Music for peace? War questions musical meaning?

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[From a recent list discussion about music, war and peace. The anonymous writer of the quoted passage — that is, I can’t remember the name of the list member who posted it, and I don’t think it was relevant to mention even if I knew it — was just one among many who posted their thoughts and supplied facts about experiences from “peace missions” with music making among people in countries and regions suffering from wars and conflicts:]

Though not an expert in this area, I wish to add that one of the things that war does to students and scholars of music is that it questions the relevance, meaning, and limitations of their/our practice.

I’m sorry to be harsh, but perspectives — and experiences — like these are painfully common: why does it take a war to get us to “question the relevance, meaning, and limitations of their/our practice”? If we don’t know what we’re doing, what its relevance is, what it means to our societies, to our fellow human beings — if we cannot address these crucial questions in the luxurious calm of peace, it will be far too late in wartime. It is what we must do, and not await catastrophe as a stimulus.

MW Morse

(listen to this mp3 — a demo version of Undiminished Hope, an original tune by MWM, now arranged for jazz quintet.)

For a friend, or two.

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“The soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend, —
Or the most agonizing spy
An enemy could send.

Secure against its own,
No treason it can fear;
Itself its sovereign, of itself
The soul should stand in awe.”

[Emily Dickinson]

Climates

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The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth, writes Richard Seager, of Columbia University Earth Institute, in an article (based on a study he and colleagues published in 2002) in American Scientist:

“What we found in these tests was that, south of northern Norway, the difference in winter temperature across the North Atlantic was always the same, whether or not we let the ocean move heat around. This result would suggest that oceanic heat transport does not matter at all to the difference between the winter climates of western Europe and eastern North America! We concluded that the temperature difference must, as we had speculated before, be caused by other processes, most likely the seasonal absorption and release of heat by the ocean and the moderating effect this process has on maritime climates downwind.

Our revised view of things did not, however, mean that heat transport in the ocean does not influence climate. The ocean indeed absorbs more heat from the Sun near the equator than it loses back to the atmosphere (primarily by evaporation). And oceanic currents indeed move the excess heat poleward before releasing it to the atmosphere in the middle latitudes. Consequently, removal of the oceanic heat transport globally in our modeling exercise warmed the equator and cooled everywhere else. The climates produced by the models deprived of oceanic heat transport were colder in the subpolar North Atlantic by as much as 8 degrees in some places. The cooling over land areas was more modest, typically less than 3 degrees. These temperature changes, large as they are, are not terribly dramatic compared with the much larger temperature contrast across the North Atlantic Ocean.

Why doesn’t the ocean exert a greater influence on North Atlantic climate? According to scientists’ best estimates, the ocean and atmosphere move about an equal amount of heat in the deep tropics. But at mid-latitudes, the atmosphere carries several times more heat. Thus, if one considers the region north of, say, 35 degrees North, the atmosphere is much more effective than the ocean in warming winter climates. Also, the winter release of the heat absorbed during the summer is several times greater than the amount of heat that the ocean transports from low to high latitudes in a year. Hence it is the combined effect of atmospheric heat transport and seasonal heat storage and release that keep the winters outside the tropics warmer than they otherwise would be—by several tens of degrees.

Although these numbers are instructive, they are not directly relevant to understanding the warming of Europe. For that, one needs to consider some details of geography. The Gulf Stream and associated current systems in the North Atlantic focus heat (and lose it to the atmosphere) in two clearly defined areas. One is immediately to the east of the United States, where the warm Gulf Stream flows north after leaving the Gulf of Mexico and rounding the tip of Florida. During winter, the prevailing winds blow frigid, dry air off the North American continent and across the Gulf Stream. Because of the large difference in moisture and temperature content between air and sea, the heat lost from the ocean through evaporation and direct heat transfer is immense—a few hundred watts per square meter. Much of this heat is picked up by storms in the atmosphere and carried over the eastern United States and Canada, effectively mitigating what would otherwise be a cold continental climate.

Where else does the Gulf Stream deposit its heat? After departing the American coast, the Gulf Stream heads northeast and turns into what is called the North Atlantic Drift and, farther downstream, the Norwegian Current. After spawning many Atlantic storms, it loses most of the remainder of its heat in the Nordic seas. There the heat can effectively be moved eastward by the prevailing winds to warm northwest Europe. Thus the transport of heat taking place in the North Atlantic warms both sides of the ocean and by roughly the same amount, a few degrees. This leaves the much larger, 15-to-20-degree difference in winter temperatures to be explained by other processes.”

