English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:59 PM

@suiiurisesse I have a feeling this is what you're thinking of: soundcomparisons.com/#/en/Romance/map/eight/Lgs_All

lots of options to click on. allows you to play a recording of the pronunciation.

But also, don't forget forvo.com which for a given word will give a handful of real people recording how they pronounce a word (and then you see where they're from)

Lots of other possibilities on a reddit comment: reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/77awwv/…

@Færd From all the stats, HC quality in the US is comparable to other 1st world countries (plusses and minusses for different situations, averaged over the entire country).

@Mitch Except for two sub-scores:

Paying for healthcare is a terrible problem though. It's usually no problem if your or a family member has a good job with good healthcare benefits, but there're a lot of people who are not covered that way. And if the person in the family that does have that coverage gets so sick that they have to leave the job that has the benefits, it can mess things up for the rest of the family.

1. Access (much worse)

2. Total cost of healthcare system per capita (much higher)

But back to actually quality. Surely across the world, rural health care is not as good as urban (just fewer doctors per patient in sparse regions.

@Cerberus sure. That's why I restricted to health care quality as opposed to financing.

Well, if there is a good hospital in Kampala with good doctors and good facilities, but it costs a fortune and few people can afford it, would you say Uganda has good quality of healthcare?

1:15 PM

but back to quality again, there are some astounding subpopulations where the care is terrible. The US stat for maternal death in pregnancy is supposedly much much worse for the US than other 1st world countries. Which by stats of populations, it is urban poor who have a very high maternal death rate (in comparison to other segments of society in the US).

@Cerberus separate the two parts, quality (death rate or QALYs, the success rate of treatment, eg cancers cured), and money spent.

@Cerberus If you talk about the population it'll be one thing (for Uganda probably not so great, still lots of infectious disease, parasites, etc), but if you talk about an individual can be different (maybe still sucks if you're moderately wealthy there, or great even if you're destitute in Japan).

Sure there's a correlation; if you don't have enough money to pay for early health care of a disease, quality is impacted later. Spending money on getting wisdom teeth removed now prevents possible years of lots of teeth problems later.

4 hours later…

5:52 PM

@RegDwigнt Now that I've had time to listen to this, I have to say I love it. I love his very humble, very wise commentary on the piece. He went through many of the same things I did when learning to play the piece—and I "learned" to play it three times in my career. First, when it challenged me as a novice; second, after I had thought I had mastered technique and could play it brilliantly very fast; and third, when I realized I needed to find phrasings that really worked musically.

The thing about Bach is, his music is so protean, so amenable to different interpretations. There is no one way to play it. And sometimes it seems, when you think you've found the handle for the Bach (pun intended) you get seduced by a single phrasing that unravels the whole piece (as Root comments about the two instances of slurs in the A-minor) and forces you to learn it all over. Me, I think you have to play Bach like jazz. You play it the way you feel in the moment.

You can't damage it with a questionable performance. A Bach score is a palimpsest, to be erased and written anew each time it is played. I really wish I'd have been that adventurous to play whatever-the-hell I felt whenever I played that, but of course I stuck to what I had worked out so meticulously.

@RegDwigнt I once attended a lecture about the 'movement for authentic music', or similar, and the discussion thereabout.

The 'authentic' school said that our tradition of performing e.g. Bach is not authentic, created only in the 19th century and later, since it includes various things we have no reason to think Bach actually intended, also because they aren't in the manuscripts. So they are trying to recreate wie es eigentlich gewesen, based on historical and other knowledge.

@Cerberus Well, the whole idea of playing Bach "exactly" one way is what is spurious.

The 'traditional' school holds that, since much of the way a piece was intended to be performed by its composer is not found in manuscripts, important aspects of performance came from direct instruction by the composer; Bach would have explained to players how he intended the music to be played, and trained them himself, or through assistants trained by him.
This unwritten knowledge was thenceforth kept alive by repeated performances: players and orchestras and directors learned from each other, and from attending other performances, how the piece was to be played. And so this knowledge was…

So we should not disregard the established practice of the 'community' as unauthentic.

@Robusto Perhaps to some degree!

As often, the truth may lie in the middle.

6:10 PM

Also, many of the instructions to players would have been to observe or ignore the typical baroque stylings, in which all players of the era were well versed.

As in, certain practices that players were then applying to a piece by default?

6:25 PM

@Cerberus Exactly.

6:40 PM

Also, understand that for many pieces, he and other composers would simply supply a melody and a figured bass.

Like so.

Uhuh, uhuh.

1 hour later…

8:04 PM

@Cerberus The doorbell rings There must be somebody there.

J. S: Bach: Solo in a minor BWV 1013 - Barthold Kuijken flute traversière

8:35 PM

@RegDwigнt: Here's another county heard from:

►

Note the ornaments. And that he takes some breaths where Root does (and surely if he'd had the benefit of my opinion he'd have done so differently, ne? ^_^)

But I celebrate both.

And both go slightly flat on the high A as the breath dies, the bête noire (Achilles heel?) of all flutes, not just baroque ones, especially if you're trying to play softly in the first place.

So yeah ... I think Kuijken's ornamentation is tasteful and stylistically echt. And I do understand why certain passages are phrased the way they are. It can be really hard to determine where a phrase in Bach begins and ends, because you're always asking yourself "Is this part of a larger idea?" and "I have to stop somewhere, don't I? I'm not a fucking violin or a harpsichord, goddamn it!"

user402022

9:29 PM

@Mitch Thank you very much, it pretty much looks like it is! Cheers!

SmokeDetector

9:54 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive answer detected, potentially bad keyword in answer, toxic answer detected (161): Synonym for observee by BigBlackCock on english.SE