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It has been a great privilege of mine to have been offered a place on an integrated masters’-doctorate programme awarded by the graduate school in the arts at Columbia University in the City of New York. From this September, I will take courses in a variety of music theory and music-related topics with a focus first on tonal analysis.

I’ve just spent the last week or so moving from a small town on the west coast of Ireland to the English–speaking world’s most well known metropoles.

I would like to investigate the usefulness of an ‘agile’ methodology for producing academic work. The familiar mantra ‘release early; iterate often’ applies and the output is a short (and growing) “research brief” of 800-2000 words. Such an output should have all the citations and references necessary to aid the curious referee or reader and should not shy away from tackling highly-specialised problems or areas of interest within the field. The briefs should be version-controlled, publicly available and open for discussion and comment, particularly with a view to emendation or the co-ordination of a longer study which may expand upon the topics explored in the seed brief.

This week I’ve decided to revisit first and second year undergraduate harmony, this time through the lens of Walter Piston’s Harmony, a canonical “American” harmony textbook. I’ll be making my own notes and commentary as I read along and work through the exercises in a LaTeX document using a document class inspired by Edward Tufte, with musical examples created in ABCPlus (an extension of ABC notation which supports harmony and polyphony).

Here’s a script that brute-forces its way through the 24 operations on PLR space for sucessive pairs of chords in the reduction of a Bach chorale.

I use a canonical name for the operation. Of course, most of these operations have homologues. The shortest label may not accurately reflect the relations between the harmonies (or so one school of thought has it). Choosing from equivalent composed operations lends an element of expressivity to NRT.

I spent some time this morning transcribing the motives that make up Terry Riley’s In C into TinyNotation so that I could use them in the creation of a script which creates scores instances of hypothetical performances of the work. I have this crazy idea that repeatedly doing this on a large enough scale could generate data enough to facilitate a formalist statistical analysis of this seminal aleatoric work.

Most of the computation time seems to go into into showing the MusicXML score. For scores with parts numbering less than four, this is passable. Better to render to Lilypond, if you can. However, this creates an unwieldy image or EPS file that is next to useless for print purposes. Anyway, the point here isn’t so much the printed score as end product, it’s the creation of a symbolic representation of the score which can be then further reduced and analysed with the help of music21 and/or common sense.

I use the vim extension vimwiki to manage a local wiki which I keep scrappy notes in, especially one-line ideas that I am liable to forget. Since I’d like to have access to this anywhere and at any time, I set up vimwiki to use ~/Google Drive/.vimwiki as its main wiki directory, which is kept in sync with my Google Drive. I then use Drive Notepad for quick edits of the wiki files (which are just plain text). The only hack required to use this was to force vimwiki to store its wiki files with the .wiki.md extension, otherwise Drive Notepad doesn’t want to edit them.

One of my personal goals for this year was to learn enough LaTeX to be able to typeset my undergraduate dissertation, such that it conforms with the fairly strict and idiosyncratic style guide that our department enforces for submitted work. Suffice to say that I’ve learned more about LaTeX and its plethora of packages in the two weeks before submission than I have done in the last few years that I have known of its existence.

I have, regrettably, two Spotify accounts. One was created from within Facebook and automatically included all my Facebook friends who use Spotify. Because I don’t want to lose my Spotify life if I leave Facebook, I created a second Facebook-independent Spotify account using a different email address (this is possible).

However, it would be nice still to follow my Facebook friends’ music selections and activity. Until I close my first account, however, all links to Spotify resources on Facebook will initiate a new session in the Spotify app using my first set of credentials (the Facebook one), and unless I link my second account to Facebook this will remain the case. That of course, defeats the purpose.

Today was spent in a typically traditional manner, home with the family and a full turkey and ham. All very delicious.

The christmas festivities on the day were preceded by an extended service at the local church which entailed a great deal of homophonic hymns.

There was an interesting setting of ‘Ding Dong’ with an insanely chromatic bass-line for the refrain but apart from that, fairly unadventurous.

From today, I’ll try and update this blog daily with some daycently vague observations about life, with a musical perspective.

You know the one; as if a hundred thousand tiny pins are undulating under your skin, from the tips to the base of your spine?

The power of a work of art to move us into what are essentially extra-terrestrial planes defies explanation by even the most staunchly rational scientific mind.

Well, that’s only partly true.

Everyone knows (why, of course, don’t you?) that sensations of happiness are merely by-products of a chemical process. An essentially deterministic outcome of the experiential chemistry of heightened aural or visual stimulus. It could even be worse: your brain may well be releasing endorphins purely on the basis of an re-evocation of an irrational attachment you may have had (or continue to have) with the work of art that has arisen purely on the basis of proximity!