Tom Glenn's Blog, page 52

Music Periods

My posts about music modes got me to thinking about the different periods of what we now call classical music. The history of western music is the story of changing tastes, moving from the highly rational toward the emotional.

The earliest period was the Medieval whose beginning is unclear but ended in about 1400. The best-known music of the period was Gregorian chant, monophonic (only one voice line) and liturgical. It was entirely modal, not tonal.

Next came the Renaissance which lasted until about 1600. Music became a group performance art with singers and instruments sounding at the same time. The move away from modal toward tonal became pronounced.

Modern music really began with the Baroque period which lasted from around 1600 until the death of Johann Sebastian Bach in 1750. Characteristic of this period was that music was written in keys, major and minor, rather than in modes. Counterpoint (polyphony), that is, playing multiple melodies at the same time while adhering to the rules of tonal harmony, became dominant. The preeminent form was the fugue. This was intellectual (rational) music at its peak.

During the Classical period, 1750 to 1830, simple singable solo melodies accompanied by chords were dominant. The piano (pianoforte) became the primary keyboard instrument. The symphony and the sonata form first appeared, and full-sized orchestras were in fashion. The most prominent composers were Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ludwig van Beethoven began his composing career during the Classical period and introduced the Romantic period (1830 to 1900). Tastes still leaned toward the rational, but the emotional appeal was growing. Mozart’s unfinished mass for the dead, the Requiem, written as the composer himself approached death, plumbed new emotional depths.

More next time

Slavery

Slavery is a curse known worldwide. Its history goes back to the beginning of civilization. Some historic landmarks: Around 500 A.D., Anglo-Saxons from northern Europe conquered England and enslaved the native Britons. By 1000 A.D., slavery was a normal practice in England’s rural, agricultural economy, as destitute workers placed themselves and their families in a form of debt bondage to landowners. In 1526, Spanish explorers brought the first African slaves to settlements in what would become the United States. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first British colony to legalize slavery.

And slavery was the cause of the Civil War (April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865). That led to the Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1 1963, that freed all the southern slaves. It was followed two years later by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution which abolished slavery in the U.S.

In the aftermath of slavery, racial prejudice and White supremacy have prolonged the U.S. disgrace. They are still with us today. Following the Democratic presidential victory in 2020—made possible by minority support for the Democrats—Republicans across the country passed laws making voting more difficult, especially for Blacks and Latinos. Nineteen states have enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote, obviously aimed at minority voters.

So the stain of slavery is still with us. We have work to do.

May’s Wilderness

I have just finished reading a book that moved me to the core: The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) by Gerald G. May (1940-2005). According to the Forward by Parker J. Palmer, May knew he was dying when he wrote the book. And indeed, toward the end of the text, he mentions in passing his fatal illness. The book was published posthumously in 2006. It was his nineth book.

The book was given to me by the May family for my birthday in 2021. I know May’s son, Greg, a circus clown and juggler, because we are both writers. May mentions Greg several times in the text, and the author’s picture on the back page of the dust jacket was taken by Greg. On the blank page at the beginning of the book is a hand-written note signed by “the May family,” expressing the wish that May and I might have known each other because we would have been good friends. I am deeply honored.

The Wisdom of Wilderness is a dissertation drawn from May’s times spent in the wild. He describes his trips away from civilization into the mountains and forests to find peace and reconnect with nature. The best way for me to sum up what he learns is to quote two short passages from the end of the book:

From the next to the last page:

Love is the pervading passion of all things that draws diversity into oneness, that knows and pleads for union, that aches for goodness and beauty, that suffers loss and destruction.

And the last paragraph:

What the Power of Slowing taught me is what the Source of the All constantly yearns for: that each one of us will know without doubt that we are loved, and that we are intimately, irrevocably part of the endless creation of love, and that we will join, with full freedom and consciousness, the joyous creativity that is Nature, that is Wildness, that is Wilderness, that is Everything.

