Ntuple Indemnity

I can’t believe I missed the whole hullabaloo over at Roger Ebert’s (here, here and here) about whether the interactivity of video games preclude the medium from being considered an art form until I heard about it via this morning’s Penny Arcade. You probably don’t need me to point this out if you read this space regularly, but this is one of those precious few debates I live for. And yet the readers who had the time to respond dote on nothing but such platitudes as commercial appeal, the emotional involvement of the audience as a subject and the skill of the craftsmanship behind the work’s constituent partitions. Shallow, shallow, shallow.

I didn’t expect Ebert, of all people, to fall back on a correlation between art and the precision of authorial intent. I guess it makes sense, though, since the great advantage that film has over live theatre – and I say “advantage” to mean an objective freedom of control and artistic license, not as a value judgment – is that the frame of a projected image, the focus of the cinematography and the mise-en-scène on the whole make it a highly constrainable format for delivering something intended. The most gifted directors don’t just control what happens on set: they control how the audience perceives the set. (This is where I’d ordinarily say, “Hear that, Chris Columbus?”, but then the guy made Rent and earned himself a “Get Out Of Blog Free” card for his efforts.)

It’s also interesting that the first article linked above cites Steven Spielberg’s views on the matter, when Spielberg overwhelmingly favours the cinematic constraints that he so deftly employs, to the point where it is his rationale for not joining his colleagues Messrs. Cameron and Lucas in the resurgence of interest in 3D filmmaking. This isn’t a criticism, just an observation. The other thing to note is that the kind of games Spielberg discusses when speaking of the medium’s limitations is only one segment of what interactive design now offers.

I’m highly critical of the recent trend in video game design and criticism that has favoured a drift towards imitating motion pictures and, in general, movie-envy: from cutscene to task to cutscene. Game-stories are becoming rote and linear, all while filmmakers like Fernando Meirelles and Christopher Nolan are making great strides in freeing cinema of linearity, in the tradition of Orson Welles. This is why I endorse Nintendo, and demonstrate a sense of corporate loyalty to the aging Kyoto powerhouse the likes of which I only offer Pixar: their game design philosophy is still driven by the sort of interactivity that creates a story as you go – within finite constraints that are at once inductive, offering infinite possibilities. It goes back to the story-plot distinction, and too often nowadays the two are conflated.

I’m not saying the cinematic paradigm is invalid. Hideo Kojima, who kickstarted it with Metal Gear Solid, basically got into the business as a second choice after film. But the consequences of establishing movie-envy as the goal of the video game business is an overwhelming focus on production values and presentation, and more to the point, realism – hence why you see celebrity voice acting up the wazoo and the Xbox 360 leveraging high-definition visual output. It’s also why you see the likes of Matt Casamassina knocking Nintendo for its insistence on text over voice work, ignoring that the dialogue-bubble polyphony of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is in fact just as valid as the comic books from which the game borrows its narrative device.

Recently we’ve seen the emergence of the “sandbox” paradigm, its most public and controversial incarnation being the Grand Theft Auto franchise. (For my part, I think Animal Crossing is a better example, because it dispenses with progressive “levels” or “missions” entirely and establishes a complete dependence on a player’s responses to the pseudorandom.) And for all the talk about whether or not the identification of player with character has a residual effect on real-world behaviour, people still talk about the game-player as a freakishly involved and active audience member.

I would contend that the player is a performer. And to dismiss the possibility that a video game can be art based on its interactivity is to simultaneously dismiss as art all that we consider performance. In drama, the fact that a theatre company produces any manner of creative interpretation on William Shakespeare based on the dialogue transcriptions of the First Folio doesn’t invalidate a study of the script itself. Nor does it invalidate a study of Shakespeare as an artist simply because his input is never fully authoritative.

