Suite for Orchestra, “Figures in a Landscape”–Documenting themes and structure

Updated 21 Apr 2023

A couple of years back I purchased the score for Finnissy’s piano collection English Country-Tunes, a beautiful score and equally arresting music. The first time I listened to it it deeply terrified me. Following that, and following along with the New Complexity composers, I purchased Ferneyhough’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram. Another stunning piano work. (And one, equally, I’d never be able to play.) Since then I’ve purchase a couple of other beautiful modern scores.

Brian Ferneyhough’s La terre est un homme (1976-1979), Lemma-Icon-Epigram (1981), Sylvano Bussotti’s Pour clavier (1961), and Michael Finnissy’s English Country-Tunes (1977)
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The catalog of Brian Eno albums I grew up with

To the left are his four solo albums released after leaving Roxy Music. They felt a logical progression of rock to cerebral to meditative to a fusion of them all. The right of that above are the two (early) collaborations with Robert Fripp. The music is equal parts each musician. Below that, his first four “ambient” albums. Process music (like much of the 20C modern music I listen to) but as wallpaper as opposed to foreground. The lower left, in the middle of his early ambient works, is the album with David Byrne. Also process; not wallpaper.

Recent movies (and TV)

I’ve been on a viewing jag over the last couple of weeks. Marx Brothers films, Russ Meyer films, an old TV show, a rare Japanese thriller, and a Mario Bava giallo.

  • Marx Brothers
    • A Night at the Opera (1935) [ IMDB ]
    • A Day at the Races (1937) [ IMDB ]
  • Russ Meyer
    • Lorna (1964) [ IMDB ]
    • Supervixens (1975) [ IMDB ]
    • Up! (1976) [ IMDB | Wikipedia ]
    • Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979) [ IMDB ]
  • McMillan and Wife (1971-1977) [ IMDB ]
  • Angel Dust (1994) [ IMDB | Letterboxd | Wikipedia ]
  • Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970) [ IMDB ]
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Aniara

Updated 16 May 2024

A few years back I watched the Swedish sci-fi film Aniara [ IMDB | Wikipedia ] and it shook me. The prompting to watch was from some now-lost review that described it as eccentric and bleak (my remembered words, not theirs) and highly recommended it but with warning w/r/t that last characteristic. And it is that last characteristic that continually resurfaces to shake me.

image from IMDB
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Word of perception

I’ve been using Celsius for the past few years and have partially imprinted it in my perceptions with a natural understanding. I generally don’t need to convert back to Fahrenheit to get a sense of the outside temperature. Celsius has a more compact range than Fahrenheit: 1 degree C. is around 1.8 degrees F. Slight changes in Fahrenheit are scientifically relevant but subjectively less so–do you really know the difference between 68 degrees and 69 or 70?–but are more noticeable in Celsius. To put it more simply: the language used to express these measurements (both Celsius and Fahrenheit) is more precise that what we can perceive.

In the book Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany on page 97, one of his characters ponders on the relative precision between languages:

Nominative, genitive, elative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases to the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural [sic, these are number and not case, English e.g. has three cases]. The North American Indian languages even fail to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid. If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it?

Babel 17, Bantam Books

Contrasting the last sentence, the converse is negated by temperature systems having a more precise expression than we can think/experience. Taking an example from the Babel-17 quote, even the imprecision of the words hot and cold can be made more precise by elaborating poetically (albeit cliched) “it was hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement” (ex-treme-ly hot) or “it was a cold that chilled your bones” (ex-treme-ly cold). Those two words don’t engender a semantic deficiency. A greater nuance in the system we use to communicate doesn’t necessarily give us a meaningful understanding of that nuance, and a lack of expressiveness of a single unit within the system doesn’t hobble your ability to be limited to the representation contained in the unit.

Delany is likely a student of Whorf-Sapir/linguistic relativity school of thought, something I’ve never been a fan of but is still popular in linguistics and philosophy. The theory is that people’s understanding of the structure of reality is based on the syntactic structures that are available in the language they speak. It’s a compelling idea.