In my composition class the other day, while doing a harmonic analysis of a minuet & trio:

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.

Does anyone else occasionally wake up from a nap and feel a little upset and angry for no particular reason?  It’s the strangest thing.  I came home from work today and was hit by a veritably tsunami of lethargy, and had no choice but to meander around my apartment in various stages of consciousness for the next few hours.  When I finally came to, I was feeling particularly grumpy and annoyed at nothing in particular.

Somehow though, I managed to inspire myself to put on some house music and start dancing.  I love house music, and I’m trying to learn to house (dance style), but it’s rather difficult to not look like an idiot unless you’re pretty good already.  Luckily, my roommate was out, so looking like an idiot was not an issue.  I don’t have dance classes for the next three weeks, so I figured that it’s probably a good thing to dance on my own to keep in shape and keep my skills nice and skillful.  For the next two hours, I switched up the music a bit (old school funk, nothing like it) and managed to practice popping, locking, and some breaking, and felt infinitely better than how I felt before I started dancing.

The joy of motion, the ecstasy of rhythm, there’s nothing like it.

So next time you’re feeling down, throw on some awesome music and just let yourself go.

A quick shower afterwards, and I feel content and happy.

I was walking home from work the other day (my favorite non-specific temporal qualifier), and I witnessed probably the single best thing ever since my arrival in Seattle.  After crossing a street, I noticed a black guy ride by on a bicycle, followed immediately by a black guy on a Segway.  Upon closer inspection (I love Segways), I noticed that this particular specimen had been painted with a bright red racing stripe, and…could it be? Yes! Shiny plastic spinners.  It was basically the best moment of my entire life.  Also one of those moments that I desperately wanted my camera with me.

In other news, work is going well.  I’m acclimating to the new environment pretty well, and definitely getting along with my team.

Outside of work, I’ve started going to hip-hop and breakdancing classes at Velocity Dance Center, which 2 times a week for hip-hop and once a week for breakdancing.  The classes are really great, and I think I’ll make a lot of progress by the time the summer is over.  Barring that, I’ll at least be in decent shape.

In another series of highly improbably coincidences, seven other interns and I have formed The Funktors, an all-male a capella group that meets about twice a week and sings contemporary arrangements.  We’re pretty much the best a capella group made of male software development engineer interns ever.