For a long time I have struggled to understand the relationship between harmony and melody.  I’ve rarely heard it explained well.

I play a single-note-at-a-time instrument.    When I play a solo, the other musicians play a-chord-at-a-time instruments.   (These chordal musicians can,of course, play a single note at a time, but I cannot do the reverse.

These chord changes define the form of the tune.   So does the melody, but it seems a lot easier get off-base with the melody than with the chords.

Pianists amaze me because they are capable of playing chords and tunes simultaneously.

Drummers also tightly follow the form of the song with neither chords nor melodies. But melodies contain rhythms.

Putting it the other way around:  There’s a phrase that melody trumps harmony, that he melody is the song.   The melody defines what chord changes are plausible, will work together effectively.   The melody defines the harmonic alternatives.

So melody, rhythm, and harmony are interlocking circles.

In soloing, a note-a-time instrument plays a melody, is guided by the melody of the song, melody that defines the harmony the other instruments are playing.   As a guidepost, the “chart” a musician uses shows the melody and the chord that parallels that melody.   But the note-a-time player is not attempting to play a harmony.   The chordal instruments are already doing that.

What does it mean to me that a chord is one thing and not another?   I’m not talking about literally knowing what the chord symbol means, but how a musician uses this information in creating an improvised solo.    It’s one thing to know that, okay, this is a minor third and this is a ii-V7 progression and this chord has a 9^th in it.   But how do I use this information in real time, as I’m playing?

Yet the largest challenge is that what has to emerge from this miasma is a sequence of notes that is melodic, that is musical.

A nearly pandemic condition in 2013.   Certainly everyone I know has it, one way or another, young or old.

Reflections Blog

Why is it vastly easier, today, to conjure up visions of The Apocalypse than to imagine anything like utopia?  Why is it so difficult to even imagine a gradual improvement in the overall status of human kind, while it so easy to picture version after version of our demise?

We have invented so many ways to destroy ourselves as a species.   We may yet do ourselves in.

But in the meantime we seem to be plunging so deep into destroying the human world as we know it.

I have always prided myself on my “hope,” my ability to perceive a bright path in dark events, like the assassination of Chilean socialist president, Salvador Allende.  I have prided myself on holding onto a socialist vision:  a vision of a world in which resources are shared more equally and fairly among the earth’s inhabitants.  In which all work toward the common good.

That vision seems so far away now that I cannot deny my despair.

Oh, I know that there are many individual voices of peace:  People who have turned inward enough to know what’s there and who try, in their own ways, to encourage others on a similar path.   But I cannot honestly imagine this peace spreading far and wide enough to save us from those who control weapons, from the street bombers to the heads of nations.

Scary times.   Has it always felt this way for humanity?  Have we always been closer to the eve of destruction than a dawn of better times?

Perhaps we have.  I guess that’s some solace.

After about thirty years of playing the flute, my teacher (normally for the sax, but he’s an excellent flute player also) told me to change the way I shape my mouth to play.  He put it rather bluntly:  “Lose the joker’s smile!”

I saw what he meant when I looked in the mirror:  Sure enough, the muscles in my face contracted into an eerie “smile” when I played the flute.

The solution was both simple and daunting:  Relax the smile muscles.    Of course the initial effect was that nothing but wind came out, because it’s not just a matter of relaxing those muscles but of using a whole combination of re-shaping my embouchure (the shape of the mouth when you play an instrument) to make the sounds.  My mouth still twitches trying to go back to its old ways, but it’s coming along…

I began to realize, though, that the concept of relaxing to attain something applies more generally.  I do community theater and it’s clear, watching both others and myself, that any form of forcing an expression on one’s face or even in how one holds one’s body, amounts to “mugging” or, to use a crossword puzzle familiar word, “emoting.”

Maybe it applies even more broadly:  The zen of  “letting go.”   Not the easiest thing to do when your instinctual reaction is to tense up, to hold on.   Not easy to go easy, to let go.

More on the amateur creative process

So the thing about Lady Bugs is that it seems wrong to do them harm.   They are the innocent bugs of summers as a kid that didn’t leave nasty bites or threaten painful stings.   They’ve looked so cute your whole life.  And here they are taking over the place and you have to do something about it.    A difficult moment.