Musical Modes (2)

Modern classical music depends almost entirely on the major and minor scales with rare experiments in the Phrygian mode. But in the early twentieth century, composers began to experiment with atonality, defined, according to Wikipedia, as “music that lacks a tonal center, or key.” Atonality, in this sense, usually describes a composition method in which a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a single, central triad is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. Most famous among atonal composers are those of the “Second Viennese School,” principally Alban Berg, Arnold Schönberg, and Anton Webern.

These composers depended on “twelve-tone technique”—also known as dodecaphony and twelve-tone serialism. They constructed “tone rows” in which the twelve tones of an octave were laid out in an order that was then used as the basis for composing a piece.

Few composers joined the original three of the Second Viennese School, and atonality has largely faded from the musical composition scene. Today tonality, the use of the major and minor keys, is again dominant. But music written in the modes continues to haunt me.

These days, when I want to comfort myself, I sit at my magnificent Steinway grand and play my own arrangement of “Greensleeves” in the Dorian mode. It takes me back to a different time and at the same time grounds me in present.

Musical Modes

My recent blog post on Mozart’s symphonies led me to think through the elements of musical structure. At the core of the music’s logic are the modes, the seven scales starting on the white keys of the piano. The best-known modes are the Ionian, the same as the modern major scale, and the Aeolian, the standard minor scale. Using only the white keys on a keyboard, the Ionian starts on C and progresses up to B. The Aeolian begins on A and goes up to the G above it.

But the diatonic scale (the white keys from C to B on the piano) has a total of seven modes. They are the Ionian (the standard major scale), the Dorian (from D to C on the piano using only white keys), the Phrygian (starting on E), the Lydian (starting on F), the Mixolydian (starting on G), the Aeolian (stating on A), and the Locrian (starting on B).

Classical music performed today uses almost exclusively the major (Ionian) and minor (Aeolian) scales. But the Phrygian appears occasionally. Johann Sebastian Bach kept the Phrygian mode of some original chorale melodies in his cantatas. Anton Bruckner was fond of the Phrygian and used it in a number of his symphonies. Most famously, Brahms started the second movement of his fourth symphony in the Phrygian mode.

The only other mode usage recognizable to modern ears is the occasional use of the original Dorian mode, identical to the minor scale except that its sixth tone is not lowered. The only music I hear nowadays in the Dorian is the folksong “Greensleeves” that originated in sixteenth century England.

The other modes are, to my knowledge, not used in modern music. More’s the pity.

More next time.

The IRS (2)

Who is responsible for crippling the IRS? According to House of Representatives Budget Committee 2021 Year-End Report, “Republicans have politically targeted and vilified the [IRS] agency for decades as part of their tax-cut agenda. After Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1995 and Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House, calls to abolish the IRS became a mainstream Republican talking point. Soon after, the Republican‑controlled Senate held a series of dramatic hearings on alleged abuses by the IRS (later debunked by the Government Accountability Office), followed by a new law limiting the agency’s collection powers and independence.” Overall, funding cuts have led to the elimination of 22 percent of IRS staff.

What can we citizens do about the IRS failures? Push our Congressmen and Senators to give the IRS the attention it deserves and increase its funding. Members of Congress respond to the people that elect them. That’s us. Let’s do it.

The IRS

With tax season approaching, my attention turns to the IRS. According to Wikipedia, “The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue service for the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of the federal statutory tax law.” The IRS was founded in 1862. As of 2019, the most recent date for which figures are available, it employed 74,454 people and had a budget of $11.303 billion.

The IRS is best known for its failings. It is slow in processing tax returns and unresponsive to taxpayers. Every year it seems to get worse. That’s because Congress keeps reducing its budget. In 2010, the IRS budget was $14 billion. That was reduced to $12 billion in 2017 and to $11.3 billion in 2019. The chronic underfunding of the IRS poses one of the most significant long-term risks to tax administration today, including reduced revenue collection, impaired taxpayer rights, and greater taxpayer burden.

But while the IRS budget was being reduced, the taxpaying public it serves was enormous. In 2018, 144.3 million taxpayers reported earning $11.6 trillion in adjusted gross income and paid $1.5 trillion in individual income taxes. The population of the U.S.—and therefore its number of taxpayers—grows every year.

