For anyone who suffered while learning greek modes (music)

So, there's a rather simple way of remembering the step/half-sep structure for the modal scales if you think of each as the scale composed of simply white piano keys starting from a given note (Ionian for C, Dorian, for D, Phrygian for E, Lydian for F, Mixolydian for G, Aeolian for A and Locrian for B).

But what are this all about? 

I promise I won’t' give a long explanation. In fact, I suffered having to learn the modes from paper and theory alone, never knowing why  I cared that a certain amount of notes combined in a certain way were called this way or the other ("I'll just play the ones that sound right, ok?). Yet all musicians with some training in theory seemed to insist on that they were important, but only guitarists seemed to understand why.

Until.

What if I told you there's a so-easy-you'll-be-shocked way of understanding why the fuck we care about these names? Each mode has its own "personality", its own particular sonority, but why is giving them names useful?

Go to your keyboard (or equivalent). Play the following (if possible, forget you are trying to learn anything, just listen a little):

Asides from the utter simplicity (the idea here is that you listen, not that you need to think of what you're doing), do you notice how the color/personality/character of each I-V scale changes?

EXACTLY. 

That's what modes are for and about. The Greeks valued beauty, but also logic. The names are not there just for naming groups of notes, they are there to name the "feeling" of each group. Even heard how major (Ionian) is the "happy" scale and minor (Aeolian) is the "sad" one? Well the rest of the modes are all the other emotions that come from combinations on unaltered (no sharp/flat) notes. 

Go ahead, have fun naming them. (PS I like to call mixolydian the king's sober clown, and lydian his wife...)

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A different approach:
What the hell do I want a mode/scale for? 

Think of a painter. he is portraying a sunset in a rainy, inhabited forest and tries to convey the solitude, melancholy and humidity of the situation by employing a large amount of purplish blue and grey (a.k.a. no pure, striking colors and a lot of blue and red).
What if he suddenly wants to include a yellow parrot? How does he make it so that it does not seem like he cut the parrot out form a different picture and mercilessly stuck it there?

That's what a palette is for (asides from giving you a place where to mix paint and solvent). If the painter opened his jar of yellow and sued it pure, the parrot would look like it's first priority is to fly away and detach itself from the painting. If, on the contrary, the painter includes yellow in his palette from the beginning (using it to mix other colors, including small amounts in bright areas of other colors, and mixes a slight amount of, for instance, the lighter green he's painted so far, into the yellow he's about to use), the parrot will comfortably sit in the painting.

You mode is, therefore, your palette. While composing within the confines of a certain mode, you are conferring a certain "attitude" to your piece because of the intervals made possible and the role they play in your composition. If you forget to prepare a palette, you may find yourself composing a piece full of cast-away parrots. If you mind the integrity of modes -even if you employ more than one in the same piece - your birdhouse will stay full. 

Nadaismo.

Today I went a considerable distance to meet a girl from another country who's getting to know my country.
We chatted and walked, and ate ice cream, and chatted,

 made silence.

I took a bus back home and in the midst of drowining ina novel and an essay I forgot to get off where I was supposed to take the subway.
I ended up at a corner of the city I'd never wandered.

As I found my way back home in a mixture of fear and thrill and wonder,
I saw the night and found it brighter.

I got on another subway, went up the wrong stares, went back down, went back up
I finally took the right trin and a phone call let me know that the reunion I was trying to get to had been cancelled.
I got on the subway and read some more and played some music on tiny earbuds,
but suddenly to male, black, beautiful voices spoke up and there was poetry
in the midst of a night, in a half-crowded, silent subway
in the middle of a country people from another chented
their voices met, and parted, and met again in a samba and suddenly

I'd met nadaism

las pepitas de la granada no son como las de la granadilla
and in the early night I'm smiling, y todo brilla
I'm walking dangerously close to buses, trecking home, being happy

God bless colombia in the subways of Buenos Aires,
the planes, the poverty and the happy don't-give a-fuckers

-Gabriel Nieto

Start here.

A few days ago, I read through a guy's blog. He'd written about why we'd not be attending the same college and I could not read through much of it before, for some reason I still ignore, I was on the verge of tearing up.

Coincidently, that happened on a day when I'd been particularly happy, and right before I went to celebrate my 18th birthday with my father. Should I also mention I never saw myself as someone to cry often?

The feeling eventually (and literally) washed away as I took a shower and headed for dinner, but it left me with the remnants of a turmoil of feelings an realizations, the main one being:

I had forgotten to pay attention to the power of words.

Thing is, as I was taking my bath I started composing over-elaborated phrases about how I used to be "a kid who wrote" but eventually forgot a very significant part of myself among the rushes and stress of a life full of As and ECs (yes, I was that kind of kid, but I can't complain if it will be taking me to an awesome college).

So I want to go back.

Part of me just wants to regain the agility and elasticity of my mind and fingers working on the keyboard, another part wants to have a way to describe myself in detail and progressively, not just with the words that come to my mind influenced by the moment I'm asked about it. I guess getting to know so many new people different to everyone I'd known before through UChicago has helped that.

I also want to get in though with this art I've been neglecting.

I was about to start a new blog, but as I thought about not neglecting my past as a kid who wrote I realized I shouldn't neglect the biased but still real fragments of me that got into this blog years ago.

So I'll start again. I'll start here. And I hope this journey will be a good one.

Go maroons!