Ground zero, Jan. 10, 2002. ©Stefan Plogmann

Most everyone in America rejoiced at the death of Osama bin Laden. So did many elsewhere in the world. After all, he was a mass murderer and spent the past few years actively plotting to murder more people. What does God,  who is love, have to say about him?

One thing that immediately came to mind is this: “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? . . . The One enthroned in heaven laughs: the Lord scoffs at them” (Psalm 2:1, 4). But Scripture also reminds us, “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles do not let your heart rejoice” (Proverbs 24:17).

In judgment, God laughs in derision at those who dare to challenge him, but he does not laugh in joy. God so  loved Osama bin Laden that if he had ever believed in God, he would never have perished. As easy as it is for us to assume bin Laden is bound for hell, we mustn’t forget that there is but one unforgivable sin, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and that no human is competent to judge whether another  human has committed it.

But suppose for a moment that our assumptions are correct. We must also remember that God’s grace outlasts his judgment, and that he is, after all love. I have long wanted a front row seat to cheer when Old Sleaze Bucket himself gets chucked into the lake of fire to join his henchmen after the millennium. Many, I’m sure, would love to watch bin Laden, or some other human enemy, get sent to roast. When I think of God’s love, however, I’m not sure he wants the separation of the damned from the saved to be a joyous event for anyone.

God wants all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4) and does not want anyone to perish (2 Peter 3:9). And yet the death of Jesus means nothing if people who ultimately reject grace to not receive what sin earns for them. Hell is real. No one will go there by God’s choice, but whoever does not want anything to do with God has nowhere else to go. Whoever goes to hell goes by his own choice. God will allow them to accept the consequences of their choice not with joy, but with sorrow.
I even suppose that God still loves Satan and his demons such that their final judgment will be more a solemn occasion in heaven than a festival.

Let us, even now, temper our gladness at Osama bin Laden’s death with a holy sorrow at the though of what great things he could have accomplished if he had not used them in the service of evil. After all, our loving God is sorrowful when any of his creatures choose to perish instead of accept his grace.

While I make no claim that the juxtaposition of those two headlines completely answers the question in libraries’ favor, it does point out yet another way that libraries work to keep up with new social and technological trends. And yet some people have been trying to write off libraries for years. Among the falsehoods that have not yet been given a proper burial are “books are obsolete” (a double falsehood, assuming as it does that libraries only warehouse books) and “everything’s available online” (there’s not enough money in the world to make that true, and much online information is so expensive only libraries can afford to subscribe).

As to book stores, a generation ago Crown Books (now Books a Million) successfully challenged the publishers’ right to set the prices that all stores had to charge. Soon enough, it and other large chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders pretty much put independent bookstores out of business. How could a chain like, for instance, Kroch’s and Brentano’s, once the largest privately owned chain of bookstores in the US with 22 stores in the Chicago area, compete with national chains of hundreds of stores that could afford to undercut their prices. It went out of business in 1995.

Not long afterward, Amazon.com came along. It took years for it to reach the dominant position it has today. Barnes & Noble has also established a large online presence. There are even large online stores, such as Book Closeouts, dedicated entirely to overstocks and recently out-of-print titles, offering discounts of at least 50% on everything. Borders, with no online store of its own, has recently closed a third of its stores and filed for bankruptcy protection. It remains to be seen if it can survive at all.

Some rights reserved by bigoteetoe

Meanwhile, the demise of the chains seems to be opening a door for independent booksellers to make a comeback and offer the kind of personal service the older indies took pride in and the chains never attempted. Most of the successful bookstores I have any personal experience with sell mostly used books, but there seems to be no reason for them not to expand into new books and other products as the chains shrink in their influence.

Meanwhile, libraries are beginning to buy e-books, and in the process, creating virtual branch libraries. Patrons can borrow books from the library using their e-reader and have no need to visit a brick and mortar library to do it. Because most libraries are now part of regional and/or state library systems, they can enjoy some of the same economies of scale as large chain stores, yet with the right level of membership, they can still make their books available only to patrons who hold that library’s library card.

Why, if it is possible to buy e-books easily and not have to find somewhere to put them, would patrons borrow them from the library? Many of the same reasons people have always borrowed from the library instead of purchasing: Why buy something you can borrow for free if you don’t know in advance you’ll like it? Why buy something that you really need at the moment, but won’t need long-term? Even e-book readers don’t have unlimited space. Unless someone is extremely good at tagging, finding anything in particular among hundreds of titles on an e-reader will be much more challenging than finding it using the library’s catalog, as clunky as it may seem.

Neither bookstores nor libraries can long survive if they continue to do only what they have always done. Except, of course, one thing libraries have always done is adapt to changing conditions.

