Friday Flora It might as well be spring edition

It might as well be spring, except it can't quite make up its mind.  This picture was taken a half hour before some intense hail.  The days have been a mix of brilliance and abject snottiness. 

But when it's nice, it's real nice. 

Wednesday Wordless...

...or "Now I understand why farmers talk to their sheep."

The Real Doctor is out of town for a week, and I am keeping as busy as possible here on the farm, in an effort to get stuff done and keep my mind off of her absence.  Though I've been on the phone and emailing, I just realized that I'd gone over 24 hours without saying anything to anyone face-to-face* except for a hasty "Thank you" to the mailman as he sped off.

The Real Doctor's friend S.  suggested I ought to get a dog so I have someone to talk with.  I'm OK with the sheep--after all, I've taught freshmen. 

*Here's our word of the day:  Meatspace, a back-formation from cyberspace. 

Tuesday Tool

Alas, today's tool is the tow truck.  It was supposed to be the Ford F-350 Super Duty Diesel truck, which I was going to use to pick up a bunch of fencing and building supplies, and then use to deliver a sheep with a possible eye infection* to the vet.  But, the darn thing wouldn't start.  The starter would crank mightily, and every so often it would cough and deliver a cloud of smoke, but no go.  The guy at the shop said it sounds like fuel injectors, but we'll get the diagnosis tomorrow.

The sheep was also to be diagnosed tomorrow; I was to bundle her into the back of the truck (which has a topper) and have her visit the vet.  I called the vet, and explained the situation.   I might be able to come by in the afternoon, if the truck were healed by then.  Or, the vet might have to go out to make a house call.  "So," said the receptionist "until then, we don't know whether we're coming or going."

That's about right for all of us today.

*The real doctor is unfortunately out of town.  What timing!

Poultry report

(Soundtrack for today's post--you can think of it as ein Montag Musikalische Opfer)

I was in the Co-op last week, and I saw that they’ve got their chicks in.  Little baby chickens are the chick magnet—the galvanized bathtubs full of peeps were surrounded by little girls (and their parents) oohing and cooing.  Which reminds me, it’s time for a bit of an update on the chickens.  They are not the glamour animals of our farm, but they work hard and they are the only ones who have brought in any revenue.

We acquired our birds from Murray McMurray hatchery in May of last year. Their numbers have been reduced by three deaths (one was a day-old chick, two were possibly due to heat), a dozen being given to the guy who did our fencing, and one who was given to a neighbor as a meat bird rather than dying from being low on the pecking order.  Thankfully, there have been no losses to predators.  Raccoons and skunks are always a worry, and a few days ago we saw a bobcat four miles away from here.

We now have fifteen birds, representing fourteen breeds.  We’ve got a hefty Black Australorp, who makes the soft ground tremble when she runs, and the petite, neurotic Golden Penciled Hamburg.  There is a shiny, green-black Sumatra, who will follow you around all day, clucking and purring the whole time, and the Speckled Sussex, who would rather you don’t see what she’s doing and why don’t you mind your own business thank you very much.  They’re an amusing bunch to watch as they roam around the house and fields on their important chicken business, or take a dust bath under the porch.

We got our first eggs in late October of last year.  The first eggs are always funny—so small, like quail eggs!   

We joked about how this, the first product of our farm, was the $300,000 egg, more precious per ounce than pure gold.  The Wyandottes were the first to lay, but the others followed over the next few weeks.  I thought the Speckled Sussex was one of the only birds not laying, but I found that what she was being secretive about was where she was laying: in a nook in the trailer shed, where I discovered a nest of fifteen eggs.  As soon as I found those, she decided to find a different nest; a few weeks later, I found a nest of another dozen eggs behind the woodpile.  It’s been a few weeks, so I wonder where the next trove is concealed.  I’ve seen her lurking around the toolshed.

The birds give us about eight eggs a day now—sometimes five, today there were ten.  They range from dark brown to white (we don’t have any colored egg layers; they have a reputation for difficult personalities), from small to jumbo, and yesterday we got a double.  Most are deposited in their nest box, but almost half arrive in the hayroom—I guess the hay feels nice on a chicken butt. Fresh eggs are a treat, and they give any baked goodies a lovely golden color.  We sell a couple of dozen a week to friends and coworkers.  If you visit, we’ll probably foist a dozen onto you.

Four days' eggs.  The double is a first.  I bet it hurt. 

The birds are, at this point, the only revenue stream here, and they look to be it for a while.  They will probably take a break from laying in spring, in order to molt.  We’ll use the break to decide whether or not to buy more birds. It depends on how we view their role on the farm.  The first reason we got them is for eggs for ourselves, but the secondary reason we have chickens is to eat bugs and snails, which can carry worms that will infect our sheep.  If our goal is more egg money, then we’ll probably get more chooks.  If not, we’ll probably get some runner ducks, which are almost as amusing as chickens, and champion snail-eaters to boot.

