Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-08-20 - 3:13 p.m.

I have had it on my list to look up M-Base for a long time. This is a name which appeared in the 1980s in connection with a group of musicians in Brooklyn including Cassandra Wilson and Steve Coleman. Its not at all easy to unearth a definition of M-Base � for example the website (which I got to for the first time today) kicks off with a list of things that it isn�t. The site has a lot of material from SC � including some quite serious analytical stuff � about symmetry in music. He includes examples from Bach�s 2 part Invention in C major (which I know three quarters off by heart), Bartok�s Music for Percussion and Celesta etc and Webern�s Op 27 Piano Variations (although not the third movement). Only this morning I was looking at how in the first five bars (of my final 11) the tone row is used forwards and backwards.

There is also some stuff about African rhythms, 3s against 4s and rotation rhythms. (�Approximately Four Minutes� is in this area structurally. I suppose that�s an example of what Andrew calls synchronicity).

Finally there is some material on the Fibonacci series. This is just an idea � I heard a radio programme about it driving back from Birmingham a few months back. You start with two numbers � each is the number one � add them together TO make two. Then next step to add the one to the two to get three � add the three to the two to get five. The point is that the ratio of the two numbers approaches a constant: 2/3 (.6667) 3/5 (.6) 5/8 (.625) 8/13 (.6154) 13/21 (.6190) - you can see that first the 6 gets settled and then 1 etc and this can go on as long as you like fixing more and more numbers in infinite decimal.

It approaches the value of �x� in the equation

1/x = 1 + x

The equation looks easy enough � its actually a quadratic. You can get to the value of �x� by taking the square root of 5 , subtracting one and then halving the result. You get an infinite decimal starting 0.6180340�.

The equation is the equation to the golden ratio � in fact it expresses the goldenness of the ratio. Greeks much preferred ratios to infinite decimals and one of the things about the Fibonacci series is that as an infinite series it enables you to express a ratio which gets closer and closer to the golden ratio � but in fact the golden ratio is a misnomer and can only truly be expressed by an infinite decimal. Lots of composers have used Fibonacci � but haven�t found a way that makes much sense to me.

Anyway all of this seems to me to be a reason to get some Mbase records and see what they sound like.

I followed up a bit on Alain Badiou. This led onto an article at www.culturemachine.tees.ac.uk which is about the numbers one and two. It�s the kind of thing Paul W might like � there�s a section on Maoism and the cultural revolution and how the basic difference between the Maoists and the Deng-ists was whether one should go to two or two should go to one. Maoists wanted to go to two. Badiou is trying to track down what happens to Marxism in the twentieth century after the failure of Leninism. The Parisian Evenements and the Cultural Rev are the obvious places to look. Lets have a quote:

�The new man, in the real present of the 20th century stood first of all for the escape from family, property and state despotism. Today it seems that modernisation amounts to being a good little dad, a good little mom, a good little son - to become an efficient employee, to enrich oneself as much as possible and to play the responsible citizen���This century ends on the motif of impossible subjective novelty and the comfort of repetition. The century ends in the obsession of security under the maxim � its really not bad being here where we are already. There has been (and is) worse elsewhere.�

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