Moving About, Humming,
Still Our Flowers are Blooming,
Under the Old Portcullis


essay no. 3
Dan Plonsey
Summer, 2001

Keywords: ignorance, bass lines, artistic statements, the red bliss potato

The band is heard as a herd: there are are too many of them. That's good because:
One bassline can go with almost anything -- recycle it a couple times.
It's difficult to follow that melody sometimes: the forces assigned to it fail to cut through the murk.
There is little that might be considered ornamental or extravagant in the greenhouse composition: that is why we needed improvisers to play the bastard.

What was necessary was almost matched by that which was given in performance by the musicians, but barely enough! When the public turned more sentimental, tastes changed, and everyone became aware of the numeric values of things, and these figures, when published, led to a completely different means of exchange: one much more cumbersome, and one which immediately put spontaneity, especially of big or little disagreementation among players, into jeopardy.

"What does he think he's doing?" Meaning he's seemingly acting against his own most obvious self-interests, not sheerly [or shearing?] himself, either. And get very ignorant of style and space in his world, the one he might project as an "artistic statement." Not so different from the page created to evaluate proposals, or the impact of a new roommate splitting fees "equally" or nearly so, but with herself hovering inwards a couple times.

I put this music up for comparison with Beethoven's Third Symphony, and with any albums of similitude by other composers of orchestral music which is grandiose, and which, shall we say, is markedly gloom-filled by the end, but still moderately droll and gelastic: laugh-cry, ha-ha. Only, why must I get up the next morning? there are feets that must be done which are surpassingly unpleasant.
--A. Fishio