Author: Don

Memo to Arlo Guthrie

The dump still closes on Thanksgiving.

A thousand years ago, I persuaded my homeroom at high school #2 to nominate “Alice’s Restaurant” for our class song. It inevitably lost out to “The Impossible Dream,” which was the song every class picked during that historical period, but it’s pleasant to imagine my classmates sashaying into the auditorium singing “You can get anything you want / at Alice’s Restaurant, excepting Alice.”

Alice Brock, who ran the restaurant in the song (which restaurant, as Guthrie notes in the song, was not actually named “Alice’s Restaurant”) died a week ago. It sounds like she was an interesting person, though we probably would have agreed on very little.

Musical miscellany

When I revisit my ancient posts I find that most of the links are dead. (Has anyone determined what the half-life is for internet links? I would guess that it’s around three years.) Some of them still do work, though, such as this one to free recordings of all of Bach’s organ works, performed by James Kibbie. I recommend that you don’t listen to them all in one sitting; one or two pieces at a time is probably enough. Turn it up; this is music that needs to be played so that the loud sections are thunderous.

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With equal temperament, each key sounds like every other key, only a bit higher or lower. However, equal temperament didn’t become the standard tuning for pianos until about a century ago. Before then each key had its own particular set of intervals and its own character. For instance, according to Christian Schubart’s 1806 Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst,

E♭ Major
The key of love, of devotion, of intimate conversation with God.

D# Minor
Feelings of the anxiety of the soul’s deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depresssion, of the most gloomy condition of the soul. Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of horrible D# minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.

E Major
Noisy shouts of joy, laughing pleasure and not yet complete, full delight lies in E Major.

E minor
Naïve, womanly innocent declaration of love, lament without grumbling; sighs accompanied by few tears; this key speaks of the imminent hope of resolving in the pure happiness of C major.

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I’m interested in the Japanese pianist Yui Morishita. He specializes in Alkan, and has recorded five albums of Alkan’s works so far. He has an alter-ego, the “Duke of Pianeet,” who plays virtuosic arrangements of anime and video game music. He is perhaps best-known for his “Gunbuster Fantasy.”1 I recently came across a playlist of Morishita performing music from Square Enix games, including many from Final Fantasy. You can listen here.

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Feeling kawaii? You might like a Hello Kitty Stratocaster, with its matching pink fuzz pedal.