Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-07-03 - 5:08 a.m.

I sent Gilbert Isbin a copy of Plundafonix together with a few supporting notes.

The Press Notice about Sports Aid and HIV in South Africa looks as if has gone out.

I managed to get a pitch of to Skoda for a re-match which Graham rather fancies.

John Gambles rang about a meeting with Graham and we cooked up a couple of quite interesting wheezes. He immediately mailed Skoda Auto College.

I arranged to go and see the TWR engineering and design centre at Worthing to discuss the technology road-map on automotive design and manufacturing (and maybe call in on Paul Wheeler). So all of that was a bit more joined up than yesterday.

I tried to read Kripke�s Naming and Necessity on the train in but the environment didn�t help. However I did pick up a useful item in Philosophy Now about Confucianism and patterns of moral reasoning by David Wong at Duke University. At root he is saying that the deductive approach to rational action isn�t the whole story. Anyone who knows Myers-Briggs will know that there is an axis which distinguishes between working with intuition and working the facts � this axis is quite close to the one which separates making judgements from seeing possibilities. So a common cluster is to make judgements on the facts and there is an opposite pole which is intuitively seeing the possibilities.

Wong is suggesting that this second cluster can be important to morality. One could easily develop several illustrations of these points.

The coincidence flows from a Confucian example which Wong cites in the Chinese philospher Zhungzi whose approach broadly speaking is Cagean. I will quote:

� Most famously Zhungzi�s cook Ding is able to cut up an oxen so smoothly and effortlessly that it is as if he is doing a dance with the knife as it zips through the spaces between the joints.�

The coincidence arises because Marianne Neville-Rolfe once used a poem about Ding�s skills as the Foreword to the Report and Accounts of The Civil Service College. All kinds of points might flow from this but once you have had a boss who goes out on a limb like this it is quite difficult to work for more conventional people.

I tracked down an article on Google which linked Kripke to Wittgenstein�s Tractatus. No sooner had I found that than I noticed that Jon Cole had mailed me � he mentioned the argument from First Cause and so almost by instinct (Ding-like) I sent him the W-K reference plus a question about the first Kate Bush album. ( Andy Powell was in the same year as John C and Paul B at Kings Wimbledon and I have a vague recollection of someone telling me that he produced the Kick Inside. At the time it struck me as odd that musicians from one year of one school should be parts of the stories of Kate Bush, Joan Armatrading and Sandy Denny. ) Jon couldn�t confirm AP-KB but I did find a KB site which said that Andy Powell was a staff producer at EMI and got put on that album.

It looks as if Jon works in West Sussex on similar issues to Marianne.

Last night I was wondering what to work on and so I got out a commercial MIDI arrangement of Billy Jean from Thriller. It�s a way of understanding the softsynths in the newer PC � well that�s my excuse. This lunchtime I dropped into a bookshop on the way to get some lunch and came across. The Great Jazz Guitarists by Ivor Mairants (vol 2). (I can remember Charlie Alexander saying something about organising a valedictory for IA). He died in 1998. The book is a complete tour of post be-bop jazz guitar with transcriptiosn and commentaries � it includes Jim Hall, Barney Kessel, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, Martin Taylor and Eric Clapton � amongst others. The EC is the 1965 Bluesbreakers version of Steppin Out � �an inspired symmetry of construction that is artistically satisfactory without resorting to pyrotechnics.

As soon as I got home from the discussion with MNR - her office is across the other side of Guildford - I started work on Weill's September Song which is in the Maraints book. A couple of years ago I spent ages trying to trace the expressionist antecedents of Pink Moon, starting with Pierrot Lunaire.

PL definitely influenced Stravinsky not least in the compressed songs he wrote during the FWW which led onto The Soldiers Tale. And this definitely had an impact on Weill - but I kind of ran out of steam with Weill being taken up by the Doors. The middle 8 of September Song is a stronger link. It is pretty unique in 20th century songwriting in that it is only two chords and doesnt end with the dominant. If the song is in C then bridge is 2 bars Fm and 2 bars F# dim - repeated once to give an eight bar unit. The line is a yearning phrase around the "d" and then a bluesier one around the "e flat". Compare Harvest Breed first two bars - the signature phrase for that song. The whole point is the emotional tone and compression not least with chromatic invasion of the tonic - the sharp fourth, the flat sixth. There is a broader point in that both songs use classic "jazz" harmonic elements and transpose them into an art-song context with great impact. Anyway I just gotta do some versions of the Weill song.

Its a relief Mark doesn't find the recklessness with BBC500 too much.

The meeting with MNR was very businessy although I gave her the Ox piece - she still has the poem on the wall of her office. I had a long talk with her colleague who concentrates on manufacturing and at least four action points came up. I smell business here.

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