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Posts by Grant Sawatzky

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new episode of free/composed radio today at 5:30pst

feeling good about how this one is coming together: trying to feature music with specific flavour of energetic pulse, and rhythmic flow woven together across genre and time period. welcome to tune in at bside.radio and twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

3 weeks ago 0 0 0 0
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new episode of free composed streaming today: 5:30-7pm PST

on bside.radio and twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

today's episode 'music train'
featuring a variety of railway related music. all aboard! 🚆

1 month ago 2 0 0 0

the venture capitalists are asking us to accept "our proprietary software will generate and display an answer by a method we don't understand (mind you we would not be obligated to inform you even if we knew)" as if it is an improvement on the advanced search tools that were once widely available.

2 months ago 0 0 0 0

let's set the average household annual income (~$70,000) as a sensible "one hamburger per day" pace, and so earning $250,000/y is like someone who worked up a big appetite—3.5 burgers/day: Lotta burgers, but comprehensible.

$1billion=14,287 burgers a day (1 every 6 seconds) which is a death wish

4 months ago 5 0 0 0

how big is one billion compared to one million? Try the "hamburgers eaten in a lifetime" unit of measure.
To eat 1 million hamburgers you'd need to eat 1.5 burgers per hour for 80 consecutive years.
to eat 1 BILLION hamburgers you'd need to eat 30.3 hamburgers per minute for 80 consecutive years.

4 months ago 6 1 2 1
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new episode of free/composed coming your way 5:30 to 7pm PST today!

tune in at bside.radio or twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

today's show: 'improvisations'

4 months ago 3 0 0 0

has an intl. player ever made world series appearance within weeks of a sitting POTUS announcing planned military operation on their country? prior to 2025 (1 Venezuelan per side), Leo Cárdenas (🇨🇺) pinch hit in the Reds' 1961 game 5 loss 6mo after Bay of Pigs, just 1wk before Cuban missile crisis

5 months ago 3 0 0 0
Preview
How the Dodgers and baseball shaped Bernie Sanders' world view Les Carpenter: When the Democratic presidential candidate was a teenager, his beloved Dodgers fled Brooklyn for Los Angeles – and those closest to him believe the shock of their departure helped inspi...

Bernie Sanders origin story

5 months ago 5 0 0 0
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The Good Samaritan, by Joseph Highmore, 1744, 📸 by @patricksmith04

5 months ago 3935 643 35 25
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New episode of ‘free/composed’ going live today at 5:30-7pst (that’s 2.5 hours from time of this post).

Today’s theme: drumming it all up

An ecclectic mix of experimental, traditional, jazz, and morefeaturing the drumming and other percussion. Tune it at bside.radio or twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

5 months ago 3 0 0 0
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Today! (3–5pm), an off-schedule ‘free-composed’ special:

‘Songstress Sunday’

Eclectic mix of women vocalists in early music, traditional, experimental, pop, classical, and more.

Tune in at bside.radio or twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

6 months ago 5 0 0 0

Hiring fair had lineup >100 people down the street waiting their turn to get inside where you get in another line to wait to hand a resume to middleman “placement company” who take a portion of the wage for any placements they make.

now THAT’s a gig (prerequisite: candidate is without a conscience)

7 months ago 3 0 0 0

If trickle down economics were real, then all those stores who replaced cashiers with self checkouts would have “free food for unemployed/former/would-be cashiers” discount programs—which they most certainly do not, since it most certainly isn’t.

7 months ago 1 0 0 0
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New 90 minute episode of my bside.radio show, ‘free/composed’ today: 5:30-7pm pst. Today’s all-vinyl set is a feature of traditional, pop, and “other” quality recordings from around the globe that have made their way to the bins of the Pacific Northwest. fun and eclectic mix.

7 months ago 3 0 0 0

I keep thinking about how mega-corps (amazon/abe, thrift-books, value-village/savers) brute force acquisition/distribution power makes thoughtful curation and contextual knowledge of materials the distinctive "product" for booksellers, but I fear is automation will squash the already thin margins.

8 months ago 1 0 0 0

I think of my bookshelves as "the people's humanities library" built entirely of materials rescued from discarded book piles/thrift shops. I'm wondering how to make the curation work I've done in collecting useful/publicly accessible. not sure where to go with it beyond digitizing the rarest items.

8 months ago 1 0 0 1
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out of curiosity, which production/conductor is it?

8 months ago 1 0 1 0
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new episode of JC-spins' "free/composed" radio TODAY, 5:30-7pm PST streaming at bside.radio and via twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

Today: all vinyl summer special of eclectic pop and oddities rescued from thrift shop and bargain bins of the pacific northwest

8 months ago 2 0 0 0
an ancient bone flute found in modern day Germany. it's at least 35,000 years old.

an ancient bone flute found in modern day Germany. it's at least 35,000 years old.

annotated photo document of ancient bone flute found in present day Labrador, Canada. it was likely played 7000 to 10,000 years ago

annotated photo document of ancient bone flute found in present day Labrador, Canada. it was likely played 7000 to 10,000 years ago

On today's episode of 'free/composed' I'll be playing a diverse 90 minute program of music for flute—past present and future this afternoon streaming on B-side Radio, Vancouver. bside.radio and twitch.tv/bsidedotradio

5:30-7pm PST

9 months ago 3 0 0 0

I see it as critical students are taught to replace the pervasive idea being sold to by tech-corps “what we know is a thanks to computers” with the infinitely more accurate “what computers appear to ‘know’ is thanks to you/us” but I fear a majority of young students are get stuck on the former.

