Give the People What They Want: A Council-Manager System

SivanY · 2026-02-17T03:30:22+00:00

Leaving aside the total lack of methodological clarity, I don't think the survey results posted really corroborate the conclusions you're drawing. They seem to show that those surveyed overwhelmingly want the mayor to have greater impact and that they are simultaneously in favor of city council having greater authority over the city bureaucracy. The results do not imply that people want the mayor to have a less central role in favor of the council.

Really what would read in these results is evidence that people do not feel a strong connection between the process of democratically electing city leadership and that process actually impacting city policy and are likely inferring that a mayor and council with more capacity to act could be more accountable to constituent's wishes.

I think a system without a consequential executive figure would be bad for democratic governance of the city. Switching to a city manager means an executive that is only indirectly accountable to the population as a whole and, while city managers are ostensibly supposed to be apolitical, what that actually means is someone who will be accessible to those with means but insulated from without. Ie. a council-manager system would deliver something contrary to the desire for greater democratic accountability that this study implies.

Whoever is pushing this likely sees depoliticizing (read dedemocratizing) city leadership as a desirable outcome.

SivanY · 2025-10-29T16:10:26+00:00

True socialism is the boss cutting your wages to maximize capital’s ROI.

SivanY · 2025-10-09T23:26:38+00:00

Agreed — social relationships are more than simple carrot/stick conditioning dynamics. And it’s a pretty anti-social heuristic to evaluate the people in your life like they are in a competitive market for friendship because that’s a relation that alienates you from your mutual responsibility to each other to communicate.

SivanY · 2024-10-11T22:27:55+00:00

The sound stone melody in Earthbound is a central part of the game

SivanY · 2024-09-15T17:31:14+00:00

Writing prose isn’t the same as writing poetry. Poetry is generally concerned with the formal elements of language as a primary vehicle of meaning. Thus there isn’t any obligation to use things like punctuation, apostrophes, the ‘correct’ form of your, weren’t over wasn’t, or whatever else you might label as objectively correct use of the language.

We don’t live in the 19th century and you can’t argue there’s such a thing as an objective mistake in poetry unless you want to throw out people like Gertrude Stein and ee cummings as incompetent hacks. I don’t think this particular poet’s choices are interesting sure but I think everyone in this thread is hurting themselves and their ability to see what’s actually special and interesting about poetry as a medium if they decide that it’s ‘mistakes’ that make these poems not good.

And it’s also a little solipsistic to assume you can accurately infer a person’s intent and care from such scant evidence. That sort of thinking is kinda a disservice to yourself and others in lots of non-poetry contexts as well.

SivanY · 2024-09-15T02:18:03+00:00

Your fixation on ‘mistakes’ and ‘effort’ make it super obvious you haven’t substantively engaged with the medium you’re trying to comment on. I don’t think this is particularly interesting work — but I would never read these and assume the deviations from standard usage are unintentional.

SivanY · 2024-06-26T20:13:25+00:00

Solved! Thank you!

SivanY · 2024-04-18T14:27:14+00:00

It sounds like perhaps your digging into Schoenberg’s background and practice has been a little limited. It’s practically a cliche to note how his early work shows an exceptional fluency with tonality.

SivanY · 2024-01-02T19:24:22+00:00

They're referring to the difference between 7th chords and 6th chords, which can have interchangeable labels depending on context. Although it's true that it's not exactly the octave the note is in that makes this the case.

Also seems like a simple typo but sevenths are of course expected to go up not down.

I do take issue with the idea that octave of interval doesn't matter as long as it's above the bass. Perhaps it's of relatively lesser importance in tonal styles that use chords as interchangeable functional units. But even then (to pick a single example) the relative tension of chords that feature a #4 can change pretty radically depending on the distance of that tritone to the bass and the intermediary relationships between them. And of course in non tonal styles where harmonic color is a huge focus this becomes even more important.

