dropping by

I'm enduring a forced layoff from the guitar. My guitar strap had slowly been slipping from day to day until it arrived at the point where the edge of the guitar was pinching a nerve on the inside of my right elbow. The ring finger and pinky on my right hand were going numb and tingly, even hurting a bit at the same time, although I suppose the idea of "painful numbness" is a little oxymoronic. It was getting to the point where I could bring my right arm up to playing position--without the guitar strapped on--and the painful numbness would set in.

In the meantime, the track pad on my laptop was doing a number on the fine muscles on the underside of my forearm, so that began to hurt, too. The two were feeding each other.

I'm disappointed, because I was playing every day and getting some good practice in on my right hand picking.

But, I have this idea that I could work on various aspects of my left hand while the right hand is out of action. For it be meaningful, I would need the balancing weight of the right arm present. Maybe I can stuff a pad of some kind under the crook of my right arm for the duration.

In the meantime, I'm practicing on Absolute Pitch Blaster at every opportunity. I estimate I've been through about 400 waves of the little Space Invaders-type aliens. I've been back to the beginning stage of C eight times so far. Whenever I got stuck I would go back to the beginning and open up a new player. As of tonight, I've completed the C level on all eight.

G is definitely making itself felt in my consciousness when doing exercises. Now and then, I find I can cheat a little bit. I might be sketchy on whether C is present, but I hear the G and I'm able to judge from that signpost whether the other notes are laid out tonally around C. If it's a really tight cluster around G, well there you have it. No C possible in that handful of notes.

In regular listening, I'm not hearing C or G jump out at me, but something is happening where I'll hear a note and think, "Hey, I've heard that note before!" In one case, the first violin note of a Stravinsky movement was the exact same note RF opens with on "Heavenly Music Corporation." (I checked.)

I bought the first volume of George Russell's "Lydian Chromatic Concept."

In its most basic outlines, it explains something I'd noticed about the 4th degree of the major scale, that it very strongly contradicts the 1/do of the major scale. It seems to say, "No, wait! I'm the tonic!" And in Russell's musical scheme, this is in fact the case. The 4th degree of the major scale is the "lydian do" and is actually the ultimate vertical root note.

Also, when describing the "chordmodes" Russell starts with a full-blown 13th chord, with every note of the scale stacked by thirds, rather than with triads. And he sharpens the 4th/11th note.

I've played around with #11 chords on keyboards before and found them to have a nice settled sound. Not suprisingly, they're often the cliche closing chord of a jazz piece.

This sharpened 4th/11th is the defining note of the lydian scale, and the most unified vertical expression of a tonality has a sharpened 4th rather than the natural 4th we're used to.

This means the major scale functions as it does in triadic, functional harmony because that 4th degree divides the scale against itself.

--diatonic="dia" meaning "two."

--"diatonic scale"=a scale with two tonics

In studying Mathieu's book, he notes that, in key of C, the 4th degree F never appears in the overtone series. To derive the 4th, you have to go a 5th below C.

This is significant to Russell's work. He cites the Perfect 5th as the ultimate carrier of "tonal gravity." The lower note of a Perfect 5th interval has that root sound, and when you go the Pythagorean route to derive your scale notes, this means tonal gravity runs "downhill" through the 5ths until it gets to the bottom.

Except that, in key of C, you find F at the bottom of the chain of 5ths.

My own ear tells me that the sounding of a Perfect 5th will set up a feeling of a key on the lower note of the interval. I noticed this years ago when I was studying the Burge relative pitch course, and so I can hear what he's talking about.

There's more to this than I have the patience to get into right now, but everything I've studied so far accords quite well with what my ear tells me. And I'm attracted to his notion of a "musical mandala" where every chord progression and tonality is nested within a unity.

He does a very nice analysis of Bach's "Chromatic Fantasy" and shows Bach had a very well-developed vertical sense of tonality. I love this piece, especially Trey Gunn's version from the Robert Fripp String Quintet album. I also like Coltrane's "Giant Steps," and Russell makes a very compelling case for how the two had arrived at a very similar musical consciousness by two very different paths.

And then we get to circulations in "C major" performed in the guitar circle.

I'm not always sure we're circulating in C major. I strongly suspect we are in fact circulating in F lydian sometimes. I rarely hear anything in our little ribbon of notes resembling triadic changes in functional harmony. Not that it couldn't happen. When someone picks up a bass note progression, then it becomes more possible, I suppose.

At our last meeting, we stumbled onto a really nice E phrygian circulation. Somehow or other, we spontaneously began leaning on the E at the 12th fret, second string. Little or nothing was said about it afterward, but it felt to me like our group consciousness had learned something and our collective ears had expanded. As a group we had found something truly new (for us) that we could add to our bag of tricks.

The "Cloud of Unknowing" in "Trapiche" is nominally supposed to be in E phrygian, so I wonder if this new discovery will make itself felt in that piece.

Last Wednesday, I had this experience of doom and alienation like I have not felt for maybe 12 years. It was The Black Hand of Doom(tm), back from the grave to make me feel like it was all hopeless and that I was on the edge of a freakout of some kind. Something had blown the lid off all this existential angst, and while it sucked to have to feel this way, I also found myself questioning whether it was real or not. I don't generally feel like this on a day-to-day basis these days. Was all this stuff lurking in the background the whole time, but I just had it shoved down where I couldn't see it? I don't know. I haven't decided yet.

It might have been sheer exhaustion that brought this on. I was physically unable to get out of bed the next day after staying up into the wee hours for several days in a row, so that probably had something to do with it.

It took a little while to put this in perspective.

On Friday, a pleasant evening of socializing in Mt. Lookout was capped off by some random douchebag fratboy insulting me and asking his buddy, "Hey, who are we going to kill tonight?"

In that moment, I offered no outward reaction or sign that I had even noticed him, but it's been nagging me. It makes me angry and makes me want to hurt the guy.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a person who thinks it acceptable to demean and threaten a complete stranger. No good can come of it.

Maybe I had a brief brush with a sociopath.