In honor of last night's eruption of Mt. Redoubt - and its glorious timing with regards to someone called the governor of Louisiana's remark about volcanoes - I give you a death metal song about explosive volcanism.
Now, I'm not a death metal fan. It isn't even particularly on my listening radar, and tuneless screaming does not do much for me aesthetically. I do, however, think that if there is any situation in which this sort of musical treatment would be apt, the explosion of a mountain would be a good candidate. I also have to admit that I adore the title of this one. "Pyroclastic Annihilation," seriously, is a winner of a title.
My knowledge of the band that performs this song, Demolition Hammer, comes entirely from Wikipedia. They were a death/thrash metal band from the Bronx, active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They disbanded around 1994 and are, from what I gather as an outsider to the genre, pretty obscure now.
The lyrics to "Pyroclastic Annihilation" have no sense of narrative or particular sentence structure of which to speak. It simply consists of various volcano-related terms and processes strung together in random order. The album this song comes from was produced in 1992, which was well before rampant Googling of things was prevalent, so I imagine the band must have trawled through some actual volcanology textbooks or articles to derive these lyrics. Most of the terms in there actually make sense, though there's a few that make me wonder what source they were actually looking at. Would anyone care to define "subrelluric forces" for me - a creative made-up definition definitely works, since I'm not finding anything real! Also, "intrusive tuff," guys? Yes, the random trawling for large and menacing phrases in a volcano book without any sense of meaning seems to have been the modus operandi here...
But still. A death metal song about explosive volcanism. For its flaws in lyrics, I still adore the concept. And it's actually screamed clearly enough that I can understand those lyrics without having to consult any external source. That's definitely worth something! And it also shows that even '90s death metal bands care about volcano monitoring.
Hear the song on YouTube (no video, though)
Lyrics
Oh crap, have I really not updated in almost a month? I had some really good excuses this month, at least, though they were stressful/depressing ones. It's spring break now. I have lots of things I actually want to write about, and will probably spew them out in the next few weeks.
Showing posts with label volcanoes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label volcanoes. Show all posts
Monday, March 23, 2009
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Volcanic Hazards for Humanities Majors
I have emerged from the depths of mid-quarter reading onto the island of Three-Day Weekend to make a post to my blog!
I taught my very first geology lecture on Tuesday. While I'm not technically a TA this quarter, I will be next quarter, and this lecture was for the same class. I ended up teaching this week because my adviser was out of town giving talks, and needed someone to cover for him. The class in question is one of those massive nonmajor earth science requirement courses - Natural Hazards. (Or, Ways The Earth Can Kill You, For Non-Majors.) This is normally a huge 500-person course, but the section this quarter is part of a special year-long course on California in general (first quarter was an English class on California novels, third quarter is on Native American history), geared at humanities majors in particular, and there are only 75 of them in the class. A slightly less formidable audience for a first big lecture!
This was not the first time I've ever taught; I was a TA for a year in the music department, but that was a much smaller class. My discussion sections had five students each, and they were supposed to sing for me. I have already found that it's much easier to impart information on a topic to a group of people than to make them practice a practical skill that they really really don't feel like doing. (It's especially hard when some of them can't even tell that the note they're singing isn't even in the same ballpark as the note I'm playing for them.)
Anyway, the lecture I got to give was about subduction zone and continental caldera volcanoes. This was very exciting to me, because volcanoes were my first geologic love, at age five or six. When you're that little, books about volcanoes tend to also be about earthquakes, so I quickly developed an interest in those as well, but the volcanoes did come first. My adviser's previous lecture had been about Hawaii and Iceland, so I got to jump right in with the really big booms. It necessarily had to be a pretty simple lecture in terms of explanatory science (the textbook states everything in terms of The Three Vs Of Volcanism: Volume, Volatiles, and Viscosity); I was supposed to cover the phenomenology of big bad eruptions more than anything else. I spent a good long time on pyroclastic flows and lahars, with historical examples from all over the world, then went into more depth on sequence of a stratovolcano eruption by describing (of course) Mt. St. Helens. (I also mentioned that Mt. Redoubt is a stratovolcano with imminent eruption, though not on that sort of scale, and I was surprised that nobody seemed to have heard of it!) I ended by tying these rest-of-the-world examples in with specific California sites (ski Mammoth before it blows, guys!), and by showing video of the Salton Sea Mud Volcanoes, because they're awesome.
