Prompted improvisation

This idea came to me in bed in the middle of the night, at least half asleep.

One composer writes a very short piece for a small ensemble. Several other composers write short works (for any or all of the same ensemble) in response. None of the composers are named until the final performance.

In my initial thought, the first piece is played just before intermission and the others respond during intermission, and their responses constitute the second half of the concert. (This is why I named it all "prompted improvisation".)

Upon later reflection, that seems impossible, so I revised it to "prompted composition" with the second set of composers given more time (24 hours? one week?) to respond. And I thought it could be named "Question and Responses".

Maybe I'll suggest this to the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series.

P.S. (July 2025) In The New Yorker this month, I read about 24 Hour Musicals and 24 Hour Plays, where "creative communities produce plays and musicals written, rehearsed, and performed in twenty-four hours." My "prompted improvisation" idea is neither completely new nor completely impossible!

A trick of memory

Walking in Debs Park with Princeton (last summer)

Sue, a childhood friend of Bruce Lemerise's, found my note about him and wrote to me Saturday afternoon. I replied early that evening, and she wrote me again Sunday afternoon.

After Bruce died, a friend and neighbor of his gave me some additional illustrations he had drawn. Now, for the second time in twenty years or so, I looked around for them unsuccessfully. I also looked for that neighbor's name. I thought her first name was Susan, but I couldn't be sure that I wasn't just being misled because this new correspondent was named Sue. I did find Bruce's address and phone number in an old phone directory of mine, but no mention of Susan.

Monday morning, I was walking in Debs Park with the neighbors' Great Dane, Princeton, as usual. After about 45 minutes, as we were headed back to his house, I had just glanced at my watch and noted that we were doing well on time, when an unusual three-syllable word popped into my head. As I mentally repeated it, I slowly realized it was probably a last name, and after a few more moments, I realized it wanted to go with "Susan". It took yet another couple of moments and mental repetition of the name before my full consciousness kicked in and I thought, "Wait a minute! Could that really be her name?"

Thirty minutes later, I'm finally back online. I discover that it almost certainly was her name. One of the four people with that name in New York state (still!) lives in the same building that Bruce lived in! And I get a phone number, too.

When we finally talked last night, we were both amazed to have connected. Susan will contact Sue, too.

The more I thought about how Susan's last name suddenly came to me, and my slow mental processing after it did, the more mysterious it all seemed!

On competition: re-purposed genes

Recently, I commented on Kevin Kelly's Google+ post that began, "Somehow I am missing that Collection Gene that many people seem to have...." I wrote, "But you also collect IDEAS and CONNECTIONS and SPECULATIONS. (And you're very good at it!)" (I've been reading Kelly's work for decades.)

There are several common genes I either missed or have re-purposed....

Fortunately, I missed the all too common Addiction Gene.

I am also completely missing the Fashion Gene. I don't even understand what it means for one color to "go with" or "not go with" another, or why stripes and spots can't co-exist.

My favorite common gene to ponder, though, is the Competetive Gene. I was never very interested in competing in sports, but I came to understand that I was instead very competitive in gathering information. (That recognition of different types of competition is why I was so quick to comment on Kelly's post.) If I get a chance, I'll try to write more about that at greater length.

On language, thought, gender, and direction

("Finally!" some readers may feel, "a blog post that's closer to what a blog post should be!")

Today's New York Times Magazine has a feature article on "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" by Guy Deutscher. Deutscher is a linguistics scholar at the University of Manchester, and the article is from his forthcoming book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

The article touches on three issues of great interest to me. (I was a linguistics minor in grad school, and I probably would have been a cognitive science major had there been such a thing at the time.)

First, the article starts with the ideas of Benjamin Lee Whorf, about how language might affect our thinking. I first read Whorf as an undergraduate (not for any assignment), and I was so intrigued by the idea that I applied for a Watson Fellowship to travel and research it. (I didn't get the Fellowship.)

Second, one of the "case studies" the article discusses is the gender of nouns in many languages, one of the impediments to my foreign language learning. I strongly resist the illogical genderfication of everything. Deutscher writes,

[O]nce gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.

Third, Deutscher discusses the remarkable directionality of an Australian aboriginal language:

In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals.

That's me!

It's slowly diminishing, but I've always amazed people with my sense of direction and place, particularly how strongly it was tied to my memories of events. If I half-remembered something, one of the first pieces that would come to me would be what direction I was facing, then whether I was indoors or out, where the door or highway or downtown or other landmark was, and that would usually pinpoint where this took place, which would remind me of everything else -- when it occurred, who was there, who was speaking, etc.

My sense of direction was weaker when I was a passenger in a car or boat or plane, and, if I couldn't pin down the directions at all in a memory, it usually was something that happened in a dream or when I was stoned! (Those were the days!)

My sense of direction is not as strong now as it used to be. I'm not sure why.