The result? Multiple problems according to a variety of sources. The IRS is unable to answer millions of taxpayer telephone calls; it is unable to timely process taxpayer correspondence; the “tax gap”—the amount of tax due but uncollected—stands at nearly $400 billion each year; taxpayers believe the tax laws are not being fairly enforced against others; and the federal budget deficit is unnecessarily large.

More next time.

Two Distortions (3)

More about the U.S. Senate: Citizens from the smallest, Republican, and most conservative states that represent only 17 percent of the U.S. population can elect 51 senators and effectively rule the senate over the objections of the other 83 percent of us.  It only takes 42 senators from smallest states representing 10 percent of the population to uphold a filibuster and effectively block any legislation favored by the vast majority.  In no other western democracy is the potential for this kind of misrepresentation and minority rule so extreme.

The senate Republicans who blocked President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, represented 20 million fewer people than the Democrats who supported him.

So there we have it, two distortions of American democracy, the electoral college and the makeup of the senate, that punish the majority and reward the well-to-do Republican minority. Changing either of them will require a Constitutional amendment, a huge undertaking.

But we Americans can do it if we put our shoulders to the wheel. Let’s get started.

Two Distortions (2)

As a result of the electoral college, twice within this young century, Republican candidates who lost the popular vote have nevertheless won the electoral vote and been named president. In 2004, Democrat Al Gore came in second in the electoral vote but received 547,398 more popular votes than Republican George W. Bush, making him the first person since Grover Cleveland in 1888 to win the popular vote but lose in the Electoral College. Even worse, in 2016 election, Donald Trump, who four years earlier called the college “a disaster for democracy,” lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million popular votes but won in the electoral college.

It is long since time that the electoral college be eliminated. How long must we allow the Republicans and racists to prevent its abolition?

And our system of representation by senators is equally undemocratic. The Constitution specifies that each state, of which we now have fifty, will have two senators representing it. That means that the 40 million people who live in the 22 smallest states get 44 senators to represent their views and interests.  The 40 million people in California get two. Nevada, next door to California with a population of three million, gets the same representation as California. This means a vote in Nevada is worth about 13 times as much as a vote in California.

The small state bias, like the electoral college, produces a Republican bias. That is because most small states tend to be overwhelmingly rural, white, and conservative. In the six-year election cycle that produced the 2019 Senate, the Democratic senators actually received 4.5 million more votes nationwide than the Republican senators. And, on average, each Democratic senator won 30 percent more votes than each Republican senator. And yet the Republicans won the majority of the seats and control of the Senate—a flagrant case of minority rule.

More next time.

Two Distortions

My beloved United States of America is severely compromised by two institutions that undermine democracy: the electoral college and the specification that each state, no matter its size, will have two senators. Both are required by the Constitution, and both would require a constitutional amendment to change.

The United States Electoral College was established by the 1789 U.S. Constitution as part of the process for the indirect election of the President and Vice-President of the United States. It was inserted by the framers of the Constitution as a last-minute deal, a gift to southern states trying to protect slaveholders’ power and leverage the “three-fifths compromise.” That was an agreement that three-fifths of the slave population in the southern states, none of whom were allowed to vote, would be counted for determining direct taxation and representation in the House of Representatives. Without the compromise, southern states would be consistently outvoted by the far more populous northern states. Hence the racist underpinnings of the electoral college.

The electoral college has been criticized since its establishment, and more than a century of attempts to replace it with a more democratic national popular vote have been thwarted by southern and Republican politicians looking to diminish the voting power of non-whites.

In 1823, Thomas Jefferson described the electoral college as “the most dangerous blot on our Constitution.” In the 1960s, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee called it “a loaded pistol pointed at our system of government,” whose “continued existence is a game of Russian roulette.” New York Representative Emanuel Celler once called it “barbarous, unsporting, dangerous, and downright uncivilized.” In 2012, Donald Trump tweeted that the institution is “a disaster for a democracy.” Despite more than 700 legislative efforts to amend or abolish it, the Electoral College remains.

More next time.