Conlon nancarrow biography of christopher columbus
One of the things Cowell mentions in his book is that, while these rhythms may be impossible to play for human performers, "these highly engrossing rhythmical complexes could easily be cut on a player-piano roll. This would give a real reason," he continues, "for writing music specially for player-piano, such as music for it at present does not seem to have."
Conlon Nancarrow read that passage in about 1939. Born in Arkansas, he had joined the Communist Party in college and was just homing from fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the Lincoln Brigade. He came home to New York, bought Cowell's book, and then found out that his friends in the Brigade were starting to be hassled by the government because of growing paranoia about Communists. Refusing to go through the coming McCarthy-era mess, he took off for Mexico City in 1940, and lived there the rest of his life, until 1997.
In 1947 Nancarrow inherited some money from his father, who had been mayor of Texarkana. He took a trip to New York and bought a player piano, and had a machine built for him to punch rolls with. Unlike Cowell, who never tried his player-piano experiment, Nancarrow took off. He had never been able to play the piano, and he loved jazz, so his first piano rolls sounded like three extremely fast Art Tatums all playing at once. Like Cowell before him but freed to endless possibilities by his mechanical resource, Nancarrow became fascinated by different tempos going at the same time. Eventually he started exploring this effect via the tempo canon, a form in which the same melody would be played against itself in different speeds at once. As he continued, Nancarrow found that the player piano was not simply a rhythmically accurate substitute for a human pianist. It was capable of textures and riffs and speeds that no human could ever play.
For decades Nancarrow worked out his series of 50 player piano studies in isolation in Mexico City. In the late 1970s, however, thanks to curious resear
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In 2019 Maria Beatrice Giovanardi, an Italian who works in London in the field of marketing and public relations, as well as an activist for women's rights, launched a petition on Change.org to change the definition of "woman" contained in the Oxford English Dictionary, considered (not wrongly) sexist, with obsolete usage examples. In March 2020, the campaign receives new impetus thanks to an open letter signed by activists and activists, scholars and scholars, addressed to the editors of the dictionary, who replies by explaining that they have completed the revision of the entries concerning women and girls and that such changes will be visible in subsequent updates of the various platforms and apps connected to the dictionary. In November 2020, these updates are "fully operational" and include more gender-sensitive definitions, revisions of usage examples and synonym clouds by inserting new labels to indicate offensive and derogatory terms and a parallel remake of the definition by man. Based on the success of the petition sent to the OED, Giovanardi (together with other people) also writes to the editorial staff of the Treccani Vocabulary asking to change the female entry in the dictionary of synonyms and antonyms (which we see better below). The editorial team responds and publishes the question and answer on the website. I quote some passages that I consider important (but I recommend reading the text in full): We had already written about this very delicate but fundamental question (the statute of lexicographical work)-and forgive the self-quotation: "As a user of a dictionary, I should expect to find the lexicon of the
Jordan Alexander Key
Music history, and history generally, is often presented as a narrative of innovation and exceptionalism. One could, I think, summarize any music history curriculum at the undergraduate level (at least in the United States) as Charlemagne, Perotin, Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Wagner, Schoenberg, Stravinsky. There will certainly be some other “stuff” in that two to three-semester curriculum, but - let us be honest - no one except for the pedantic musicologists [1] ever remembers the interesting details. It is “the details” – the “little people” [2] – who in many ways make these “exceptions” possible. Who wrote the first symphony? “Who” designed the Baroque fugue? Who wrote the first opera, or came up with the idea in the first place? Or less musically, who invented the light bulb? Who invented the printing press? Who discovered the method of calculus? I will let you know now that the answers to these questions are respectively not – as many often answer – Haydn, Bach, Monteverdi, Edison, Gutenberg, and Newton, though book after book and teacher after teacher (granted, not all books and all teachers) will love to communicate these inaccurate notions – more some notions than others.
It is not that we need eschew exceptionalism and exceptional innovation in a model of music history. Indeed, there are exceptional ideas and people sprinkled throughout the timeline of human toil. Rather than simply not focus on innovation as an act of exceptionalism, we should teach innovation as a dialogue with culture, a dialogue that is often cyclical, more frequently unconsciously than consciously recurrent. Furthermore, innovation only rarely locates itself in one person or a closely related group of people. When this does happen, it should be noted and the factors that helped to locate this innovative insight into one person should be examined. However, we s I know this “ode” is tongue-in-cheek at best, but I still grew up listening to it and still mean it when I sing out the chorus. Given I’m planning a trip home next month, I have to post some home-town love. And, hey – do you like apples? On this day in 1788, Massachusetts became the sixth state to ratify the new constitution. How d’you like them apples? Your fearless heroine had a, shall we say, “wet” December. The gauntlet that shoots one from Thanksgiving to New Years turned into a slip-n-slide of festive parties. The moon rose on events and the sun rose on headaches. It was a lot of fun. Until it stopped being fun and started being kind of stupid. There came a moment, around December 31st, when I woke up just felt generally unpleasant, like a washcloth that had been used too many times before being cleaned out. So Mr. Yankette and I decided that we would have a “dry” January. This means I haven’t had a single one of these drinks at all this month: I also haven’t had any of these, which are of course in the liquor shelf in our kitchen: I’m not here to preach the gospel of dryness. Of course I feel great. Obviously I feel great. I am as clean and unblemished as a brand new window pane. I’m squeaky and practically translucent. And, this feeling is certainly nice enough to skip over what people who attempt this generally do after their dry month, which is plunge head first into a booze pool in February. I’ll go back to my pre-holiday moderation, no problem. But. As a working professional in a busy, high-maintenance city, where networking happens around happy hours and drinks lubricate the awkward few minutes of conversation, I hadn’t fully grasped the extent to which drinking punctuates daily life. It’s