{"id":1587,"date":"2017-06-05T16:10:06","date_gmt":"2017-06-05T21:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/?p=1587"},"modified":"2017-07-30T20:12:24","modified_gmt":"2017-07-31T01:12:24","slug":"bach-caged-isomorphism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/archives\/1587","title":{"rendered":"BACH CAGED : an isomorphism"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is code and a musical piece combined into a story, notated in poetry. Meaning on so many levels, in so many mediums, into one. Coders, programmers, this is for you!<\/em><\/p>\n

Ah, poor Bach is a criminal,
\nclad in stripes.
\nHis pacings across white cell block,
\nwould turn the guards\u2019 brains dark.
\nThe iron bars twist and bend
\nand break with glassy tones,
\nbarbed wire snaps like the castinet
\nas the wind blows pipe trombones.<\/p>\n

Soon the sleeping villagers leap
\nOut of their beds, both lout and learned.
\nNot one eye has known a sparkle,
\nAt least not since the timbrel burned while
\nThe race of the tortoise and the hare,
\nAbrogates with the hare\u2019s despair.<\/p>\n

HARE: \u201cNo more asymptotic infinities of small!
\nHalving the half exhausts me;
\nsweet death draws me to its pall.
\nJ.S. Bach once played to me infinities of canon,
\nbut BACH is CAGED,
\nmy mind enraged
\nby unfulfilling Mammon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Poor hare, the tortoise mourned his loss
\nas he paced across the floor.
\nFor without Bach, he understood,
\nold Zeno was a bore.<\/p>\n

The universe futile crumbled into ash and puffed away,
\nFor without Bach seated at his harpsichord,
\nparadox twisted the world into a dangerous place,
\nand far away the men in ties gave a program a fellowship,
\nThen gave the programmer a link and put him on the web for free.<\/p>\n

The oldest villager stares at a painting on the wall
\nas his ceiling shakes,
\nand plaster crumbles,
\nas the prison explodes,
\nand the ground stone rumbles.<\/p>\n

OLDEST VILLAGER:
\n\u201cLeci n\u2019est pas une pipe.
\nEnvision it one way, and of course it is a pipe!
\nBut the mind twists and curdles until you can\u2019t but see:
\nLeci n\u2019est pas une pipe.
\nThat is double vision –
\nThe hammering and the pounding of one image at another –
\n‘But then my mind was never worth much.'”<\/p>\n

Ricocheting madly, a piano speeds down the stairs with crumbling marble,
\nEbony shattering to slay music’s captors.
\nCold BACH alone is untouched in orange,
\nAs prison guards bloodied run and wail
\nPassing like smoke, shouting babbles of bail.<\/p>\n

The wind blows pipe trombones,
\nbarbed wire snaps like the castinet
\nand breaks with glassy tones.
\nThe iron bars twist and bend,
\nturning the guards\u2019 brains dark.
\nHis pacings across white cell block –
\nclad in stripes –
\nAh, Bach is a criminal.<\/p>\n

EXPLANATION:<\/p>\n

A crab cannon is a musical round (often sung) in which the theme comes in again later, backwards. This poem is a crab canon because the stanza it ends with is the introductory one backwards, the second and second to last stanzas are both acrostics, and the third and the third to last are both dialogues. In the middle is a bridge stanza.<\/p>\n

At the same time, on a different level, BACH CAGED is a sonata. What sets a sonata apart from other pieces is that it always takes the form ABA – theme, development, then recapitulation. BACH CAGED can be split up with its first and last two stanzas as \u201cA\u201d and its middle five as \u201cB\u201d.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, BACH CAGED is actually a musical piece. The way we write down music, we use ABCDEFG to denote the 8 whole pitches in our Western musical system. In Germany, \u201cH\u201d also was added on to denote \u201cB natural\u201d while B stood for \u201cB flat\u201d. So the title, BACH CAGED is actually a set of musical notes! Additionally, I took the liberty of counting the letters in each word of the first stanza and from that assigning each word a musical note (e.g. \u201cpacings\u201d is \u201cF\u201d because \u201cpacings\u201d has six letters and \u201cF\u201d is the sixth note). From this code I constructed a melody.<\/p>\n

Here is the title + first stanza song: https:\/\/drive.google.com\/open?id=0B6h9pUyD7UPxeGVPMmZxVUNMaDA<\/a><\/p>\n

These three \u201cdouble meanings\u201d of BACH CAGED summarize the essence of Godel, Escher, Bach which discusses how systems acquire meaning despite being made of “meaningless” elements. The book also discusses the meaning of communication, how knowledge can be represented and stored, different kinds of symbolic representation, and even picks at the fundamental notion of “meaning” itself. I wanted to show by this poem how one medium can hold multiple meanings through different systems of knowledge storage, in other words: coding.<\/p>\n

I additionally paid tribute to Godel, Escher, Bach by my format. The book is organized in a series of dialogues\/monologues followed by chapters of the traditional sort. In the same way, I stuck in some scripting for \u201cHARE\u201d and \u201cOLDEST VILLAGER.\u201d I also make numerous references to the book by including BACH, the tortoise, Zeno\u2019s paradox, recursion, \u201cLeci n\u2019est pas une pipe\u201d, and the confusion of the program with the programmer. So both format, content, and purpose reflect Hofstadter\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Of course, in the end, it is also a poem lauding music and portraying my confusion about the complexities of the world.
\nSo, in the end, BACH CAGED has 5 meanings:
\nA traditional poem
\nA tribute to Hofstadter
\nA literary crab canon
\nA literary sonata
\nAn actual sonatina<\/p>\n

Hope you enjoyed! If you are interested in the book, there is a good explanation of some of it here: http:\/\/serendip.brynmawr.edu\/exchange\/node\/10416<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is code and a musical piece combined into a story, notated in poetry. Meaning on so many levels, in so many mediums, into one. Coders, programmers, this is for you! Ah, poor Bach is a criminal, clad in stripes. His pacings across white cell block, would turn the guards\u2019 brains dark. The iron bars…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1538,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[263,470,478,475,469,468,473,471,264,74,168,11,476,472,479,477,474],"class_list":["post-1587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writings","tag-bach","tag-book","tag-canon","tag-dialogue","tag-godelescherbach","tag-hofstadter","tag-isomorphism","tag-literature","tag-music","tag-poem","tag-reading","tag-school","tag-socrates","tag-sonata","tag-sonatina","tag-tortoiseandhare","tag-tribute"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/20170407_133637-e1491879434167.jpg?fit=1836%2C3264&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WcVY-pB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1587"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1599,"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1587\/revisions\/1599"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rasmusen.org\/special\/ameliajane\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}