February 16, 2012

Instructions
I. Darwinian Grammar and its Eventual Undoing
II. The Rand Corporation, John Cage and the I Ching
III. Arbitrating the Arbitrary: What of the Undone?

[The following paragraphs can be read in any order, but each should be read once before any are read a second time.]

A. "I'm as good a singer as Caruso," Bob Dylan told a reporter in 1965. "You have to listen closely but I hit all the notes and I can hold my breath three times as long as Caruso if I want to."

B. "When Schoenberg asked my whether I would devote my life to music, I said, 'Of course,'" John Cage said. "After I had been studying music with him for two years, Schoenberg said 'In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case, I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.'"

C. Released in 1965, Bringing It All Back Home was Bob Dylan's fifth album and the first one on which he employed an electric guitar and a backing band. Despite distancing him from his folk music base, it was Dylan's first record to sell a million copies.

D. The average span of human hearing is 10 octaves, or 120 notes. If the sounds recorded coming from our sun were transcribed into musical notation, they would cover a span of 10 million notes.

E. There are more than a million numbers between one and a million. There are semi-numbers and demi-semi-numbers. Our current numbering system is the result of the arbitrary segmentation of the single continuum which stretches from one to a million.

F. Each of the 12 notes of the octave is divided into 100 cents, so that a quarter-tone could be said to be 25 cents, and a whole tone a dollar. One dollar is also the common price of a legally downloaded song, which is a bargain as most songs contain a variety of different notes. In fact, when someone says they got something "for a song," they generally mean they got it for a negligible price. There are few things other than a song that can be purchased for a dollar, or 100 cents. One might say that a song can be bought for a song.

G. The composer Arnold Schoenberg devised a system by which each of the 12 tones in the Western musical scale were given equal weight. Under the old system, it might be said, the whole numbers one through 12 would have been: 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11 (where the tonic is A).

H. The concept of a million isn't hard to grasp merely because of its size. As it turns out, a million isn't even always the same thing. Until a pronouncement by Prime Minister Harold Wilson brought the British numbering system in line with the American in 1974, the classes of large numbers were much larger in England. The British (and some other European countries) used the term "one thousand thousand" for a million, and further complicated things with such numbers as a "milliard" and a "billiard." Multiplying the number 100,000,000 by 10, for example, results in a number (1,000,000,000) called a "billion" in the American system but a "thousand million" or a "milliard" under the old European system. The European system also had a "billiard" (a thousand billion) and a "trilliard" (a thousand trillion) meaning we were working with very, very differently sized quadrillions. It's only a factor of modern times, however, that we actually have to agree on such things as trillions and quadrillions. To borrow a quote from the former Illinois senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

I. Enrico Caruso's 1907 recording of Vesti la giubba from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci is commonly considered to be the first sound recording to sell a million copies.

J. In 1959 John Cage won 5 million lire on an Italian game show answering questions about mushrooms.

K. "There's a book called the I Ching," Bob Dylan said to the Chicago Daily News in 1965. "I'm not trying to push it, I don't want to talk about it, but it's the only thing that is amazingly true, period. Not just for me. Anybody would know it. Anybody that ever walks would know it. It's a whole system of finding out things, based on all sorts of things. You don't have to believe in anything to read it, because besides being a great book to believe in, it's also very fantastic poetry."

L. Some questions: What is done with the coins collected from fountains? Are they made back into dollars? How big a fountain would it take to hold 1,000,000 pennies? Are there currencies that fall between cents? And: If you haven't got a half penny, it is said, then God bless you.