Mobius Music

I just finished a fascinating book by Clifford Pickover about the Mobius strip.  A Mobius strip is a loop that has only one side.  They are really easy to make: simply tape together the two ends of a strip of paper, after first giving it a half twist.  The two-sided-ness of the paper disappears and you are left with a one-sided object.  You can test this by coloring the paper.  Try to color one side green and the other red.  It can't be done on a Mobius strip, because there is only one side to color.

The Mobius strip was discovered by August Mobius in 1858, and it's remarkable that it wasn't discovered sooner.  Studying the strip is a great introduction to topology, the study of surfaces and spatial relationships.

Topology doesn't really have anything to do with music, but it is possible to write music that can be adhered to a Mobius strip.  Music played on such a strip will result in music that can be played forwards and backwards, and upside down and right-side up.  Our good man J. S. Bach wrote something like this, called the Crab Canon from the Musical Offering.  This piece can be performed forward, then the musician can turn the page upside down and play it again.  Plus, the musician can read the music backwards to produce a different melody.  Then, using both hands, the player can perform the piece as a two-handed duet, with the canon flipped over and reversed in one hand and right-side up and forward in the other hand.

Bach wasn't the only musical genius to experiment with these musical puzzles.  Arnold Schoenberg (I've talked about him recently.  Remember Schoenberg?) also wrote canons, that he called "mirror canons" that could be flipped over and turned around.  Schoenberg was also interested in "twelve-tone music", which uses the same one-sided idea as the Mobius strip.  With the 12-tone rows, the composers would assemble all 12 pitches in a row, sometimes at random, but only using each pitch once within the row.  From here, they can reverse the pitches, invert them, and invert and reverse them.  The result can be applied to atonal music.

I know.  Just accept the fact that you are going to learn more about atonal music than you thought you wanted to this year.

:-)

H2O

I'm around water a lot now (with the new job.  It's going well, BTW).  So, it isn't too much of a leap to start thinking about music and songs about water.  After some thought, I realized that there are less songs about water than there are about songs about activities on or in the water.  Let's dive right in, shall we?

Starting on the west coast: try Surfin' USA with the Beach Boys.  Or, if you aren't a very good surfer, you can Wipe Out with the Surfaris.  If are prefer to stay on dry land, you could just practice the different swimming strokes to Bobby Freeman's C'Mon and Swim (1964).

But why stay out of the water, landlubber?  Join Ariel the mermaid and her aquatic friends in a cheerful Caribbean calypso rendition of Under the Sea.  This song was featured in Disney's 1989 The Little Mermaid, in which Sebastian the crab tries to convince the finned girl to stay in the sea where she belongs instead of trying to sprout legs and run off with some land prince she just met and barely knows.

Water music isn't such a new thing, though.  Just ask England's King George in 1717.  He wasn't doing so well in the popularity polls, so his advisers suggested to him that he throw a boating party on the Thames River.  The King's composer, George Frideric Handel, was given the task of writing the music for the party (all good parties need music).  When Handel's Water Music was ready for performance, the King and his buddies listened from one barge, while the musicians performed from another.  It was a huge success, and Handel's watery suites are still recognizable and popular today.

At the end of a long day of swimming, surfing, and boating the Thames, you can relax with Otis Redding, just (Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay (1967), wasting time.  Watching the boats cruise in and out of the harbour and hearing the seagulls shriek.  Redding wrote the song while literally sitting on the dock of a bay (well, maybe a houseboat).  I've read that the whistling at the end was an impromptu addition at the recording session; apparently, there was some time to fill.  Sadly, Redding died in a plane crash in Lake Monoma, (near Madison, WI) shortly after the song's release.  He never saw his song become a hit.

And with that, I'll leave you to swim around in your own thoughts. 

Nuts and Bolts

Wow.  Do you ever go back and re-read stuff you wrote a long time ago?  Kind of embarrassing.  It probably means nothing to you, my loyal Zombielets, but I have updated/edited/made less dumb-sounding the "About this Blog" and "What is a Music Zombie" pages.

I feel better now.  Until I read them again in a year.

Writing is hard.

Haha!

:-)

I had better include something musical though, so your time reading this won't be completely lost.

Here ya go:

Beethoven composed 32 piano sonatas.

What do you mean "Is that all?"  How many piano sonatas have you written?!