This afternoon, we have over +30 (C) here in Stockholm, and reports of tropical night temperatures (over +20) also in other parts of Sweden last night.

Landscapes

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Kyle Gann in PostClassic has a long post about American art and music, American Romanticism: Music vs. Painting, with a discussion of what was new and specifically American in the Hudson River School of painters, and then in comparison how little original their contemporaries among composers were:

“Their music is a pale imitation of the European aesthetic of their day. In vain one listens to their symphonies, tone poems, piano pieces, and string quartets, for a new feeling for melody, a new sense of form, a departure from Europe. They were timid. Their emphasis was not on a bold new beginning, but on a sense of correctness, a balance learned rather than created, and a desire to impress. At their very best – as in, say, Chadwick’s string quartets – one finds an energetic smoothness, but even here the music seems to plead, ‘Look – I followed all the rules. Isn’t that enough?’ “


F. E. Church: Morning, Looking East Over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains

When I told my friend Pat Ross-Ross that I have started to paint in oil, and thought both landscapes and portraits were interesting to try, he mentioned The Group of Seven, and suggested I looked at the works of these famous Canadian painters, to see if my idea of Northern landscapes resonated with theirs. Yes, maybe. And then I read that some of the painters in the Canadian Northern school were inspired by the Scandinavians of a generation before them… If I understood this right.


Tom Thomson: The West Wind

The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm will host an exhibition in the autumn 2006, with works by romantic and early 20th century landscape painters from the Nordic countries. (The exhibition is in Helsinki this summer, starting in Stockholm on 30 September, will be in Oslo in spring 2007, comes to Minneapolis in the summer 2007, and then last stop is in Copenhagen in the autumn 2007)


Edvard Munch: Moonlight

Chasing foxes

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This morning, I watched two small foxes playing in the meadow between the village school and the old feldspar mines. At first I wondered why two cats were running like that — or was it martens? No, foxes. A beautiful chase, like two waves of red fur flowing over the field, and then rolling on over the road and into the wood.

Marie-Louise Maude Ester Fuchs De Geer Bergenstråhle Ekman

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Det här är en ny artikel om en av mina idoler – Marie-Louise med de många efternamnen. Det här är en äldre intervju. Jag har verkligen inte följt med i allt hon har gjort – sett alla bilder och installationer, sett alla filmer, läst böcker, sett pjäser, inrett med hennes tyger, eller så. Men jag uppskattar hennes klokt galna syn på konsten, och människorna:

– Jag har förstått först efteråt vad det är jag gör, ja, vad jag har hållit på med hela tiden. Jag är inte konstintresserad alls. Jag försöker förstå tillvaron genom att rycka ut fragment ur den som jag håller på med tills jag känner mig… lugnare, i alla fall med just den lilla skärvan. Men jag har ingen ambition alls att göra konstverk.

– Alla människor får miljoner idéer. Det svåra är att sortera, välja bort och välja rätt. Att göra ett bra val är det som utmärker en god idé. Man kan lära sig att vara uppmärksam på vilka människor eller saker man vill komma nära, och på när varningssignalerna lyser. Hjärnan håller på hela tiden.

[This linked article is a recent interview with one of my idols – the artist, playwright, movie director, and art professor Marie-Louise Maude Ester Fuchs De Geer Bergenstråhle Ekman. And this is an older article from another newspaper.]

Posted in art

work in progress

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the camera was unsteady, which in fact makes this picture look better than in real life, but both two paintings of the helmsman (-woman) are unfinished, I can’t get the eyes right, and the whole thing is lifeless kitsch, but maybe someday..

the landscape seen in the background of the studio interior (the thing with the red road and the puddles) is in its first stages, so the colours aren’t right yet, but will be darker with more layers of paint.

Claude Ranger

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My good friend Terry King has mentioned [on this tribute site] our introduction to Claude Ranger in 1970:

“I was playing jazz violin in Montreal around 1971, when I met Claude along with my friend, bassist Mike Morse. At that time we had never played with a musician of Claude’s stature (I’m not sure I’ve ever played with anyone of his stature since, either).”

