2013 — 7 November: Thursday
Since I'm pretty sure1 an Aeolian harp is an instrument played by the wind, I'm not sure how it can be emulated on a piano. But what I do know is I caught enough of Henry Cowell's "Aeolian harp for piano" this morning to be instantly reminded of the opening notes of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Take a pebble" from their début album — and I further know there's no way that's ever going to show up on BBC Radio 3's Breakfast programme.
So I now have the (I suspect) mistakenly-tagged "Aeolian Harp and Sinster [sic] Resonance" from the "Piano Essentials" Goldenlane Records release. Bang goes another 89 pence.
And a moment's dalliance with Wikipedia has suggested it was Lord Rayleigh who, in 1915, explained the process with respect to the von Karman vortices I (shudder to) remember encountering during some of my fluid mechanics lectures on aerofoils. That should hold me until breakfast.
When Amazon finally got round to sending me an email acknowledgment of my little order, the "mail arrived" chord that chimed while I was actually playing the Henry Cowell piece was, sadly, somewhat more to my liking than most of the track itself. I suspect I now have enough Cowell (just this one track!) in my collection.
Well, at least...
... my gentle stroll around Soton yielded a little fruit, and worked up a not-so-little appetite. Pleasant though it was, there are so many memories and ghosts of the past 30+ years down there that such strolls can become a little melancholy. Never mind. Time to satisfy the inner man before I do anything else. One such anything else being, a little later this afternoon, the blagging of a cuppa and biccie across the village with Roger & Eileen. I'm predicting my return from that will be in the dark.
Moving right along...
... I managed, by much scouring of the Waterstone's discount shelves, to find the following sets of words for what dear ol' Dad always used to describe (when I asked him, as a kid, how much something had cost) as "money and fair words"...
Fair enuf. Indeed, having already amused myself thrice (here, here, and here) by reading and quoting from reviews of Ray Monk's biography2 of "Oppy" I was hardly going to say "No" to a half-price hardback copy of it, was I? And then there's an unrepeatable anecdote in Debra Winger's light memoir that alone was worth the 99p that that had been reduced to. (You just have to know where to look.) As for the McGough, I believe I've managed to acquire every book of his adult poems, including the 1969 "Watchwords" that he subsequently withdrew (for no good reason, in my opinion) from sale.
Words can only take you so far, so then there was some interesting music to be winkled out of the basement of HMV, too...
But I'm now feeling a growing need for that free cuppa. I shall quickly "dish the dos" and be off. TTFN.
At some point...
... between 19 February 1994 and today3 my ancient Pan Books paperback copy of Frederik Pohl's anthology The Expert Dreamers: SF by scientists was culled from my shelves. Only today, however, have I belatedly discovered that "Boyd Ellanby" (who wrote the story Chain Reaction in that anthology) was the pen-name of William Clouser Boyd, one of the only two close friends Oppenheimer had at Harvard in the 1920s. He (Boyd) also co-wrote a book Races and People with Asimov. I did not know that, either.