Ninety miles . . .
Posted in general on 10 Jun 2006
… and it wasn’t even a dead-end street.
Happy anniversary!
Eyolf wrote in the month of June, 2006
Things Twice – The Book
Posted in announcements, dylan, general, music on 12 Jun 2006
For various reasons, I’ve put my Dylan-oriented writings together to a book. It is available for download at http://www.dylanchords.com/tt.pdf (2 Mb).
The main reason I have done this has nothing to do with Dylan, but more with Seal: it’s an experiment in LaTeX, inspired by the wonders of this typesetting environment, gradually revealed to me through Seal, which gave me the urge to try it out myself.
Another reason is the long period of inactivity here. I guess I felt that something needed to happen.
The third reason, and the most direct one, is the Lonnie series, which I thought I had brought to a conclusion. As it happened, I still had more to say. I have extended it with a practical demonstration in a concrete analysis of three versions of Mr Tambourine Man, which I consider prime examples of the method. This is included as a new chapter in the book.
Other than that, the book contains most of the articles that are already available in the Professors section of the site, but I have also added some stuff which is not there (teaser…). The new stuff is: the rewritten Lonnie chapter, the follow-up about the Three Tambourine Men, an article I wrote for Judas! a while back, about Dylan’s concept of beauty (yes, he has one…!), and a short piece about In The Garden. I have also rewritten and updated several of the other articles. Eventually, I may re-incorporate the changes into the webpages, but from now on, I consider the book the main source.
The music examples to the analysis of the T-Men can be downloaded separately, both as midi-files and as pdf-files. Get them here.
All the music examples in the book have been produced with Lilypond, a free, open-source music typesetter which is quite similar to LaTeX: plain-text input, steep learning curve, but superb output, once one gets to know the machinery. Highly recommended.
As this is a learning experiment, there are still some things that are not perfect — some figures that are missing, some hyphens which ought to be en dashes, etc. Bear with me — I will clean it up, eventually.
Happy reading!
Theme Time
Posted in dylan, music on 7 Jun 2006
I just heard some of the Theme Time radio shows. Damn, this is almost better than Chronicles! I’m delighted to see that he’s actually doing what I suggested a few posts back – play the stuff that he likes…
Theme Time is exactly that: a selection of favorite songs, interspersed with hilarious, deadpan comments, interesting insights, floating in and out of quotation and commentary, the way he does it on the sleeve notes to World Gone Wrong and, in a different way, all through `Love and Theft’. Way to go, Bobby!
I explicitly suggested Charles Aznavour, and, well… here’s what Dylan says about Charles: “He’s written over a thousand songs. I only know half of them.”
“What I Learned from Lonnie” pt. V: three times 2, and 7 and 4
Posted in "What I learned from Lonnie Johnson", dylan, guitar, music on 3 Jun 2006
[This post concludes the series about Dylan's idea of "mathematical music" in Chronicles]
When Dylan talks freely, he can be very eloquent, and one feels one is snapping at the heels of pure genius. But once he starts giving examples, it all sounds quote mundane, and very banal, and one is left thinking “Was that it?!”
And of course it wasn’t — one realizes that some people are better poets than teachers.
Let this be the introduction to this last installment in the Lonnie-series, where the shroud of doubt is lifted and everything is explained:
* * *
Today’s lesson is from I Chronicles, Ch. 4
In a diatonic scale there are eight …