Earlier Lady Bug Post 

I fervently believe that I don’t have a clue of what lies beyond life.  My best guess is nothing.   When life’s over, it’s over.   Sure seems to be tied up to our physical bodies.   When your body goes, does something persist?   Possible, I suppose, anything’s possible, but just doesn’t seem very plausible to me.   And as soon as it gets tied to any particular version of what’s supposed to lie after life, well, they can’t all be right!

I saw a TV show once where a priest and a rabbi were talking about how much they had in common and how they really believed more the same thing about God and so on than those awful “secular humanists,”  who, they implied should burn in Hell, except that Judaism doesn’t have a concept of Hell.   Pagans, Greeks, yeh, Hell works for them;  Judaism, not so much.   It’s absurd to the point of ridiculousness to suggest that a Catholic’s version of the afterlife is pretty much the same as, say, a Hindu.   Every vision is different.   Even multiple stories within a single religion conflict, conjure up different image of life beyond life.

Then throw in a few wild cards like vampires and witches and brain-eating aliens from the planet Zircon and you begin to have a whole universe of possibilities no single one of which really seems likely to be the correct answer, since, bottom line, we just do not know, end of story.

So, like I say, I know my brain will die with my body, so I figure, the most likely thing is, that’s it.

To me that has a consequence:  Make every moment of life matter.  ‘course then I have another voice that just says, “Would you just chill out.”   No one pays any attention to what you say anyway, you’re just an old man mumbling in the corner.

Maybe so.

Another essay on this topic.

As person who taught psychology most of my adult life,  I must say that novelists and playwrights have an accuracy about human nature far beyond what psychology appears to become, “the science of the brain.”   We laugh when we think of people who, a century or so ago, thought you could understand people by analyzing the shape of their heads.    Doesn’t psychology realize that reducing human beings to variables is unhealthy.

Even the least acclaimed struggling author has to strive to capture some fraction of what it means to be a human being.   To be even remotely convincing, you have to understand who people are and how they interact.

What happened to psychology?   When I studied psychology, oh many decades ago, it still liked to think of itself as a “new science.”    What are we fifty years later? I dare anyone to compare a textbook from 1963 to one in 2013.   A few eye-opening “discoveries,” I suppose, but nearly all the identical information.   Except that all the thinkers of the mid-twentieth century are now purely historical footnotes.

What is new?  What is relevant?  Brain chemistry.   CT Scans of the brain.    I had someone tell me yesterday that they can see your dreams by measuring your brainwaves.

Right, I remember that science fiction story.   As a kid, I was promised space cars and domed cities and machines that could read your dreams.   Pictures of brains in vibrant colors?   That’s dull stuff.

I told my friend that I was going to be impressed until they could do that thing where you’re inside my brain.   Kind of like Being John Malkovich meets The Matrix.   Then they’ll have gotten somewhere!

Meanwhile, what do all the pretty pictures of your brain tell us about ourselves?   Do they tell why we live the lives we lead?  Neither the sorrow nor the pity can be captured by computerized maps and images.

But read any decent novel or watch a good play and there will be truth about human nature you won’t see a computer screen or read on a print out, or  a psychology textbook.

Add water and leave on the kitchen counter overnight,

He wrote down the time he took his medication: 2:57 PM.    He did not write down the date.   As long as he knew what day of the week it was, he was pretty much set.    When he was murdered, the Post-It note with 2:57 was the only clue that was important to the detective, though there were, of course, many other things that might be clues: a family picture, a key, a bracelet, an appointment book.  Irrelevant, actually, once the mystery is unraveled.

But what did the note mean?   The reader knows it was his medication. But the detective does not know this.   The detective only knows that it is important.

The  reader might think that it was the medication he took at 2:57 PM what killed him.    It was not.

But the detective doesn’t even know yet that the note is related to when he took his medicine.

