A Tale of Note
The Source
You don’t have to know anything about music to realize when something’s off key. Even the most tin-eared audience member will wince at the sound of an out of tune guitar. Which brings me to the Perseus Cluster of galaxies. . . Astronomers in England have discovered a singing black hole in a distant cluster of galaxies called the Perseus. They’re 250 million light years from Earth, so chances are that you’ve not yet picked them up on your IPod if you purchased the device recently. The Englishmen have determined that this faraway soup of stars emits an exact B-flat, albeit a rather low one. If you find middle C on a piano, the Perseus B-flat is 57 octaves below that…sort of like the digestive sounds of the Jolly Green Giant. To make it even less plain, the human ear can only hear sounds low enough that they travel 1/20th of a second past our ears. The Perseus B-flat has a frequency of 10 million years, so you’ll have to listen very closely and turn off the television. Which brings me to the Arenzville train. . . Arenzville is nestled into the crotch of a beautiful hillside that hugs Indian Creek. If you enter the town from the south it’s a truly Mayberry-ish sight with the church steeples poking up through the greenery and the rows of white two-story houses painting a picture right out of Norman Rockwell. However, since we are located next to the hill and since a railroad brushes the west side of town, the train engineers don’t look upon our little stretch of track as being quite so idyllic. It’s a steep hill but they can’t take a fast run at it because of the rather vicious curves, so a push engine is needed to goose the train up the hill. If you live in town this means you get to hear two sets of whistles: one as the train goes up the hill, and another some minutes later as the push engine descends. This is a lot of tooting. Which brings me to my autoharp . . . The Autoharp is probably the simplest stringed instrument to play, but it’s a real bugger to tune. I have no idea how many strings it has. I can’t count that far. I think it’s related to the Pegasus galaxies in terms of numbers. Once a year I pull it out of my little Amish shed and proceed to tune it up to take to camp. When you see a young camper playing my Autoharp that probably means he’s a drummer. Back in the days before digital tuners this was an all-day chore, but since the invention of these glorious little devices string player’s lives have been lengthened by about six years. So I sit there watching the little dial sway from sharp to flat as I tune the multitude of strings, and the train comes by. It might interest the British researchers to know that the Arenzville train plays a perfect F-sharp, while the push train toots either a B or a D-flat, depending on which train’s in use that day. In any case, it is impossible to tune an Autoharp when the train’s coming through town. And if you were wondering, the Arenzville noon whistle blows an entire octave, G to G, and many of the semis rolling through toward the pig factory in Beardstown cruise along somewhere between a C-sharp and an F. Visitors to Arenzville may look upon our little village as a peaceful little place designed by Grandma Moses, but if you’re tuning an Autoharp it’s a maddening cacophony of discordant chords. Which brings me to some of the musicians I’ve known . . . Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t have to have a great ear to be a good musician. Some of history’s finest composers couldn’t tell an out of tune piano if it fell on them. Your finger dexterity is in no way connected to your ear. There are generally two types of musicians: those with good pitch and those who have no ear whatsoever and generally drive the first type crazy. You’ll often find them side-by-side, playing in the same band. I’m somewhere in the middle since both types tend to irritate me. What irritate me most are the types of musicians who are constantly tuning while I’m playing with them. Dog-gone it, wait until the song is finished! Stop messing with your tuning pegs while we’re playing a song. The thing was in tune when you bought it! Leave it alone! Which brings me back to the Perseus Cluster of galaxies . . . . Despite the fact that this group of distant stars continues to toot the same note for billions of years, I have to appreciate the thing’s consistency. I’ve played with guitarists and banjo players from whom I’d have given anything for that kind of consistency.