It turns out we scheduled a board meeting for this morning in Martinez and I just remembered I had to write a welcome column. Since I am deep in preparation and have some pressing deadlines I’m going to recycle a column I wrote about a year ago.
Isaac Newton. As the not-so old testament story goes, Satan got Eve to take a bite of the apple, Eve baked an apple pie to feed to Adam, and when she threw the cores out, one happened to hit this bum laying under a tree and he had some immediate epiphanies…gravity, calculus, the laws of motion, Newtonian physics, and how to build the world’s first reflecting telescope. Man, it just all came to him in a flash and our view of the world, space, and damn near everything changed forever. It allowed us to calculate the orbits of planets, the orbits of moons, the path of comets, the flight of satellites, the trajectory of Martian probes, and it allowed us to predict these strange, mysterious events called eclipses. In my creative rendition of this history, I choose to emphasize the apple as the core (yep I meant it) theme that links all these characters together because I surely do not want to imply that Satan (as played by Christopher Lee) was the catalyst that led to the important discoveries and inventions made by Isaac Newton. The point actually is that eclipses are predictable; when they occur, where they may be viewed, how long they last, and the path of the shadow. Totally and amazingly predictable! Now this doesn’t detract any from their beauty or from the amazement that we have watching them, and really inherent in that amazement is the beauty of the forces, and the ongoing mystery of how they work that allows us to know when and where we will fight the traffic and the crowds to watch an eclipse.
Bill Monroe and the Legions of Bluegrass Music. There really isn’t a biblical story we can hang on the genesis of bluegrass music. If there was, Bill would certainly have a biblical character that was, shall we say, of foundational import. But with bluegrass, it wasn’t something that one could use the natural laws to predict would happen or to predict how it was gong to unfold. Bluegrass is a human invention and while Bill is credited with inventing it, like Newton, it was really built on backs of all the musicians that went before him and Bill was either lucky enough, or genius enough, to figure out something that transformed itself into bluegrass. I tend to believe his genius was helped out a little bit by hunger and the need to put food on the table, and by those ego-gratifying moments that happen when he could see the crowd that came out to hear what he was playing. In the movie, Christopher Lee would have played a great Bill Monroe, but I am probably the only person in the world that would think that.
A well-sung bluegrass harmony is a sound to behold. It could be broken down and theoretically analyzed wave-form by wave-form, and we could write some mathematical descriptions of what those sounds are, and those formulas would resemble some of the formulas used to predict the motions of the earth, the moon, and the sun to predict eclipses. But that’s not what we do and as beautiful those formulas, and their history, might be to a few scientists, they don’t reveal the pleasure we have hearing a well-sung stack. It is still too complicated to write some formulas that can tell us how the individual voices come together collectively to create that sound and those formulas don’t inform us on the hours of practice it took, or help us understand the inspiration for the arrangement. So even though an eclipse is a wonderful and rare event, for me it just has no comparison to the unpredictable and ephemeral magic of our music. Having said that, I will probably take a pause in my picking tomorrow morning to go from unpredictable and ephemeral, to wonderful and rare, and than go back to whatever it was I was playing.
