monetarily successful marriage! Bye bye, Velveeta! Seeya 'round!

3. Instrumental + Reprise: O Velveeta/Fondue (Fondue + Velveeta)

Fondue: [kazoo]

Velveeta (sung) + Fondue (kazoo):
O Fonduuuuuuuue! I love youuuuuuu!

3. Melodrama + Finale: O Joy! (Velveeta, Fondue, & Ensemble)

Velveeta:
Indeed! You've driven away the townspeople!

Fondue:
Golly Velveeta! Now we can get married!

Velveeta:
And we are left alone with the money and cheese shops of the townspeople!

Velveeta + Fondue:
O joy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy! 
We're joy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-ous! 
We're joyous, oh so joyous! 
We're joyous, oh so joyous! 
With a fa la la, fa la la la, fa la la la, fa la la la, fa la! 
We're joy-oy-oy-ous!

Ensemble:
We're joy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-ous! 

We're joy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-ous! 

We're joyous, oh so joyous! 

We're joyous, oh so joyous! 

With a fa la la, fa la la la, fa la la la, fa la la la, fa la! 

We're joy-oy-oy-ous!

Mexico Day 5: Franz Mayer Museum and Ballet Folklorico

On our last full day in Mexico, we walked to the Franz Mayer Museum.

Located in a former monastery and hospital, the museum houses a collection of decorative and utilitarian arts that Mayer, a German-Mexican financier, amassed over his life--furniture, silver, ceramics, etc. Many of the pieces come from Europe, although the majority originated in Mexico, with a European flair that suggests they were for wealthy colonials.

Jars, 18th c.

Adan Diaz, 1514-1519

The oddest item I saw was a delicate miniature ivory anatomical model of the female body from 18th-c. Nuremberg, Germany:

As an added bonus, the museum was hosting its seventh biennial exhibit of utilitarian ceramics. Some of my favorites are below.

"Noche de estrellas," Erika Rocio Martinez Iraundegui

"Medusa," Carlos Vizcaino Guitierrez 

"No somos iguales," Adrian Cruz Ramirez

"Tamul" and "Tulum," Ana Carolina Colin Garcia Guijosa

"Edoné Corset," EDM Fashion (Oscar Vazquez Alanis)

"Bules," La Chicharra and Justina Ricardez

"Ocho parades," Jose Luis Torres Flores

"Plato puzzole," Daniel Alejandro Cruz Vazquez

Works by the jurors were on display inside, including...

"Cactus," Javier Villegas. I'm wishing I had made note of the fish and shell shapes hanging on the wall; they look like they could be ocarinas.

"Las firmas del agua," Gloria Carrasco

"Experimentaciones a través del microscopio," Adriana Dias de Cossio 

(Glaze detail)

That evening, we went up the hill to Chapultepec Castle for an outdoor performance by Ballet Folklorico de Mexico. We hadn't realized it was going to be a Christmas show until we arrived to hear patience-straining syrupy pre-show Christmas music coming from the loudspeakers; but the show itself was beautifully and tastefully done, combining picture-perfect tableaux vivants with live music (choir and band), live animals, and energetic dancing. The show depicted the Annunciation through the Nativity to Epiphany; once the three kings arrived on horseback, bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, myrrh, the Christmas theme gave way to abundant gifts of folk dance from across Mexico.

La Virgin, straight out of a picture book. Notice the donkey and cow, followed by the choir and instrumentalists.

King #2

Viva Mexico!

Songs for children

When E was a baby, I made up lots of songs for him, and I notated the cream of the crop in Sibelius 2.0. I've moved on to Sibelius 7.0, and E has moved on to adolescence, but the world around us is still largely the same. Here's the end of one song that we still sing, followed by the beginning of a song I had forgotten entirely about. (If you feel a need to see "Murder, Mayhem, Chaos, Death, and Destruction Makes [sic] Baby Cry" or "Pistachios and Noodles Don't Go Together Well" in their entirety, let me know.)

New areas in hole appreciation

I'm working on a paper on different ways to tune ocarinas and needed a symbol to distinguish the total area of all open holes, A_t, from the area of a single open hole. While tempting, somehow A_hole didn't look quite right.

A Tale of Six Books

Am I busy finishing A Tale of Two Cities? No--but I interrupt my literary slackitude to bring you a tale of six books. Seven books, actually, but only six of them mine, and none of them fiction, thank goodness. This is one of those rare stories in which real life imitates a novel.

