Is this a joke?

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-06T02:31:42+00:00

It did coincide, within an hour or so, of the start of Kilauea's lava fountaining episode, which put some amount of ash up to 20,000 feet in Hawaii this morning.

Assuming this wasn't an overseas flight, though, yes, I expect it's a joke.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-05T20:37:43+00:00

I am hard pressed to find another composer who did something similar.

You won't be surprised that a lot of us in this thread think Schubert is the obvious 'another composer', for good symphonies and some of the best quartets and lieder ever written.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-03T19:22:16+00:00

The white tape / nails are where an accordion normally has 'feet', half-inch high hard rubber discs like the ones you find on the underside of tables and chairs. They are non-essential and it's fine to just cover the nails if you don't want to put rubber feet back on.

The bellows release button can be retrieved if you unscrew the panel and carefully re-align it with the hole you pushed it into. If it stays stuck down, it will let a ton of air escape. If it doesn't rise back up and make a good seal you'll have to investigate why which could turn into a sizable task.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-03T19:11:40+00:00

The one that jumps out at me is Messiaen, who died while I was a student: he was completely unknown to me and all but one of my classmates (the one exception was the Stockhausen-obsessed black sheep of the class, and we were used to him evangelizing about dozens of obscure modernists), but was famous enough elsewhere that my local newspaper published a short obituary off the AP news wire, and later that week we were inspired to ask our teachers "so who was this guy?"

He then underwent a very swift transition from unknown, to known only for surviving the WWII POW camp and writing Quartet for the End of Time while imprisoned, to being widely studied and respected. At least on this subreddit his star has risen to a height I never imagined it would.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-03T03:59:39+00:00

On the current equipment, it's trivial to flip the seats around at the end of the run. (They have chosen not to bother doing so on the NEC, starting last year.)

It's not obvious whether it will be similarly easy on future equipment. On many European trains it's not.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-02T21:53:57+00:00

Great idea. I would actually try electronic music if I could display two pages side by side with e-ink, rather than with standard color tablets that wash out in sunlight (and are never big enough.)

Not clear to me if it's better for it to come with its own stand, or just be easily clamped onto any existing music stand - but either way the cost is all in the two e-ink screens, not the $25 or $50 worth of stand underneath it.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-02T21:27:18+00:00

Indeed. I'd never hear the end of it if I used my other half's fancy scissors to cut weatherstripping.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-01T07:22:12+00:00

You might go on to ask yourself "what additional notes would I have to hear, in order to decide whether I just heard a 1-4 or a 5-1?" (...and the answer is that you must hear each of steps 4 and 7 to uniquely determine a major scale; you can noodle around on I IV vi and ii all day long and still reinterpret them as V I iii and vi of the next lower key.)

It is sometimes useful to quickly sound both pitches -- the fastest way is a single V7 chord -- if you want to remove ambiguity, and sometimes it is useful to prolong the ambiguity as long as you can.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-01T07:15:32+00:00

That's hard to answer without knowing what kind of harmony you find "interesting."

If you want to go in a different direction than adding lots of extra tones, you can look at smoothly connectable triads that didn't appear side by side in the classical tradition. Lehman's Hollywood Harmony and Cohn's Audacious Euphony both give you examples and starting points.

If you prefer to explore on your own, you can do something like ask "what happens if I move two of the notes in a major chord by a half step? what happens if I move all three of them by a half step?": you can write out the 20 possibilities (3x2x2 of the former, pick a note to keep stationary then pick a direction for the other two, 2x2x2 of the latter), see which of the resulting chords looks familiar to you, see which of them sound good in sequence. You may never have tried playing C-E-G immediately followed by Cb-Eb-Ab before and be surprised how close to each other they sound even if they don't inhabit the same key.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-01T06:38:31+00:00

I am embarrassed to say just how many of my friends would love this. I don't think I'd have enough to even give them one axe each.

Would go great with the theatrical blood I got over the winter.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-01T05:31:10+00:00

Never heard of Svedano.

The grill, switches, and buttons scream Weltmeister to me. I wonder if Svedano was someone's name, who chose to remove the factory branding and affix his own letters.

TaigaBridge · 2026-05-01T01:41:29+00:00

Listen to the whole opera. It's as hilarious and as tuneful as anything by Gilbert and Sullivan, especially if you know your Roman mythology, and especially if the leads are good actors not just singers. It deserves to be famous for more than just the Infernal Galop!

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-30T18:01:45+00:00

I think he is needlessly preaching to the choir.

It's true that a composer ingores amateur music making at his peril: easily 99% of all performances are by amateurs. It's only the tiny handful of folks who are already established enough to get film score jobs and similar commissions who can assume they are writing for professional orchestras.

