Culture comes to the hinterlands (updated wth video)

One of the things that I have really missed since moving from Sacramento to Roseburg is a lively classical music scene.  The Real Doctor and I were spoilt rotten by the concert programming at UC Davis—the yearly series by the Alexander Quartet, the recitals by Garrick Ohlsson and Joshua Bell and the like.  The scene here is considerably colder, as might be expected in a town of 20,000.  Roseburg’s nearest neighbor with artistic aspirations is Eugene, over an hour away, and beyond that, there isn’t much less than three hours away.  Roseburg gets a yearly visit from the Eugene Symphony, which is the best orchestra in the southern Wilamette Valley.  There is a Community Concert series, whose offerings tend to be jazz or pop-classical.  There is the Umpqua Symphony Association, which focuses mainly on local talent for its handful of concerts each year.  If we went to every concert that could be filed under “classical music” this last year, we’d have seen less than 10 events, of wildly variable quality.

Given that, here’s a big shout-out to the proprietors of MarshAnne Landing Winery, who have seen fit to invite some classical musicians to have recitals in their tasting room/gallery.  The space can hold thirty people or so, making it quite cozy; the “stage” is nook with a decent-but-not-fabulous upright piano and room for a string quartet or a single very expressive violinist.  The concerts are the personal effort of the winery’s proprietors, so programming is necessarily modest.  Joshua Bell won’t be playing there, and the two recitals we’ve seen may be all for the season, but they’ve been thoroughly appreciated.  I don’t feel like being the music critic here; my attitude is more gratitude than judgement.  So, I’ll go on about some externalities.  

One program featured the violinist Lindsay Deutsch, playing a very casual show of Gershwin, Piazzola, Vivaldi, Brahms, and De Falla (the pianist played one of the Debussy Images while the violinist took a break).  The concert reflected the cultural stereotype that when you go out into the sticks, you have to play pop or light classical stuff.  It was pretty clear that there were a few audience members who would not be satisfied with any violin show that did not involve some of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons—and “Winter” was duly served up, to audible sighs of contentment.  The Brahms concerto was presented, but with apologies about its length and (to prevent boredom, I guess) as isolated movements separated by shorter, snappier pieces.  It was nice to get the Piazzola; it’s a little off the beaten path, and I really enjoyed the De Falla “Suite Popular.”

The concert by Chamber Music Amici of Eugene was a bit more “Serious”; a Mozart violin sonata, a cello sonata by the 20^th-century Portuguese composer Luis Costa, and a string quintet by Bruch that, while written in 1918, had only been published around 1980.  It was so nice to hear unfamiliar stuff presented straight up; the cello sonata was convincingly delivered and the Bruch made me go home and buy a recording.  The performances were good; the Amici have day jobs, and though most are connected with music, the violinist for the Mozart is a practicing physician. 

A couple of the instruments being played were of interest to the Real Doctor and me.  We are both a bit geeky about violins, and sometimes my attention to the music can be diverted by attention to the violin it’s played on.  In this case, the instruments were both inspired by Guarneri “del Gesu”, but took the inspiration in different directions.  The first, from across the room, really had the look of a del Gesu, but as it was played, it just didn’t seem to have the same tonal oomph.  It (and the player) was clearly aspiring to tonal richness, but it just was not really there.  The second instrument looked del-Gesu-ish, maybe early 1730’s, but just didn’t seem visually to be abused enough for a violin of that age.  However, its sound was rich—not as rich as the best del Gesu’s, but much more satisfying than the first violin.   

There are different schools of thought about what makes the difference between a good and a great violin.  Being who I am, I tend to think in graphs.  Here’s what some people like, which happens to be the first violin:

On any note, at any volume, the violin can only produce a limited number of interesting tones; however, it’s extremely uniform across the entire spectrum.  There’s also this:

Combine that with the fact that it tends to sound good under the ear of the person playing it, and you have what some people—including big names such as Hahn and Tetzlaff—find satisfying. It should also be noted that the brown line for your average student violin rarely gets as high as the brown line above. 

Here’s a rather different sort of violin, which happens to be the second violin, and also is more like the violins of Stradivari and del Gesu.

Few or no notes are wanting in tonal richness, and some regions are positively oozing with the stuff.  But,

It takes a lot of work to pull that stuff out of the violin.  It’s harder to play, and effectively use the entire endowment of the fiddle—but if the player has the skill and patience to exploit it, the results are amazing. 