Suppose this:  Suppose the victim was a very orderly man, particularly with respect to time.   Suppose he did things in particular time sequences.    So if he took his Advil at 9 am, he took it again regularly 4 hours later at 1:00.   So perhaps the clue will tell us something that happened much earlier than 2:57PM.   Maybe even the day before.    Perhaps he was regular in his sleeping habits, rarely varying more than a half hour one way or the other for weeks at a a time.    So perhaps something happened that kept him up later than usual the night before so that his sequence of Advil was put off by two hours.   Or perhaps he had an unexpected phone call that last nearly two hours

Who is he, this man who’s been murdered?   And how did this person, this man or woman who’s committed the crime, reach the extreme in nature of taking another person’s life?

(I hate one’s where the reason isn’t really a motive, just a lust to kill.  It’s just too creepy .  I’m squeamish:   I screamed aloud in the theatre when that gooky creature burst out of the guy’s stomach in Aliens.   So no “serial killers.”   Too cheap an explanation anyway.   Just a variation on “a madman did it.”    Same with sex crimes.  Too sick to enjoy.   And meanwhile, while the detective’s figuring it out, people are being fucked up in the most horrendous, wretched ways.    And like I say, ultimately there isn’t a “motive” as much as there are just some people who are completely fucked up.  True, too true, but not a “motive” for a murder.)

But back to our story: the detective has to find out what the time means.

Who is he, our detective?   (Do we really care?  Pruriently, perhaps, like why we read the celebrity magazines on line at the grocery store, but that’s about the level of our interest.   Oops, the cashier’s getting ahead of us scanning the items, time to move on.)   So forget the tec’s private life.   He goes home, he sleeps when he can.  That’s it.   Is he fat is he slim?   Is he tall or short, sexy or flat, sloppy or neat?   Tux and martini or over-worn slacks and a beer?

What he is is a detective:  He is determined, above all else, to get to the bottom of the case, to solve the case, to bring the perpetrator to justice.  That’s more than his job, it’s his identity.  (How many plots have you seen where the detective is put on suspension, his badge or private investigator license taken, and yet he soldiers on?)  Cliché or not, he has no choice.  That’s what makes him our detective:  He must solve the crime, no matter what the cost.

And all he has to go on is the scribbled time on a post-it note: 2:57 .

So he goes out and talks to anyone who knew, had contact with, or was related to the murdered man.  Each interview leads him to another interview.   Sometimes he has to circle back to someone he spoke to before.  The victim’s widow?   His girl-friend or boy-friend?  His wife or her lover?  Our detective is caught in a web that has more lies than truths, since everyone also has something to hide, including our detective.

As usual:  Everyone had a reason to kill the victim, but really no one has a reason to kill him.  Are they crazy?  Nasty?  Seductive?  Innocent?  Helpful?   Possibly.  All are suspect.

So our detective stops:    Perhaps if he only knew one thing, one fact that he could make sense of, one fact that included the note on the post-it: 2:57 PM, he could make sense of it all, unravel the mystery.

But will we understand  the motive only after we’ve solved the murder or do we need to understand the motive in order to make sense of the clues?

The victim wrote 2:57 on a Post-It note just before he died.   (The coroner says he died a 4:15.)

The victim is a large (or perhaps a small or medium-sized) man.   Perhaps he is not a man at all.   No, we called him “he” at the beginning.  He is a man, though it does not matter.     We have supposed that he is a very regular man, that is, a person who does everything in carefully ordered and repeated sequences.   Let us suppose:  He is a regular man.

And our detective has determined, by interviewing a series of people (A typesetter?  A botanist?  A parolee?) that either some people have lied about when they saw him get up and get his newspaper or that he altered his schedule for some reason prior to 2:57 PM.

Our detective now plunges us into the web of truths, white lies, omissions, misremembered facts, and the cold-blooded lies of the murderer, as each tells their story and variations.   What happens?  It turns out that the sister’s mother is not the person who raised her, but it doesn’t really matter.   It turns out that the uncle who pleaded insanity, is, in fact, insane.   And quite harmless.   It turns out that the banknotes were forged, or not forged but slipped into the country illegally, or maybe the banknotes have nothing to do with the story.  It turns out that one of the small mirrors in the dining room as been tampered with to allow someone to see what happened in a certain room at a given time, but what they saw was not what they thought they saw.

The detective uncovers all this.   Does he do it by impersonating insurance salesmen or telephone company repairmen?  Does he throw his weight around, act tough with cops?  Is he a private eye or a public servant?   Does he sneak into places where he could be killed, or fired, or sent to prison if he got discovered?