If you look at music, it doesn’t even exist without performance – and the constraints on performance are less and less rigid. I’m going to play the card that everybody who talks incessantly about music loves to play: John Cage, 4’33”. It’s a piece composed entirely of rests, and the sound dwells in the ambient response of the audience: coughing, chatter, confusion. The audience’s contribution, often ignored, comes into the foreground without asking.

Of course, there’s no shortage of people who still insist that aleatory à la Cage is not art. To be perfectly cynical, I think that’s a byproduct of an unconscious layman’s definition of art that has nothing to do with intent, craftsmanship, or anything quantifiable about a work outside of its context. I think most of us privately define art as directly proportional to the difficulty of its creation. We tell ourselves that computers are incapable of art, because art has to be harder than anything merely programmable. We tell ourselves that an abstract splatter painting, beyond its other crime of not representing anything outside itself, is not art by virtue of my-daughter-can-do-that. Vonnegut parodies one extreme in Breakfast of Champions, Rabo Karabekian’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (two perpendicular strips of neon orange tape on a green canvas).

But if we want to look for an example of improvised performance apart from its originator that we would indisputably consider art, we do not need to look any further than jazz. It doesn’t matter that bebop reduces to a bunch of noodling bound by mechanical laws of tonality and set over Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” or the bridge of “I Got Rhythm”. If you take a look at what bebop does with rhythm changes, there is no more “I Got Rhythm” – the melody’s been surgically airlifted, and the chords have been substituted with functional analogues. But Gershwin still wrote it, and we still think of him as a composer, the composer.

That’s what it means to play a video game: improvising over changes somebody else wrote, using an instrument somebody else made. And you can go nuts with however many choruses you want, but the original composition draws you back home to a destination that may be ordained. The emphasis on the performance does not devalue the foundational construction. Art can still exist within accident.

Few games actually do that, though. Most of them are crap.

While we’re on the subject, for those who are wondering: there is exactly one computer game that I think has unquestionably achieved the inconsistently-awarded honour of Literary Work, and its name is Grim Fandango. As with all the classic LucasArts adventures, of which it was the last of the line, the game is heavily scripted, and for the most part the player engages in sequences of dialogue choices that do end up being deterministic. But that determinism doesn’t detach the actions of the player from the progression of scripted action, and as a drama awaiting private performance on a personal computer, Fandango is unparalleled.

The Citizen Kane of video games? No, I wouldn’t say so, since the influence of Citizen Kane on filmmaking, beyond its killer script, lies primarily in form as an accessory to story; the same goes for Watchmen, the Citizen Kane of comics. The Casablanca of games, maybe, for its achievement as a superbly-written character drama where every line counts for something and contributes to a larger thematic fabric. It’s a noir tragicomedy on par with its non-interactive peers.

Why nobody has matched its storytelling excellence in the seven years hence is anybody’s guess.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I have to say on the matter of video games as art, but I’m sure I’ll return to this again with a lot more depth.

I’m told that the choir I play with is performing Saturday evening at Convocation Hall, somewhere in the vicinity of 8pm. Admission is $10 for students and $15 for all of you other folks. Aside from little oddities like banquets and weddings, this will be my first public performance in several years, so if you absolutely insist on missing it, do have the courtesy to at least miss it very deliberately.

I’m also seeing Filumena tomorrow, as far as I have been made aware. I don’t expect to have the opportunity to review the Edmonton Opera production anytime soon or relevant, not even in the form of a capsule (a capsule review or a time capsule – take it however you wish), but word is that I won’t have to: the overwhelming sentiment preceding the show is that it speaks for itself, and admirably at that.

And then it’s back to work. You probably don’t want to hear about that, unless it so happens you have a perverse fascination with suboptimal approximation algorithms or semantic analysis of formal grammars. And if you do, welcome to the club.

On a tangentially operatic non sequitur: is it Towy Season or Gwit Season?

Allow me to reflect.

I’m not a prolific writer by any means, on the web or in print. Part of it, by my intention or not, is that I’d rather read than write – a preference that I think should be a property of all writers irrespective of their level of seriousness or the prestige of the medium they call home.

