59’th year – Page 32

Logitech Harmony Remote

I got a good price from eCost.com on a Logitech
Harmony 550 Universal Remote.

I had tried the $20 “universal” remotes and found they didn’t work
with all my devices and didn’t completely emulate even the devices
they did work with.

For instance, I had a Sony remote that
would turn my Sony Receiver from the 1980’s on and off, but not
let me change the FM stations with the numeric keypad. And none
of the cheap ones I bought would work with my cheap Apex DVD
player.

Both the TV remote and the Cable Box remote claimed
to be able to operate the other device. The Cable Box will indeed
turn the TV set off and on, but not select the input or the aspect
ratio, both of which are important if you want to use the TV set
for watching DVD’s. The TV remote never did anything at all for
either the cable box or the DVD player.

So my coffee table
had a forest of remotes and I could never find the right one when
I needed it. I’d read reviews that said the Logitech remotes were
better, but they seemed pricey. I’ve been feeling less poor this
year than for the last two or three years, so when I saw the one
on eCost for less than $50, I ordered it.

Results

It seems to work. It does do all my devices; it lets me change
the FM stations on the receiver; I can tell it “watch TV and it
turns on the TV set and the cable box and switches the TV input to
the right one for the cable box.

Certainly if you have a
device that needs to be programmed, hooking it up to a computer
and running a program is a better idea than trying to enter codes
through a keypad.

The program that’s supplied with the
remote needs a commercial OS (Windows or Mac). Googling did turn
up a command line Linux program that will do some things, but it
sounded harder than finding the right remote in the remote forest.
I didn’t check whether the windows version would run under Wine;
my laptop still has windows on it, so I just boot it into windows
when I need windows to do something. But Logitech should be
encouraged to provide a Linux option.

I’m enjoying using
the remote with just the out-of-the-box programming I did, but it
still needs more programming — I’m going to check whether I
really like having the sound from the TV set played through the
stereo set better than through the TV speakers, and then program
it to also turn on the stereo and switch to the right input
source.

I don’t have the “watch TV” and “Play DVD” settings
set right yet so that I can easily switch between them. But I’m
sure it’s possible.

Some of the programming seems odd —
there isn’t a “power off” button that will work all the devices.
The thing that looks like it should do that is actually an “end
activity” button. So if you’re doing the “watch TV activity, it
does turn off both the cable box and the TV set. But if you
haven’t defined a “Listen to radio” activity, you have to scroll
through 5 or 6 screens on the AV receiver device to find the power
on/off. I think you can fix that by programming some button to be
power on/off, but it seems strange not to have it right there
without doing that.

So on the whole, I recommend the Logitech remotes over the
cheaper ones, if you think programming them to
do what you want will be easier or more fun than finding the
remote you need in your coffe-table remote forest, and if you have
a computer that’s connected to the network running a commercial OS.

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Beet-walnut salad, with tofu croutons

Mark Bittman’s Minimalist
column in the New York Times food section last week had a
recipe for beet walnut salad.

It sounded good, and I had intended to make it for the
after-rehearsal food for the band on Tuesday. But one of the
members said there was a large tray of salad left over from some
conference where she works, so although I had already diced and
roasted the beets, I didn’t get around to making them into salad
until Wednesday night.

The band had made a large dent in the salad on Tuesday, but
there was still a lot left, so I took some of that and added the
beets and walnuts to it. I made a very basic vinaigrette with
just olive oil, vinegar and mustard.

In order to make it more of a main
course, I added some tofu croutons, from Bittman’s How
to Cook Everything Vegetarian. Basically, you cut the block
of tofu into small cubes, flavor them the way you want them, and
put them in a 350°F oven for an hour. I used olive oil mixed
with a mild chile powder and herbes de Provence, salt,
and pepper. I may try 325°F next time; the smallest cubes got
a little charred at 350.

I don’t have anyone else’s comments to pass on, but I’m looking
forward to eating the rest for lunch today. The beets and walnuts
do go very well together — the sweetness of the beets needs some
kind of contrast, which in borscht is the sour of the sour cream,
but the nuttiness of the walnuts is good too.

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Can you open the box?

Some day, you’ll probably end up being the person who makes
funeral arrangements for someone you care about.

This happened to me last Spring, when my friend
Bonnie Rogers died.

There have been lots of books written about how the funeral
industry takes advantage of people in the first shock of their
grief and causes them to spend thousands or tens of thousands of
dollars they can’t afford. Some of them probably caused
improvements to happen, so that what happened to me was a fairly
mild version of what these books describe.