Eventually the detective solves the mystery.   The time on the note leads to the uncovering of a lie that leads to the discovery of the killer and the reason for the murder.

What was the motive? Was the victim murdered for money?  Do people commit flesh and blood murder for money alone?   A robbery gone wrong, perhaps?  No, not good enough.

Jealousy?   Perhaps.   Fear of exposure of his fraudulent existence?  That too.  Lust, sure.

But it is always desperation that causes the crime.

The killer wants, but can’t have.  He wants out, but can’t escape.  It’s over:  There’s no where to turn.  Past a line of no return.  What’s already happened was the end for him, the bitter end, but he lives on. Only dark hatreds drive him forward.   He kills.   He covers his tracks.  Carefully.

But he did not know that his victim arose a bit late that morning or that his day was interrupted so that he took his Advil two hours later than usual.  Our detective knows what delayed him.  We knew why at one time, but we’ve forgotten.  It doesn’t really matter.   It wouldn’t have saved his life if he took his Advil some other time that day.  But it enabled our our detective to put the pieces together.   Was the motive that the killer was about to lose his wealth andreputation and have to endure his wife running off with his brother-in-law’s wife?   Perhaps.

We’ll never really be sure.   How can it end this way?

Because it does.

I spent the day killing ladybugs.   An exaggeration, of course, but where on earth do these bugs come from, for god’s sake???  They’re way too big to fit through the screen.  (Unlike no-see-um’s, that made mincemeat of me one of my first summers living in Vermont.)   So how do they suddenly appear in droves?

I’m sure I could look it up and figure out (maybe ladybugs fly up through vents?  do they lay eggs?  immaculate conception?)  , but I got stuff to do, so I guess it’ll have to remain one of those mysteries of life to me.

I think it’s almost certain that insects will inherit the earth.   Probably along with fungi.

An atheist says that, for example, there is nothing after death.  Nothing persists.   Certainly nothing like a soul.   When your body goes, you go, what’s done is done.

OK.   But does the atheist have doubt just as any believer in anything has doubt?   And the answer is “Yes, of course there’s doubt.”

So isn’t that exactly the same as the agnostic?

And doesn’t the deepest believer also doubt?   (Geeze, we even have Broadway plays on da subject!)

So aren’t we all agnostic?   Don’t we all have doubt?

Agnostic or atheist?

There’s a mantra that an agnostic is simply an atheist too cowardly to admit it.

An agnostic says:  I cannot know if there is a God.   The question is beyond my human mind to truly answer.   It is like “life after death.”   We are alive; therefore we don’t know what it means to be dead.

We can guess. We do wonder.

The atheist says:  There’s nothing to wonder about.  There is nothing Higher.  What you see is what you get.    Life and life only.

And that’s true, too.  We can dream whatever we want about what may lie beyond our human ken, but it lies beyond it, so we can only imagine, hope or fear.  We may say we even say we believe, but what does this imply?  It implies doubt.   So we all know that at the end of days, or our own days, certainly, any we believe but do not know may or not prove true.   Even a lot of what we think we know might prove to false.

And beyond that, is any particular version of Higher anything exists true while all other versions are false?   I can barely imagine a person being unaware that billions of people believe other things from oneself and with equal intensely.

So doesn’t make us all agnostics, all doubters? That we are utterly incapable of answering the fundamental questions of life and death?

Don’t even atheists have doubts?

practicing the flute can be a form of meditation.

It’s late enough in winter, here, in Vermont, that everyone’s mind turns to spring, as if it were around the corner, which we all know it isn’t.  But a winter thaw is definitely in motion.  I have a house up from a river and I’m hearing grinding noises that sound like trucks dropping fifty-foot lengths of girding, when it’s the river ice breaking up.   Icicles and chunks of ice and snow, slide down one roof and crash into the roof below.  Crows caw, seeming to express their displeasure at this or that, though I suspect that’s not what they’re talking about.

But maybe this is the turning point.   Maybe, even if we get cold winds and big snowfalls, they’ll feel like aberrations in the flow toward more warmth and light.   I hear tweets among the caws I haven’t heard for many months.