Adventures with Poulenc

I'm working on learning Poulenc's Un sour de neige for a small ensemble performance thereof in March. It's a pretty cool piece that musically amounts to Poulenc repeatedly saying "you may have noticed that I am a french composer." To me, it speaks of the influence of Satie and perhaps Ravel. Quite plainly tonal, but with the "impressionistic" emphasis on sonority over harmonic direction.

While the melodic writing is not traditionally contrapuntal, the interaction of the lines is quite interesting (which is a dumb thing to say, since "interesting linear interaction" describes a large swath of choral works). Of particular interest is the degree to which individual lines are deceptively simple -- only in the group context is the full harmonic richness apparent. This is in contrast to the writing of Bach, or Mozart, or Brahms, for example, in which any given line tends to carry pretty strong harmonic implications (to varying degrees, of course).

For instance, at the start of section 2 in the second movement, were a singer only to consider his or her part, he or she would be in for an unpleasant surprise in ensemble context: the alto and second soprano both bop around a second-inversion G minor triad; the first bass outlines a root-position C minor triad against the second bass' C pedal point; the tenor would likely hear the line as a first-inversion E-flat major triad with a decorative upper neighbor C along the way. But put those parts together and you have what amounts to one big statement of a C minor 9 harmony; the moving of lines makes the overall texture move between different voicings of that harmony, but it is always that harmony, with the harmonic motion coming largely from the changes in color inherent in the placement of sevenths/seconds.

With all this in mind, I'm trying a different approach in preparing for this. Namely: I'm not "learning my part" (tenor). Rather, I'm studying the score as a whole, building familiarity with the entire texture, with the full harmonic language. I think this will ultimately aid my understanding of how my part fits in, but more importantly, heighten my appreciation of the piece and the experience of performing it with the ensemble.

It's possible that this approach will blow up in my face and I'll wish that I had just learned my part more directly when the first rehearsal comes, but there's plenty of time to prepare and I've got a 45-minute train ride every morning during which I can quietly study the score. Also, I'm not all that familiar with Poulenc's work and this seems like a good way to get into his stylistic world more completely.

So, each day on the train to work, I look over one or two movements. After picking a movement to work on, it typically goes like this:

• If there's an obvious melody/theme, look over that first; if there's a relatively simple accompaniment, try to look at both simultaneously. For instance, at the start of movement two, it's useful to try to hear the droning C's against the melodic activity.


• At any given section where the texture changes, look over the material in the most active parts, one part at a time.


• Look at pairs of parts and try to read both simultaneously. Try this with various pairings and go slow if it helps.


• Look at all the active parts (or as many as concentration allows) and try to hear the harmonies; don't do it in rhythm, just read from one chord to the next. When the texture gets particularly thick, reduce the number of voices under consideration.

Those are the steps, but the steps are probably less important than the guidelines used in applying those steps:

• Try to hear it in your head, rather than actually vocalizing.


• Don't hear abstract pitches; try to hear the actual sound. When reading an alto line, try to hear the timbre of a small alto section. This makes it more musical and meaningful and less of an academic exercise.


• If your concentration starts to wander, stop and think about something else for a few minutes. On my morning commute that typically means looking out the window, or closing my eyes, or getting irritated by that guy who always sits in the same seat and loudly shares whatever inanities are on his mind with whomever happens to be nearby. Get a blog, dude, so you can be as verbosely pretentious as you like and others need only endure it by choice (as so aptly demonstrated in this little article).


• Accept that it will never be easy, and at times it will seem impenetrably hard.

For the past six or seven years, I've generally refused to learn my part with the aid of the piano, unless the piano is used to play a part other than my own. This has, on occasion, bugged the crap out of Courtney. (Quite understandably; we'll be reading through music together, I screw up and swear about it, she starts to play the notes I messed up and as a reward gets barked at by her jackass of a husband.) Having spent the entirety of my life learning and playing music by ear, I didn't see any way to overcome my sight reading limitations other than to be pretty strict about it. So this little experiment in learning the Poulenc is the next step in that process.

I can't claim to know my part yet, nor all the others, but it feels like a good process to apply. I'll follow up here as time goes on and the process unfolds. In the meantime, please try to contain your excitement.

Recipe the First - Meatballs

My sister-in-law, Caitlyn, asked me for recipes to a variety of things. Note the use of past tense, which indicates only that a thing happened prior to right now, without conveying the magnitude of temporal distance.

She asked some nine months ago. I'm lame.

So, at long last, here's the first: meatballs.