Lately, I’ve neither read nor written to any nontrivial degree. I’ve been playing Scrabble. But there’s a common principle at work that applies to both activities: you can’t do something well if you don’t know what it means to do it well.

Writing without reading is bad writing, and to a discerning observer the deficit is as discordant as a karaoke regular who has never heard a real singer in his life. Then again, real singers are hard to come by for the modern layperson when record labels are actively engaged in marketing superstars on the basis of their being tone-deaf. It’s become a house style. And a world where Kenneth Gorelick making like a prehistoric glowworm and flopping his way around an ill-selected blues scale is enough to outsell every real jazz artist on the globe is a mad, mad, mad, mad world indeed.

The funniest thing I’ve read in the last little while comes from a controversy I thankfully slept through a few years ago, and have only discovered now. It seems that Mr. Kenny G decided to overdub a few of his trademark saxopharts over Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World”. This prompted a reaction, I would call it, from none other than Pat Metheny himself (only the man who defined the sound of contemporary jazz guitar, if you don’t know who he is), who called the endeavour “musical necrophilia” and then some. Metheny’s talent for obloquy is as lyrical as his proficiency for the Ibanez electric. It even spawned a song.

(Permit me to make a brief and self-congratulatory pause as I admire, in the above paragraph, the best word I’ve coined in at least a fortnight. Google returns no hits for the word or a variant of it spelt with an F. This one’s mine, baby.)

Anyway, to return to the topic at hand: every time I think of writers who don’t read nearly enough, the one that comes to mind is Robert Jordan. When I was fetching the new Snicket at Chapters last week, I passed by another freshly-delivered penultimate volume of a more thickset build – Jordan’s Knife of Dreams, the eleventh of a projected twelve books in his popular series of sword-and-sorcery paperweights, The Wheel of Time. I quit the series after seven out of having better things to read, though I no longer sleep as well as I once did; Jordan’s prose was a panacea for all forty-two flavours of insomnia, and I recall missing at least one bus stop on its account.

Now that I’ve discovered a really schlocky bestselling writer, who is as terse as Jordan is grandiloquent, he doesn’t seem so bad. I still can’t justify resuming where I left off, of course, because I simply have better things on my shelf, and his common penchant for pluralizing gerunds could have a detrimental effect on my word study.

But I digress. (Almost as much as he does. Oh, snap!) I meant to bring up Robert Jordan in conjunction with the topic of how reading and writing interact, because I remember one particular interview with him where he comments on the same. I’ve dug up the relevant excerpt:

I had always said, “One day I will write.” Then when I was 30 I was walking back from a dry dock to my office, and I had a fall and tore up my knee very severely. There were complications in the surgery, I nearly died, I spent a month in the hospital, and I spent three and a half months recuperating before I could walk well enough to go back to the office. During that time I reached burnout in reading. I remember picking up a book by an author I knew I liked, reading a few paragraphs and tossing it across the room and saying, “Oh God, I could do better than that.” Then I thought, “All right son, it’s time to put up or shut up.”

And so I wrote my first novel. It has never been published although it’s been bought by two publishers, and a lot of good came out of it, including meeting my wife.

And you know, I respect that. It’s true that the extremity of consuming words in hopes of fueling the production of them is a life of consumption that produces very little. I think a lot of writerus blockitis comes from ambition and perfectionism. Robert Jordan has the good fortune of suffering neither.

He’s an odd example in the sense that he is, in a manner of speaking, a writer who reads. (We’ll ignore for now that according to Amazon’s “Significant Seven” interview, he names as his desert island book his own work-in-progress.) But judging from his own writing, if he thinks he can do better than the authors in which he was once so engrossed, either he’s not there yet, or his influences clearly weren’t very good.