The violin is a tool, a physical entity.  So what makes this difference?  The musicians giving these concerts were generous enough to let us take a closer look at their instruments and tell us about them. 

The first violin was a Vuillaume, made in the mid-1800’s.  Vuillaume enjoyed a reputation for making the finest copies of the finest violins, so it’s not too surprising that the fiddle visually announced itself as “del Gesu” from across the room.  However, close-up, a couple of details emerged.  One was that the arching was very low—if you looked at the fiddle side-on, it was several millimeters skinnier than a classic Cremonese instrument, which bulges out 15 or more mm front and back.  Another structural detail that affects sound was the absence of recurve as the arch blends into the side of the violin; if you were an ant, marching from the bridge to one of the sides, your trip would be downhill all the way, rather than pitching up for the last few paces.  These structural details—and lack of tonal richness--are pretty characteristic of Vuillaume.  Now, these are not horrible fiddles; I wouldn’t reject one as a gift, and one recently sold at auction for over $200,000.  They are just not my thing.

The second violin of note was an American instrument made by Carl Holzapfel in Philadelphia in the 1920’s, who was (it turns out) the great-grandfather of the violinist.  It had nice arching and nice recurve.  As I mentioned, it also had terrific sound; according to the violinist, it won a slew of awards and was the pride and joy of its luthier.  Holzapfel has some limited recognition as a good maker, and despite the obvious quality of the instrument, it will never sell for a tenth of what the Vuillaume will bring.  Go figure.

This raises a couple of questions.  The obvious one is why does sound mean so little in the sale price of a musical instrument—but the answer there is probably like the answer to why a 500-square foot apartment in downtown New York costs as much as our farm.  Another question, to which I don’t have a good start of an answer, is why Vuillaume made the copies he made in the way that he made them.  Was he aware of arching, and discounted it as meaningless?  Did it just not register in his eye?  I just don’t know.  To emphasize the point, I’ll close with photos of a different Vuillaume and a real Cremonese violin (alas, I can’t remember its identity; I think it’s a Petro Guarneri; the photos were taken during the 2012 Claremona workshop).  

And here, courtesy of Michael Darnton, is a video of a Brothers Amati violin that really illustrates the classic shape I'm talking about: Go watch this!

Ephemera

Found this scrap of newspaper in a forgotten nook of the house. 

It's interesting that there was a spot--a sort of bench-cupboard next to the fireplace, probably intended for firewood--undisturbed for such a long time.  There were a few other items in there, some of which will appear here, some of which have been returned to their original owner (who grew up here, and is now an elderly lady living in town).  Also interesting to note the evolution (or lack there of) in the funnies.  I know I've seen the gag in Gasoline Alley before, and the ones in Smokey Stover and Winnie Winkle seem familiar (the gag-per-frame thing in Smokey Stover is interesting).  The plot in Smilin' Jack seems a bit outre, but probably isn't to the devoted reader of Apartment 3-G.  I suppose I should also lament how the funnies have been shrunk and made less colorful; sic transit gloria sunday.

An update on the aliens...

There was an unfortunate incident with our chicken Sixteen of Sixteen* this morning.  She has been feeling a bit more perky of late, although she still looks horrible--a few of her tail feathers are growing back, but a patch of her skull the size of a nickel is visible and her neck skin is healing in grotesque lumps.  Nonetheless, she charged out the door of her box when I opened it to change her scratch and water, and clearly did not want to go back in.   I deferred worrying about it: the other fifteen birds had already dispersed throughout the yard and were busy gathering the morning's bugs, and Sixteen of Sixteen, though she didn't want to be caught, also didn't want to leave the coop.  I went and saw to the next stations on the feed list, the goats in the garden and then the goats in the play castle.  The fifteen other chooks seemed to be very happy scratching around the sheep pens, well away from the chicken coop, their alien minds more on worms than murder.  

When I was feeding the goats in the castle, I heard the alarmed calls of an abused chicken.  I dropped what I was doing and saw that a dozen chickens had converged on Sixteen of Sixteen and were chasing her around.  She would occasionally stumble, and couple of birds would jump on top of her.  Her screams grew more intense, and when I finally reached her, she was trapped in a corner of a fence, screaming and being vigorously pecked by the bird who was standing on top of her.  It was Fifteen of Sixteen.