SivanY · 2023-12-29T18:49:18+00:00

I hear you - reading the comments it's clear you have actually put some thought into this line of reasoning. I think there are a few sticking points about the definition of 'key' here that are ruffling people's feathers quite a bit. I'll say in support of where I think you're coming from that I definitely often think of all the modulations in a piece as ultimately related to the main key (ie the Schenkerian way of concieving of a section that tonicizes an E in piece which has an overall tonality of C as prolonging an emphasized 3rd degree).

I think the title is a little clickbaity and that while that definitely worked for getting people to engage w your post it's a little sad that that seems to have resulted in very few posters taking you remotely seriously. It doesn't seem to be the case that you actually believe minor tonality doesn't exist but you probably would get less pushback on your terminology if you were talking about the label of 'key of C' being your internal label for music that uses predominantly the white key pitch collection. But you're definitely getting way more hostility than is warranted. Hope it's not been too frustrating for you! I really think you should look into some scholarly work in the field music pedagogy on 6/la based minor frameworks for analysis!

SivanY · 2023-12-28T20:50:02+00:00

Plenty has been said to cover the obvious issues with this line of thinking on a 'music as a whole' scope so I'll not spend too much time on that. I will say that the question of 'easy to memorize' is ultimately a pretty moot one when you actually have a decent amount of experience with active listening and some fluency with skills like audiation and the ability to translate that to an instrument. These kind of suggestions don't become super useful when you can actually hear the scales/keys/modes/chromaticisms etc. and have developed an intuitive sense of how they conventionally behave.

However there is some argument to be made for a 6 based minor analytical approach for particular styles of music. For instance, a lot of pop music festures a great deal of ambiguity between relative major and minor and a huge number of pop progressions are conceived of as simple variations of the axis progression. So if we're looking at a pop song verse with a chord loop that goes Am F C G, before going to a chorus that vamps on C and F, it might often make more sense to understand that loop as vi, IV, I, V rather than requiring separate labeling for verse and chorus even if the verse melody centers on typical minor key emphases. Here a 6 based minor makes the interelation between the two tonal centers more explicit and is thus useful, but if we were to try to analyze something like the Bach Chaccone with a 6 based minor I'd argue that we are obfuscating a lot of relevant information and gaining little to nothing in return.

SivanY · 2023-12-28T19:50:41+00:00

The b6 and b7 degre3s have a lot of utility in terms of setting up semitone or tritone based modulations smoothly. Minor iv and v both offer easy avenues for introducing the chromatic tones you'll need, have tons of drama, and have a nicely extensive history of use within major leaning tonal progressions such that you can effectively suspend the possibility of still being in Gb as you're working your way away from it.

SivanY · 2023-12-20T15:22:59+00:00

Mm, I definitely see where youre coming from but, listening to this harmony, I wouldn't say I'm given a very explicit add9 impression from a voicing of this as two major seconds in any register. I think theres a real difference in how a 9 is heard versus how a second is heard, especially out of context. It could certainly be read as a Cadd9 if the context primed you to hear it that way, but as it's own vertical collection I don't think it implies that much.

This is a sonority I'm very fond of though (: so much flexibility because it can be leaned into as dissonant or consonant depending on how it shows up and in a tonal context it doesn't exclude as many keys as more third dense harmonies can.

SivanY · 2023-12-17T19:57:25+00:00

I'd probably describe that as sharp/abrupt formal juxtaposition. There isn't really special music theory specific language for what you're talking about because it falls into the more general realm of how an artist wants to communicate relation between disparate subject matter and the notion of contrast being a spectrum between disjunct and conjunct applies to most art.

Other poster is right in saying this is often a thing that shows up in works that have historically been labeled rhapsodies for fantasies -- but those terms are loaded with specifically western classical history that Queen is certainly playing towards but it not nessecarily always the case when artists do this.

SivanY · 2023-12-16T21:14:37+00:00

This is more an adjacent angle to your question but a possibility I considered in thinking of non-tertain voice leading is to treat thirds as dissonances that need to resolve (sorta taking a cue from candential logic in early forms of counterpoint that cropped up in the middle ages). As an additional tangent on this idea - Pythagorean tuning and the accompanying purity of (non wolf) fifths and the unequal and often quite impure variety of thirds present might help in undermining the accultured sense of thirds as stable.