Tuesday Tool pedicure edition

Today's tool is a hoof trimmer.  It's actually a cheapo pair of small garden shears, and I'm too beat to go out and take a picture of the thing, so I'll encourage you to use your imagination. 

I spent the afternoon trimming the ewe's hooves.  I'm getting better at it; you gotta catch the sheep give it a hug, lift it up and sort of sit it on either its left or right buttock, and lean it back against your thighs.  With its four hooves up and out, it usually doesn't squirm too much, and you can trim the horny bits off.  Some people prefer straight bladed shears, some curved, some serrated, some flat--I haven't noticed much difference, other than between sharp and dull--sharp is good.  The most important variable, I've found, is the squirminess of the sheep.  I only cut one hoof to the quick, which got me a few drops of blood and a dirty look, and I sliced a little bit off of one of my knuckles, which anointed all the subsequent sheep with a bit of my blood.

Most of our ewes are pretty easygoing.  No real problems catching or flipping or clipping.  A couple of them completely relaxed, and sort of flopped over while I was working on them.  Two of them were hard to get, and being larger and wilier, much harder to flip.  One was absolutely awful to catch--I had to do the flying football tackle to get her, and do some TV-style wrestling moves to get her on her butt.  Once there, it was all squirm, all the time.  Of course, she was the one whose pedicure was interrupted by my cell phone ringing.  She finally got done, but feh! she was a pill.  I don't think she's going to be part of our flock by the end of the year.  Nice fleece, but good looks will only get you so far. 

Monday Musical Innovation

I have to admit that I’ve never loved the “historically informed performance” movement.  This is the whole scheme of playing the music of the Baroque and Classical eras, on musical instruments of that era, in (what is supposed to be) the style of that era.  The movement is about as old as I am, and become mainstream in the classical music world. I’ll concede that the “period performance” movement has had a corrective effect on some 20^th century excesses.  However, I still prefer Bruno Walter’s Beethoven to Norrington’s, and Szerying’s Tartini to Wallfisch’s.  But, a recent scientific breakthrough may lead me to change my mind.

To be completely honest, I’ve got several problems with the “authenticity” thing.  Some minor issues are that I just don’t think Locatelli was that great; that the players usually play too darn fast; that vibrato is, in fact, a good thing, and so on.  There’s a larger philosophical issue—we simply can’t recreate 18^th century performance style.  The 20^th century is a complete anomaly in the history of humanity and music, in that sound (and performance practice) is no longer ephemeral, but the performances of Mozart and Bach—the sounds they made—are lost forever. 

However, the biggest problem I have with “authenticity” is the instruments.  I simply don’t like the way they sound.  I hate the timbre of the harpsichord, and “fortepianos” sound like John Cage’s “prepared” pianos and can’t stay in tune.  I’ve played excellent baroque violins, and they’re interesting, but there are reasons that just about every Strad and Guarneri and Amati has been modified to modern spec and played with a modern bow.  To my ears, authentic instruments don’t sound good, so imagine my surprise when I found that problem is with my ears, or what’s around them.

A really neat paper came out recently about the interplay of acoustics, acoustical aesthetics, and fashion.  The lead author, D. Avril Poisson, is more noted as a researcher in the biological sciences, but like the noted geneticists Jacques Monod and James Crow, she is an accomplished amateur string player.  Like me, she had always been irritated by the sound of “period” instruments, and like me, she had always assumed the problem was with the unique timbre of the instruments—their signature collection and arrangement of overtones.

The bolt of lightning that inspired her to change her mind was quite literal: it fried a transformer at an electrical substation near her workplace, Miskatonic University, one evening last winter. Dr. Poisson is as dedicated to her art as she is to her science, so the evening’s rehearsal of the Miskatonic Pro(-Am) Musica went on according to schedule, in a chilly room lit by candlelight.  Dr. Poisson found herself wearing a sort of hunter’s cap with earflaps and LED lights in the visor so she could read her score, and found that her viola sounded radically different.  The ear flaps, though they did not cover her ears, seemed to amplify certain frequencies of sound from her viola and quench others, and her modern instrument took on a radically different character.

As soon as she could, Dr. Poisson borrowed one of her fellow enthusiast’s violins—a 2003 reproduction of an Andrea Amati in its “original” condition with gut strings and a baroque bow, and played it with a variety of headgear, ranging from the hunter’s cap to a sombrero.  Although, to her ears, the fiddle never sounded great, it sounded quite different with each topper—different enough to spark a possible breakthrough in “authentic” practice.