What happens is that you go to the funeral home the day after
the death happens and sign papers. They have asked you the big
questions on the phone (where’s the funeral, cremation or
burial…), and they have papers drawn up with what they think are
the standard things people want.

Of course you can argue about lots of the charges, but if your
loved one left enough money to cover the standard stuff, you
probably have lots of other things that you need to spend your
energy on at that time, and I recommend not worrying about whether
you’re spending a few hundred dollars more than you need to.

However, there is one question you should ask, which with 20/20
hindsight, I don’t see any way I could possibly have known that it
was important, and getting the right answer would have saved both
time and money.

One decision you have to make when you’re there signing the
papers is what kind of box to put the ashes in. They show you a
selection, and you point out that the ashes are being scattered so
paying for an objet d’art doesn’t make sense. So they
suggest a plain brass box, which costs more than you would think a
box that size would cost, but you’ve decided that arguing about
that kind of thing isn’t worth it.

So you get to the ash scattering event a month later. A dozen
friends who either want to support you through a difficult time,
or weren’t able to come to the funeral and really want a ceremony for saying goodbye
all get together at the spot you’ve picked and you sing some hymns
that got left off the list at the funeral and people read some
things they want to read. And you start to open the box, and
there’s no official way to open it. The dozen people collectively
have several Swiss Army knives, so eventually you get it pried
open without cutting large gashes in anyone’s hands and scatter
the ashes.

But you should have gotten the Funeral Director to tell you how
to open the box.

It could be worse — James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star
Trek wanted his ashes shot into space, and died before the
technology for that was perfected. His son gave an interview
about how difficult all the failed launches were for him to deal
with.

But we have had the technology for making boxes that stay
closed until you want to open them, and then open easily, for thousands of years, and
if you want to scatter ashes, you should make sure you’re buying
that technology.

Lavinia

I read Lavinia,
by Ursula
LeGuin while in Fall River
over the weekend. It was about as good as you’d expect if
you’ve read LeGuin’s other “Anthropology Fiction”. The review
which brought the book to my attention said that it
wasn’t as good as The
Left Hand of Darkness, but the reviewer had looked at it again before
filling out her Hugo Award ballot, and decided it was definitely
one of the best five new books she’d read last year.

My personal favorite of Leguin’s is The
Dispossessed, but I agree with the assessment.

As always, the writing is superb. The phrase that sticks in my
mind is a reference to an aging woman as being “in the twilight of
the mind”. It probably struck me more because I was with my 86
year old mother, but it really seems like a kinder way to
describe what happens than “senility”. In my mother’s case, her
mind still works as well as ever on what she’s actually
concentrating on at the moment, but she just doesn’t seem to be
able to think of anything besides what she’s concentrating on at
the moment.

As far as her reconstruction of how Vergil might have wanted to
finish the Aeneid, as I remember Aeneas from my Vergil course with
<a href="Professor
Putnam in 1972, I didn’t see him
as someone who would have agonized over having committed a war
crime. But the scene where Vergil wonders whether his friend
the Emperor Augustus will get the point does ring true.

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Following up

I’m back at home, mostly unpacked, and typing this on a real
computer, with an X-windows system that I know what it’s going
to do when I try to copy and paste, where emacs has psgml
installed, and there’s a clicky keyboard at the
right height. And it’s now past when I normally post, so I
thought for a quick post I would write some followup posts, and
save anything strenuous for tomorrow.

Pianos are out of tune

Saturday’s post
on tuning drew an official comment with a book
recommendation. It also drew an email from my friend Ishmael,
who works in a lab at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear
Infirmary. A colleague of his has written an article
claiming that there’s a neurophysical basis for the stretched
octave. His research subjects for this article are cats, who
tend in my experience to have rather wierd musical tastes, so I
don’t know that this is relevant to why equal temperament was
adopted as the standard tuning by humans, but you can read it
and decide for yourself.

Ishmael also reminded me in the same email that we both play in
lots of contexts where the official tuning system is completely
irrelevant because enough of the performers or instruments
aren’t capable to keeping to a system. This is probably
historically true of an awful lot of music. Which is why many
tuning discussions seem pretty off-the-wall to most practicing
musicians.

Concert construction

Last Wednesday’s
post about the concert program drew an email from one of the
participants. He agreed that more instrumental music would have
been good, and also said that a wider variety of instruments
(more serpent, some crumhorns) might have helped.

I’ve loved you so long

I said in my
post about this movie that I’d had A la claire
fontaine running through my head a little bit wrong since I
saw it. I eventually got out my book of French folk songs and
learned it.

Nokia 810

In my post on my
new Nokia 810, I may have forgotten to mention that it
works much better than the Nokia 770 did as an MP3
player.

