Learn Norwegian

This was an amusing find. I was reading up on the Norwegian composer Ole Olsen, which led me to a short biography of Olsen at the Music Information Centre Norway. Actually it led me to the Internet Archive’s cached copy of the page, since the Music Information Centre no longer exists. The second sentence of the bio states that the composer’s father gave him “soog music training”. Thinking “soog” might be a distinctly Norwegian style of music or training I looked around for evidence of the word’s meaning. This led me to Jørn Dybvik’s “LEARN NORWEGIAN INSTANTLY!” page, which looks like it has everything you need to know to speak essential Norwegian like a native:

I don’t think “soog” was intended to be in that English-language biography of Ole Olsen, but there were other typos as well.

Jørn’s pages are at Tripod.com, a free hosting site I thought certain had ceased to exist. Curious if I left a trail there for any reason I discovered that I edited a page on Tripod a few years ago: sorabji.tripod.com. Not much is there except for a montage of photos I got at the cemetery after Sandy blew through here.

I logged in to the account and saw a notice saying I’ve been a member since 1995. I have no memory of what was there before the last posting in 2014, and no captures of Tripod.com sites seem to exist at archive.org’s Wayback machine. I attempted to get my Tripod.com page archived but it activated what appears to be an anti-leeching mechanism:

Having not logged in at Tripod for a few years I was forced to update my password. After a couple of rejections I got the weirdly encouraging notice “YOUR PASSWORD IS VERY STRONG”. Why, thank you. Thank you very much. Would you like me to flex it for you?

Jørn’s hilarious Norwegian page – and Tripod.com in general – bring back memories of those early days on the WWW. There were a number of free hosting sites (there still are), all of them supported by advertising. My memory of Tripod.com was that the quantity of ads they barfed up seemed positively vindictive. Accessing anything on that site felt like punishment. Their freely hosted sites today do not seem to bear any ads.

When I created that single unremarkable page a few years ago I was exploring the wider world of sites like Tripod.com, which let people with no coding chops build reasonably presentable web sites. I have no particular need for such a thing but I was just interested to see how well they worked. I never got too far with this little exploration, but I did post this interesting find regarding my father to a Wix page.

I cannot believe that the customized excite.com start page still exists. Or rather, I cannot believe that it still exists in the same format as when it was created 20 years ago. This looks very 1997:

The weather forecasts are from the cities where I and my family lived. Today Miami and Daytona Beach would be off that collection. The weather for Astoria is way off. No way was it 41°, either Fahrenheit or Celsius, today. The latter would have been 105° Fahrenheit!

I have been at the piano a lot the past couple of weeks. That is what led me to look up info on Ole Olsen, the Norwegian composer of a sweet little trifle of piano piece, the Serenade in A major. I rediscovered the piece in a compilation of Scandinavian piano music compiled by Louis Oesterle, an editor whose name is familiar to me since youth.

I recently procured a microphone boom stand and have been experimenting with a podcast sort of thing in which I play through music and make comments along the way. So many decisions made, so much compromise and disguisement goes into learning even a simple piece like the Serenade. I am not certain of the format of this podcast attempt, nor am I sure that I even have anything interesting to say about these pieces I’ve been exploring.

As with almost any of my current pursuits I find that the technology upon which I’ve begrudgingly come to rely has prevented or seriously delayed me in getting things done. In the past when a software crash or buggy web site irritated me or threw a running chainsaw into my serenity I could always turn to the piano. There, I think, is one place in this world I inhabit where I actually have control over the situation. But as technology invades that space I find that this sense of control is becoming less and less of a sure thing. It started when I got the giant tablet for use as a sheet music reader. That transition was actually pretty smooth, as those things go. Now, as I try to progress with developing other ideas I must invoke the use of recording gear and sound equipment. None of it is especially elaborate, just a small mixing board, a field recorder, and now a microphone in my face. But it just seems like every simple task is intercepted by something that just Doesn’t Fucking Work™. At present I was inspired by my rediscovery of Leo Ornstein to compose music for the first time in a while. I attempted to download MuseScore, the promising looking open source notation software. For some reason their website thinks I speak Czech, so I was given the Czech-language version of their website, and there was no obvious way to switch languages (like there should be). Music itself might be something of a universal language but I assumed I had to find the English language version of the website, lest I download a version of the product where menus and text matter are in Czech. By manually appending /en to the web site URL I found the English-language version of the site. From there I attempted the download. It started to download and said it would take over an hour. Thinking it was just going to be very slow I attempted to do other things, but after about an hour I saw a “Network error” message and a failed download. Thinking WiFi might be to blame I tried the download on the desktop PC. Same story. It did not work. There appears to be no way to download MuseScore today. If I want to write music at the piano today it’s going to have to be with good old fashioned paper and pen.

I had downloaded a copy of MuseScore to the desktop a few months ago. Why not just copy that file over to the tablet and install it that way? Because for some reason that doesn’t work, either. I cannot access the tablet over the WiFi network, as I was able to do just fine before a system update reboot last night.

This technological aggravation took up a lot of time and caused enough annoyance that I decided to move on to something else. Now I can’t decide what that something else should be.

I’ve spent much of the last few days listening to the sound of my own voice. I am not certain how much more I can take of this mostly monotonous pursuit that could ultimately be yet another waste of time. I’ve been sorting through audio I made between 2011 and today, some of which I posted here recently. The only thing really keeping me going is that once in a while a gem appears. I tag it “A+” and then listen to another hour of monotonous, labored pablum.

I am also motivated by the darker sense of wanting to avoid having this pursuit amount to utter and complete futility. That’s not inspirational, now that I put it into words. I guess that’s why they call it work.

Here is one track you might find amusing. I certainly did, having no memory whatsoever of having recorded it in December, 2011.