Thomas Built Buses of High Point, North Carolina, one of the largest manufacturers of school buses in the United States, recently announced that they had become landfill-free after two years of effort. Their last ever load for the landfill left the plant in December. Now, everything that enters the plant is used, reused, recycled, or sold. They reuse shipping cartons, reclaim solvents, work with their suppliers to reduce packaging, and turn whatever waste remains after all that effort into energy.

It is not the first American corporation to achieve zero waste to landfill, and it will not be the last. Its parent company, Daimler Trucks North America, is committed to sustainability at all of its subsidiaries. Thomas Built boasts it has joined an elite group, but here’s hoping that group will grow both in numbers and visibility.

In addition, Thomas Built has focused on decreasing use of both energy and water and, as part of Duke Energy’s distributed generation plan, has provided land to support 1.690 solar panels that will produce 389 kilowatts of electricity.

The rhetoric of environmentalists often paints corporations as the enemy. When a large corporation reaches zero waste to landfill, we should all applaud and encourage it and others to continue their efforts to sustainability. They will profit. The environment will profit.

The music-loving Medici family managed to persuade the Emperor to name them as hereditary dukes, but unlike most other dukes, their background was in banking and commerce, not military strength. They had the greater need than other ruling families for music and drama to project their strength and stability, so while other courts mounted comedies, by now newly written, with intermedii, the Florentines presented more of them and documented them more carefully. For two Florentine spectacles, all of the music has survived. For the rest, elaborately printed commemorative books describe them in enough detail that we can know exactly what musical numbers were composed for the occasion and exactly what voices and instruments performed each one.

Scenes of the intermedii could take place anywhere from the heavens (or Mount Olympus, or otherwise seat of divine power) to a variety of stereotypical earthly locations to the underworld. Certain instruments were conventionally considered especially suitable for each setting. Scenes among the gods (always immediately recognizable as standing for the hosts ) used all of the instruments typically played by courtiers and all of the instruments played publicly on state occasions. The latter specifically means the court wind band, comprising cornetts (or shawms) and trombones. The illustration shows the demons lamenting that with the coming Golden Age, to be ushered in by the 1589 wedding being celebrated, there will no longer be souls for them to torment. Sorry I couldn’t find a larger image, but the trombonists would have been out of sight, anyway.

Trombones occasionally participated in the various earthy scenes (both on land–especially the countryside–and sea) occasionally, but scenes in the underworld typically required four of them, playing in their lower register. Monteverdi’s Orfeo, both a court spectacle and an opera, written in a transitional figure, illustrates these standard conventions nicely. Earthly scenes and underworld scenes use completely different instrumentation. Strings and recorders play the pastoral scenes; cornetts and trombones play the underworld scenes.

For the most part, however, opera arose as a reaction against the pretentiousness and dramatic absurdity of the intermedii. The mixed string and wind ensembles that developed by the end of the 1500s must have sounded spectacular on occasions where there was plenty of time for rehearsal. Otherwise, inherent intonation problems rendered them intolerable to many listeners when presented again in more ordinary circumstances. Except for Orfeo and possibly some of Monteverdi’s lost works, the earliest operas used only a string accompaniment.

After the first commercial opera theater opened in 1637, no opera offered to the public included trombones in the orchestra until 1762, when Gluck used them in Orfeo ed Euridice. Courts continued to present ostentatious extravaganzas on special occasions, and many of these used trombones. All of the music exists for the longest and most complicated of them, Antonio Cesti’s Il pomo d’oro, the Spiderman musical of its day in terms of complicated machinery and production delays. It kept the trombonists as busy as anyone else.

Of course, a skilled children’s librarian is no substitute for the daily attention of a caring parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, older sibling, or neighbor. If a child has no one who will take that time and effort, who will take him or her to the library? But perhaps if responsible older people can be persuaded to take preschool children to the library and listen to a story hour, they can see for themselves how easy it can be to read to children and how much the children enjoy it.

As children get older, they do not outgrow the need for adult help. Once a child learns to read, continued reading aloud–with both the child and older person taking turns reading and listening, while both looking at the same page–helps the child master reading skills and grow in enjoyment of and comfort with literacy. But eventually, every child’s information needs will outgrow a parent’s time and ability to be the major provider.

The children’s librarian offers a number of skills that every school child needs, including but certainly not limited to:

• familiarity with the stories and information sources appropriate for each grade level and subject
• ability to facilitate group interaction during story times or other age-appropriate discussions
• offer a less formal atmosphere than the classroom in which children of different backgrounds and skill levels can participate as equals
• ability to lead art programs, gaming competitions, and similar programs that parents could not reasonably be expected to devise
• ability to spark children’s imagination to find and explore new interests–and to show them how to find the tools and resources they will need for the journey.