First, some context:

• I don't measure anything. This is the means by which I assert my masculinity in the kitchen.


• It comes out a little different every time.


• Texture and feel are my guide.


• I like garlic more than most.

Preparation

Here's what you need:

• A lot of garlic. Get garlic cloves, don't use dried, powdered stuff. I tend to use 8 to 10 cloves, depending on the size. Chop 'em finely or put 'em through a garlic press before you get started.


• Sauce: if I were more of a foodie, I would make my own, but I'm not and I don't. I tend to prefer Trader Joe's arabiata sauce, or its roasted garlic marinara. Classico's basic tomato/basil sauce is okay, as is its roasted red pepper sauce.


• Ground turkey: I tend to prefer the basic ground (not lean ground) Empire kosher turkey; industrial kosher is pretty similar in preparation to industrial organic, but costs less.


• Veggies: up to you, but my preference tends to be for a couple red peppers, a zucchini, and sliced mushrooms (either basic white or portabello will do), and a decent-sized onion.
  
  
  
  • Dice the onion
  
  
  • Chop the pepper into slices
  
  
  • I like to cut the zucchini lengthwise into two long, skinny halves, and then slice them up into half-moons
  
  
  
  


• Salt and (freshly ground, preferably) black pepper.


• Olive oil


• An egg


• Bread crumbs


• Pasta


• A good-sized frying pan; I recommend iron, if available.


• Another good-sized pan of whatever make you've got. I'll refer to this as the less-nice pan.


• A big-ass bowl


• A cleanser that contains bleach

Additionally, you will want one of the following:

• Oregano


• Basil (fresh if you can get it)


• Lemon juice (paired with basil in one of the alternatives below)

Getting the Meatballs Ready

Into the big-ass bowl, plop:

• The ground turkey


• Half the chopped-up garlic (unless you're doing the "fancy alternative" below, in which case save the garlic for the fanciness)


• Olive oil: a good pour, probably amounting to about a quarter cup. Don't be stingy with the fat. This is good fat, and most of it comes out into the water anyway.


• Salt: a pile. You obviously don't want to oversalt, but shake more on that you might be inclined to.


• Black pepper: a pile. Too much can overpower, but like the salt you want to put plenty in there. Incidentally, if you're using a grinder, the chances of putting too much in are a lot lower than if you're using pre-ground pepper.


• Bread crumbs: at least equal in volume to the turkey itself, but in fact probably more, perhaps like 20-30% more. This is something you get a sense for from repeated cooking attempts.


• The egg. Sans shell, preferably, unless you enjoy a crunch surprise.

Choose one of these flavoring alternatives and do it:

• Yia-yia's way: add oregano (probably equivalent to a couple tablespoon's worth) and a plop of sauce. Greek oregano if you've got it.


• Simple alternative: add basil (to taste, but I put in quite a bit) and a plop of sauce.


• Fancier alternative:
  
  
  
  1. Put olive oil in a pan and get it quite hot.
  
  
  2. Put in half the garlic; stir rapidly until it whitens, then quickly...
  
  
  3. Put in half the onion; stir rapidly again, turn the heat down to medium after 20 seconds or so
  
  
  4. Stir for a few minutes until the onion gets translucent. Don't let it burn.
  
  
  5. Put the resulting stuff oil/garlic/onion slop into the big-ass bowl
  
  
  6. Pour in some lemon juice, perhaps amounting to two or three tablespoons (make sure this is getting poured into the breadcrumbs, and not directly into the oil, so you don't get spattered)
  
  
  7. Give the stuff a minute to cool alongside its previously refrigerated big-ass bowl brethren
  
  
  
  

Roll up your sleeves, put your less-nice pan right next to your big-ass bowl on the counter. Mix up the ingredients by hand, massaging the turkey gently into a wonderfully fowl glop in which everything seems to be evenly mixed. If it's really shiny and slippery, add more breadcrumbs. If it feels almost grainy and seems to come apart pretty easily, add more oil. It should not feel overly oily but should hold together without effort.

Grab little handfuls and roll 'em into balls, putting 'em into the less-nice pan. Use whatever size you like, though I tend to make 'em probably a 1.25 to 1.5 inches in diameter.

Fill the less-nice pan with water until the meatballs are perhaps two-thirds submerged.

Put the less-nice pan on a burner, put it on high until you get a boil, then back off to medium; cover the pan if you've got a big-enough cover (not essential, but helpful if available). Use a spatula to flip the meatballs every five or ten minutes; treat them as if they were burgers, meaning flip them by scraping the spatula on the pan underneath them, because they could stick to the pan and you want to keep the meatballs intact.