It’s easy to tell when a writer is an overly selective reader – one who only reads in genre, or one who refuses to read in genre; one who only hits the pulps, or never hits the pulps. I find that writers who read develop a writer’s identity, or voice as some would call it, through a balance of controlled mimicry and improvisational distortion; and just as the most revered figures of the great improvisational art form, jazz, draw on influences from gospel to swing to stride to bebop to post-Romantic to chain-gang country blues, writers can only benefit from reading diversely.

Then you have the likes of Umberto Eco, who is so well-read that it makes his fiction impenetrable because of all its a priori dependencies. Predictably, his non-fiction critical discourse fares much better, but even in fiction he conceals a treasure trove of content, not fluff, behind a tattered verbal curtain. In Robert Jordan’s case, after some early books that are pleasurable for their escapist manoeuvres if not their style, the content is wholly subsumed by a textual torrent that begs for a stopper. One wishes the author spent more time reading the works of others instead of treading water in Narcissus’ swimming pool.

I hear that Knife of Dreams cleans up some of the muck, but considering how much of it must have accumulated in the interim (in addition to how much was floating about already), it sounds like a book for fans’ eyes only. I’ll not make judgments by covers, of course.

There is more to say about literacy that needs to be said, but I have midterms to swat.

If you were expecting a post on the applicability of “Turtle Talk with Crush” as a superstructural blueprint for the Turing Test, precursory omens of why high-definition post-DVD storage media are doomed to failure in the general consumer market, secret schematics of the Nintendo Revolution controller or more invective hilarity induced by a certain undeservedly bestselling author, come back later. This is not the post for you.

What’s better than one blog unlocking the mysteries of music theory? That’s right – two blogs unlocking the mysteries of music theory. Below I respond to Guillaume‘s criticism of the elevation of middle C in the Western European musical tradition, and while I may get on a slightly technical bent, it is my hope that this post will not be wholly inaccessible.

You should read Guillaume’s statements before proceeding, as he presents a concise historical overview of the familiar A to G tonal system as well as a rundown of what he considers to be a problem: that C, and the major and minor keys built upon it as a tonic, is an arbitrarily-selected tonal centre of gravity that is presently overemphasized and overrepresented. Those who are at all familiar with the rhetoric of Marxist or postcolonial literature should at once recognize the tropic structure of his argument, which is the age-old attack on an instance of reification. It runs thus: a) the governing establishment (in this case, a cultural bourgeoisie of tonality) presents an artificial construction (C as the organizing epicentre) as a normative and natural entity; b) the foundations of this construction are arbitrary; therefore, 3) the constructed norm, now revealed, must be disestablished.

Being a neo-imperialistic bourgeois know-it-all, I feel inclined to reject the conclusion that the C “mythology” (to borrow Barthes’ sense of the word), once properly exposed, should necessarily be subjected to demotion. Certainly, I concede that C is an overelevated focal point (and will attempt to explicate it with additional reasons that may ease Mr. Laroche’s bewilderment); and certainly, as a musician, I see the pedagogical value in exposing both students of music and the public at large to the undiscovered country beyond the major-minor system, though I do not envision such instruction as concurrent.

But the battle cry for change is a case of overstated alarmism, and the bizarre suggestion that A would be a suitable alternative makes hardly sense at all. Where it is not based on a circular rationale to do with the order of the Latin alphabet, for crying out loud, it refers to 440Hz as “a nice number, easily divisible into a number of smaller parts.” Here, the menace of the constructed norm rears its ugly head in the other direction. 440Hz was never standardized as the standard acoustic tuning frequency until the ISO 16 specification, dated 1955 and renewed 1975; prior to that, Guillaume’s assumption of a “properly-made tuning fork” was far from a proper existence, as proprietary conventions hovered all over the place.

Furthermore, if we are going to talk about divisibility as a theoretician’s convenience, we must also remember that these numbers are founded on a unit of measurement that is also not a natural entity. The hertz is the inverse of the second, and the authority of the second has no relevance to music in its unquantified form. Now, as soon as you quantify music, the second becomes important – not just in terms of frequency, but also in the dimension of tempo when it comes to variables like prescribed metronome markings – but these are every bit arbitrary conventions in no worse a way than C is a convention. To justify a mathematical convenience with itself is patently tautological.