10 months ago 2 0 0 0

there is a good article in the 1997 book "Hamlet on the Holodeck" that reports on people who thought they'd fallen in love with "ELIZA" and her offspring, which were "early natural language processing computer program[s] [first] developed from 1964 to 1967[1] at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.

10 months ago 4 1 0 0

I propose a new rule: whenever the sitting US president is talking seriously about annexing Canada via gradual economic takeover; Canadians who are renting housing from US-residing absentee landlords are allowed—nay, encouraged—to pause rent payments indefinitely.

10 months ago 2 0 0 0

our brains: a lot like cuneiform
no, they're just like written scrolls
no, it's that they're typeset books
no, most like card catalogue
no, reeling thoughts are cinema
no, computer hard-drives describe it best
no—dim resemblance, these and the rest

10 months ago 0 0 0 0

F. M. Anayet Hossain: "empiricism is not to be totally accepted because it presumes that the world falls apart into two classes of entities. Firstly, “subjects” whose principal task is to perceive and secondly, “objects” which are only to be
perceived. But this whole idea is defective."

10 months ago 0 0 0 0

Very much so—nicely put.

Like the physicists particle/wave duality music theory’s own “double slit” involves an analyst finding object must have been process, but process/relation must have been object (and so neither and both)…

10 months ago 2 0 0 0
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Text: Implicit to any music-theoretical analysis is some degree of meta-level speculation as to which musical objects are considered especially relevant, salient, or "natural" to the given context. But the musical "object" is often slippery. Precise definitions of musical objects are inevitably scaffolded onto one's preconceptions about music perception and conceptualization. These assumptions are significant to our musical analyses. We, as theorists, must take a particular stance on what does or does not count as the musical object even (or especially!) where the position may be unconventional, idiosyncratic or controversial. The outgrowth from such discussions has wide ranging impact on the variety and breadth of analytic insights and intuitions as related to theoretic, hermeneutic, and cultural analyses.

The SMT Philosophy Group solicits proposals for lightning talks that deal with the meta-level stakes of musical ontology to take place during our interest group session at the upcoming joint meeting of the Society for Music Theory and American Musicological Society in November. We welcome proposals that: highlight an analytic object exemplifying ontological particularity or complexity; are illustrative for ontological issues related to music theory pedagogy; or speak to distinctives of a musical ontology within a specific cultural context or repertoire, etc.

Text: Implicit to any music-theoretical analysis is some degree of meta-level speculation as to which musical objects are considered especially relevant, salient, or "natural" to the given context. But the musical "object" is often slippery. Precise definitions of musical objects are inevitably scaffolded onto one's preconceptions about music perception and conceptualization. These assumptions are significant to our musical analyses. We, as theorists, must take a particular stance on what does or does not count as the musical object even (or especially!) where the position may be unconventional, idiosyncratic or controversial. The outgrowth from such discussions has wide ranging impact on the variety and breadth of analytic insights and intuitions as related to theoretic, hermeneutic, and cultural analyses. The SMT Philosophy Group solicits proposals for lightning talks that deal with the meta-level stakes of musical ontology to take place during our interest group session at the upcoming joint meeting of the Society for Music Theory and American Musicological Society in November. We welcome proposals that: highlight an analytic object exemplifying ontological particularity or complexity; are illustrative for ontological issues related to music theory pedagogy; or speak to distinctives of a musical ontology within a specific cultural context or repertoire, etc.

Varun Chandrasekhar and I are co-chairing the Society for Music Theory Interest Group 2025-27. Here is the call for papers on we sent out for our upcoming meeting (AMS/SMT Nov. 2025) on the topic: “ontologies of music theory’s analytical objects”

DM if you’d like proposal submission details

10 months ago 1 1 1 0

by default the modern University frames humanities subjects as past oriented, and sciences as future oriented:“History of Science” like “Humanistic Futures” is a niche in broader field. But “why (re)consider old science?” and “why (re)imagine new humanities?” shouldn’t require extra justification.

10 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Above is Hudson’s Bay Company flag ad flown from 1707 to 1801. Preceded but red and white version (British Merchant flag 1682 to 1707) and followed by version with the Union Jack flag in upper right was flown from 1801until 1965 when Canada’s current flag was first introduced.

10 months ago 0 0 0 0
Hudson’s Bay Company flag in the version that was flown from 1707 to 1801. Great Britain Flag in upper left, on solid red field with company initials ‘HBC’ in white lettering at lower right. Updated version with the Union Jack flag in upper right was flown until 1965 when Canada’s current red and white maple leaf flag was first introduced.

Hudson’s Bay Company flag in the version that was flown from 1707 to 1801. Great Britain Flag in upper left, on solid red field with company initials ‘HBC’ in white lettering at lower right. Updated version with the Union Jack flag in upper right was flown until 1965 when Canada’s current red and white maple leaf flag was first introduced.

The company whose commercial monopoly was so effective that for 200 years the corporation was the de facto government of the geographic area presently known as Canada—governing for a period almost twice as long as ‘Canada’ has existed—is shutting down for good today.

10 months ago 1 0 1 0

I forgot I remember it all
I remember that I forgot it entirety
I forgot I forgot it so completely
I remember I remember it so well

10 months ago 0 0 0 0