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Welcome to Pianonoise!
July edition
the featured recording
Be Thou My Vision, arr. Jeremy Fischer
A couple of years ago, I had a substitute
engagement at a place called Sewickley
Presbyterian Church. For the offertory, the
associate musician arranged this setting of
the popular hymn "Be Thou My Vision" as a kind
of jazz ballad for singer and piano. At the
time I was unaware of how to share it with
you, but now, as a regular staff member, and
having discovered the Youtube Channel at SPC,
here it is!
July thoughts:
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7-1
Some People, Use Too Many
Commas
Have you ever noticed, that there are some
people, who like to use a lot of unnecessary
commas? Like croutons, on a salad, they
sprinkle them everywhere. Have you ever
wondered, why that is?
In the ever growing plethora of human
divisions, a lot of rancor is generated by the
observance or non-observance of certain
grammatical customs or rules. Some of them
have simply to do with word choices. For
example, have you noticed that less and less
people use the word 'fewer' anymore? One
assumes that the reason for this rule is that
many quantities end with the letter 's' and
using a word to modify them that does not also
end with an 's' will make the speaker sound
less like a snake. It is, in a word, more
elegant, which is a quality appreciated by
some and deprecated by others.
Some of those others simply don't like the
complexity that this kind of elegance
requires. Like writing for multiple voices in
music, wherein upper motion in one voice is
met with downward motion in the others,
instead of simply letting them all go in the
same direction and not bothering one's head
about it (counterpoint is mentally
challenging), having to use plural verbs with
singular subjects (he swims and they all swim)
simply requires more head scratching than
making everything match. And in some languages
the matchers have carried the day (the use of
multiple negatives in Spanish, for instance).
But the comma lobby comes at things from
another direction. To me, what they are after
is a sonic representation of what their minds
are generating and their tongues are speaking.
Essentially, it comes down to, not clarity,
but a pause for breath. They simply want to be
able to stop more often. There are other forms
of punctuation that can be pressed into
service for more emotive reasons. Such as:
colons! The slight catch breath that is
created by putting in a completely unnecessary
colon represents a dramatization of the
mundane, a sense that everything is a
revelation. A kind of: wow, this is exciting!
Commas can act similarly. Heck, any
punctuation can. They have ceased to have
separate functions at this point; anything
will do, as long as we have time to stop and
insert some emotional charge into what we're
saying.
People have been trying to put a stop to this
as long as there have been people. And there
are others, generally a majority, one thinks,
that have found this sort of rulish behavior
really annoying. Like, enough already!
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