Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Okay, this is pretty cool ... I started stumbling through the book my mother brought me, ΤΑ ΔΗΜΟΤΙΚΑ ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙΑ ΚΑΙ ΟΙ ΛΑ·Ι·ΚΟΙ ΧΟΡΟΙ ΤΗΣ ΚΥΠΡΟΥ (ISBN 9963-42-016-8), and noticed a few interesting things.

1. (expected) Some of these tunes are going to take me a while to really get used to rythmically, but will be niftycoolfun when I do,
2. (unexpected) In the first three tunes, one sounds mostly Western scale-wise but has Middle-Eastern-sounding phrases stuck in here and there, and two just flip-flop constantly between Western-sounding and Middle-Eastern-sounding (I'd expected one or the other),
3. (unexpected) While the titles and lyrics are in Greek, the stuff that's usually in Italian is in Italian -- "Allegretto", "rall", "fine", "Andantino", "Canto", "violono", "Rubato" -- and trills are marked "tr" in the Roman alphabet (I guess it's just Standard And Expected that anything in modern Western musical notation will have those markings in the Roman alphabet?),
4. (had I noticed this before?) I read (for pronounciation or hunting for familiar words) all-uppercase Greek (chapter titles in the front text, tune titles, book title, dedication (well it's in the expected place and looks like a dedication anyhow), copyright notice, publisher) much more slowly than I do lowercase or mixed-case Greek (everything else), and
5. (just a little unexpected) I got more out of paging through the introductory stuff at the beginning than I thought I would, once I noticed the section on the different ways 9/8 and 7/8 are broken up in these tunes, and the special metrical pattern for 8/8 (3-2-3), but there are still twenty-five pages of probably useful (or at least interesting) text there that I can't read, and I'm not sure which (double-strung) instrument that is that they give the tuning for with a unison course followed by an octave course followed by a unison course followed by another octave course.

It was kind of cool to suddenly notice solfege in Greek in the paragraph before that interesting tuning, obviously about the tuning. It took me a little while to figure out why "Do" had what looked like an extra letter in it ("Nto", "Ντο"). My current guess is that it's just the closest you can get to a 'D' sound in Greek, which I noticed when I tried pronouncing it. (Delta is not quite a 'D'. I've heard it pronounced as a really hard 'TH', and as a cross between 'D' and hard-'TH'.) I'll have to remember to ask Mom about it later.

When I was first flipping through the book, after glancing at a couple of the tunes I commented to my mother, "I can see that this is going to keep me up late tonight." I am going to have so much fun with this book. I'll have to try some of the tunes on mandolin. (There's a bouzouki on the cover, but the author is a violinist. The bouzouki tuning I'm familiar with is violin/mandolin tuning an octave down, but I've been told in very strong terms that that tuning is Wrong (in my defense, I'd written that it was one common tuning (which it is, at least in Celtic music, which swiped the instrument from the Greeks), not that it was "the" tuning.)) In one tune (that I've noticed so far), some notes have thick slashes across the stems, the way a roll is noted in drum music. I'm interpreting this as a "pick tremolo" and assuming that at least that tune is intended for mandolin or bouzouki, the instruments most associated with that technique. (Though I do occasionally use it on guitar -- it's easier on the 12-string but it works on 6-string also.)

My mother commented that the book was surprisingly expensive. I noticed that it's printed on fairly expensive (heavy, glossy, high clay content) paper. (About 300pp., paperback, but with what looks like a pretty nice binding for a paperback. I hope it holds up as well as it looks like it will.) I'm not sure why they'd used such expensive paper, but there are eight pages of photographs near the back. Perhaps the whole book is on that stock just for the sake of those eight pages (four leaves)? Or maybe somebody just really liked how clean music looks on that nice paper; I don't know. The price sticker says eight pounds, which http://www.xe.com/ucc/ says is a little more than sixteen dollars (US), and that sounds like "more than Glenn can afford right now", but it doesn't sound "expensive, for a music book" to me. I don't remember how much I paid for my copy of McGee (Medieval Instrumental Dances, Timothy McGee, Indiana University Press, ISBN 0253333539), and that's only got what, forty-three tunes in it? (But I can read the text...) Before she left for Cyprus, I had asked Mom to get me Greek sheet music. I wasn't expecting more than a hundred tunes and a specifically Cypriot theme. Extra bonus mommy-points to my mother for this!

Okay, I am way too into this. I just spent how many paragraphs telling the world how cool this book is? And as sleepy as I am right now, I'm not going to be able to sleep until I try a couple more tunes on guitar.

In unrelated news, my brother discovered the Hash House Harriers in Cyprus and is now interested in joining a branch around here. Mom asked me whether I'd heard of them, and I said, "You mean the 'drinking club with a running problem'?" I just hadn't realized that they were everywhere. (I've got at least one friend who is a Hasher, and The Homespun Ceilidh Band played for a Hasher wedding once.) I am amused that my brother had to go halfway around the world to find them, but I seem to be especially easily amused tonight.

And no, I don't know why what I'm pretty sure is a line from (or the title of?) a comic I don't read has been crawling out of my brain in at least two journal entries recently.

"Being on the side of truth means you get slammed from all sides. I can see why people choose one side and stick to it." -- theferrett, 2003-10-16

Today I slept. Not quite enough, but more than the previous few nights. I woke at 18:00. That after the weekend I had, several things on my to-do list did not get done is not surprising. That I was asleep while not doing them instead of awake and feeling wretched while not doing them is a little better than what I'd expected.

I had a fun weekend, just a painfully tiring one.

Other than spot-checking a few individual journals, I'm nearly a week behind on my friends list (something like six days and twenty two hours behind, I think, but I'm not going to go check that figure right now.)

I have to figure out which of the apparently unsolvable problems in front of me really are unsolvable and how bad the fallout from not solving them is going to be. Y'know, the idea of needing to borrow money to be able to afford to file for bankruptcy strikes me as perverse. But that may well be where I am at this point. More on that later.

When I'm buying gas by digging into my bag of quarters (the one that I hang from my belt when I'm in medieval or renaissance garb) to buy gas a dollar or two at a time, I start thinking, "Can I afford to go where I'm planning to go today?" I don't like thinking that way. I find it quite uncomfortable. Asking that question about a long trip -- to NYC, Boston, Pittsburgh, or Toronto -- is familiar. But "Can I afford to go to rehearsal?" feels odd and frightening.

I don't like the depressiveness index of this entry, so here are some good things I'd been meaning to write recently anyhow:

For the record, silmaril does glamour quite nicely. The subtly-retro approach works very well for her.

I enjoyed a nifty conversation about grammar over the weekend, which was interesting because we were talking about English, French, Turkish, Greek, Russian, and Latin all at once. I learned new cases and new kind of verb. (Well, new-to-me -- they've been around for centuries.) Who knew, back in seventh grade, that knowing declensions and conjugations would later prove so entertaining? I still have to get around to asking juuro to explain a bunch of other unfamiliar cases as well.

The thing I want to mention about understanding semiconductors requires more background that I feel like typing right now, but it still goes on the positive-things list.