In Honor of Homecoming

I had translated "Teach Your Children" by CSN&Y into ancient Greek, in a lovely Greek font, but I can't get it to display in the livejournal windows, so something else will have to do. Why on earth would I do this? Because I remember thinking, freshman year, that many of the pivotal words in "Teach Your Children" are words we learn in the first weeks of Greek (e.g. road, code, become, yourself, teach, children, father, and so on). And I watched the movie of Woodstock last week. Therefore, etc.

Here is a quote from Victor Zuckerkandl's Music and the External World, on hearing melodies, and on why the "gestalt" of a melody does not involve hearing a tone in its relation to past and future tones:

"Not one out of a hundred listeners will be capable of singing or playing from memory a melody that he has heard with pleasure--that is, with understanding. [well, I can..] Or try breaking off a melody at random and asking listeners what tones, or even what tone, immediately preceded the one they last heard; the majority withh be unable to answer. And then try the contrary experiment: let anyone unable who is capable of it call to mind the immediately preceding tone of a melody that he is hearing. The instant he does so, he will have lost the thread of the melody. The hearing of a melody is a hearing with the melody, that is, in closest connection with the tone sounding at the moment. It is even a condition of hearing melody that the tone present at the moment should fill consciousness entirely, that nothing should be remembered, nothing except it or beside it be present in consciousness. The essence of the musical tone, its dynamic quality, lies precisely in its relation to something that itself is not there; any turning back of consciousness for the purpose of making past tones present immediately annuls the possibility of musical hearing. Not only, then, is the individual tone in a melody understood in itself, without the slightest regard for whether anything is remembered; it cannot be understood if something is remembered" (231).

This goes nicely with the experience of doing something we know how to do well, but interrupting the action to wonder which movement comes before which; we usually trip ourselves up.

And here is a webpage about Harry Partch. All Johnnies should know about Harry Partch. He built his own instruments and tuned them in just intonation, using them to give weird performances of Greek tragedies, among other things.