Once children get to high school, they need not only research tools for completing class assignments, they begin to need tools for planning their future. Children’s and young adult librarians can help them determine what kinds of careers they want to explore and understanding what kinds of training and education are necessary and available.

Children’s librarians cannot duplicate the work of teachers any more than they can substitute for parents or other older, responsible adults in each child’s life, but they serve as a vital supplement and help. Every school ought to have its own library or media center, with professional staff. Not all do. In that case, children’s librarians at public libraries become all the more important to the success of the community’s educational efforts.

Even if the schools have excellently staffed media centers, the library is special as a place. It’s different from school and offers different programs and opportunities. These programs, probably attracting children from more than one school, increase children’s chances to experience and learn to interact comfortably with children from different neighborhoods and backgrounds. In this way, libraries open children’s minds not only in the sense of their intellectual development, but also their social development and other important life skills.

A large store posted its core values where everyone could see them. They included friendliness and good customer service, but one clerk was providing particularly surly and reluctant service. When a customer pointed out, as gently as he could, that she was not living up to those core values, she snapped that she considered them as just words on paper.

The Beatitudes are the core values of the church. There is probably no other passage in the New Testament that is so widely known and admired. Some people even hold them up as the be all and end all of Christianity. We don’t need Paul’s epistles, they say, because he’s such a scold. He’s always getting in people’s faces about stuff that doesn’t seem like any of his business. They say, we don’t need to believe that Jesus is God. All we need is the simple gospel contained in the Beatitudes. Jesus was a great teacher, they say, and that ought to be enough for anyone.

But it is not enough to post the Beatitudes, to love them, to defend them, to claim them. If they are more than just words on paper we need to believe them. The test of how much we really believe them is how well we live them. They may be simple, but they are very difficult for us to live, because they run counter to all of our most basic instincts.

Moses the lawgiver, US Supreme Court building

We can understand the Beatitudes as a summary of the gospel, much as the Ten Commandments are a summary of the law. In neither case can we embrace them to the exclusion of the rest of Scripture. Speaking of the Ten Commandments, nine are prohibitions. All of them are commandments, not options. They are law. They must be obeyed. When any law is broken, it entails certain penalties. In American law, the penalties can include fines, imprisonment and other unpleasantness. In the Old Testament, God instituted a curse for those who broke the law. Some time, I challenge you to read Leviticus 26. It contains a blessing, 11 verses long (3-13), for obeying the law and a curse, 32 verses long (14-15), for breaking it

Now, what happens if a law-breaker repents and seeks to return to God? The law makes provision for an elaborate system of sacrifices. Once a year, there was a Day of Atonement. All of this served to remind people of their sin and its contrast with God’s holiness. And it was mostly for the benefit of individuals. But the curse applied to the community as a whole. What provision was there under the law if the whole nation turned its back on God and wanted to return to him? There wasn’t any. That is a very important thing to understand. According to Leviticus 26:40-42, they could only fall back on God’s covenant with Abraham.

Under the law, there was no provision for the community to return. Under the law, there was no grace. Grace was found only in the older covenant with Abraham. Paul tells us that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law in order that the blessing of Abraham might come not only to his physical offspring, to whom the covenant was given in the first place, but also to repentant Gentiles, who are Abraham’s spiritual offspring. It is Jesus’ fulfillment of the law that makes that blessing possible, because everyone else who has ever walked the earth, including everyone who has ever named Jesus as Lord, has been a law-breaker, not a law keeper.

What a contrast when we turn back to the Beatitudes. If the law tells us how to earn salvation by doing or not doing certain things, the Beatitudes tell us how to earn blessings. Salvation itself is a gift. We don’t often talk about earning things in the New Testament, but I want you to notice something. The first Beatitude says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Does it say only the poor in spirit are saved? No. Anyone who calls on the name of Jesus is saved. Those who are saved and poor in spirit get a particular blessing that other saved people forfeit. No one is poor in spirit by nature. All of us are pretty full of ourselves by nature: self-centered, proud, if only proud of our poor self-image. Getting saved does not automatically make that change in anyone. All the rest of the Beatitudes follow the same pattern and promise special blessings to believers who develop certain parts of their personality and behavior.

A cover issued when the song was already famous

“After the Ball,” by Charles K. Harris kicked American popular music into a higher gear. I have even encountered the claim that it marks the birth of American popular music! Certainly, publishers and performers had long attempted to make as much money as they could by appealing to the tastes of a mass audience. Songwriters too often had to sell the rights for a song to a publisher for very little money. In fact, it was because Harris was offended by low payment for another song that he decided to publish “After the Ball” himself. It became the first sheet music in history to sell a million copies. It didn’t stop there, either. Eventually it sold about five million copies worldwide.

