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just the white keys
Friday, January 29 2021
One of the last things I watched last night on YouTube before falling asleep was a presentation about the Locrian mode, a topic of music theory. I'd learned about it earlier on David Bennett Piano. Up until tonight, I'd thought Locrian was achieved by some exotic combination of (on the piano) white keys and black keys. But it turns out that B-Locrian is entirely white keys, and, furthermore, that all the modes have white-key-only representations. This means the modes are all about the framing of the diatonic scale. I know there are some scales that cannot be presented only one white keys. For example, Nirvana's "Love Buzz" is in the Phrygian dominant scale, where two pairs of notes only a semitone apart are themselves a whole tone apart, an arrangement that demands at least one black key and one white key. But this isn't true of the modes, which is probably why they're called "modes of the major scale." It really helped my understanding of music theory concepts to discover that the simple framing of a key (that is, what note is at the bottom of the scale, and sequence of half steps and whole steps above it) changes the entire color of it. I ruminated on this several times over the course of the night, sometimes in dreams and sometimes while lying in bed awake.
I tried drinking kratom tea this morning instead of caffeine, and that actually worked fairly well. It made me feel alert and good (though not quite euphoric). I was also able to do good workplace work (in this case, getting things working on a Windows server). In the afternoon, though, I was beset by headaches and was forced to switch to a tea containing caffeine.
My brother Don called me today and said that our mother Hoagie wasn't feeling well, the supply of alfalfa pellets had run out, and yet the horses needed to be fed. So Don had called our old friend Josh Furr and had him deliver a $16 bag of pellets. Apparently Hoagie had no cash on hand to reimburse Josh, telling him that he'd have to wait until the end of the month. That really doesn't sound like the way things would've traditionally operated in my family, and it's another indication of decrepitude. I wondered if Don was burying the lede by not telling me what specifically was wrong with Hoagie. Did her indifferent attitude regarding the wearing of masks result in an infection with the coronavirus? Apparently not; Don said she was feeling nauseated, perhaps from eating chocolate cake brought over by a friend named June Tarder (the same one who had shown Don his Facebook profile page and had a plumber fix the plumbing at Creekside).
It was brutally cold today, but by evening I had the stove going nicely.
To break my diphenhydramine habit slightly, tonight I took 10mg of olanzapine, the drug mistakenly given as a citalopram replacement when we were in India. It worked perhaps a bit too well.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210129 feedback
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