I really tried to impart the impression that, "These volcanoes are fascinating, beautiful, and can totally kill you," and I really hope that more than just the two talkative students came out of the lecture sharing my enthusiasm and trepidation over all things volcanic. As I expected, based on the undergrad level classes I've taken here, the class was pretty quiet and stonefaced throughout, and they seemed loath to actually answer the questions I asked, even though it was stuff they totally should have known from the previous Thursday's lecture, if nothing else. I hope that their lack of response was just because I was the new unfamiliar guy, and have no actual grade-giving power. Because seriously, how could anyone not find extremely explosive volcanoes even a little bit cool?
Despite the unresponsiveness, I enjoyed giving this lecture, and it was definitely valuable practice for future TAing and lecturing in years to come. I'm looking forward to properly TAing this class next quarter, even though I know to expect some degree of apathy from people who are mostly just filling gen-ed requirements. I'm hoping I'll be able to indoctrinate at least a few of them into enthusiastic geogeekery!
I taught my very first geology lecture on Tuesday. While I'm not technically a TA this quarter, I will be next quarter, and this lecture was for the same class. I ended up teaching this week because my adviser was out of town giving talks, and needed someone to cover for him. The class in question is one of those massive nonmajor earth science requirement courses - Natural Hazards. (Or, Ways The Earth Can Kill You, For Non-Majors.) This is normally a huge 500-person course, but the section this quarter is part of a special year-long course on California in general (first quarter was an English class on California novels, third quarter is on Native American history), geared at humanities majors in particular, and there are only 75 of them in the class. A slightly less formidable audience for a first big lecture!
This was not the first time I've ever taught; I was a TA for a year in the music department, but that was a much smaller class. My discussion sections had five students each, and they were supposed to sing for me. I have already found that it's much easier to impart information on a topic to a group of people than to make them practice a practical skill that they really really don't feel like doing. (It's especially hard when some of them can't even tell that the note they're singing isn't even in the same ballpark as the note I'm playing for them.)
Anyway, the lecture I got to give was about subduction zone and continental caldera volcanoes. This was very exciting to me, because volcanoes were my first geologic love, at age five or six. When you're that little, books about volcanoes tend to also be about earthquakes, so I quickly developed an interest in those as well, but the volcanoes did come first. My adviser's previous lecture had been about Hawaii and Iceland, so I got to jump right in with the really big booms. It necessarily had to be a pretty simple lecture in terms of explanatory science (the textbook states everything in terms of The Three Vs Of Volcanism: Volume, Volatiles, and Viscosity); I was supposed to cover the phenomenology of big bad eruptions more than anything else. I spent a good long time on pyroclastic flows and lahars, with historical examples from all over the world, then went into more depth on sequence of a stratovolcano eruption by describing (of course) Mt. St. Helens. (I also mentioned that Mt. Redoubt is a stratovolcano with imminent eruption, though not on that sort of scale, and I was surprised that nobody seemed to have heard of it!) I ended by tying these rest-of-the-world examples in with specific California sites (ski Mammoth before it blows, guys!), and by showing video of the Salton Sea Mud Volcanoes, because they're awesome.
I really tried to impart the impression that, "These volcanoes are fascinating, beautiful, and can totally kill you," and I really hope that more than just the two talkative students came out of the lecture sharing my enthusiasm and trepidation over all things volcanic. As I expected, based on the undergrad level classes I've taken here, the class was pretty quiet and stonefaced throughout, and they seemed loath to actually answer the questions I asked, even though it was stuff they totally should have known from the previous Thursday's lecture, if nothing else. I hope that their lack of response was just because I was the new unfamiliar guy, and have no actual grade-giving power. Because seriously, how could anyone not find extremely explosive volcanoes even a little bit cool?
Despite the unresponsiveness, I enjoyed giving this lecture, and it was definitely valuable practice for future TAing and lecturing in years to come. I'm looking forward to properly TAing this class next quarter, even though I know to expect some degree of apathy from people who are mostly just filling gen-ed requirements. I'm hoping I'll be able to indoctrinate at least a few of them into enthusiastic geogeekery!
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Gongs, Gods, and the Ring of Fire
Java is the most densely-populated island on Earth, both in terms of humans and in terms of volcanoes. With cities built between these peaks and farms reaching uncomfortably far up the slopes, it is no surprise that this volcanism has greatly influenced the culture. National Geographic ran an article on Indonesian volcanoes in culture and the conflicts between spirituality and science earlier this year; I saw discussion when I was first getting into the geoblogosphere. But for all it was an interesting article, and for all the cultural discussion that was there, music didn't come up at all.