I also found a new application for it — because of the foldout
stand, I was able to set it up on my bedside table in Fall River
as a traveling clock.

Blogging in my 59th year

This post
drew a couple of comments, including one from Mike Cane, whom I had
cited as part of my inspiration for doing this.

He remarks that he’s sure the energy he put into it has
shortened his life, and he doesn’t know how people do it on a
longer term basis.

I think my one post a day isn’t quite as energetic as Mike was
doing — it doesn’t seem any harder than practicing a musical
instrument every day, which I’ve done for several decades. Of
course there is a limit to how many things you can do every day,
and this is cutting into some of the others.

Solar powered Christmas lights

Last Christmas, my sister decided her yard looked drab compared
with all the neighbors’ Santas and reindeer. So she bought some
solar
lighting. They looked fine when we
assembled them out of the box, but that evening as night fell, one
of them glowed weakly, and the other didn’t light up at all.

We hoped it was because we’d set them up in the afternoon and they
hadn’t had a full day to charge the batteries, but the next day was
the same, so we tried putting them on the south side of the house,
which was a little better but still not very much light for very
long.

I’ve been thinking about that because the lights are still there,
and now, in mid-March, they’re working fine. They come on at dusk,
and are only starting to weaken when I walk the dog at bedtime.

In June and July, they’ll probably run for a good part of the
night.

So the moral of the story is that if you want to use solar power to
celebrate, the summer solstice or either equinox is a better bet than
the winter solstice, at least here in southern New England.

Why pianos are out of tune

I recommended How
Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)
by <a href="Ross
Duffin
last week
without having read it, so this week I decided to read it.

The description of “how” equal temperament took over is a bit
vague, but the “when” is extremely detailed without being dry
and scholarly, largely thanks to the entertaining biographies of
the major players.

Where I would have really liked more detail is in where to go
to listen to non-equal temperaments. He does recommend 6
degrees of tonality and Beethoven
in the temperaments by Enid Katahn as CD’s for hearing a
piano tuned in non-equal temperaments. But his
arguments about “why you should care” seem to be the standard
“early music” ones: Beethoven did it on this kind of piano and
so should we. I’d be surprised if they convinced any of the
people who believe that Beethoven really wanted his sonatas
played on a modern Steinway, and was just stuck with those silly
fortepianos that were always breaking strings.

I actually think you can make a case that it isn’t equal
temperament that makes modern pianos out of tune, but rather the
other way around — there’s no possible way to make a modern piano
in tune, so that’s why equal temperament, which is “easier” in
ways that Duffin explains in detail, became accepted.

Piano tuning

I think Ross Duffin doesn’t really realize how out of tune any
modern piano is, even when just tuned by a good tuner to exactly
the frequencies that are theoretically accepted as the best
ones.

Octaves

There’s one issue that he does explain in detail, and that is
that the octaves are in fact wider than the doubled frequency
Pythagoras and Helmholz and all tuners before the metal framed
piano believed in.

Many people’s eyes glaze over when I try to explain this, even
though I think it’s one of the most elegantly complicated
explanations in the history of musical acoustics. So if your
eyes glaze over on complicated explanations, feel free to skip
to the next section.

The short answer for why a note on a piano is more than twice
the frequency of the note an octave below it is that with a
string as stiff as a piano string the
overtones are sharper than the harmonics.

That is, with a light string like a harpsichord or guitar has,
when the string vibrates in two sections to produce the first
overtone, the lengh is in fact almost exactly half the length of the
string, making the frequency twice the frequency of the string’s
fundamental tone.

On a piano, however, the string is so stiff that when it
vibrates in two sections, the actual vibrating length is
noticeably less that half the length of the string. And the
difference is even more pronounced with the higher
overtones.

So if you tuned a piano so that the fundamental of a string
was precisely twice the fundamental of the string an octave below
it, you would have horrible beats between the first overtone of
the lower string and the fundamental of the higher string, and
even more horrible beats between other pairs of overtones.

So one of the things piano tuners do is figure out how much
they have to “stretch” each octave to minimize these beats
formed by the out-of-tune harmonics.

Unisons

If you’ve looked at piano pieces, you can see that pianists
play octaves all the time — there are whole genres of piano
music where the left hand is doing nothing but play a walking
bass line in octaves. So if you have to tune octaves out of
tune, there’s no way anyone is going to ever hear a piano as in
tune no matter what theoretical temperament the tuner uses.

But it gets worse than that — not only are the octaves all
sharp — all the unisons are deliberately tuned out of tune.