While that's going, you can move on to the other things and be confident that by the time everything else is ready, the meatballs will be ready too.

Veggies and Sauce

Get the pasta water going. Put plenty of olive oil and salt in the water. I assume you can handle the pasta from here.

In the good (iron, right?) pan, pour a good bunch of olive oil. Remember not to cheap out on the yummalicious fattiness. Get it way hot.

Put in the rest of the garlic, stir quickly letting it whiten but not burn. Then put in the onion (whatever's left of it, depending on your flavoring choice). Stir quickly, reduce the heat after 30 seconds or so (to medium or med/hot), keep stirring. You want the onion to go translucent and ideally do not allow the garlic to burn.

Once the onion is translucent and you're getting hungry from the smell, toss in the other veggies. Stir 'em around and let the zucchinis be your guide for readiness: I like to keep them frying at a pretty high temperature (stirring all the while, of course) until the majority of zucchinis have gone mostly soft (they'll start to appear as if they are soaking through or something, which indicates that their softening and cooking through).

At that point, pour in the sauce. When you start getting bubbling in the sauce, turn the heat down and shoot for a simmer.

Let the sauce simmer for a few minutes, stirring periodically. If you've got fresh basil, wash it and shred it while you're waiting.

Turn the meatballs off and plop them into the sauce/veggies. Add basil now if that's what you're using for seasoning.

Let things go for a couple minutes more, until you're confident that the sauce is evenly hot and (if used) the basil's been in for a few. Turn it off.

You're done. Chow down.

I Like This Article Because It's Wrong

In reference to the enjoyable article "I Like Unicorn Because It's Unix".

I don't take any pleasure in claiming that the intelligent, read-worthy author is wrong. I don't even really mean it; the article has plenty of good stuff to say and has been a useful point of reference for me in weeks past. I have one point with which to quibble, and it may have been right when he first wrote it.

But, lest anyone else be led astray, here's the issue:

Most notable is the following call to select(2):

ret = IO.select(LISTENERS, nil, SELF_PIPE, timeout) or redo

This blocks until one of three things happen:
...
2. Some notable error state occurs on the file descriptor in SELF_PIPE (like when it’s closed), in which case the child’s side of the pipe is returned as an IO object. This really deserves its own essay, but I’ll take a quick shot: the IO object in SELF_PIPE is created in the parent process with pipe(2) (IO.pipe) before the children are forked off. The children then write on the pipe to achieve basic one-way IPC between child and master. It’s used here in the call to select(2) to detect the master going down unexpectedly – parent death causes the pipe to close. Unicorn children go down fast when their master dies.

That's not actually what happens.

SELF_PIPE is used in two different ways:

1. In the master process, the master writes to the pipe from signal handlers; it selects on the pipe in its main loop, such that signals will wake the master up in that loop.


2. In the child/worker processes, the original pipe inherited from the parent process is completely replaced by a new pipe; signal handlers in the child process close one end of the pipe, such that they interrupt the select referenced by Ryan Tomayko's blog as quoted above.

I admire Ryan Tomayko's blog and should he happen to stumble across this little article here, I hope he'll appreciate the tongue-and-cheek nature of the title. His article is more right than wrong, but that's not as much fun to claim, is it?

Henryk Górecki

I was pretty bummed to hear of Górecki's passing today.

Courtney and I first encountered Górecki's popular third symphony in her second (I think) year at Boston University; the BU symphonic orchestra was performing the third paired with Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste, and possibly along with Stravinsky's Symphony of Winds. We went primarily for the Bartok (and the Stravinsky, if it was really on the program; that sounds like a rather long program, but I remember that it really kicked a lot of ass so it's possible that they did indeed do all that together).

I recall being pretty captivated by the Górecki. But I was emotionally invested in the Bartok and stored up my energy and focus for that. When it got to the Górecki, I was tired and couldn't focus much more. That's how it typically works for me: save the mental energy for the piece I care most about, and let whatever wants to happen happen on the others. Often that means I space out or sleep through the pieces I'm not there to absorb. But the Górecki is pretty captivating stuff, and while I won't claim that I was immediately sucked in and energized or whatever (after all, the Bartok performance was quite engaging and I just didn't have it in me to care any more), the piece was nevertheless provocative enough to prevent me from falling immediately asleep.