I was able to remove Fifteen of Sixteen (who, curiously, seemed to be in a mental state similar to that of a hen sitting on eggs; normally, she's a bit flighty, but allowed me to pick her up and had the same mental vacancy of a setter) and throw her as far away as I could.   Sixteen of Sixteen was a bit shocky, so didn't offer any resistance to being picked up.  Her neck, which was scarring up, was once again raw and bleeding.  She's back in protective custody. 

Alien minds.  Maybe, when they were all chicks, they did a dramatic reenactment of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", and it just got out of hand.

*Like Seven of Nine, though I never followed this show.

Tuesday Tool Standard Time Edition

Today's object that makes life better is

the Light & Motion Urban 300 LED bicycle headlight.  It gets dark dark here about 5:00; the sun goes down, and it's usually quite cloudy, so even if there's a full moon it's dark.  If you wanna go for a ride after all the contractors have gone and left you alone, you need lights.  This one (and its big brother the Urban 500) is excellent. 

(I just gotta say, I've been riding with lights for fifteen or more years, and I'm just amazed at how much better, brighter, longer-lasting, and cheaper they've gotten.  When I started, it was with a home-made rig using 6V batteries for model airplanes and a halogen lamp bulb jury-rigged into a flashlight reflector, and that was as good as you got unless you shelled out hundreds of dollars for a Night Sun outfit (which wasn't that much better).  Since then, the Real Doctor and I have gone through four generations of outfits, and they've gotten so much better.  This little self-contained unit that charges with a micro-USB is an order of magnitude better than its predecessor in our collection.  I suppose there is a lighting equivalent of Moore's Law.  I wonder what I'll be riding with five years from now.)

Aliens in my backyard

One of my favorite authors, Stanislaw Lem, has as a recurring theme the utter impossibility of really understanding and communicating with aliens if we ever meet them.  I agree with his assessment, based on personal experience.  I didn’t need to travel to Solaris or Quinta meet an alien mind.  They roam our property in the bodies of sheep and goats and chickens, and though I’ve become somewhat familiar with their patterns of behavior, I can’t say I truly understand them.

The most alien are the chickens.  This sort of makes sense, given the evolutionary distance between humans and avians.  I appreciate their eggs, I appreciate the pests they consume, I appreciate the fertilizing effects (if not the aroma) of their poop, but I just do not get the chicken mind.

Chickens are social creatures, and the bedrock of their society is ruthless hierarchy.  If there are sixteen chickens (as we have here), there will be one chicken that fifteen chickens have free license to abuse.  It’s pretty easy to identify this bird, and the ones that can be freely picked on by twelve, thirteen, or fourteen other chickens.  They are the ones with ratty, reduced, or completely destroyed tails and pecked patches on their necks.  

We have one bird, number sixteen of sixteen on the order, and her rank had been apparent for some time.  However, a week ago the alien minds of the chickens went a little bit too far; when I came by in the evening to shut the birds up, I found this poor Lakenvelder cowering in a nest box, the walls smeared with blood.  The chicken was staggering, grievously wounded. She had no tail feathers, revealing the mangled, bloody nub of its tail.  Her skin from the top of her head to her upper neck had been completely flayed off, leaving a portion of her skull exposed, and she was still bleeding heavily.  I quickly got a small dog crate to put her in, and she gave an unnervingly un-chickenlike scream as I picked her up.  Amazingly, she is healing, and has a good appetite, but she still looks like hell. 

Here is where my understanding fails.  This is within normal for chickens.  It doesn’t matter if the flock is stressed or not, crowded or not, fed or not, all one breed or not.  It’s part of the chicken psyche, an occasional outcome of the pecking order. There are all sorts of things that have been tried to mitigate a problem that can reduce flock yield by 15%, ranging from beak trimming to contact lenses to a kind of hot sauce that you can put on a bird's back to make it distasteful to its “superiors.”  But the trait can’t be eliminated.  I know this is not totally alien to the human mind—ask any dalit--but it’s alien to me, and I’m happy to say that I can’t relate to it. 

Our birds have started laying eggs, and this brings up another annoying facet of the chicken mind.  Not only are they prone to cannibalism, but they will also eat one another’s eggs.  I’m not sure that our birds do this, but I did find one egg that had been broken.  I can’t tell if it was pecked at or merely trod upon, but it has me worried.  The lore among chicken growers is that once they develop a taste for egg, they can never be cured*. 

