contentious remarks

1. I saw a number of posts asking if readers were going to watch the State of the Union. I don't know why: I don't recall ever being asked about watching them before, why should I now? I find my desire not to see that man is strong enough that I even turn off parody versions of him.

2. I've been seeing a lot about how the tale of a woman's date with Aziz Ansari (of whom I'd never previously heard, btw) has become a generational divide, particularly among women. Younger ones are appalled by his behavior, older ones say it was just a bad date, what's the deal? One reply even said what he was guilty of was not reading her mind, even though her objections to his advances weren't just implied through body language.

I thought that I'd be with the older cohort on this, until I read the actual account. Then I was appalled. Not so much that he specifically ignored her objections, but just at the boorishness and heavy-handedness of his advances. People who think that he wasn't smothering her agency must have no idea what a genuinely consensual romantic or sexual encounter is like.

3. A while ago I wrote a mocking advice list of How Not to Respond to Angry People, which received some approbation. I've recently seen an account of a perfect example of this in real life, one employing a technique I hadn't mentioned.

It's in this story about an audience member who hijacked a panel at ConFusion, an sf con. The problem wasn't anything done by the moderator, who wrote the post: she seems, at least in this her own account, to have behaved judiciously. It's something else she mentions: one of the other panelists "backed me up and pointed out that it was not Q&A period and not his turn to talk," so "This man got up and stormed out in a huff." And "as he departed," that same panelist "cheerfully sa[id], 'Bye!' to him."

It's the cheerful "Bye!" that did it. The best word I can think of for that is smug. It's fortunate that the departing man didn't turn around, come back, and punch the panelist in the snoot, because it wouldn't have been out of character if he had. If someone wants to stalk off, don't sneer at them as they go. De-escalate, don't reinforce and compound bad behavior.

two concerts reviewed

The Menlo Festival asked me to attend their latest winter series concert, a pairing of Brahms and Dvorak. So I slipped it into my Daily Journal schedule and reviewed it.

And then SFCV sent me off to hear some Schubert songs with the piano accompaniment arranged for string quartet. That was rather different.

Also on the program was Britten's Second Quartet, a work for which I needed to do a little study, so I checked the score from the library. And therein I found something unannotated which I couldn't explain: all over the chaconne movement were brackets covering phrases of two or three notes. They looked like the mark put on a note for a mandatory downbow stroke, but those are only on single notes, and as such these wouldn't make musical sense. (Also, I later noticed some on pizzicato notes, so no: not bowing.) They could be ties, indicating notes should be played together as a flowing phrase, but ties are rounded: these were square. So they must mean something else.

B. didn't know. The retired professional cellist who gives the pre-concert talks didn't know. So I asked the quartet at the post-concert Q&A. Three of them didn't know either, which is really disconcerting considering they'd just given a professional performance of the piece. They hadn't found out what the composer was telling them?

But the first violinist knew. They're rhythmic instructions specific to a chaconne. A chaconne is in 3/2, a slow triple time, with the emphasis normally on the second beat. These brackets appear on pairs of beats to indicate when the emphasis should be on the other beat. OK, that makes sense, and I see crescendo markings and accents that confirm this.

English suites and others no. 22

Our next Celtic stop is Cornwall. Malcolm Arnold was not Cornish, but he lived at St Merryn on the north coast of that county for several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and threw himself into the musical life of the community, organizing Cornish music concerts and writing Cornish-inspired works.

Among them was a set of Four Cornish Dances along the lines of the English Dances we've previously heard. Like them, these are based on original material, but they sound like folk tunes, each evoking some aspect of Cornish life.

Of the four, only No. 1 (0.00) actually sounds much like a dance, and that an irregular one, the first beat of each repetition stomping on the last beat of the previous one. Perhaps it's for fishermen wobbly after getting off the boats. No. 2 (1.36) is slow and spooky, perhaps evoking a trip down a Cornish tin mine. No. 3 (4.45) is an entirely serious Methodist chapel hymn. No. 4 (7.21) seems to mix the moods of all the other three into one.

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