Musical excercise on the bus

[WARNING! There is a danger that you might not find this reflection worthwhile]

This morning, while riding the bus on my way to work I pleased myself by solving a little puzzle I had created for myself. One of my all time favorite CD is the first album from Screaming Headless Torsos, a masterpiece of jazz funk-rock. When I discovered the CD about ten years ago, I noticed the guitarist Dave "Fuze" Fiuczynski (try spelling that name!) use a very strange and interesting chord. On a guitar tabulature, it looks something like this (don't remember the key, here it is in Ab):

E - - - - - - - - X
B - - - - - - - - 12
G - - - - - - - - 12
D - - - - - - - - 12
A - - - - - - - 11 -
E - - - - - - - - X

It's kind of a basic G major barre chord, with Ab on bass. On the piano, you can get the same sound by playing Ab on bass with the left hand and substituting the Ab major triad on the right with a G major triad. The chord is a minor maj7th diminished, a weird one at that.

This morning on the bus, I started wondering the tonality of that chord. What kind of scale does it correspond to? After a lot of agonizing, I realized that indeed, there is a scale that fits. The sixth mode of the harmonic minor scale works, as it is indeed is a minor scale with both a major 7th and a diminished 5th.

I don't know the name of the scale, but you can try it by first playing a C harmonic minor on the piano: C D Eb F G Ab B (H in Europe) C, then starting the scale on the sixth, that is,

Ab, B, C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab

Anybody who has ideas on the context in which to use that chord, feel free to comment. A strange II in a minor II-V-I? A VI in an even more strange harmonic minor I-VI-II-V?

Tonalities

I was giving a guest lecture on reputation management in Uusikaupunki last Friday. The director of commerce from this pittoresque town gave a lecture on managing the brand of a town. She used an interesting term "brand tonality" to denote the impressions, invoked by a particular brand.

When I heard the word tonality, attributed to a particular brand, I was reminded by what Antonio Strati, perhaps the first authority on organizational aesthetics, has called "invoked knowledge", a type of knowledge which is lived by a person when being involved in a particular context. For organizational scholars, the notion of "invocation" is valuable, as it makes the researcher recognize the texture of organizing. I recall my first experience, entering the electronics laboratory of the Helsinki University of Technology, in my very first semester. The emotions, invoked by the smell of burning tin, in a cement bunker in a basement, turned into immediate soul-searching: is this engineering thing really something I want to do with my life? The textures, smells, sounds and images in the electronics lab environment had reminded me of my high school woodwork classroom, a subject which I hated in a profound way.

Brand tonality is a nice metaphor, I think, because music affects us in the same, immediate, personal manner. The tonality of a piece, which I would summarize as the harmonic background context in which melodies are presented, affects the hearer in a profound, yet often implicit manner. If a town has a pleasant tonality to its brand, it manages to grab the potential inhabitant in a very personal way.

Tonality is characterized in the Wikipedia in the following way:

"Tonality allows for a great range of musical materials, structures, meanings, and understandings. It does this through establishing a tonic, or central chord based on a pitch which is the lowest degree of a scale, and a somewhat flexible network of relations between any pitch or chord and the tonic similar to perspective in painting. This is what is meant by tonality having a hierarchical relationship, one triad, the tonic triad, is the "center of gravity" to which other chords are supposed to lead. Changing which chord is felt to be the tonic triad is referred to as "modulation". As within a musical phrase, interest and tension may be created through the move from consonance to dissonance and back, a larger piece will also create interest by moving away from and back to the tonic and tension by destabilizing and re-establishing the key. Distantly related pitches and chords may be considered dissonant in and of themselves since their resolution to the tonic is implied. Further, temporary secondary tonal centers may be established by cadences or simply passed through in a process called modulation, or simultaneous tonal centers may be established through polytonality. Additionally, the structure of these features and processes may be linear, cyclical, or both. This allows for a huge variety of relations to be expressed through dissonance and consonance, distance or proximity to the tonic, the establishment of temporary or secondary tonal centers, and/or ambiguity as to tonal center. Music notation was created to accommodate tonality and facilitates interpretation."

In a paper (read it here), forthcoming in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, John Sillince, Virpi Hämäläinen and I explore organizational change through the notion of this tension and resolution in music. The paper is motivated through a willingness to find an alternative to the popular belief that organizational change is painful, best achieved through fear, violence and manipulation.