We were the house band in a jazz coffee house in Val David called Jazz et Café. Some amazing people trooped through there, including Marius Coulthier, Peter Leitch, a very young Steve Hall, and Brian Barley. Brian amazed us, of course, and told us about Claude’s playing and writing. He showed us some of Claude’s tunes, and explained some things about Claude’s unique and insightful concept of harmony, based on the extensions of a seventh chord.

Terry and I went down to Old Montreal, and heard him with Billie Robinson, Peter Leitch, and Freddie McHugh. Growing up in NJ/NYC, I had already heard many great musicians — but nothing like this. The energy and creativity never flagged for a second, nor did the utter beauty of sound from the drums.

Shortly afterwards, Terry and I asked Claude to play a set at a college concert. To our amazement he said yes, and even agreed to do a rehearsal. We played in the basement of the McGill student centre. Claude was affable but quiet, setting up with seeming unconcern. The first tune we called was Claude’s “Le Pingouin,: which we had learned from a record of Claude, Brian, and bassist Daniel Lessard. The bass line is a simple chromatic pattern in half steps. I started playing it, and after a few measures, Claude started to play. That first few moments was one of the defining moments of my life. He was playing the most complex things I had ever heard from a drummer, yet it fit so beautifully and simply with the bass line he composed.

We finished the rehearsal, and played the concert a few days later, in a kind of ecstatic daze. We finished our set, and had to find the promoter to get our salary. 20 or 30 dollars for all three of us? Something like that; we gave it all to Claude, naturally. In any event, Claude waited backstage. The next act had already started, a loud rock band. When we found Claude, he was sitting with his back to the wall, which shaking from the volume of the rock band–composing music! Thunderstruck, we asked how he could do this, and he said something like “only what you hear inside matters.”

Many folks have rightly mentioned Claude’s capacity to turn any musical event into something extraordinary and artistic. I remember once going to hear Claude up on St. Hubert someplace, with Terry and Jerry Labelle. The group was just a trio, an amiable but utterly pedestrian organist, singer — and Claude.

The music was the most banal bar trash of the day. One of the numbers was a merengue. The hook to the commercial merengue beat is four sixteenth-notes on the snare drum at the end of the second bar of the pattern, leading to the downbeat: ducka-ducka-DUM; ducka-ducka-DUM. When the tune started, my friends and I suddenly felt something utterly marvellous, and didn’t know immediately what it was. We soon figured it out. Claude was playing all of the standard accents for merengue, but was playing the principle figure on the ride cymbal instead of the snare. The first sixteenth note, he left out altogether. The next was piano-pianissimo, the next pianissimo, and the fourth and last piano, in a slight, incedibly controlled crescendo. The effect was magical, profoundly musical, and danceable, too! Even if someone else had thought of this ingenious variation, it demands virtuoso control of dynamics to pull it off. Who else but Claude could do that?

Claude always played the complete music, never just a drum part. I had the opportunity to work four nights with Claude in Ottawa, a trio gig with baritone saxophonist Charles Papasoff. It was all standards and jazz tunes, and Claude played with such sensitivity to the music that you actually hear the chord changes, both in his accompaniment and solos. Here was a drummer on the level of the greatest in jazz, a composer and theorist of the same calibre, and a profoundly inspiring bandleader and teacher to several generations of musicians.

I once spent half a year composing a postcard to Claude, in French. The substance was: if I have been able to glimpse a small part of the true glory of music, revered friend, it is thanks to you above all.

MW Morse

Here is a tune inspired by Claude Ranger’s musical ideas.

Kitchen quilt from 2004

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This is a quilt I made a couple of years ago, and which I use as a drape between the hall and the combined dining room and kitchen. (Click on the photo to see a larger version). The design is a wild interpretation of a quilt from a book by Kaffe Fassett, and the colours are meant to match the ochre and blue of our kitchen. The technique is blocks made of 3-5 cm wide shreds, sewn around a small square in the centre. Then the slightly uneven blocks were cut after a square paper pattern, and some of them cut diagonally in halves. The quilt was composed with a greyblue/beige striped fabric between the blocks, and small violet squares in the corners. Around it all is a darker blue and violet border. The other side is in bright blue with golden stars.