Hoarding and Notation

I'm not a hoarder, despite the fact that I have at least 2 m³ of books and around (379±1)×10² g (or (37.9±0.1) kg) of music instruments. I think part of the concept of a ``hoarder'' is one who stores all things, not necessarily with any intention of actually being able to use them. The stuff I have aren't really hoarded---I do use them, some more often than others.

Besides, to be a ``true'' hoarder would require the near-equivalent space of an entire apartment/house, and lead to rather nasty issues of pest infestation and the like. I don't have that kind of situation, just the ever-present dust nonsense due to living on a lower floor apartment near the road without air-conditioning and the associated sealing/filtering of the external air.

I was just thinking about this because I was considering the notion of minimalism, and just examining it to see just how much of that I was. The idea of minimalism is very appealing---an aesthetic choice that focuses on reduction to the barest of minimum that does not sacrifice overall functionality. But there are different schools of minimalism, and I think I veer more on the choice of ``doing more with less''. So I'm likely to have a jack-of-all-trades Swiss Champ XLT than an entire box of tools.

But that does not preclude actually having a box of tools as well, particularly if they are of exceptionally good quality, and that their use can actually save me the time and effort needed to sometimes MacGyver things in a janky/scuffed sort of way.

So in a sense, I think I like the concept of minimalism, but I practise some kind of careful ``right tool for right job'' aesthetic for things that matter enough. Thus, not quite a minimalist, but not a hoarder; just picking and keeping things according to a context-sensitive thought process.

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I've recently finished reading A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of ``A'' by Bruce Haynes, and it certainly gave me much to think about, particularly about how the historical movements of the [reference] pitch standard affected the way music instruments are eventually combined into an orchestra with their associated nuances in notation.

I would say that the time period of these happenings (from between 1700--1900) is rather similar to that of the time period in which the traditional Chinese instruments are combined to form the so-called 民族乐团 or the Chinese Orchestra. It really puts into perspective the journey that the homogenity of the western orchestra had to take to get to where it is, and even then, how tradition still overrides many sensibilities.

Some highlights of A History of Performing Pitch include:

1. The big schism between church-chorale/organ music, popular opera/ensemble music, and military music;
2. Sonority/timbre challenges for wind/brass instruments that come from their ``native pitch'' depending on which type of music they were predominantly played in;
3. Common transpositions of M2 (two semitones) and m3 (three semitones) to allow a single piece of written music to be harmoniously playable among the different ``native pitch'' tuned instruments;
4. The very large role in which vocal range determined the appropriate pitch standard to work with (tendency to pitch ``A'' lower for better range);
5. The disproportionate amount of influence of the various wind instruments (cornett, flutes, organs) in determining pitch standards after the vocalists.

I think this is the kind of history that every respectable [classical] musician should know so that they can better appreciate the setting in which their instrument and repertoire evolved in.

It also behooves the Chinese orchestra folk to learn from the mistakes/lessons that the western folk had gone through while trying to reconcile the different music traditions to form their symphonical orchestra, and not just copy the final behaviour blindly without thinking.

Yes, I'm still salty about why the staff notation for 笛子 is in concert pitch instead of instrument pitch for whatever type of 笛子 being used. The old consort recorders had their stuff written in concert pitch despite their tuning works because they were following an older music tradition for a mostly recorder-only ensemble---the recorder was a less important instrument in the world of the orchestra, being suplanted by the flute and concert flute. And even then, the tradition of pre-transposing the concert pitches of the staff into instrument pitches have already been put in place to ensure that the players don't have to do on-the-spot transposition of complex writing.

I suppose there really isn't enough history of important transposition instruments in the Chinese orchestra as compared to the western one (i.e. clarinets, and horns). It's just the 笛子, and it is thus easy enough to be ``bullied'' to do stupid things.

Anyway, I think that's about all I want to mumble about for now. Till the next update.