But, like an old retired spinster, she fell into disuse and faded into obscurity. What was the point?

I wandered around the apartment restlessly, looking for something of interest, even though I knew I wouldn’t find it. Everything was so familiar, old, worn from overuse. What was the use in buying another useless trinket? I’d only bore of it over time, another lap in the infinite race to achieving something more than a passing interest in anything.

Shelves. Endless shelves. At least, they once seemed endless. Hard disks, CDs, LPs, cassette tapes, printed scores, even inane wind-up toys playing out-of-tune “Twinkle, Twinkle”s and “Frere Jacque”s. Slowly, carefully, I’d gathered them all. What started as a few of my favorite piano works grew to encompass the complete oeuvre of the Romantic piano masters. Why stop there though? Bach, Berlioz, Boulez, Count Basie, Beatles, The. 25 letters left to go, might as well try. Try to finish it, complete what I’d started. All the music in the world. And when someone created something new? It would be mine. I would wait.

All the music there would ever be.

The academics argued, the news outlets exaggerated. It happened, eventually. Frustrated composers wondered what other soundworlds existed, if theirs was the only one. Searching, hoping for some forgotten detail, in vain. Same old laundry. Same old shelves. Same old sounds. There would be no more music.

No celebration. No joy that my long task was finally done, that no more shelves were to be conscripted into eternal servitude in those dark corridors.

My muse was mortal, after all. And she was dead.

Somehow, today, I felt something new. Anger. What foolish endeavor had led me here? Broke and alone, left with only these obsolete, meaningless trifles from another age. This bereaved widower had mourned long enough in the shadows. Turning away from the suffocating mass of plastic and vinyl, I noticed something on my desk: a match. Taking it carefully, I struck it against the brick wall and watched a flame spring into life. I watched as my hand let the flickering light fall to the ground. I left.

And it burned. All the music in the world burned on a funeral pyre made of wood, and brick, and linoleum. My apartment burned. And while it burned, it crackled and roared. The timbers groaned and creaked, crashing down occasionally in a thunderous cacophony.

I thought to myself, with a smile, “Nobody has ever heard the burning of all the music in the world. Nobody has ever heard a phoenix sing so beautifully.”

Ted: I’m a master of cryptography.

Ted: You actually can’t export me to Syria.

It seems like an impossibly long time ago, but once upon a time, it was actually summer.  It was warm and sunny, and life was considerably more carefree than it has been since school started up again.  I was working my internship, singing with my a cappella group, and more or less just having the time of my life.  One weekend, a friend of mine who’d recently graduated and was working for Microsoft Games (Hi Karena!) decided to get a bunch of people together for a night of good ‘ole fashioned karaoke.

You see, before there was Rock Band, before there was Karaoke Revolution, there was karaoke.  Straight up karaoke, complete with terrible MIDI instrumental tracks, questionable transcriptions of song lyrics, giant tomes full of song titles and six-digit codes, and more reverb than anyone could ever possibly need.

So I found myself with around 12 other people, most of whom I didn’t know, in a little Asian karaoke place somewhere in the middle of Seattle.  We didn’t have much in common other than we were all friends with Karena, but we sang anyways.  We sang the classics, we sang Backstreet Boys, we sang harmonies with each other, we sang in key, we sang off key.  Hell, we even sang the guitar parts to “Knights of Cydonia” by Muse, complete with requisite headbanging and hardcoreness.

It was good times.

We had a concert this past Sunday for our 21M.303 (Writing in Tonal Forms I) class, where the fantastic QX String Quartet performed our humble compositions for us. The project was to write a minuet & trio for string quartet in idiomatic 18th century style, a goal I think all of us in the class achieved quite well. My minuet & trio pushed a bit against a few rules, a few dissonances sounded more 19th century than 18th century, but overall I (and I hope my professor as well) was pleased with the final result. A classmate and I recorded the concert, and recordings will find themselves on the Internet sometime in the near future.

Thanksgiving is coming up. Does anyone else notice that it’s basically a week late this year? I thought it was always the third Thursday of the month. Apparently somebody decided that it would be the fourth Thursday of November for 2008. I had a friend who actually booked her flight home incorrectly because of that faulty assumption. Is there some committee somewhere that’s in charge of deciding these things? Are there some people somewhere who sit around and vote on when Thanksgiving will be? The National Committee on Holidays and Funtimes, I would call it. I wonder if they have lobbyists. Could I lobby for a new holiday? Do companies lobby for holidays? Coca-Cola Day? Christmas, brought to you by Samsung?

Isn’t that just about the worst chord in the worst inversion (iii64) you could possibly use as a pivot ever?

Yeah, but when you get to real music and you’re Haydn, you can do these things.

Basically, what happens when you progress to the third class in the MIT Music department’s composition offerings, you start tearing apart the system of nice-to-haves and never-dos that you’ve spent the past two semesters building up.  Rules turn into guidelines, and eventually turn into recipes for writing boring, formulaic music.  As my professor told me: writing one parallel octave is a mistake, writing 23 in a row is exciting.

Why did you write that voice leading there?  It doesn’t quite resolve the 7th regularly.

I don’t know. It sounds beautiful to me.