Here goes:

During the Great Purge, I made a lot of choices, obviously, about what to pull from the shelves. Some choices were easy, some were hard, and some took serious nudging and emotional support from friends. In the end, multiple boxes of books and CDs went to the nonprofit "Friends of the Public Library," from where they will hopefully find their way into hands and hearts that will enjoy them anew.

One particular set of books was too special for such purging while simultaneously too good to simply gather dust on my shelf: Sir Donald Francis Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis--cloth-bound hard-cover printings from the mid-1940s, in excellent condition, all six volumes. Tovey was a musical jack-of-all-trades--musicologist, pianist, composer, conductor, analyst, and editor. The Essays in Musical Analysis were collected from his insightful program notes for the Reid Orchestra at the University of Edinburgh. They're classics.

I had coveted these books when I was in grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1990s, but the copies I had seen in the local used books store was beyond my budget. I acquired my set when a fellow grad student bailed from the program; he sold me a ton of books, all of them highly desirable to music theory geeks, for a mere $200, including the Tovey set.

The books moved with me to my first teaching gig in Kansas, and then to my second gig at Duke in North Carolina. I followed my friend out of the discipline in 2003, and all of the other books eventually ended up in the hands of a later generation of grad students, but I kept the Tovey Essays through every baby-step purge. The Great Purge of 2014 was different: the books had to go, but were too special to just give away to strangers.

I offered to ship them to former classmates who had remained in academia. No one jumped at the offer; as one explained, "thanks Liz, but I don't need any more unread books on my shelf mocking me (as [our advisor] used to say)." Some voted for eBay, but I feared a buyer would split the set up. One friend agreed, urging "c'mon, Liz. Keep 'em. They're classics. Beautiful little time capsules (in more than one sense). Every time you sell a volume, a program annotator cries."

So I put the books aside on the roll-top desk in the living room. Two months later, I was cleaning off the desk (we clean in our house largely by moving piles of stuff from one location to another) and decided the time had finally come for them to move on.

I had heard about a relatively new used-books store downtown. I've never been there, because, as you know, either I dislike reading or I'm too busy slogging my way through A Tale of Two Cities to buy more books. Whatever. I went to the bookstore's website, saw that they were in a historic city-center building with pressed-tin ceilings, and thought that folks who appreciate old urban architecture and old books might understand the emotional investment I had in a Tovey set I had barely read but nonetheless still cherished; perhaps they would be interested in them.

I started drafting an angst-filled email inquiry and wanted to accurately describe the condition of the books. They were in excellent shape for 70-year-olds, but I recalled that they did have some markings inside the front covers. I opened one volume to confirm that, and saw the Ex Libris plate, dated 1948--itself an antique. All six books had the same plate and date. I didn't recognize the previous owner's name, but thought it might be of interest, so I googled it. The search engine returned a few links, with More Familiar Name often included. Additional googling followed, plus a closer inspection of the pencil scrawlings inside the covers, where I found More Familiar's name written in cursive.

More Familiar is a former colleague of mine at Duke.

The books had belonged to More Familiar's first wife, a scholar in the performance practice movement who died, too young, in 1974. She had been a teenager when she put her Ex Libris plates in the books. More Familiar had taught in Madison for a few years in the 1970s before coming to Duke.

I emailed More Familiar and asked if he'd like the books. He wrote back that he had consulted volume VII just the week before and was wishing he had kept the rest of the set. I hadn't even known there was a volume VII.

So there it ended: the Tovey collection that was too good to randomly give away, too good to split up, and too good to sit unread was happily reunited with More Familiar, 1000+ miles and 40 years after he and the books had parted ways.

The Great Purge

A friend named this photo "The Emperor's New Piano":

It's a beauty, no?

About a year and a half ago, my mom reached her limit. She and my dad had been nudging me since about 1998 to move the family piano from their house to mine. Between the two of them, my dad was the more persistent verbally. He died in early 2012, but he would be pleased to know my just-do-it decision-making mom finally achieved what he was never able to. To encourage the transition, she generously helped us get the piano refurbished.

Just before Thanksgiving last year, The Piano People (Urbana, IL) declared their work complete. Shipping was postponed until after the holidays, by which point The Piano People were having difficulty locating a moving company in Durham that could receive and deliver the instrument. This gave us time for the long-delayed Great Purge.