Only the bottom notes of the piano are played by one string —
the others are have two or three strings (usually) hit by the
hammer. (The soft pedal works by shifting the hammers over so
that only one string is played instead of all two or three.)

Most piano tuners believe that the piano sound is richer if the
two or three strings that play one note are tuned a little bit
differently from each other, to produce something like one beat
per second.

And of course, if you think about the description above of why
the octaves have to be out of tune, you can see that even one
string played all by itself is producing overtones that are “out
of tune” by any theoretical tuning system based on simple
ratios.

Alternate history

So I think the history of the acceptance of equal temperament
as the dominant tuning system may be something like this:

During the late Renaissance and Baroque eras, people played
music that became more chromatic and more based on harmonies and
played in a wider variety of keys. So tuning systems wer invented with
more compromises in order to play
the wider variety of notes and intervals. This is much better described in Ross Duffin’s 150 page
book than I can do here.

During the nineteenth century, pianos became larger and louder,
and therefore needed to use stiffer strings, so tuning them to any
system based on single frequencies and their ratios became
impossible.

Pianos also became the dominant instrument, so that most
singers and other instrumentalists were most likely to perform
with a piano as accompaniment rather than with an organ or a cello.

It became increasingly difficult to tell the difference between
the non-equal temperaments favored by the nineteenth century piano
tuners (even when they said they were tuning equal temperaments)
and an equal temperament. And the equal temperament is easier to
train people to tune. So starting in 1917, all piano tuning
manuals advocated equal temperament, and most instrumental
instruction included at least methods for dealing with playing
with an equal tempered instrument, even if they believed some
other kind of tuning was preferable for solo playing.

However, piano tuners (and pianists) do in fact believe that
piano tuning is an art, not a science, so when they’ve finished
tempering all their fifths and stretching all their octaves and
detuning all their unisons the way the manual or their tuning
course told them to, then they play the piano and fix
anything that doesn’t sound right to them. I haven’t looked up
the literature, but I’m pretty sure that this often results in a
tuning where a very large fraction of the strings are vibrating a
a frequency very different from what a computer program will tell
you is an equal tempered scale.

Summary

None of which is to imply that I didn’t enjoy Ross Duffin’s book a lot, or that you shouldn’t read it if you’re interested in its subject matter.

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Cream of Parsnip Sweet Potato Soup

This was the soup of the week after the Cantabile Band
rehearsal last Tuesday.

I talked to someone at a party in January who had also just
gotten a farm share for the first time, and she said the
associated purchase she had enjoyed most was an immersion blender,
so you can make blended soups right in the pot without other
dishwashing. So I was at the hardware store for something else
last week and I bought a Cuisinart
Smart Stick Hand Blender. As was also true of my cuisinart
bread machine, it came with a nice booklet of sample recipes, one
of which was for a parsnip-sweet potato purée. I still had
a bunch of small sweet potatoes from the farm share, so I decided
to modify it to make a soup.

I had about 5 small sweet potatoes, and a pound of parsnips.
I peeled them and cut them into small chunks and put them to simmer in my
2-quart cast iron pot with water to more than cover and salt and
pepper. I sauteed an onion, some garlic and some peeled and sliced
fresh ginger root, and added that. When the parsnips and sweet
potatoes were soft, I took the blender to the mixture and then
left it on the back burner, which has an especially low simmer.
Then after the rehearsal, I added some half-and-half. If you’re
cooking vegan or for the lactose-intolerant, I don’t think the
half-and-half is necessary; it was a pretty creamy soup before I
did that. But I’d bought it with the parsnips, so I decided to
use it.

One thing to note about soups: the recipes all minimize the
cooking time, and then say to use broth, which has previous
cooking time built into it. If you just simmer you soup for
several hours, the vegetables that are in it make the liquid into
broth. In the case of my after-rehearsal soups, the cooking is
usually done around 6 PM, and the eating is after 10 PM when
rehearsal ends, so there’s always several hours of simmering. So
I don’t bother making broth separately.

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Milk

I saw the movie Milk
last night, on DVD from Netflix.

I usually watch movies with as much acclaim as that one had, so
I’ll be able to talk about them with people. In this case, I was
interested in the subject — I did do left-wing politics (mostly
Cambridge rent control) in the
period covered by the movie, so I was interested to see how
Hollywood would deal with it. Also, I always found it surprising
that the Gay Rights movement took off when it did, because as
someone peripherally involved in the local opera world, I had very
shortly before that been at parties attended largely by gay men,
and I wouldn’t have taken the positive side on any bets on their
ability to work with either women or black civil rights people.