A system built upon twelve well-tempered semitones to the octave derives its tonality from ratios of resonant frequencies, and the important thing to remember about ratios is that they are relative. Like the Kelvin scale (that would be a scale of temperature, not music), the only absolute is zero. Outside the realm of the theoretical, relative intervalic distances are sufficient.

In sum, arbitrariness is unavoidable. That said, C has a far better claim to its present position as the Ptolemaic do of the solfege in elementary instruction. Yes, this claim is one part retrospective and another part descriptivist, but at least it’s based on something practical, which is more than one can say for Guillaume’s argument for A to take its place. A is no more the sun of western music than C is the Earth.

So let’s examine some possible causes for the prominence of C. I attribute it first and foremost to notation. C Major has no sharps or flats. It tends to be very readable in any clef (and I hasten to point out that the thriving clefs, treble and bass, are founded on G and F respectively). This presumes the authority of the Ionian mode, but it also permits the definition and instruction of other scales in terms of how they differ from it; scales are easier learnt from identifying distinguishing accidentals than from note-to-note intervalic distances.

But, one might object, even if you accept the Ionian as the organizing mode of western music, you could establish it on any scale – and the readability of C Major doesn’t correspond to the ease of its playability on a given instrument. So how is it that C-oriented musical notation set foot in composition and performance?

Answer: keyboards.

The keyboard configuration of black keys and white keys is a direct visual isomorphism of musical notation, a representational mapping from sight to sound – albeit not a lossless one, due to the limitation that enharmonic equivalences like A# and Bb (or more tellingly, B# and C) are indistinguishable. Middle C is easier to grasp than, say, a hypothetical middle A, because only hitting the white keys with C as the tonic delivers an entire major tonality, just as hitting only the black keys delivers a pentatonic spectrum.

This isn’t something to be prescribed to the serious aspiring pianist, as it has the potential to lead to fingering habits that are undesirable in the long run as the keyboardist progresses to more complex pieces; Chopin famously trained his piano students starting with the B Major scale to avoid exactly that pitfall. But basic keyboard literacy is nowadays fundamental to any performer, and familiarity with the black-and-white layout is often a requirement for intermediate musical studies in any instrument. For them, keyboard technique is a secondary consideration, ranking behind the layout’s usefulness as a theoretical aid.

I’ve coined what I think is a clever word for this phenomenon, which I do not believe has been employed in a theoretical context: pianocentrism.

The continued entrenchment of C as a de facto “starting note” since the fifteenth century is a pianocentric result; the black-and-white alternation first emerged in exactly that period. The keyboard has historically been, and persists to be, the reinforcing mechanism for what Philip Tagg, in his paper on the semiotics of popular music, refers to notational centricity. Any way you swing it, notation has restricted much of our tonal cognition to a discrete twelve-step cycle, when pitch in the abstract is a continuous domain. Fred Lerdahl’s work on formal grammars of music outlines this conception in a generalized framework; the pianocentric orbit around C Major that I am here identifying is a specific, if popular case.

There exists a solid objection to this, and it is one that Guillaume implicitly posits when he defends his preference for A based on its suitability to the Aeolian mode – that is to say, the natural minor on the sharpless and flatless staff, executable on white keys alone. The idea is that if we reverted to an A-oriented model, which brings us back to how A-to-G notation was alphabetized in the first place, natural minors and not majors would be the new point of origin in a coordinate system that remains diatonic.

In other words, the dominance of C is a direct product of the dominance of the major scale. The utility of teaching the major scale first is what leads us to a descriptivist argument: simply put, it permits the beginning performer easy access to what we now call small-c classical music as well as a plentiful repository of nursery rhymes. In the dungeons of tonality, the major scale is the Big Key.