For better or for worse, I don't have a photograph of the study pre-Purge. What's deftly omitted from the post-Purge photo above are two bicycles and some large rolls of bubble pack. What you also don't see--because they are no longer in the room--are the futon we had since grad school, a desk, a printer cart, and a table. These had all been providing horizontal surfaces for Stuff, so moving the furniture out for the piano meant clearing shelf space for keeper Stuff, plus folding and putting away 75 cubic feet of laundry that we had been storing on the futon instead of in our dressers.

Clearing the bookshelves meant finally saying farewell to the academic detritus I hadn't been able to part with during the Lesser Purge of '11--the books I was still clinging to because they had offered glimmers of light in my previous incarnation as a depressed music theorist. Goodbye books: a Recovered Academic lives here now. Ten years out, and I'm healed.

Cookbooks, gardening books, travel books, textbooks, unused scores... The purging process was slowed by time spent imagining how much better and more interesting I would be if I dedicated myself to actually reading and studying all the books on the shelf.

I willingly parted with some gems, including a 25-year old German textbook that built a lesson, in Chapter 3, around the vocabulary words "der Kassetterecorder" and "funkelnagelneu":

Gisela: "Ist der Kassettenrecorder neu?" 
Susi: "Ja, er ist funkelnagelneu." 
Gisela: "Und hast du auch Kassetten?" 
Susi: "Ich habe fast 20 Kassette. Was hoerst du gern? Culture Club? Styx? Duran Duran?" 
Gisela: "Ich hoere nicht gern Rockmusik, sondern lieber Klassik. Hast du nichts von Beethoven oder Brahms?"

Gisela: "Is the tape recorder new?" 
Susi: "Yes, it is brand spankin' new." 
Gisela: "And do you have tapes too?" 
Susi: "I have almost 20 tapes. What do you like to listen to? Culture Club? Styx? Duran Duran?" 
Gisela: "I do not like to listen to rock music, rather classical. Do you not have any Beethoven or Brahms?"

Thankfully, I have a blog, so though the book has moved on, I can continue to revisit that dialog.

We also bid adieu to about 25% of our CD collection. Goodbye Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Messaien, and you other bitter Brussels sprouts of academe. I admit it: I never liked listening to you. (Well, OK, Wozzek has some freaky redeeming value, but I'll rent it on DVD if I ever miss it--which I'm sure I won't.) Other choices were a little harder. Goodbye, Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium and Matthäus-Passion; you were too long for your own good.

The futon moved across the street, the desk moved into a hall, the printer cart moved into the basement, and the table moved...into the middle of the living room...to hold boxes of purged Stuff. We'll get rid of them this week, I swear.

Links

It's been a busy month for Claymakers. First, there was this fabulous show in the gallery--"Steinzeugkrug: Present Day Interpretations" (a.k.a. Steinfest), a major step forward for Claymakers. And two short weeks before the federal gummint shut down, a [presumably subsequently furloughed] employee at the IRS popped Claymakers' 501(c)(3) designation letter into the mail. Woot woot!

There was also this music-related article in the local paper. I think the title is rather excellent, since it makes us sound either like a trio of superheros (can you imagine us with our capes fluttering behind us as we sit on the organ bench?) or a mafia family (THE SOPRANOS ORGANISTS).

There were also two firings of black'n'white zigzag pots, including some really excellent ones. Photos to follow soon...

The NC Maker Faire and the easiest fipple in the world

Today E, S, and I went to the NC Maker Faire--our first Maker Faire experience.

E's highpoint was learning to solder:

He made his very own blinky Make LED robot pin:

When he came home, he added a piece of paper to the back to interrupt the circuit; otherwise the LEDs would blink until the battery ran out.

S's highpoint was seeing the robotic bugs by the folks at www.sheekgeek.com, although I suspect he also enjoyed showing off his biking finesse by zipping his way through SPARKcon's stationary bike race. S handily won the first race; E came from behind to win the second.