Yesterday's tonalities

Yesterday was a day of pleasant tonalities. My friend and comrade in arms had his 40th birthday. A close circle of friends was invited to their summer cottage, where a tent had been raised in the garden overlooking the lake, a gourmet chef preparing a four-course meal. Talk about tonality.

As my own family was still recovering from the flu, I had to contend with a very brief visit, driving back in time to put the kids to bed. The pleasant, welcoming company, beautiful surroundings, gourmet food, and several bottles of Jallu made me really sorry I had to leave.

Yet, when I arrived home, put the kids to bed and took some time to relax on our balcony, I was awarded by another kind of pleasant tonality. A mist was slowly descending, bringing with it a pleasant spring scent and a magical low light. The birds were singing, and I had a nice Chimay on the balcony. I did not bother to take a picture, but the mood was a little bit like the one in this picture taken in our holiday at the Azores a couple of years ago.

Little tonality, lots of volume

As the time elapsed from by last blog entry communicates, the last few weeks have been characterized by moments blurring into a chaotic discord, with little discernible tonality. May is always like this, but add to this a family member defending her PhD, two small children and the flu season, lots of variables have to be managed.

I had also managed to catch the flu, and was fearing how I would be able to deal with the three long guest lectures that had condensed themselves into last week. I had been traumatized by one particular guest lecture where a group of middle aged men from the construction business wiped the floor with me in a discussion about participation in the strategy process. I felt I lost control of the situation because I could not use my voice to control the dynamics in the room. I was pleasantly surprised as things did not turn violent in any of the three engagements last week. Indeed, I think it may even be easier to appreciate the dialogical aspects in a lecture when one can not rely one's ability to control the discussion.

And finally: Some de facto tonalities

Some great music has been published during the last few weeks. My favorite band Rush has published Snakes & Arrows which is their best album in a decade. There is joy in the their playing. The lyrics are sincere and smart at the same time. There are even a number of catchy choruses, which you don't typically expect from a prog rock band. Cynics may frown upon phrases like

"We can only grow the way the wind blows
On a bare and weathered shore
We can only bow to the here and now
In our elemental war

We can only go the way the wind blows
We can only bow to the here and now
Or be broken down blow by blow"

or

"In the sweetest child there's a vicious streak In the strongest man there's a child so weak In the whole wide world there's no magic place So you might as well rise, put on your bravest face" I hate the tendency that rock lyrics are labeled naive or un-cool if they try to convey anything beyond the micro.

Another great recently published album: Fear of a Blank Planet by Porcupine Tree. It's a textural masterpiece, which confidently guides its listeners from mellow psychedelia to the borders of trash metal and back.

While the joy of Rush's playing as a band on their new album has been something of an affirmation of life for me lately, a particular joy in the PT album is the work of the drummer Gavin Harrison. While the dystopic mood of the album is characterized well by lyrical passages such as

X-box is a god to me A finger on the switch My mother is a bitch My father gave up ever trying to talk to me

Don't try engaging me The vaguest of shrugs The prescription drugs You'll never find A person inside

Harrison plays with such ferocious joy and inventiveness that I felt like jumping up and down in exhilaration. Go listen yourself at http://www.porcupinetree.com/

One happy squirrel

While putting Iivari to sleep in his carriage in the yard, I notice a busy squirrel carrying something. Luckily Iivari was content to wait while daddy rushed to get his camera and telephoto to capture what was going on.

As it turned out, the happy little fellow had discovered a roll which he was munching away.

I too have been one happy little squirrel as, career-wise, I too seem to be "on a roll", as they say. The paper with Eero Vaara I mentioned earlier was accepted to be published in Organization Science. When you top this with another acceptance for a solo paper from the Journal of Management Studies, it would appear I have had a rather fortunate spring. A couple of years worth of hard work is starting to pay off.

Rather than bore you with the details of what the papers are about, I am going to share a few other images I captured with my telephoto just a few minutes ago.


Our neighborhood has echoed with the sounds of industrious woodpeckers for quite some time now. These little powerhouses want to lure mates by making as much noise as they can. The urbane environent has allowed them to up the ante by switching from tree barks into various metallic objects. One fellow was banging away on a street light when I caught him. Does he not get a headache doing that?


On top of that, a wagtail ("västäräkki" in Finnish; I admit it, I had to look that word up) was minding his/her own business on the lawn.


And finally, a rare and dangerous Amazon-leapfrog who had gotten caught in our fence!