All of which sounds insulting to the piece, which is not how it's intended. I seriously slept through large portions of concerts on a regular basis at that time; I was always overtired, and as much as I loved (and love) music I just couldn't fight the need for sleep, and concert halls filled with beautiful music make for a marvelous bedroom. Just ask Stravinsky regarding Schubert. In any case, I was all prepared to settle in and pass out for the next 45 minutes, and instead I had a reaction of "hey, what's this all about?!"

Since then it's become one of those special musical jewels that I really adore. I don't listen to it all the time. It's not necessary. It fills a special place that only needs to be visited once and while. The third movement in particular is so astonishingly beautiful and expressive, and it embodies (for me) what music is all about. When words fail us, music is there. The deepest aspects of our emotional lives are too rich to express verbally. That third movement gently rocks you with love while it breaks your heart.

Farewell, Górecki. Thank you for the sorrowful songs.

Observations regarding large data sets

I recently started a new position at startup that shall go nameless. It's been an interesting time so far, as we're dealing with fairly large data sets (not huge, but large-ish). Additionally, I've been dealing with MySQL a lot more than I'm accustomed to, as I've generally been something of a Postgres partisan. Some observations:

• Some times, the query plan for a given query (as described by EXPLAIN) looks absolutely horrible, but then MySQL actually performs well.


• Some times, the query plan for a given query looks great, using an index the selectivity of which is quite high, minimizing the rows for which any non-indexed criteria are considered. And yet the performance sucks.


• When the performance is sucking, it is rather unhelpful to not have iostat nearby.


• It is incredibly painful how with large data sets the simplest operations can take so long.


• It is similarly painful that were I using Postgres, I would know exactly what to do to address some of the performance nastiness I'm seeing. And in MySQL I don't have the same level of knowledge. I think it's also fair to say that in MySQL the ability for introspection is fairly limited compared ot Postgres, which doesn't help. But I'm hoping that these conclusions are wrong and that it's just a matter of acclimation.


• Hope is not useful when solving engineering problems. Rather, it's probably detrimental.


• It probably makes relatively little sense sense to object to the notion of eventual consistency if one is within the same algorithm sending writes to master whilst reading from a slave, and especially so if said master/slave servers are in the crappy-io-osphere known as "the cloud".

Some of the data manipulation issues we see could be readily assisted by using a distributed datastore of the Cassandra/Ryak/Voldemort/HBase variety. Consider the implications of such a step: certain things (like arbitrary querying, or range queries, or fast sorting) become a pain in the ass. Notice that all of those things are already a pain in the ass using a relational database. Thus, it looks like a no-brainer; why spend time propping up an approach that will be horribly expensive and difficult and rickety, when you can spend that time building something with horizontal scalability, availability, and the means to exercise control over the inconsistency inherent in replication/distribution built in?

Anyway, that's all for now. It's a good bunch of folks and there are a variety of interesting problems to solve, so my brain's wanderlust is happily contained.

Noodle on "Autumn Leaves" Changes

It's fall. The leaves fell by our windows. And it's time for the digital piano to retire back to its place in the basement. So, as a deeply sloppy ode to autumn, and a gift to Courtney (so she needn't tolerate this noodly nonsense from me every time a show cuts to commercial), a little improvisation that begins on the changes to "Autumn Leaves".

Samsung Fascinate Features Car Affinity

As the earlier post implies, I've been contemplating making the switch to an Android phone. My sister-in-law the second (in order of birth, with which I was entirely uninvolved) has a Samsung Fascinate in her possession, and took the trouble to highlight some of its many fabulous features this weekend that I might make a more informed choice in my pending purchase/indentured servitude decision.

The feature that most impressed me? Automotive affinity.

We piled into two cars Saturday afternoon to take a trip from Needham, MA to Stow, MA (some 40 minutes away) to engage in the touristy activity called "apple picking". Unbeknownst to the rest of us, the aforementioned sister-in-law placed her phone on the rear trunk of our sporty 2001 Toyota Corolla, in a dramatic display of faith in the efficacy of the phone's auto-clinging capabilities.

Whilst driving on I-95N, sister-in-law the first called my phone and asked us to pull off the highway. We drove another mile at 55 miles/hour to get off at Route 16 in Newton, where we could pull over safely. Sister-in-law the second wandered over to our car and held aloft the mobile device from its place on the Toyota's rear hood, to which it clung with such excellent tenacity.

I had not given the Samsung Fascinate much consideration, but upon such a dazzling display, I find myself moved to give it further contemptation. It is a contender, it does have class.

The problem with picking an Android phone is that they're all so damn shiny.

Additionally, deepening my association with Verizon makes me feel dirty. Oh well.