My highpoint was learning how to make the least fickle fipple in the world from wood artist Hal Papan. I was drawn to his table of wood whistles when I looked up to see a hands-on wood-whistle-finishing demo in progress. Hal kindly talked to me about fipples and let me finish a whistle too. He had prepared a bunch of nearly-finished whistles, having already carved the bores and cut the bevels and fipple plugs; my task was simply to orient the plug properly and insert it far enough into the bore that it lined up with the vertex of the bevel cut. He had to help me force the plug in far enough, since it was a tight fit, but the nudge-check-nudge-check process was helpful since I could easily hear the difference between the not-quite-there-yet sound and the loud tweet of the aligned plug. It's a very pretty whistle, with lovely knots and curves.

Of course, when I got home, I tried making one out of clay. It was quick work to roll a coil, push a dowel in, and make a plug for the open end. I was too impatient to wait for the tube to stiffen up, so I went ahead and used a wire cheese slicer to cut the bevel. A little bevel tidying and voila--a sounding whistle, with a remarkably straightforward fipple.

My first attempt was a little too big to put my lips around (which I was doing with a conflicted mixture of enthusiasm for the sound and worry that my bag of clay scraps had been growing bacteria for three months on my porch and I really shouldn't be putting the clay anywhere near my mouth), so I smushed the first iteration and tried again with half as much clay--and voila again

The result is a plain can-I-do-it experiment (yes! I can!), but there's clearly room for further experimenting to discover what kind of sound(s) I can get out of these sorts of whistles, to learn how they can be visually beautified (Joe is back at Penland making far more beautiful ones), and to find out whether there's any chicken potential. Tweet tweet.

A Claycophony of Instruments

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye--
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages--
Thanne longen bloggers their blogges to update.

I'm thinking of Chaucer because yesterday, I was on a jog with my friend C, and something she said made me think of The Squire's Tale, in which the narrator claims he will not speak of something and then goes on for a while speaking of it. C said there's a name for that rhetorical flourish, and I've tracked it down on Wikipedia: Apophasis (more specifically, Paralipsis and Proslepsis).

Says the Squire:

This Cambinskan, of whom I have you told,
High in the palace, mounted on his throne
With crown and royal vestments sat alone,
And held his feast, so splendid and so rich
That in this world its like was not, of which,
If I should tell you all of the array,
Then would it occupy a summer's day.
Besides, it needs not here that I apprise
Of every course the order of service.
I will not tell you of their each strange sauce,
Nor of their swans, nor of their heronshaws.
Moreover, in that land, as tell knights old,
There are some foods which they for dainties hold.
Of which in this land the esteem is small;
There is no man that can report them all.
I will not so delay you, for it's prime,
And all the fruit of this were loss of time...

At the point in my education when I read The Canterbury Tales, it seemed that the narrator went on for pages and pages like this. As an adult, I see he didn't (maybe there are longer examples elsewhere in the text), but my memory of him inspires my blog today.

Thus, I will not tell you of the past year of running with C, training first for a 10K and now for a 10 mile race; of the weekly interwebs running assignments she signed up for and from which I mooched; nor will I tell you of our increasing endurance, nor how 5K, once strenuous, now feels brief.

Moreover, I will not so delay you by reporting on my renewed love affair with Robert Schumann, of my exploration of his Six Canonical Etudes (with which I was previously acquainted through Debussy's arrangement for two pianos), nor of their beauty on the organ, nor of my continued good but largely unrealized intentions to record and here upload my organ demos at Duke Chapel, so that I might learn from the listening thereof. Moreover, I will not mention the comment left by a YouTube listener regarding someone else's too-fast but otherwise accomplished performance of Bach's "Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist," BWV 671 (a piece about which I erstwhile wrote)--no, I will not mention the five words that cut to the quick, dissuading me from ever being so bold as to post anything but cute cat videos on YouTube; nay, I will not here type the patronizing punch: "This is a laudable start."

Instead, I will get to my primary point of the day (about which I will actually say little; there's probably a rhetorical term for that too): musical instruments made out of clay. I've blogged before about making clay flutes and, of course, chickarinas. Thanks to a request by a student at Claymakers, this past session I taught a class entirely devoted to making clay instruments ("Bells and Whistles: A Claycophony of Instruments"). We made ocarinas, flutes, penny whistles, rain sticks, drums, horns, vuvuzelas, and tooters, with some bells and bowls on the side (not surprisingly, pretty much anything you whap will produce a tone).