A few weeks ago, I got into a discussion with a few ethnomusicologists and an anthropologist over whether central Javanese gamelan music is high art music or not. It is considered one of the major fine arts of Indonesia, but at the same time, this music is used for so many purposes and events that it not, in the strictest sense, art music. But regardless of how it's classified, its aesthetic, origin, and some of those uses are undeniably geological.
A gamelan consists largely of bronze keyed instruments and different styles of tuned gongs, both horizontally and vertically suspended. There are string and woodwind instruments involved, as well as vocals, but the core set of instruments are all heavy metal. The instruments, particularly, the gongs are cast by digging the form into the ground and casting molten bronze into it. The word gamelan comes from gamel, which means "to forge." While the heat from the actual volcanoes isn't used to melt the bronze, the heat of these forges is symbolic of the heat within the volcanoes. With that starting point, it could be read further that the molten bronze itself references the lava, forming the instruments like the volcanoes formed Java to begin with. The instruments are made as a set, not interchangeable with instruments from other gamelans; each set is given a name, often related to the landscape and natural setting of the city in which the set of instruments is to reside. UC Riverside's is Kyai Telaga Semu, or "Venerable Lake of Illusions," referencing mirages in the desert surrounding the university. UCLA's is, amusingly, "Venerable Dark Cloud." I have no doubt that volcanoes find their way into the names, where appropriate.
The most important instrument in a gamelan, though it has the fewest notes, is the great gong. The legend of the first gamelan states that the sultan needed a way to contact the gods, so he invented the gong; other gongs were added to contact other gods, and the ensemble grew. The gods in question are believed to reside in the volcanoes; there are some volcanoes, most notably Merapi, which is located between Javanese cultural centers Surakarta and Yogyakarta, with resident gamelans in caves on the slopes, which are played to keep the godly residents of the volcano appeased and less inclined to induce eruption. To speak to a volcano, the sound would need to be loud and low. The great gong consists of several hundred pounds of bronze, and makes a sound so low that it tests the bottom range of human hearing. When playing in a gamelan, you can feel the gong just as much as you hear it; the compressional sound wave pulses past you, as if the gong is the central vent of a volcano unleashing an explosion, or the epicenter of an earthquake. Even the names of instrument and mountain are related: gong ageng, or "great gong," has the same root as gunung, or volcano. A further connection here is that the animistic spirit of the gamelan resides in the gong, much like the larger gods reside within the volcanoes.
Javanese gamelan music is cyclical. There is a set framework pattern of notes that is repeated over and over, with variations in tempo and underlying texture. This music also has three basic levels of instrumental parts: those that play the framework, those that elaborate virtuosically within the framework, and those that punctuate. The gong is the strongest punctuation - it marks each repetition of the cycle, and marks the very beginning and the very end of a performance of a piece. To me - though I have not yet heard or read anything that definitively confirms or disproves this - having the gong be the beginning and the end at once is like the explosive part of an eruption cycle. Is the bang the end of one buildup, or is it the event that allows the next buildup to begin? Another feature of gamelan music is that more punctuation indicates a more intense mood, regardless of speed and volume. A quick piece with sparse punctuation would be considered less intense than a slow piece with frequent punctuation, and pieces used to represent fight scenes in shadow puppet theatre or dance have multiple punctuation strokes per note of the main melody. Could this relate to the eruption cycle as well - the more noise and material shooting out of the volcano, the more intense the eruption? These particular connections are things about which I have not seen research, but I am very curious to know if this is real, or if I'm just overanalyzing. I suspect I'd need to speak/read Javanese to figure this out, so I may enlist one of my Javanist ethnomusicologist friends to help me dig, since the only Javanese words I know are directly related to gamelan.
I've been playing in the UCR Javanese gamelan for two years now, and I absolutely love it. I joined the group for purely aesthetic reasons - I loved the sound of the music - but the more I learn about the structure of the music and the culture behind it, I appreciate it more and more in deeper ways. The undeniable connection to geology in this music is an added bonus, but one that makes gamelan even more fascinating and beautiful to me.
And now, since I've been jabbering about this for a lot of lines, here's a soundfile of a gamelan piece. This is the group in which I play, from our 6 June 2008 concert. We're not Javanese professionals by any means, but our instructor and guest singer have been studying Java for decades, and we had a guest director come in from Yogyakarta to work with us. These are good people to have in charge. This particular piece is a ladrang, which has 32 notes per stroke of the big gong, and it is often used to open a concert.
