harp music, and random bits
Jun. 22nd, 2004 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioLast night I adapted a piece of music for (folk) harp for the first time. Mind, I don't play harp -- but I've been around those who have enough to have some basic clues, so when a friend asked me if I could render a four-part a-capella piece for harp and singer for her wedding, I agreed to give it a shot. It was an interesting exercise; harp is kind of like piano in terms of how you think about the hands, but has the twist of also having to plan for when to flip the sharping levers for accidentals. (Doing so requires that you take one hand off the strings, so right after a long note is a good time to do this.)
After I completed my first draft I talked with the harpist. She says she doesn't have sharping levers. Oops; how did I miss that? So I'll see if I can arrange around them. At which point we move from "music that is a subset of the original" to "music that is slightly different from the original". Fortunately, it's rennaissance music and I know how not to do anything egregious there. Still, it's a fun challenge.
One of my cats (Baldur) has taken to meowing
persistently in the early mornings (around 6am),
almost every day, for minutes at a time. He's
11 years old and this is a recent change (last
couple months). I have been unable to correlate
it with anything else going on in the house.
His last physical was in January and he was fine,
and he doesn't do this at other times. Do the
kitty psychologists in my reading audience have
any theories?
Today my shell-account provider had a scheduled OS upgrade. When they came back online, SSH was behaving oddly for me. It told me the host key had changed (not surprising), and I chose the "accept for this session only" option. (Hey, I'm paranoid -- even though I know that should be ok, I want to see the right things happen before making the permanent change.) At that point SSH bounced me on a permission error (I never got to the password) -- repeatedly. On a whim, I said to just accept the key -- and everything was fine. What the heck? Now that I think about it, though, I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to me a few years ago -- so maybe if I write it down this time I'll actually remember next time.
Asian restaurants tend toward the "spiciness on a scale of 1 to 10" meme. Of course, one restaurant's "7" might not resemble another one's "7" -- or even its own on a different day. But there's a bigger issue: is this supposed to depend on the dish you order? What does it mean to order Moo Goo Gai Pan to a spiciness of 9, or Kung Pao Chicken to a spiciness of 1? If you do that, does the cook just shrug and make the dish normally, or what? (Mind, I have little personal experience with numbers in the bottom two-thirds of the scale...) This thought brought to you by the data-collection effort going on at my place of employment to attempt to determine the pattern, if any, of spice levels at the nearby Thai restaurant.
I enjoyed this entry on the dynamics of ladies' nights at bars.
Why can't people who use auto-reply systems when they're on vacation learn to configure them to not send such messages to posters on mailing lists? Sheesh. For mail that was sent directly to you, go wild -- but if I post to a mailing list with several hundred subscribers, I really don't need to be told about the ten specific subscribers who are on vacation this week.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-23 06:20 am (UTC)Asian restaurants tend toward the "spiciness on a scale of 1 to 10" meme
I've found the same restaurant varies slightly too. But I hadn't considered what it means if a dish is meant to be spicy in the first place. Maybe they should go to a scale of -5 to +5 instead? (with zero being the typical level of spice)
I had this image of an elderly Asian gentleman in the kitchen at places like that, carefully weighing out the spices on a balance for each dish, consulting a worn book that was written hundered of years ago and passed down the family for special recipies.
Then at the Schezuan House on Murray Ave this past Sunday, I saw the cook come out of the kitchen to ask a customer about a big take-out order. He was a Caucasian in his early 20's, might have been a college student. Blew my image completely. But hey, it's Pittsbugh (not Chinatown New York), and Beef Orange can't be that hard to make, should have known better.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-23 08:39 am (UTC)Sure, once I debug it a bit. (Or do you have levers and thus don't care about that problem?) It's "O ochi manza mia", which is in four parts. In this case there'll be a soprano singing it, so I'm putting the other three lines on the harp. (The harpist I'm doing this for is Roana.) It wouldn't be hard to give you a version that also integrates the soprano line.
Maybe they should go to a scale of -5 to +5 instead? (with zero being the typical level of spice)
I like that! And every geek will instantly understand, while most non-geeks would probably think that's too complicated.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-23 10:03 am (UTC)I have levers on the 27-string harp (except on the random E that fell off). Hmm, my harp goes down to first F below middle C, so not sure if I have the right octaves.
Roana's good enough to do the harmony/melody two-hand playing -- I just do the melody and use the off-hand for flipping the levers for accidentals ;-)
Neat icon!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-23 10:09 am (UTC)Oh right -- you did mention that when I saw you last week. As for range -- ok, so you'll play the piece an octave up if you do the full-blown arrangement; you're probably used to that. Can you read bass clef in the left hand or isn't your brain wired that way yet?
Roana's good enough to do the harmony/melody two-hand playing -- I just do the melody and use the off-hand for flipping the levers for accidentals ;-)
Ah. Hey, you two could play it as a duet in that case! You do the melody, she does everything else. :-) I mean, if she's going to the trouble to learn the piece anyway, then presumably she wouldn't object to that sort of jamming at an event. Unless she sings while playing or hooks up with another singer, she won't be able to use that particular arrangement after the wedding, and that seems a waste.
Neat icon!
Present from Debbie Ridpath Ohi, a filker in Toronto.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-24 05:45 am (UTC)Nope, have enough trouble doing just simple chords with the left. Even with the red and blue pens (for C and F), the bass clef is a pain.