Collaboration with Amy Vieuxtemps, a historian, and some creative work with a costumer provided Dr. Poisson with a variety of periwigs and perukes such as might have been worn in the time of Bach and Handel.  These all featured curls of stiffened wool immediately adjacent to the wearer’s ears, and unsurprisingly, radically altered the wearer’s impression of modern and baroque violins.  Dr. Poisson found, to her surprise and delight, that the annoying features of the baroque violin’s timbre vanished when she wore a gentleman’s wig of the late-17^th century German style.  The fiddle sounded great. 

Dr. Poisson, a noted experimentalist, realized that this was an extremely subjective observation, and so, set about to gather some data.  She rigged up a manikin with microphones and a variety of wigs, and collected sound spectra of several modern and baroque violins.  She was able to identify certain clusters of tones that the wigs filtered out, and others that they seemed to amplify.  The result was not surprising, given what anatomists knew about the effect of different shapes of bats’ ears on their sound perception.  Also, the result was robust enough that she developed a computerized filter that could be fed a digital waveform from a baroque violin, and would produce a “wigged” version of the sound.  In a blind survey of the 107 Miskatonic students enrolled in a music history class, 83 preferred the “wigged” baroque violin to the “naked” fiddle.  Similar results were obtained with a reproduction of a 1691 Flemish harpsichord, and the university’s prized 1780 Stein fortepiano.

There is some fodder here for historians of fashion.  Ornate wigs were absolutely required for men of any standing in society from the mid-1600s on.  Fashion, driven by royal vanity, is usually cited as one reason, along with the desirability of a shaven pate and removable hair in a milieu rife with head lice.  Along about 1800, such wigs rapidly become intensely unfashionable (outside of the English legal system).  Given the eternal nature of both royal vanity and parasites, the reason for the wig’s demise has long been a mystery. 

At the same time wigs were on the way out, Francois-Xavier Tourte revolutionized the design of the violin bow, giving the instrument much more power, and the violins of the Cremonese masters were having their necks replaced and strings tensioned.  John Broadwood was expanding the length and width of the piano, balancing the increased tension of the strings on a stronger, cast-iron frame, and harpsichords generally became kindling.

According to Poisson and her colleagues, this synchrony is no coincidence.  I have been taught that the interplay between composer/performer and instrument builder was a closed cycle: the musician wanted more powerful instruments, driving to the builder to make a more powerful instrument.  Then, the instrument maker built something with even more oomph, and the composer expanded his vision to encompass it.  Poisson suggests the radical hypothesis that this vicious cycle also killed the periwig, as, by 1800 its major use (according to her) was as an acoustic filter.  The itchy, unpleasant thing was no longer necessary and was summarily discarded.

Although fashion is constantly recycling old ideas and calling them new, it is unlikely that the clock will roll back far enough for the powdered periwig to re-enter the mainstream.  The fashion of playing the music of the Baroque on unimproved instruments is also unlikely to perish (especially since so much money has been invested in modern reproductions of these instruments).  I am always hopeful that I will be able to enjoy such performances, but must I go and get a wooly wig?

Not to worry.  Poisson, in conjunction with the global mega-instrument maker Yarnaha, has developed a product called “BarokEerz.”  These are a disposable, clip-on set of curls made of synthetic fibers that can be worn to any event featuring period performance practices.  The concept is on firm scientific, artistic, and financial ground.  Yamaha acousticians have confirmed that BarokEerz exactly replicate the acoustic effect of a periwig, and can even be specially tuned to maximize enjoyment of music from the early Baroque through the late classical period and account for variations between Italian, German, French, and English fashion.  Endorsements have been secured from a variety of the most pure-minded and rigorous period performers.  And, they are inexpensive enough that they can be included in the price of a ticket to any major concert venue.  I look forward to hearing the Baroque with fresh ears—or, though I shudder at the spelling, Eerz. 

Poisson, D. Avril, and Amy Vieuxtemps (2013).  Acoustic and Perceived Timbre-Modifying Effects of 17^th-18^th century Gentlemen’s Wigs.  J. Hist. Informed Perf. 33: 430-440. 

Kuc, R., (2010).  Morphology Suggests Noseleaf and Pinnae Cooperate to Enhance Bat Echolocation.  J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 128 (5): 3190-3199. 

Poisson, D. Avril, and Bella Sone (2013).  Wigger: A Software Package for Modernizing Ancient Instruments.  Proc. Southeast. Indiana Acoust. Soc. (A), 12: 72-77.

Yarnaha (2013).  You’ve Never Heard Baroque Music Before—Hear It With New Eerz! [Press Release]

je ne regrette rien

A belated happy Purim, to those who celebrated.  If you want to make your own, I'll send you a very good recipe.