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May 9th, 2009
hi everybody 
i’ve just started looking at the prelude of the 4th english suite by j.s. bach. it’s an interesting work and i thought i’d share some of my thoughts.
firstly the basic structure of the piece. like the prelude of the second english suite (and to an extent the third, which is rather more episodic in character), the basic form is ABA. interesting is the brevity of the A section, which amounts to 19 (20) bars. the piece has a total length of 108 bars, meaning that the B section is more than three times as long as the A section.
the two sections have different melodic styles. the A section is more like the first theme of a sonata, with a rising melody. here the counterpoint rarely consists of parallel thirds or sixths. instead bach stresses the major beats as being harmonic, with the remaining space between the beats being filled with 16th notes or dotted rhythms which rarely result in parallel movement. the B section is different, starting as it does with a new theme made of 8th notes in parallel thirds.
most melodic ideas in the piece work as leading phrases. both themes of the counterpoint in the A section lead into the first beat of a bar. the first theme in 16th notes consists of a rising 15 note lead in followed by two 8th notes establishing the tonic. the second theme (which follows directly and acts as a counterpoint for the first theme) is a melodically static theme made of dotted rhythms with some decoration (mordants and trills). harmonically, apart from one interrupted cadence before the full cadence at the end of the section, there is no hint of a minor key in section A.
section B starts with a reduction in pace. whereas in section A the 16th notes had melodic significance, here they are used in an alberti fashion, resulting in movement as 8th notes. this is also a falling melody. the effect is of a second subject in sonata form, traditionally described as feminine. another idea in section B, and probably the most attractive idea by first listening, is made by the repeated 8th notes chords with suspensions and accompaniment by broken chords. these establish a strong half note speed for harmonic progressions. this impression is reinforced with a further melodic idea bach introduces (found at the end of bar 28 up to the start of bar 31 in the treble), which bach harmonises with half note speed harmonics resulting in strong suspensions on the 7th with (delayed) upwards resolution. the first few times this comes it moves upwards. later bach inverts it to great harmonic effect.
oops, gotta go. maybe i’ll continue this later.
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June 3rd, 2008
well you may be wondering why i’ve been so quiet recently. Basically i’ve had a lot to do and little desire to write anything. there are however a few interesting things going on in my life, so i thought i’d fill you all in, my loyal and true readers.
firstly i was in berlin for a couple of days. that was fun unfortunately i managed to break my ubuntu installation an my laptop on the way there, so i couldn’t program anything and instead had to be sociable–a singularly unpleasant experience.
then i got back home and discovered that i’d been putting on weight, so i’m now on a strict diet (and have been for a week now). hopefully i’ll soon be my old, slim self. weight-training is going really well too
what else? well, i’m writing a lot of php and javascript for a project at work. that’s a lot more fun than seam/java, because you can actually see what you’ve done without spending 2 minutes redeploying. it is however a lot of work, and the initial time estimate is probably out by a factor of ten.
that’s all that i can think of atm. if anything else occurs to me, i’ll fill it in here.
oh yes i bought an eee pc (and installed hardy heron on it). apart from problems with wireless encryption, everything works. actually, i’m not sure i have problems with encryption, as i’ve never got encryption working on my router at home. it may be, that the router’s broken, and not the wireless driver (big bad binary blob for the atheros chipset, so you don’t expect it to work anyway). it is a really cool little computer and fits in the pockets of my cargos
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May 9th, 2008
ich habe soeben eine anwendung fuer googledocs entdeckt. ich wollte soeben zuhause eine sammelbestellung bei emp.de abgeben, der eine hatte aber die falsche artikelnummer eingetragen, also konnte ich nicht bestellen. emp.de aber speichert den warenkorb in einem session-cookie, also habe ich den cookie geklaut und in googledocs gespeichert, damit ich ihn auf arbeit benutzen kann
schauen wir mal, ob es funzt. ich bin gespannt
update—
leider hat es nicht geklappt. vor allem schwierig war es, die cookies.sqlite-datenbank zu bearbeiten, aber google hat ein plugin fuer firefox geschrieben gaaanz cool
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April 26th, 2008
well i’ve just spent most of the day installing ubuntu 8.04 on my ultra10 (remind me to get my blade 1000 fixed someday, so i have a machine that can run solaris, and i refuse to run solaris on anything other than a sparc). sometimes i enjoy battling with whatever bugs you can find, and this time there were lots of them.
you can read about it here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=768997
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April 24th, 2008
as you already don’t know, i’m a pianist. i’m not a good pianist, but i get by. truth be told, i’m pretty lazy and spend way too little time practising the things i ought to practise and way too much time just playing.
anyway, about 4 years ago i discovered the band “extreme”. up to that moment, i had only ever really enjoyed glenn gould, so extreme was a whole knew music direction for me. at that time i didn’t have broadband, so i bought all the cds i could find and then perchance i happened across the music for “more than words”.
anyway, i spent about 3 months playing guitar about an hour a day until i could play it. and then i put it away and didn’t touch it again until last night. Now i’m wondering if i can spare half an hour a day to get it running again.
On a side note, Nuno Bettencourt looks exactly like one of the characters in my novel.
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April 23rd, 2008
A workmate dragged me to a weight-training establishment last night. He calls it the Folterkammer, but if your heart isn’t in it, and you don’t over do it, it isn’t that bad a torture at all. I managed to display my total weakness, but nobody laughed. Strange.
As all modern men, I’m extremely vain when it comes to my body (though I have very little to be vain about). Maybe I’ll stick at it and turn myself into a second van Damme. Okay, that’s really unlikely.
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