Is it limiting that the major-minor system – and as a result, C Major – indoctrinates society with traditional prejudices of consonance and dissonance? Yes, in the same way that the limitations of Euclidean geometry are prejudiced against hyperbolic surfaces. Yes, in the same way that the limitations of Newtonian physics make no allowances for wave-particle duality on the atomic level. It is no coincidence that Arnold Schoenberg (and every time I mention him, I just know Guillaume is going to jump all over my flagrant misunderstandings of serialism) described his twelve-tone system as being to music what relativity was to classical physics.

By this I mean that tonal prejudices, reified as they are, hold for a reason. Like the postulates of Euclid and Newton – although a better analogy would be to Northrop Frye’s theory of archetypes in English literature – tonality defined around the major scale is a theoretical approximation that only works under certain assumptions, but its utility is sufficiently justified by the breadth of observable phenomena it envelops.

Of course, music performance is one thing, and composition is quite a different matter; in that regard, it has been some time now that composers have dispensed with pianocentricity in the key of C, not to mention every other rudiment in the unwritten classical rulebook. This is by no means confined to atonal experimentation, nor has it failed to elicit popular consumption.

Think Leonard Bernstein. Or, for that matter, Danny Elfman’s title theme to The Simpsons. Or John Williams, probably the most popular symphonic composer of modern times. Although a good many of his lavish and bombastic leitmotifs that are now as firm a part of the cultural fabric as Wagner was a century ago are strongly major or minor, much of his work is not: the contrapuntal dialogue between keyboard and spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the exemplary cue, but consider the echoes of Stravinsky in The Empire Strikes Back (both its incidental music and the thunderous “Imperial March”), the “Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra” in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and a good chunk of Jaws. In video games, the Japanese RPG music of composers like Nobuo Uematsu and Yasunori Mitsuda was heavily modal (particularly in the Aeolian and Dorian); notice the frequency with which they resolve cadences from minor dominant chords, putting a whole tone of space between the leading note and the tonic.

Guillaume also makes an interesting observation that I feel should be quoted directly:

The reason kids don’t appreciate Messiaen’s sense of tonality (he argues that it’s there in his Technique de mon language musical, I tend to agree based on my definition of what tonality should be…) is partially because from the beginning we have them play nice little pieces in C+ that shy away from dissonance. We teach them that dissonance is bad because these cute little pieces alternate between the chords of I, IV and V, and anything outside that is a minor chord and thus to be avoided. If a minor chord is to be avoided, how are we supposed to appreciate the beauty of an augmented chord with a minor 9th added on top? Even on the other side of the musical learning, that thing called jazz, most books teach the chords and progressions and techniques from a base of C. How unoriginal.

(“Aha!” sayeth Nick as he espies a mention of his own personal field of quasi-expertise, “a chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality!”)

This is an interesting passage, partly because jazz harmony is almost exclusively founded on 9th, 11th and 13th extensions when it is not busy mucking about with overlapping inversions and funky pedal points. In fact, I speculate that is precisely why illustrations of leadsheet chord symbols are presented by example with C as the root: the accidentals on the staff explicitly signify how these harmonies fit into or differ from the diatonic sequence of the major scale.

In practice, the situation is quite different. Chord substitution and voicing revolve around emphasizing the traditionally discouraged tritone, often using it as a diametric pivot across the circle of fifths. Melodic improvisation is one big exercise in the convergence of modes and blues scales. New syntheses of these scales with the vocabulary of underlying extended chords are happening all the time, and complete conversions to a modal framework are old news; Miles Davis was doing it half a century ago in “So What”.

In my own experience, C is not the most comfortable of keys for the jazz pianist, as the white-key correspondence to the diatonic major becomes almost a hindrance and a distraction once one has found tactile comfort in a roughly equal proportion of black and white landings. I much prefer Eb, as the proximities surrounding it lend themselves to some very interesting progressions that feel a lot more natural to the fingers.