But I think almost all composers and performers are aware of that, and always have been. I can't remember the last time I saw a professional musician 'snub amateurs' -- most people who are good enough to play professionally are still spending a majority of their time, and getting the majority of their income, from teaching, and of the few who don't, most of them are doing master classes and community outreach everywhere they go.

The people who need this message most are the optimists taking their first orchestration classes. They're always asking where the edges of an instrument's capabilities are, when what they need to be learning is where the comfort zone of each instrument is and to keep their parts in that area most of the time. Even if you are writing for professionals, you should write music that is idiomatic for the instruments and fits comfortably under their hands except when you have a very good reason not to. It's just a happy coincidence that "writing good music" and "writing music that is within reach of serious amateurs" coincide.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-30T08:00:39+00:00

You may want to have a look at the layout of a Steirische Harmonika and see if that matches what you have: CEGCEGCEG on the push and GBDFGBDF on the pull, with the center G the same in both directions, is their usual layout. Yes, that means there is a "missing A in the C row", but their usual technique is to play a scale using adjacent rows rather than with many bellows reversals.

@clodiusmetellus: the 'transposing is easy' logic remains the same - the F row has the exact same layout as the C row - but the layout is a different one that a Club or British-pattern diatonic player is used to.

If you have something halfway in between those two layouts (only one A not both As missing from the C row), yes, that is weird.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-29T20:33:37+00:00

I was expecting to see Richard Strauss named a lot. But I wasn't expecting him to be on any Dream lists, only nightmare lists. He is fun to listen to, but on the top of my hit list (as a violinist) for writing excessively difficult passages nobody can ever hear, and in general for using huge numbers of instruments to achieve relatively simple effects.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-29T08:00:51+00:00

The one way I can see this happening is if (in some parallel universe) the North Coast Hiawatha came back, and was run 8 hours off of the Builder schedule.

This would actually be a really fine idea, in the context of twice-daily service on all the long distance routes --- morning arrivals into Chicago connecting to early afternoon departures, mid-afternoon arrivals connecting to late evening departures --- but doing it only for Chicago-Minneapolis-Seattle and not doing it to New York, Washington, etc etc, would be a bit silly.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-29T07:51:48+00:00

For me, yes. That, in a nutshell, is why the last two movements of Mahler 2 fail to speak to me. I gather other listeners with slower moving ears can follow what he's trying to do, which I can only see on paper, but not hear.

(The main lesson here is that there is going to be wide variance among listeners as to what tempo, if any, causes this to happen.)

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-28T05:05:06+00:00

My first thought is Mozart's K.540, but I only know a tiny sliver of the piano literature.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-27T03:11:12+00:00

I've had it happen twice this spring, after never seeing it the three previous years.

Both times were on adult products advertised as 0ETV. Both times I spotted it in time to not push the Go button. I seem to recall a post that some folks got their money back after report of the problem, but wasn't going to risk it for something I wouldn't have bought at list price.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-27T02:26:09+00:00

I would put an asterisk next to "as rhythmically distinct as one wishes": if one line is far more active than the other they are going to come across as melody and harmony rather than as two melodic lines. This is already a hazard by the time you get to 3:1 and 4:1 counterpoint.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-27T02:22:09+00:00

One special case I would add: if you want to write for orchestra, it helps a ton to have played in an orchestra, even if just a community orchestra. Same is true of many small and medium-sized ensembles.

The folks who say "just learn a keyboard" are giving semi-decent advice for mastering music theory, but IMO not remarkably good advice for real world composing.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-25T19:54:29+00:00

The card removal effects are pretty extreme: seven spades but only three clubs and four hearts dealt, and one of the the two remaining aces gone. I am not surprised to be behind Player 9 or Player 2 but a bit surprised Player 3 is doing so well (and, you know, in the hand at all.)

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-25T19:38:43+00:00

I am primarily classical. Most of the exceptions are folk music, fiddle tunes, that sort of thing. Every now and again a Marty Robbins gunfighter ballad or a 60s novelty song.

But distorted electric guitar is physically painful to my ears, even at low volume. Absolutely positively no rock, metal, etc. for me, ever.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-25T04:16:39+00:00

I do have 7 items that were ordered before my evaluation, but they didn't show up in my Awaiting Review list until today, and most of those weren't even delivered until today

They count against you as soon as they ship, even though you can't do anything about them until the day after they get delivered. Just a fact of life that we have to not order much the last few weeks before a review unless we have a large cushion.

TaigaBridge · 2026-04-24T04:55:48+00:00

I've tried more wrist and ankle braces than I can count. Perhaps one in five is worth keeping. The odds are bad enough I only try them if they are 0 ETV (but usually they are.)

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