Barry Hall's fabulous book From Mud to Music served as our inspiration. Barry Hall's even more fabulous CD Terra Cotta made me and E drop everything one evening after dinner and rush out to Home Depot to buy PVC parts for a didgeridoo. The student who requested the instruments class ended up building an impressive didgeridoo-horn hybrid that is way cooler than PVC tubing can ever be.

This was a great class to teach, since it involved problem solving and engineering, music theory and physics, and rawhide (sorry cows) and roofing nails and holes and a willingness to make noise on the way to making music. (Did you notice all the conjunctions in that last sentence? The rhetorical term for that is Polysyndeton.)

Naturally, we ended the class with a potluck and jam session. Alas, I did not have time to bake jam bars, but one student did bring caramel Bugles.

Note: video has been edited to protect the embarrassed; you know who you are. Also, S insists the flute lick is "House of the Rising Sun," but that would mean I actually absorbed something other than classical music during my early youth, which is unlikely.

Summer recap continued: Bridges 2012

Way back in July, my pottery-, parenthood-, and standing-in-line-friend Dr. J (Duke PhD in Mathematics, 2009) and I traveled to Towson University to attend the Bridges Conference. According to the Bridges website, the conference is the largest mathematics and art interdisciplinary conference in the world, so you can see why J was the perfect travel companion.

I had some ceramic pieces in both the conference exhibit and an associated month-long exhibit in the Towson University art gallery. I knew I was in clay-geek heaven when, as I unpacked my nested spheroids for display, a mathematartist came over for a peek and, hearing the pieces were handmade, said, "you mean you didn't make those with a 3D printer? What did you say those are made of??" Yep, I make my nested spheroids the old fashioned way: by hand, from clay, on a potter's wheel, just as generations of my ancestors would have done before me, had they had the opportunity, the years of training, and the sense that it was actually necessary.

"You mean you didn't make those with a 3D printer?"--Renowned Mathematartist at Bridges 2012

J and I attended numerous talks, browsed assorted displays of math-related art, books, and toys, perused the art exhibits, explored small downtown Towson, conversed with enthusiastic math-art folk, went on an "Excursion Day" tour of Baltimore, and overall had a swell time.

There's a nice video summary of the art exhibits here: http://bridgesmathart.org/past-conferences/bridges-2012/2012-art-exhibition/ . (If you want proof that J and I were really there, pay attention at 1:09.)

With multiple concurrent sessions, it was impossible to get to all of the talks. Of the ones I attended, those that stood out enhanced my understanding of both math and art. These included a sort of six-degrees-of-separation networks talk by Brian Evans; a talk by Greg Frederickson on polygon dissections, with beautiful animated videos illustrating not only that any polygon, properly dissected, can be reassembled into another polygon of equal area (think of Tanagrams), but also highlighting the different ways to transform the pieces (reflections, rotations, etc.); a delightful lecture-demonstration by mathematician and former professional clown Mike Naylor on using math to predict, describe, and invent juggling patterns; and an amusingly touchy-feely group workshop, led by Luke Wolcott, on imagining negative-dimensional space (-1D, -2D, etc.) that had us dancing in circles by the end.

One of my conference highlights was meeting the inventor of Space Chips, Dick Esterle. He had a large-scale collaborative Space-Chips vision that he wanted to realize at the conference, so he brought a few thousand bright orange 5-slit chips with him to make it happen. (There were, in fact, multiple artists with large-scale visions for collaborative art in assorted different media. It would not be inaccurate--litotes!--to say there was a competitive undercurrent between folks who wanted their visions realized. Largest, tallest, mostest, firstest, pointiest, originalest, elaboratest-Greek-prefix-before-"hedron," etc.) The Space Chips project started a few days into the conference; J and I wandered into the construction extravaganza around 4pm, when we couldn't handle attending yet another talk. Little did we know we'd get sucked in for eight straight hours. We tried to escape for dinner, but our ringleader looked so disappointed, we ended up turning back and suggesting we order out for pizza instead. A major downpour deterred our second attempt to escape at 11pm, so we stuck it out until the last component was put in place, and the vision--a giant orange Space Chips megalohedron--was realized. It turns out that this was a vision that kept on giving: if you spend 8 hours assembling 3,200 bright orange Space Chips into a giant ball, what you dream about all night long is bright orange space chips.

Below are two other projects that required group efforts to realize. J and I learned how to fold and assemble the playing-cards mock-up in the foreground of the photo below, but bailed before visionary George Hart moved the party on to the larger cardboard creation.