The ideal standard of performance in any genre, of course, is equal and balanced proficiency starting on any note. But for most purposes, C is as good a place to start as any.

I’m aware that today is a national holiday in a little country I actually like quite a lot, replete with festivities commemorating tea parties and dangling modifiers. I still fondly recall the last time I spent the Fourth of July down south: it involved a visit to an ice cream parlour in historic Princeton with the founding fathers of my old stomping grounds at the Entmoot forums, which you’ll note was a lot more interesting than what I did last year (watching digital fireworks with virtual furry animals in Animal Crossing so Tortimer would come by and award me a piece of furniture). I don’t remember much about the ice cream parlour itself, but it’s still the best one I’ve found east of MacKay’s.

Aside from an obligatory tea party, a double waffle cone of peanut butter and chocolate and discovering that first-printing hardcovers of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are still on shelves with the Priori Incantatem continuity goof on page 579 intact, there wasn’t so much to celebrate today up here in the land of absent hockey, misty giants and wacky marriage legislation about which some people out there apparently harbour opinions.

We had our party of patriots three days ago, when I chanced upon a free public performance by a fantastic a cappella quartet on Banff Avenue right across the street from the Grizzly House, capitol of the carnivorous connoisseur. They caught my attention with “Use the Force”, a complete retelling of the original Star Wars featuring mock lightsabre duels onstage and Darth Vader breathing, and held it until after their set when I walked out with two of their albums and autographs to boot.

The ensemble was none other than the Heebee-Jeebees, a Calgarian foursome I first heard of years ago (thanks to their accomplishment of concocting the world’s most boring song, appropriately entitled “The Boring Song”) but never had the pleasure to see in person. It turns out they hit Banff every Canada Day, when admission to the National Park comes at no cost, and I highly recommend seeing them. They also perform at the Stampede in a week’s time, for those of you spending the summer in Alberta’s better city.

This was also when I discovered that their bass singer, who has a remarkable talent for reaching depths lower than das boot in Das Boot, is none other than former Rose Bowl-winning clarinetist Cedric Blary, who was first known to me (although we did not meet per se) over a decade ago as we shared a composition instructor at Mount Royal College back when I hadn’t moved beyond scribbling fat major triads in basic triple time, and I saw him perform his own piece in a student recital. This was years before I started playing the clarinet myself, but it was an important stepping stone in verifying that it was indeed what I intended to pursue as a second instrument. Last I heard, Mr. Blary had taken up the position of being the clarinet clinician at this staple of local musical education.

Somewhere in all this is a segue to a point about the value of celebrating a national holiday, but I am going to forgo a seamless transition in favour of what the calculus-literate refer to as a jump discontinuity.

I’m going to do something unorthodox here and, in an obliquely politico-avoidant manner, reply to what Steve Smith wrote in his entry dated 1 July and the comment box therein.

Mr. Smith has a proven record of thinking national pride is silly, so it comes as no surprise that he doesn’t give a Carlos’ jackass about feeling all whoop-dee-doo when it comes to observing the birthday of the political entity to which he may or may not pay his taxes. He then proceeds to draw the salient distinction between nations and states, the timeworn semantic trademark of those with at least a freshman’s understanding of political theory who respectfully don’t want anything to do with those without the same.

I would contend that Canada’s history of not being and never having been a Westphalian nation-state is precisely why among its class of holidays, Canada Day is something unique and worth applauding.

Over the past few decades, Canada has retooled itself as a most admirable experiment in permitting the divorce of cultural identity from ethnic origin, and encouraging the severance of political allegiance from both. In this sense, separatist movements in both Quebec and to a lesser extent Alberta are a reaction to this project, not a progression.

We’re too good for homogeneous cultural isolation walled behind the borders on a map. While national self-determination is a stabilizing destination in the pre-national world, Canada is a post-national country, and that’s where the state is relevant to its citizens on an individual level. The fact that it has survived this way for yet another year is worth a cheer and a beer.