Great strapline for a rather shocking post from Dizzy Thinks. (I read it on Iain Dale first though).

Meanwhile, outside the Labour Party conference…

(There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch…)

Looking at some photos from my trip to Saltaire, this American toy reed organ jogged a memory. I used to borrow my school friend Stewart Weston’s Bontempi, something rather similar to this. It had a regular polyphonic keyboard (i.e. each note would sound individually) and a cluster of buttons to the left. Each button played a chord with the white buttons playing major ones, black buttons minor ones. This organ is slightly confusing in that it uses regular (if truncated) black and white keys with a non-logical layout and the keys are numbered rather than showing the note. On reflection, I think that Stew’s was similar in labelling, suggesting that they may have come with some kind of method songbook.

I fixed Stew’s a couple of times as he had a younger Sister who also played with it and it got chucked in a cupboard when it was in the way. Opening it up, it was surprisingly simple inside, a number of mouth-organ type reeds covered by the keys and a fan arrangement underneath. When you pressed a key the corresponding reed was uncovered and it sounded. For the chord buttons, they uncovered a reed assembly with three tongues to play the harmony. For duff notes, the normal symptom was that a reed had shaken loose and was lying around in the innards.

You could also make it fart- you pressed all the keys at once and it audibly sagged.

I did ponder why the keyboard was laid out the way it is (five black notes in a group of two and three for each octave, being twelve notes before the sound repeats itself higher at double the frequency) and the more I looked into it the more I discovered that music theory is really complex. Indeed I can can recall a professional musician saying that it is like peeling an onion grasping the complexities of how key transposition works, especially when non-western music is studied that uses other scale structures. The language quickly becomes arcane and the lay person (i.e. me) gets lost.

Then you catch sight of a keyboard like this. It is known as an enharmonic harmonium and uses a tuning called 53 equal temperament. Rather than a semitone between notes making the twelve steps, there are very small increments making 84 steps. This is known as a generalized keyboard and just reading about it does my head in…

This keyboard, however, would do a musician’s head in, making no musical sense at all. That is because it is used to control lights and the black keys are for colour change equipment.

(I’ve played with the Drury Lane Theatre Royal one when it was still installed, but unfortunately the dimmers were switched off at the time.)

A few weeks ago, we received an invite to a garden party with Prince Charles. It was being held at Alnwick Garden as a special event for the Friends and looked good. There were a couple of problems though- the date clashed with the Morley Musical Spectacular, you had to pay for tickets, and… our friends membership has lapsed. (You can’t always justify a two hour trip to visit a garden at least three times a year so we decided to go pay as you go this year).

However, it was a timely reminder, so we headed up there today with a Grandma. The new entrance pavilion has been open for over twelve months now (the white roofed building) and gives a great view of the cascade as you enter. The building fixtures & fittings still look new, although we noticed some bent forks when we dined!

The treehouse is starting to mellow into the woodland setting. This is a big building and there can’t be too many that boast a pair of spiral staircases.

(Eat your heart out, Dean Friedman!)

The bamboo labyrinth has now matured sufficiently to give you a fair chance of getting lost or disoriented

Designer sinks in the toilets gracefully change colour from blue to green.

The cascade continues to impress, although I noticed one or two nozzles not squirting. A new book informs on the eighteen large pumps underneath and you can even get a post card of the pump house (although it is closed to the public, the room I’d most like to visit of course).

David particularly likes the Serpent garden which has interesting water features. This is Waterglass - Two unbroken membranes of falling water in a circle that you can enter. (Unbroken when David isn’t sticking his head in it, that is!)

This is Torricelli - A celebration of the intrigue of hydrostatic pressure. A firm favourite with children, even when 19 degrees and overcast.

From the Press Release:
Torricelli, an Italian mathematician of the 17th century was fascinated by the properties of hydrostatic pressure that is to say the pressure derived from the ‘head’ or distance between surface and points below. Using these principles a central mirror-polished stainless steel column and three smaller transparent, acrylic columns surrounding it fill with water from the overflow of an elevated pond nearby to a point where the central column overflows down over the outer surface of the cylinder. Once full, a motorised valve opens, releasing the hydrostatically pressurised water into a circular manifold that feeds ninety vertical jets which slowly subside in unison with the dropping levels visible in the acrylic tubes.

Us bloggers don’t like bullies.

(Hat tip & sidebar graphic lifted from nourishing obscurity, cartoon from the cartoonist)