I suppose this isn’t totally out of the range of human experience, but at least infanticide (and infantophagy) within a group is pretty universally frowned upon.  The practices are found in some mammals, but the motivation is probably different (e.g. males of harem species killing the offspring of their predecessors, presumably to free up mates to receive new genes).

That said, there are aspects of the chicken psyche that, while I find completely alien, I would kind of like to experience. 

Perhaps driven by egg-eaters, some of our hens have started to lay their eggs in our hay-storage area.  I was only alerted to this by a soft clucking noise coming from a narrow space between bales this morning.  Shining a light into the space, I saw a buff-colored chicken butt.  I left it alone and set to feeding the sheep, and when I returned there were two chicken butts crammed into the space.  A little later, there was the celebratory cackling that heralds the arrival of an egg into the world.  Only one bird was there, but she was still firmly planted there.  I was able to stick my hand under her, and lift her up and out of the stack of bales—and here she demonstrated the state of consciousness I’d like to experience:  she seemed to have achieved the Buddhist ideal of the empty mind.  Her body was still, she was not especially responsive to pretty dramatic stimuli (like getting bodily picked up and squeezed between two bales of hay), and she had a peaceful expression and made a contented purr. 

Maybe a lama can achieve this mental state, but it’s still alien to me.  Maybe it’s the yin to balance the violently hierarchical yang of the chicken mind.  But the serene, empty mind is my human mind’s projection onto the mental state of the sitting hen—what's really going on in there is alien, unknowable.  Given the evolutionary history of our barnyard chooks, it makes me wonder what consciousness would be like if dinosaurs evolved in that direction.

Deep thoughts about shallow minds?  This video is relevant.

*I heard one story of a chicken owner who discovered that her hens’ eggs were being eaten—she found broken shells and consumed yolks.  She didn’t want to get rid of her whole flock, but she couldn’t watch them all the time to tell who was the culprit.  One suspect after another was turned into soup, sometimes on flimsy evidence, but the eggs—produced in ever-diminishing numbers—continued to be eaten.  She was down to the last couple of birds when she discovered that the ovivore was her dog, who had figured out the latch to the coop.

The Saga of the Waters...continued

Just over a week ago I wrote

There are still unresolved mysteries in the property’s water situation.  While digging in the yard, we broke a PVC pipe that started gushing water under pressure.  It’s pretty clear that it comes off the main water line; however, I followed it out some ways, and it just ends.  There’s also a spigot—dry, or at the least plugged—way out in the middle of the field, over a hundred meters from anything else.   Pipes from the original system—a gravity-pressured system fed by a tank on a tower in that back of the house—are still buried in the back yard.  But after a year, and gallons of bleach, and two cartridge filters and a UV filter, I’m pretty confident that we have pure, potable, non-stinky water and reasonable wastewater disposal.  

Unfortunately, I need to update this. 

We have a hint about the dry spigot in the middle of the field.  As I was walking to the house from the excavation for the barn, I saw this:

Les jeux d'eau de la ville d'Umpqua, part deux

Isn't that nice, thought I, a leak in a live line in the middle of nowhere.  Scooping away some mud revealed a capped pipe pointing from the general direction of the house to the general direction of the dry spigot.  The cap had rusted, and is about to give up.  I need to dig up the pipe (it's at least 20 meters from any live pipe I know about) and put a new cap on it.  

It gets worse, though.  I continue to find the effects of the torrential rains we received a couple of nights ago--Roseburg airport got 3.5 inches, another place near here got four inches.  Last night, I noticed that our house water was turning a little turbid, and smelled a little like dirt.  I checked what the well was producing and found this:

Clearly a problem

We called our local well guy and gal, and got the info that older wells (like ours) can be contaminated by ground water after heavy rains.  The cement casing surrounding the well pipe can crack as it ages, so we're guessing that has happened.  The fact that we're seeing it in the house means that it's such a heavy load that it's not even settling out in our reservoir.  It has probably overwhelmed our bag and cartridge filter, and the turbidity means that the UV filter won't be able to kill everything.  So, we're stuck with boiling everything and having a faint odor of soil.  "Like pioneer days!" said the well gal.  "It will be a couple of days.  [Well guy] is so busy, that storm washed every single river pump around here all the way to Reedsport."

The saga continues...

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving--go have some turkey, go for a walk, or do both.