Somewhere in between the 12 hours of dance per week I’m putting in, the composition class I’m taking, and the Romantic music analysis class I’m taking, I’ve found some time to discover something a little bit comforting about the nature of art.  And by art, I mean the larger sense of the word.  Music, dance, Python, whatever tickles your inner sense of pretension.

The struggle between form and freedom.

That is the only reason I have yet to write a Python script to automagically generate my composition assignments for me.  It honestly would not be terribly difficult, because there are enough rules in play for many of the assignments that one only makes a few decisions before the rest of the notes just inexorably fall into place.  Writing music is not about being correct though.  Writing music is about that moment when you accidentally play a sharp instead of a natural, and you notice that it sounds infinitely more exciting (after all, what could possibly be more exciting than a misplaced augmented chord?), or when you deliberately scatter unresolved melodic lines about a deceptively complete harmonic cadence to nag at the minds of your listeners.

Rules give these little transgressions a framework.

You can’t really break rules for fun and profit if there aren’t any rules to begin with.  Rules create expectations and tendencies, and only then can you manipulate those forces to add some pizazz to your plain ‘ole I-IV-V-I progression.  Breaking, as an improvised dance, would be incredibly difficult to pull off without a huge vocabulary of moves and sequences to draw from.  It would also be incredibly boring if that’s all anyone ever did.  There is a sense among bboys that whatever you decide to do, be it adding some Latin flair to your style, freezing completely when nobody expects it, or running around pretending to be an airplane, if you do it convincingly and with confidence, then it works.

In math, 1+1 will always equal 2.  In art, 1+1 could equal 2, but it might equal 22 if it’s more beautiful that way.

The a cappella group that I’m a part of this summer, The Funktors, recently got its first gig: opening for Jon McLaughlin at a company barbeque on Monday.  This is very, very exciting.  We’ve been rehearsing about three times a week for four hours at a time for a few weeks now, and working pretty hard at preparing ourselves.  This Thursday, we were missing a few members because of scheduling conflicts, so our rehearsal was short and not terribly productive.  On a whim, we decided that it might be fun to go sing outside and get some fresh air.

We wound up wandering around downtown Seattle from around 10pm until 11pm and singing songs at various street corners for all of the homeless people and drunken clubbers who would listen.  It was a real joy when some random passerby would compliment us, or even go so far as to stop and dance along.  We even made $1 from a woman who gave us a tip, despite the fact that we had no tip jar/hat/guitar case.  On top of all of that, we sounded amazing.  Maybe it was the adrenaline, or maybe it was the acoustics of singing outside, but we were in tune, on time, and really just loving every note we sang.

Also, some guy spit at us.  This is patently absurd, mostly because we are probably the most harmless group of college-age, mostly Asian, happy-go-lucky singers you could ever encounter at 10pm in downtown Seattle.  Seriously, we couldn’t even hurt someone if we tried.  What sort of thought process goes like, “Hey look, a bunch of Asian kids singing ‘Brown Eyed Girl.’ I think it would a rational decision to spit at them.”?

Jerk.

Browsing Facebook one lazy evening, I came across a Marketplace listing for a used Fender American Stratocaster for $450. I wasn’t actively looking for a new guitar, but this was potentially a tremendous deal, and if I were to buy another guitar, it would have been a Stratocaster anyways. My interest piqued, I e-mailed the poster and opened the appropriate lines of communication. After meeting him and playing the guitar in person, I wrote a check, and came away the proud owner of a beautiful guitar. Curiously enough, I can’t seem to quite pinpoint the exact model of the guitar, since the serial number is missing. I suspect that it has either worn away, or the neck was replaced at some point. Anyways, here are the specifications:

• White Fender Stratocaster
• 3 Rio Grande pickups
• Vintage tremolo, temporarily stopped for more sustain
• 21 frets
• One-piece maple soft-V contour neck

And the promised pictures:

If anyone needs me, I’ll be channeling Stevie Ray Vaughan and wailing away in my room (which, incidentally, I moved into about a week and a half ago).  I’d post pictures of it, but that would oversaturate this post with pixels, and they’d start dripping all over the place and everything would just get messy.

The first disc, Jupiter, by far the more restrained of the two, begins with the now instantly recognizable “Dani California,” which is merely “very good” until John Frusciante launches into an incendiary solo near the end of the track. Frusciante’s guitar work on this album is simply remarkable, and is one of the main reasons I like Stadium Arcadium so much. Most of the remainder of the Jupiter disc is composed of slow ballads, reminiscent of “Under the Bridge.” Frankly, I prefer Mars over Jupiter, but the ballads are all well done. When I first listened to Jupiter though, it left me wondering, “Where’s the funk?”

Luckily, Mars proved to be the answer. Here, we hear Flea returning to the hyperactive slap-pop style that characterized much of the Chili Peppers’ earlier work. It works wonderfully. The tracks here are catchy, memorable, and above all, funky. Every member of the band shines here, from Chad Smith’s solid drumming, to Anthony Kiedis’ supercharged vocals. Mars is a disc that makes you want to move, and while it might not inspire some to get up and dance, it will certainly leave a huge, silly grin on your face.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers haven’t released an album in four years, and suddenly they drop this massive two disc set on the world. While it may not explore many new musical territories, it shows the Chili Peppers maturing as a band, at times preferring the sublime over the psychedelic, but no matter what, still doing what they do best: having fun.