'The forest green of G minor'

[cloughie]

For Sis?

M - where did that come from - probably a slipped digit! Did I mean to Type O?

[Serial_Apologist]

M - where did that come from - probably a slipped digit! Did I mean to Type O?

M for sis - or emphasis, cloughie. You're obviously too young to have encountered "the surrealist alphabet".

[cloughie]

M for sis - or emphasis, cloughie. You're obviously too young to have encountered "the surrealist alphabet".

I did get it - I was somewhat mystified how the M got there and just explain punetically!

[Serial_Apologist]

There’s an arrangement of the Schubert GFlat Impromptu in G major. I think it was made because G major is an easier key to read and play in than a black note key. I can’t put my finger on why but when you play it - it sounds different. Less dreamy and exotic somehow - flatter in the sense of duller somehow.

I think you just did, EH! Seriously though, flat keys are easier to get fingers around - for the right hand, at least: sharps involve having to twist the hand to the right, a less natural movement. I must admit to never having understood some composer's preferences for certain keys for expressing particular moods in particular - I suppose it has more to do with registration than anything else.

[Pulcinella]

I think you just did, EH! Seriously though, flat keys are easier to get fingers around - for the right hand, at least: sharps involve having to twist the hand to the right, a less natural movement. I must admit to never having understood some composer's preferences for certain keys for expressing particular moods in particular - I suppose it has more to do with registration than anything else.

Isn't that what organists have to concern themselves with?

[RichardB]

Surely what we're dealing with here is the associations created by different tonalities before equal temperament caught on, which gave rise to a musical repertoire reflecting them, so that when we think of particular tonalities as having particular emotional qualities this is really just (consciously or not) a question of recalling either the music in particular, or the kind of music in general, which composers wrote when tonalities actually sounded different from one another. Which to an extent they still do, given that for example string instruments don't naturally play in equal temperament and thus really do sound "brighter" in sharp keys than in flat ones.

An example of the general principle: B flat minor and its associations with death go further back than Chopin's funeral march. Sylvius Leopold Weiss's Tombeau sur la mort de M Comte de Logy, written in 1721, uses that tonality as a homage to its lute-playing dedicatee, since B flat minor is a highly awkward key for the lute: the lack of available open strings will give the instrument a darker than usual quality.

[Mal]

M for sis - or emphasis, cloughie. You're obviously too young to have encountered "the surrealist alphabet".

I'm ploughing through the "newspaper" chapter of Ulysses and Joyce/Bloom is making fun of a journalist colleague for making up complicated word plays for the paper. Ultimate case of pot calling kettle black?

"Martin Cunningham forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarar two ars is it? double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry with a y of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn’t it? Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry."

Before reading on, can you make any sense of what Bloom is doing?

Google tells me a journalist read out the following sentence to several eminent people:

‘It is agreeable to see the unparalleled embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of a peeled pear.’

This sentence was submitted to the thirteen persons present all of whom transcribed it on slips of paper, when it was found that two of the whole number had spelt each and every word correctly!

So we see Bloom struggling to get the spellings right in this "spelling bee conundrum".

[smittims]

Hi, MickyD, no, my day-colours are different from Stockhausen's:

Monday - pale blue
Tuesday - yellow
Wednesday - orange
Thursday - terra cotta
Friday - emerald green
Saturday -light (not pale) blue
Sunday - a rich red.

[MickyD]

Hi, MickyD, no, my day-colours are different from Stockhausen's:

Monday - pale blue
Tuesday - yellow
Wednesday - orange
Thursday - terra cotta
Friday - emerald green
Saturday -light (not pale) blue
Sunday - a rich red.

Interesting, thank you!