Feeling much better, thank you: sitting on IC's floor in a beige skirt and a little Urban Outfitters pseudo-indie-boy shirt listening to Megadeth ("Trust" -- thanks for asking) and moaning and groaning about practically nothing compared to the last entry. Except I really wish this keyboard (the split kind, you know, the kind that's supposed to be ergonomickal, had two "Y" keys: I tend to type "Y" with my left hand, but there's just this gully in the way, so I end up hitting "T"--"uglt" for example, or "at, dios".
Christopher Tte, er, Tye, wrote a wonderful In Nomine called "Trust". In Nomines are a genre of English sixteenth- and seventeenth-century viol consort music. One viol, usually a tenor (from "tenere" -- to hold the melody line down) plays a section from the plainchant Gloria tibi trinitas and the other viols play countermelodies around it. Already interesting, no? I mean, it's a secular genre, and it takes as its focus this ostensibly liturgical fragment. Of course, it gets more interesting; the reason it's called an "In Nomine" instead of a "Gloria Tibi Trinitas" is that the entire genre is a reaction to one piece by Tallis, no, one section of a piece by Tallis--the part of his Mass "Gloria tibi Trinitas" (based on that plainchant) that starts with the words "In nomine domini et filij et spiritus sancti...", which was extracted and played on instruments.
I don't know why the discursus on viol music just popped out; sorry. Anyway, Tye wrote some really strange In nomines. Email me and I'll send you a sample. "Trust", the one that inspired this digression, is written in 5/4, more or less, although notation was rigorous in different ways back then, and there weren't really discrete bars, so it's less surprising-sounding than it sounds like it sounds. I like the idea of stressing every fifth beat (instead of every fourth, as is sometimes done with the piece) because it makes sense of the name -- having to trust members of your ensemble.
Read an Equal Music by Vikram Seth. I know everybody else read it two years ago; I was busy. And I'm sorry, to everyone who insisted that I read it earlier. You were right.
11:11 -- make a wish!
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