My room (waiting for wonderland) - a little musical analysis

I posted the following on the new VdGG discussion board a few days ago -

The discussion about this song that started with the Hugh Banton radio interview led me to share a few musical insights to this seemingly simple song.

First of all, for the first three and a half minutes, all one hears is a variety of major chords (I wouldn't be surprised if Peter managed to include all twelve major chords in the song). It isn't until he hits the words "how could you let it happen" that the disappointment of the words is matched by the music, turning into a minor scale. The final verse is a mixture of optimism ('dreams, hopes and promises') over major chords and disappointment ('but still you don't understand how it feels') over minor chords. The coda is simply two minor chords repeated.

Secondly, the rhythm at the beginning is somewhat odd: a bar of four beats, one of two beats and then another two bars, each of four beats each. This pattern repeats for most of the verse sections. For the discerning, this same rhythm is used in 'The Sleepwalkers'; it's fairly clear in the final verse of that song, but it also occurs in the opening verses. This rhythm is disguised somewhat as the band invoke a fast, ternary, rhythm that masks the bar lines, but it's the same as the final verse, which is now in a straight 4/4 time signature.

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This innocent post that was trying solely to inform received the (IMHO rude) reply  Yawn.....sorry, you were saying?

Why bother to post that? As Thumper in the movie 'Bambi' says, "If you've got nothing good to say, then say nothing" (I'm paraphrasing). It's not worth even replying to that post because then it's liable to start a flame war. Obviously that poster is not a musician.

What is clear is that this reaction will deter me from posting anything else of substance there. It's simply not worth the aggravation. 

Winter comfort food

It's been very cold for the past few days, and raining almost non-stop. It seems that every time that I step outside to take the dog for a walk, rain suddenly starts to fall, increasing in intensity from a few drops to a full and heavy downpour. I realise that this is nothing unusual for certain places in the world (especially like where I grew up), but this is very much the exception than the rule for where I live now.

Bearing this in mind, I thought it a good idea to cook some comfort food - what I call 'beef ratatouille' [Digression: whilst 'ratatouille' is not an English word, it does contain all five vowels, albeit not in the correct order, having one doubled. 'Facetious' also has all five vowels, each once, and in the correct order]. This is an easy dish that even kitchen challenged people can cook well - it's hard to mess up.

The day before, I had soaked 'white' beans and pearl barley in water.  Today I first prepared all the vegetables: cubed courgettes, sweet potatoes, potatoes and tomatoes; grated carrot and diced onions. Then I fried the onions until they started to turn brown, at which stage I added the tomatoes and carrot for a few more minutes frying (these release water so they counteract the frying somewhat). Then I added half a kilo of minced meat and continued frying and turning until all the meat was brown/grey. The next stage was adding flavour: tomato extract, oregano, cumin and paprika. Finally I added two cups of boiling water, along with all the vegetables and the beans. I mixed the entire mixture thoroughly, covered the pan then let it cook for a few hours - the longer the better.

After about two hours, it was lunchtime, so I took out two portions: the beans were cooked, but I prefer them softer, so I continued cooking for about another hour. Eventually I turned off the gas but let the mixture sit in the pot for another hour before transferring to a glass dish and storing in the fridge. This is the sort of dish that improves with age, so tomorrow's lunch should taste better than today's (not that today's was bad).

I won't include a picture because it doesn't exactly look attractive - especially as I mash everything up together. Unfortunately, it looks like something the dog brings up. But it's warming and nutritious!

Continuation from a few days later: I'm making a second batch because the first got eaten very quickly! I made one conceptual change to the above recipe: I'm cooking the beans and barley in a separate saucepan for two hours so that they can absorb liquid and get throroughly cooked; then I'm going to add them to the main mixture.

Here are most of the ingredients

Cormoran Strike (3)

Something that I missed writing about earlier: I think that this book gives away the fact that it was written by a woman. There's a section about choosing perfume that I very much doubt that a man could have written. I certainly couldn't have written it as I am almost anosmic* - there are many things, including perfume, that I can't smell, although of the things that I can smell, most of them I don't like, primarily coffee and cigarette smoke. There is also a bit about the significance of a man buying chocolates or flowers as a birthday present - apparently it means that the man did not devote much time or thought to the present and so it doesn't mean much to the recipient.

I shall bear that in mind the next time I have to buy a birthday present for a woman.

* I'm fairly certain that this started in my final year at university when I spent several weeks working with a nasty chemical called acetonitrile which was the solvent of choice for my liquid chromatography experiments.

 

Cormoran Strike (2)

I'm slowly rereading the first book in the series, "The cuckoo's calling", and I also watched the first part of the dramatisation. My remark that "nothing has been added" is not strictly true, but it's interesting to see which parts of the book have been discarded completely (much of the back story) and which parts have been combined. For example, in the book there are two policemen who investigated, but they have been combined into one. Another example is a 'business lunch' that takes place between four people; two of them have been removed from the equivalent scene, but as one of these is the downstairs neighbour, Tansy Bestigui, her questioning has to be moved elsewhere.

I've now read all five books in the series, and I have to say that the fifth, "Troubled blood", is quite a tour de force. It's also much longer than the other books, but this is difficult to quantify as a digital book doesn't have page numbers. Theoretically the file's size should provide a good correlation, but TB has several 'pictures' (supposedly handwritten extracts from a journal) that increase the file's size disproportionately. There are four main threads to this book: the reason for the book itself (a cold case from 40 years ago regarding someone's disappearance), the period leading up to and after the death of Strike's aunt, other cases that the enlarged office is handling and the mix of feelings between Strike and Robin. This latter thread constitutes another trope, 'shipping'. 

With respect to the cold case, I am surprised that people have such strong memories of events that occurred 40 years ago. Whilst I remember where I was 40 years ago today (in the army), I don't remember the events of any specific date. Maybe having their statements to the police read back jogged their memory, and presumably the original statements were made close to the event. One thing that I don't like about Rowling's writing style is that several characters 'speak' in dialect that is rendered faithfully in the text; this makes it difficult to understand what these characters are saying. The normal convention is to write a sentence or two in dialect then continue in normal English; the necessary mental gymnastics required to decode this text makes it even harder to fit the data into one's understanding of the plot. I hesitate to call the data 'facts' because there are several liars involved in the story.

Strike's previous successes have led to his office expanding, with a few investigators and an office manager. This enables several cases to run at the same time and leads to various complications. Whilst these extra cases don't add to the main thread (in fact, they detract because of scheduling issues), they add verisimilitude.

To my pleasure, I discovered that our television supplier has started showing the second third season of the tv series: the fourth book "Lethal white" over four parts. The first episode was recorded automatically on Thursday evening: I thought that I would have to wait until Monday morning for a time slot of its broadcast that doesn't clash with other recordings. Doubling the time devoted to this book (the first season had one book with three episodes; the second series covered two books, each with two episodes) should enable a better translation of the story to the screen. I found this book slightly confusing: it starts with one story, moves to another that in itself turns into something else, and all the time the initial story is continuing to develop underneath the second story (shades of Rebus). The addition of the first external investigator adds complication without resolution.