I ran some errands yesterday, and ended up at Five Guys @ Plaza Singapura for a lunch-dinner combination. As usual, I got a Bacon Cheeseburger ``all the way'' (i.e. all the toppings), Cajun fries (large), and a Corona Extra beer. Definitely delicious; I had been craving for some meat for quite a while. I think it is something that happens at least once a week, so I need to take that into consideration when I plan my going-out time.
I also dropped by Essentials Pharmacy to grab some of my standard medicines to deal with the sensitive skin issue. While I am no longer oozing serum from broken skin like a monster like in the bad old days, there is still some maintenance needed as the weather conditions get more and more unpredictable. I have a decent regime set up: basic mometasone furoate for skin inflammation control, use of loratidine and chlorpheniramine as oral anti-histamines for the day time and night time respectively. As for cleansing, Simple soap is used instead. As simple as it sounds, the soap seems to be exceedingly hard to find in Singapore for some reason, at least, if one is using the brick and mortar shops. But I digress.
I was listening to 李镇's 《走西口》 album from 1999 for most of the travel time, and am reminded about the beauty that is the expression of the humble bamboo 笛子. Yes, I play a lot of concert flute, but in the end, the dizi is still the superior expressive instrument, mostly because of how raw it gets when it comes to techniques of expression; it relies on emotive power over music theory to get what it wants across. 李镇's pieces were not highly complex musically, but they have a good sense of melody and feel in them that makes them oh-so-alluring. Good flute music is amazing too, don't get me wrong, but at some fundamental level it still relies heavily on the Western construct of music theory to bring out the beauty within.
Is that bad? No, it's just different, and I wish that more people would understand that and realise that everyone can stand to learn a bit more about how music is interpreted and performed by different peoples and cultures.
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I spent much of today working on adding the new page of fingering charts on my 笛子 materials set of pages. It is, in many ways, pandering to the types of terms that are used by people to search and click into my web site. There are already ample information on fingering charts within, like concert pitch-bangdi mapping and concert pitch-qudi mapping, fingering pattern charts for the different tongyin, and even the most crazy 12-tone fingering pattern chart that provides additional information on how to find the right keys to change, but I suppose people are just fundamentally lazy.
I must admit that the dizi, when looked at from a very high performance level, is a very cerebral type of instrument. I tried my best to capture all these in ways that would make sense, but it seems like it might not be well appreciated.
And so, I pandered by writing up the fingering charts using Lilypond, and more specifically, the woodwind diagrams. The tin-whistle pattern sufficed for the 6-hole dizi, and it was what I ended up using.
If I want to do the same thing for the dadi and/or xiao, I will need to learn how to hack scm/define-woodwind-diagrams.scm and scm/display-woodwind-diagrams.scm. I had a quick glance into them---they are non-trivial to mess about with.
Apart from doing up the 6-hole dizi charts, I took the opportunity to put together a simplified generic saxophone fingering chart, with the original intension of adding in the altissimo stuff. As I worked through with my tenor saxophone, altissimo on the saxophone is hard---I was not even good with playing harmonics with the correct intonation on the horn. Without this strong fundamental, there was no way to tackle the altissimo register at all. So that's something I need to work on.
But that aside, here is the chart as it stands:
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