The writing and acting are pretty good, so the award
nominations are justified. Josh
Brolin, who plays the assassin Dan
White, is particularly good as a man whose rage grows gradually as
he’s increasingly out of his depth in a situation he can’t
control. (I assume it was a deliberate decision not to ever show
him eating a Twinky.) He was intermittently brilliant in W,
and is consistently so here.

Clearly, nobody would expect any in-depth coverage of the
content of late seventies left-wing politics. I assume that the
word “Marxism” did in fact come up in gay rights circles, but I
wouldn’t expect it in a Hollywood script. What did disappoint me
was that there was no coverage, either verbal or visual, of the
actual work that goes into building a movement. There was one
argument about the content of a flyer, but when the activists are
standing around the store-front campaign office, there’s nobody
stuffing envelopes or making phone calls, or even holding lists of
addresses or phone numbers in their hands. So we’re going to have
to wait for the good European cinematographers to show us what an
political movement actually looks like. Like most such films, the
writers and actors do know how to depict the drunken sensation
of crowd-swaying rhetoric.

As far as how the gay rights movement hooked up with women and
blacks, that does get a little bit of coverage. The scene where
the female campaign manager comes in and takes over the
ultimately successful campaign for Supervisor is really
well-done. But there’s no depiction of any of what led to
Harvey Milk’s Gay Rights bill being co-sponsored by a black
woman, although they do include the scene where it passes and
Milk and the woman embrace.

So I would say to watch this movie if you’re interested in the
subject matter, but don’t expect it to enlarge your
understanding of the politics of the time.

Blog schedule

I’ll be at my Mother’s house in darkest Fall River, Massachusetts, for the next three or four days. I’m
expecting to have a good enough internet connection to continue
with this blog, but if I miss days, it’s because something didn’t work
right.

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Concert Program Construction

This is also something I need to think about. We’re planning
the Walk for Hunger
program. Also, I’ve been mulling some of the comments I got
about the Loring-Greenough house program.

Last program

Apparently everyone found the first half of the
Loring-Greenough program a bit heavy and hard to take:

A friend who’s not a very experienced concertgoer said,
“It’s all about dying, it’s so depressing.”
A very experienced performer told me that I should have made
more comments, which would have paced it better.
A fairly experienced musician said, “There was an awful lot
of stuff in minor keys.” I think this one isn’t even true, for
instance, The silver swan is in a major key.
Another experienced performer said she thought there should
have been more instrumental music on the first half. The
original version of the program did have some, but it was part
of what got cut to get the length right.

These might all really be the same reaction. I’m sure having
some instrumentals breaking up the vocals would have been a good
idea. Also, there were really two sections, both fairly dark.
The material flowed pretty smoothly between the section about
tears and frustration and the section about death, but maybe
having one of those sections on the second half, and some of the
stuff from the second half about dancing and singing and having
fun on the first half would have made a better balance.

Of course, it’s also possible that it came out so dark and
frustrating because we weren’t doing it well enough. Things
like Flow my tears and The silver swan
should be uplifting, not depressing, and maybe we just aren’t
quite good enough to do that.

Next program

Every year, the Cantabile Band plays for the Walk for Hunger. This
happens on the first Sunday in May at a beautiful spot on the
banks of the Charles River. This is one of the more reliable
times for good weather in this part of the world, and The Walk
for Hunger is one of the popular charities where it’s possible
to tell the people you work with that you’re doing it and get
them to contribute money. So this is our opportunity to play
for tens of thousands of people, although not many of them
stay to listen for vary long, even when the weather is warm
enough to sit and listen.

So you want fairly upbeat, walking tempo music; there’s no
chance of too long a section about death and dying. It will
be most of the same people who played the last concert (Stuart
the cellist is going to be out of town, but the rest of us are
all playing). I haven’t heard from anyone else who wants to
do it, but I’ve given people another couple of weeks to
decide.

At rehearsal yesterday we came up with one set that goes
together:

Weelkes, Pipe it up tabor, which is about the
frustrations of a Morris team dance leader who has people with
aching joints who can’t dance very well.
Weelkes, Come, Sirrah Jack, ho, which is about
using tobacco to fix the aching joints.
Morley, Arise, get up my dear, which has morris
dancing in it.

We might also include some real morris dances, and preface it
with the Dowland It was a time when silly bees could
speak, where an exasperated king gets the last word about
the complaining silly bees.

Another feature of that spot is that it’s where I chose to
scatter the ashes of our group member who died last May, so we
do have to sing something for Bonnie, but I’m sure we’ll find a
cheerful thing she liked to sing in May, rather than insisting
on all the stuff that helped us while she was dying.