Reading Robin's stuff about Pink Moon made me dig a bit of my essay on that album out:

"Major-minor

Harvest Breed and Things Behind The Sun both derive some of the musical drama which drives them along from the difference between the major and minor third. In a minor scale the third step in the scale is a semitone lower than in the major scale � in C this would be E flat rather than E. The middle sections of Things Behind The Sun is in two halves � the first very much in the major mode:

MAJOR

"Take your time and you�ll be fine "

"And say a prayer for people there "

MINOR

"Who live on the floor floor"

The change from major to minor is clearly reflected in the sense of the lyrics and indeed leads on to the main �point� of the song � the long phrases centred on the second scale step which completes the song � �about the farmers and the fun��..sends you out into the rain�

Overall Things Behind The Sun has a downward trajectory � the episode with the major third represents a brief upswing which can�t be sustained and which falls back on a series of obsessive and unanswered questions.

Harvest Breed is similar in that it plays with the major, minor third, fourth and the second to give an overall shape to the song:

Falling fast - minor third

And falling free - major third

You Look - fourth

To find - major third

A friend - second

Once again we see the contour of the song rising at first and then falling back � indeed it falls further in the penultimate line �you�re ready now�. But like TBTS, Harvest Breed does not follow the linear logic of the song through to a proper harmonic closure, preferring to leave things open and unresolved."

I wrote an earlier very long essay trying to argue that Pink Moon was an expressionist work - going back to Pierrot Lunaire where Schoenberg stands outside himself and portrays himself as a puppet of internal and external forces. The idea was that you could follow various musical/existential positions from there through Stravinsky (eg The Soldiers Tale, Ragtime, The FWW short folky songs) Weill (up to the Doors - Moon of Alabamma) Walton's Facade, Britten's Peter Grimes possibly into Nick's mum's writing etc) as an alternative tradition of songwriting. I tried to build in Adorno's theory of waht amkes some works of 20C music epochal - that the outsider stance of the writer is carried through into the structure of the songs. In fact it would be interesting to look at the quieter pieces of Harrison Birtwhistle in that connection. Anyway it was great sprawling thing which I abandoned having inflicted it on a couple of people. Instead a wrote a much tighter analytical piece that the extract above comes from.

Yvonne mentioned this morning that in About A Boy the hero gives the depressed mother a Nick Drake album for Christmas - she thought that was a pretty good joke.

Yesterday evening we finished the Discipline book off - the final sections are about Power and Money. Roughly the line seems to be that unless you are engaged with the disciplines the power of money will seduce you. The other leg of the argument is that with the disciplines you escape the power of money and avoid the need for poverty as a precursor to spiritual development. In fact I wrote to Paul Wheeler yesterday about how I couldnt see myself enjoying a major cut in income. Paul was talkng a lot about being "autumnal" and reclusive.

By the way I found the key to the blue box. This didnt prevent some very odd experiences in the middle of the night between sleeping and waking. Probably some chemical or other.

On the technical front I am hacking my way through the jungle of how to connect the rest of my assets to the PC through the USB port. My local shop recommend an Edirol box that costs around �250 - this seems to be an outpost of the Roland empire. The box in question is middle of the product range and there is a simpler product in the range that just as some SPDIF ins and outs which I can get quite cheaply from the US over the net. But I am also wondering about buying an outboard soundcard with suitable routing like maybe the Creative Labs Audigy. Or I could go up a step and get a Tascam 4 track USB controller. I bought a copy of Future Music this morning to try to get further ahead on all of this.

Rolling away in the background is the question of methodology - how does one define and justify one's methodology vis a vis other people using similar technology to different ends. How is the way ahead emerging from the recent pieces?