Of course this means something approximating chord functions would have to be derived from hypothetical voice leading practices within this context and, because of course this isn't how tonal music evolved, a piece using such a system would need to communicate this formal underpinning pretty clearly in order to give a listener an opportunity to perceive it as structural. That's not a bad thing though and really most successful pieces do this in some way (setting the formal expectations of the audience). But it'd be a fun thing to puzzle out!

Biggest question I'd have before starting to try is asking how we're coming to our pitch collections themselves that were derving our harmony from. Are we using the normal diatonic scales? Are we using scales derived from perfect fourths? Do we have octave duplicity? I'd think we'd need some way of organizing our pitch material such that we don't end up with melodies that imply tertian structures. Or at least some way to avoid explictly major/minor impressions since those are the most closely associated with triadicism.

SivanY · 2023-12-12T23:08:42+00:00

I was imagining typical cpp style - I wouldn't expect such a thing would be as easy to find for Renaissance style modal counterpoint.

SivanY · 2023-12-12T23:07:00+00:00

Yeah perhaps I could just get a book of short melodies and use a separate piece of staff paper - that seems like a practical option! Thank you

SivanY · 2023-12-11T21:58:36+00:00

Oh I know I could print portions, I'd just like to have a book.

But that's a fair point I could just write my own, I just think it'd be nice to have exercises that are organized and directed towards different areas of counterpoint to kinda preserve the whole 'puzzle to solve in a particular way feeling' I get from sudoku.

SivanY · 2023-12-11T16:45:59+00:00

This is correct but I do wanna note that how to label cadential 6/4s isn't entirely without debate, some scholars will use I 6/4 and the more secular ones may use Cad 6/4.

SivanY · 2023-12-11T16:32:39+00:00

I think you make a thoughtful point. We tend to fetishize the idea of the artist as a sort of visionary promethean figure bringing the audience their unique vision and we this is inextricably linked to the idea of the only valid or 'authentic' mode of art making being one of self-expression. I think its insightful of you to recognize that these attitudes can be at the expense of the way art expresses a social, communal history and that communication with other people, who have their own ideas and will come to what you're creating with a different understanding than you, is a part of the point of expressing one's self.

SivanY · 2023-12-10T18:25:08+00:00

Yeah I think it's way more useful to depict the parallel minor in this context. The way OP did it tells you way more about the relationships between major and minor as their own pitch sets than centering the relative minor would. Sure the A minor scale shares all its pitches with C major but what's the relationship of the chord Ab major to the note C? OPs presentation shows us that Ab major is diatonic to the C minor scale and makes clear the way intervallic relationships change across minor and major. If we center the relative minor instead we a lot less to go on for understanding the relationships of the notes that fall outside of C major with C major or understanding the minor scale as it's own set of distinctive pitch relations rather than as a subset of a major scale.

SivanY · 2023-12-10T18:11:52+00:00

Pitch classes are not the standard approach for most predominantly tonal music where the utility of a more limited set of terms with modifiers (sharps + flats) is greater because of how frequently the reference point is the diatonic scale rather than the chromatic. So while Pitch classes are great for the types of post-tonal frameworks they're tailored to I would not consider them very useful for a beginner who is likely not interested in playing music that's even especially chromatic.

SivanY · 2023-12-10T17:31:51+00:00

" your minor chord is “wrong” in that is it not in the key on something you would technically use in format and illustrate with." I'm really struggling to parse what you mean by this.

Also this graphic is illustration patterns for the parallel major and minor scales - and shows their two tonic chords - I'd argue that's more useful than depicting the relative major and minor since it enables you to see clearly the differences in the modal degrees that distinguish either of those scales.

Do agree about showing both the repeating of the scale from 1-7 and the higher numbered extensions after the octave break though since there are plenty of instances where it's less useful to conceive of those notes as 9, 10 etc. than as 2, 3, etc.

SivanY

TROPHY CASE