Late Thursday night, while we were inside working on the orange megalohedron, another group was tempting fate outside by building this tall pointy thing in a brewing thunderstorm. Sorry, I remember the names of neither the visionary nor the components.

No conference talks were scheduled on Friday because it was Excursion Day. J and I and 148 or so other conference attendees headed to Baltimore. The first stop was the Walters Museum of Art, where we were treated to a fascinating lecture by Will Noel on the Archimedes Palimpsest. In the 13th century, a monk harvested the parchment out of Archimedes' Codex C (presumed to have been copied from original scrolls in the 10th c.) and a bunch of other outdated books to create a new prayer book; the pages of the codex were cut up and refolded, mixed up with pieces of parchment from other books, the original texts wiped off, and new text written on the primed pages. Noel and the Walters Museum led a 12-year multinational project that, using assorted imaging techniques, deciphered the original texts. You can find assorted videos on YouTube on the palimpsest-decoding project, including Noel's TED talk. After the talk, we had some time to peruse the museum.

We saw Gilbert Stuart's iconic 1825 rendering of George Washington, plus lots of other stuff I didn't take photos of.

Our next stop was the Baltimore Museum of Art. J and I were feeling a little art-museumed out, so we skipped out of the guided tours and had lunch a few blocks away. To get back, we had to cross over to the far side.

The Baltimore Museum of Art is a good place for thinkers.

From there, it was on to Fort McHenry. During the War of 1812, on September 13, 1814 (1812 was a long year), the British fleet bombarded the fort. An American lawyer was on one of the British ships, negotiating a prisoner exchange when the Battle of Baltimore started; when he saw, through the dawn's early light, that a star-spangled banner yet waved o'er the fort (are you getting patriotic goosebumps yet? The Visitors Center video was very good at inducing patriotic goosebumps), he penned a four-stanza poem entitled "Defense of Fort McHenry." His brother-in-law set the words to a popular tune ("The Anacreontic Song") that is so hard to sing, we can be grateful our national anthem only uses the first verse of Frances Scott Key's poem. (Personally, I think we'd be better off both in music and sentiment with "America the Beautiful," but oh well.) Incidentally, Key spent much of his later legal career prosecuting anti-slavery activists for supposed rabble rousing, which puts an interesting spin on the line "the land of the free."

J and I ditched the group tour at the Visitors Center and went off to explore the fort on our own. There, I learned that when the flag was raised daily over Fort McHenry, it was often to the tune Yankee Doodle. Of course I immediately set to learning to finger the tune on the handy chicklet ocarina I was wearing around my neck. During the rest of the conference, this new-found facility served to entertain primarily me, but also the occasional inquiring mathematician.

After visiting Fort McHenry, everyone piled wearily back into the buses, and we headed to Baltimore's Inner Harbor, where we were sent off to entertain ourselves until the evening. As it was a hot, hot day, J took a carefree barefoot gallivant through a fountain (too swift to completely capture on camera).

We spent the rest of the afternoon at the invitingly cool, soothing National Aquarium. No pix, as the lights were dim and the fish were fast.

The conference continued until Sunday evening, but alas, work beckoned, so J and I left on Saturday afternoon. Consequently--can you believe this?--my chicklet and I missed the Bridges 2012 Informal Music Night! Dang! I'll have to plan better next time. And there will be a next time, if not in one year, then in 2, or 3, or 5, or 8, or 13, or...

Update 9/28: J reminded me via a comment about Henry Segerman's talk on 3D-printed representations of regular 4D polytopes, the analogues of the 3-dimensional regular polyhedra; which reminded me that I also failed to mention Carlo Sequin's talk on Klein Knottles; which sent me perusing the gallery again, reminding me of Bjarne Jespersen's amazing wood knots (he's written a book showing how he makes them) as well as David Chappell's mesmerizing prints (which showed, in a gallery full of vibrant colors and multi-dimensional representations, how immensely satisfying grey 2D can be).

Wrong vs. right

Fused chicklet-kabobs: WRONG. Wearing safety goggles when you futilely attempt to dremel kabobs apart: RIGHT. Thinking even your wife's ruined work is too good for the landfill: CHARMING.
 

Avoiding kabob membership in the first place: RIGHT.