Entries tagged with music

Crossposts: https://cjwatson.livejournal.com/64169.html

Entry tags:

gaeilge,
music

TG Lurgan, amhráin as Gaeilge

Coláiste Lurgan (Lurgan College) is an Irish-language summer school in Connemara; it has a musical project called TG Lurgan which does lots of brilliant translated covers. Here are a couple, worth watching even if you have little or no Irish 'cause they're obviously having such a good time with it!

( videos )

(I'd run across them before, but eyebrowsofpower reminded me of them today.)

Crossposts: http://cjwatson.livejournal.com/63170.html

Entry tags:

maths,
music

Counting on my fingers

Happy Christmas and happy Hanukkah (they coincide this year)! This is not especially festive except that I was reminded of it at Midnight Mass while counting verses of a rather long litany.

When I was a teenager, I invented what as far as I know is an original method of finger-counting; at least I was unaware of having based it on anything else and I haven't seen it used anywhere since. No, please stop backing away slowly, I promise I'm not dangerous. I don't remember exactly why I bothered, but it may have had something to do with being a cellist and therefore occasionally having to count off long rests in a reasonably discreet way that was harder to lose track of than just counting in my head. I still sometimes use it in similar circumstances.

My method goes as follows:

Begin by counting off the three segments of each finger on your left hand by touching the palmward side of them with your left thumb: 1, 2, 3 for the tip, middle, base of your index finger, 4, 5, 6 for your middle finger, and so on. This takes you to 12.
Touch your left palm with your left thumb for 13.
Now return to your left fingers as before, but this time touch the backs of the segments: 14, 15, 16 for the tip, middle, base of your index finger, and so on. This takes you to 25 on a single hand.
If you need more, use your right hand in the same way as a 25s place. The upper limit is therefore 625.

I was certainly aware of binary and hexadecimal bases by that time and reasonably fluent in both, and I thought of finger binary independently, but converting between bases can take a bit of thought, and the point was to be easily usable in situations where I didn't have much spare brainpower available, for example when in the middle of an orchestral concert with lots of other stuff going on. I basically wanted to be able to delegate the job of counting to a simple motor task and be reasonably sure of getting it right.

This method has several nice properties:

25 is very decimal-friendly, at least at smallish values. It's pretty rare to have to "manually" count higher than 100, and that's just 0 on the left hand and 4 on the right. Most numbers one is likely to need to count to come out easily. Wikipedia tells me that there are Asian systems that use finger segments in a similar way to reach 12 on each hand, but that's not as decimal-friendly.
Only involves small movements, mostly within the natural crook of your hand. You can quite easily count this way in a context where other methods would be awkward or gauche, and probably nobody will notice.
Reasonably useful upper limit with a single hand. (As a cellist I was usually holding a bow with my right hand, but during rests my left hand was free.)

It is, I suspect, not at all useful for communication: distinguishing between two different sides of a finger is quite easy by touch but probably not by sight.

Am I weird? Is anyone aware of a previous base-25 system like this? Feel free to only answer the second of those questions.

Crossposts: http://cjwatson.livejournal.com/56385.html

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December days: Favourite carol

For Christmas Eve,

ghoti asked me to talk about my favourite carol.

( Noël, Noël )

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

Crossposts: http://cjwatson.livejournal.com/54274.html

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December days: Music

pentamer asked me to write about music. I briefly covered this in my post on art earlier in the month, but let's expand on that a bit.

( do re mi )

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

Current Mood: creative

Entry tags:

music

Spode Music Week

ghoti, Benedict, and I have just got back from Spode Music Week, our first in its new home. We had a wonderful time although I at least am pretty tired, and ghoti is sleeping so I assume she is too ...

The course music was, on the choral side:

Britten: Hymn to St. Cecilia
Brahms: Fest- und Gedenksprüche
Tallis: Puer natus est nobis (Mass setting)
Davy: Salve Regina (sung at the end of Compline)

... plus a good deal of liturgical music. In orchestra:

Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherezade (third movement)
Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio espagnol (fifth movement)
Tchaikovsky: Waltz from The Sleeping Beauty

The string orchestra had rather less preparation time :-), and played:

Holst: St. Paul's Suite (Dargason)
Grieg: Holberg Suite (Sarabande and Gavotte)
Handel: a movement from a Concerto Grosso, though I've forgotten which one

We did a scratch performance of Show Boat, and I sang Schubert's An die Musik (accompanied by Charles) in the last night concert, which seemed to go reasonably well.

As usual, there was lots of impromptu/sight-read music-making, the highlights for me being a five-voice arrangement of the Londonderry Air, some rather good six-cellos work (which unfortunately I couldn't join because I picked up a stinking cold a couple of days from the end and had to retire to bed), and I'm told GSJ's nine-part recorder arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody was amazing.

I doubt I'll have much of a voice for the next few days, but it was definitely worth it!