Ladrang Wilujeng
A few weeks ago, I got into a discussion with a few ethnomusicologists and an anthropologist over whether central Javanese gamelan music is high art music or not. It is considered one of the major fine arts of Indonesia, but at the same time, this music is used for so many purposes and events that it not, in the strictest sense, art music. But regardless of how it's classified, its aesthetic, origin, and some of those uses are undeniably geological.
A gamelan consists largely of bronze keyed instruments and different styles of tuned gongs, both horizontally and vertically suspended. There are string and woodwind instruments involved, as well as vocals, but the core set of instruments are all heavy metal. The instruments, particularly, the gongs are cast by digging the form into the ground and casting molten bronze into it. The word gamelan comes from gamel, which means "to forge." While the heat from the actual volcanoes isn't used to melt the bronze, the heat of these forges is symbolic of the heat within the volcanoes. With that starting point, it could be read further that the molten bronze itself references the lava, forming the instruments like the volcanoes formed Java to begin with. The instruments are made as a set, not interchangeable with instruments from other gamelans; each set is given a name, often related to the landscape and natural setting of the city in which the set of instruments is to reside. UC Riverside's is Kyai Telaga Semu, or "Venerable Lake of Illusions," referencing mirages in the desert surrounding the university. UCLA's is, amusingly, "Venerable Dark Cloud." I have no doubt that volcanoes find their way into the names, where appropriate.
The most important instrument in a gamelan, though it has the fewest notes, is the great gong. The legend of the first gamelan states that the sultan needed a way to contact the gods, so he invented the gong; other gongs were added to contact other gods, and the ensemble grew. The gods in question are believed to reside in the volcanoes; there are some volcanoes, most notably Merapi, which is located between Javanese cultural centers Surakarta and Yogyakarta, with resident gamelans in caves on the slopes, which are played to keep the godly residents of the volcano appeased and less inclined to induce eruption. To speak to a volcano, the sound would need to be loud and low. The great gong consists of several hundred pounds of bronze, and makes a sound so low that it tests the bottom range of human hearing. When playing in a gamelan, you can feel the gong just as much as you hear it; the compressional sound wave pulses past you, as if the gong is the central vent of a volcano unleashing an explosion, or the epicenter of an earthquake. Even the names of instrument and mountain are related: gong ageng, or "great gong," has the same root as gunung, or volcano. A further connection here is that the animistic spirit of the gamelan resides in the gong, much like the larger gods reside within the volcanoes.
Javanese gamelan music is cyclical. There is a set framework pattern of notes that is repeated over and over, with variations in tempo and underlying texture. This music also has three basic levels of instrumental parts: those that play the framework, those that elaborate virtuosically within the framework, and those that punctuate. The gong is the strongest punctuation - it marks each repetition of the cycle, and marks the very beginning and the very end of a performance of a piece. To me - though I have not yet heard or read anything that definitively confirms or disproves this - having the gong be the beginning and the end at once is like the explosive part of an eruption cycle. Is the bang the end of one buildup, or is it the event that allows the next buildup to begin? Another feature of gamelan music is that more punctuation indicates a more intense mood, regardless of speed and volume. A quick piece with sparse punctuation would be considered less intense than a slow piece with frequent punctuation, and pieces used to represent fight scenes in shadow puppet theatre or dance have multiple punctuation strokes per note of the main melody. Could this relate to the eruption cycle as well - the more noise and material shooting out of the volcano, the more intense the eruption? These particular connections are things about which I have not seen research, but I am very curious to know if this is real, or if I'm just overanalyzing. I suspect I'd need to speak/read Javanese to figure this out, so I may enlist one of my Javanist ethnomusicologist friends to help me dig, since the only Javanese words I know are directly related to gamelan.
I've been playing in the UCR Javanese gamelan for two years now, and I absolutely love it. I joined the group for purely aesthetic reasons - I loved the sound of the music - but the more I learn about the structure of the music and the culture behind it, I appreciate it more and more in deeper ways. The undeniable connection to geology in this music is an added bonus, but one that makes gamelan even more fascinating and beautiful to me.
And now, since I've been jabbering about this for a lot of lines, here's a soundfile of a gamelan piece. This is the group in which I play, from our 6 June 2008 concert. We're not Javanese professionals by any means, but our instructor and guest singer have been studying Java for decades, and we had a guest director come in from Yogyakarta to work with us. These are good people to have in charge. This particular piece is a ladrang, which has 32 notes per stroke of the big gong, and it is often used to open a concert.
Ladrang Wilujeng
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