According to his autobiography, Harris was living in Milwaukee when he escorted his younger sister to a ball in Chicago. Among other people he met there was “a charming young couple, engaged to be married. Suddenly we learned that the engagement was broken. Just a lover’s quarrel, I presumed at the time; but they were both too proud to acknowledge that they were in the wrong.” Later, he noticed the young man escorting another young lady home as his former fiancée tried to hide her tears. Harris thought, “Many a heart is aching after the ball.”

He had a studio in Milwaukee, with a shingle that proclaimed “Charles K. Harris / Banjoist and Songwriter / Songs Written to Order.” The day after returning from Chicago, when he would have rather just napped, a customer came in asking for a new song for an upcoming minstrel show. Inspired by the breakup he had witnessed the evening before, he made up a story of an old bachelor explaining to his niece why he was still single: he had seen his sweetheart in the arms of another and angrily rejected her. It turns out the man was her brother, and the verse that describes his letter darkly hints that she took her own life.

Like many popular songwriters before and since, Harris never learned to read or write musical notation. In the space of an hour, he had written the lyrics, devised a melody, and figured out an accompaniment on the piano. Then he called for his arranger, Joseph Clauder, to come to the studio and write down the music as Harris sang and played it over and over. Then Clauder played it from the notation, and Harris pointed out whatever wrong notes there may have been. For the sum of $10.00, Clauder made polished arrangements both for piano and orchestra. (Harris’ rent for his studio was $7.50 per month.)

The original cover, published in Milwaukee, looked like this, except with Harris' name where this cover says Oliver Ditson (of Boston)

The first performance of “After the Ball” didn’t go well. The man who commissioned the song couldn’t remember all the words and mangled the story. No one was impressed, but Harris thought it had potential. Rather than risk another 85¢ payment from an established publisher, he published himself then set about to badger established singers to perform it. J. Aldrich Libby introduced it in a hit show called A Trip to Chinatown with great success. John Philip Sousa liked the song and played it every day during his band’s six-week engagement at the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893). Plenty of other bands and singers performed it, too.

Harris moved his office from Milwaukee to New York. While none of his later songs approached the unprecedented success of “After the Ball,” his publishing company did well enough to inspire other songwriters to open their own companies on Tin Pan Alley, which became so dominant in the publication and dissemination of sheet music that publishers in other cities became completely marginalized. And if Harris never wrote such an instant hit again, other songwriters did.

A cover from Sweden

Meanwhile, in Europe, operas had been the predominant form of popular music for most of the nineteenth century, but Wagner, and to a lesser extent Verdi, began composing operas from which it was more difficult to extract popular tunes. As their operas became more intellectually demanding and moved more firmly into the realm of art music, the audience for popular music began to move from the opera house to the music hall, where they could not only listen to simple songs, but also drink. These music halls were much more open to American influence than the opera houses had ever been. “After the Ball” and other American mega-hits swept Europe (translated into local languages) and eventually inspired European songwriters to present original songs “in the American style.”

While Harris was not the first musically illiterate person to achieve success as a writer of popular songs, he certainly appears to be the first to exert an international influence on the composition, publication, and marketing of popular music. And in a day when it seems like our culture almost regards anything before Elvis Presley as “classical” music, “After the Ball” still holds up well in comparison to the hits that followed so closely behind.

Sources:

Chas. K. Harris: king of the tear jerker

The continental tradition, popular music in France and Germany: the story of “French Fry Alley?”

“Charles K. Harris on writing hits for Tin Pan Alley” in Music in the USA: a documentary companion, ed. Judith Tick (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 361 ff.

Popular song in America, part 9: Tin Pan Alley

I was taken aback at first, but then it occurred to me that he and I had very different environmental concerns. Anyone looking at earlier posts in this blog will notice my concern for conservation of energy and water, and waste management. Although I have never talked with him at length on the subject, I finally figured that my neighbor cared more than I did about the environmental impact of various chemicals.

Now that I have started my own site to sell green products, I have had to look beyond the things I have always cared about in order to broaden my understanding of what “green” means. I find that according to Global Green, “urban runoff accounts for about 14% of common water pollution and just over half of that is due to residential use of fertilizers” I suppose herbicides could be included in that figure.

The reason I was spraying my yard in the first place was that I have usually relied on rain to water my lawn, and we have had droughts locally for several years running. My poor grass finally could not take it any more, and large patches of a disgusting variety of ugly weeds appeared where it had died. I wanted to kill the weeds in order to plant more grass in the fall. I had never paid that much attention to urban runoff and how my yard care practices could influence pollution of local streams.

Here are some basic aspects of eco-friendly living, some of which I have always cared about, some of which I was always vaguely aware of, and some of which I am just now learning about.

Conserve energy and water
Develop renewable energy sources
Reduce the size of the waste stream
Reduce the toxicity of the waste stream and runoff
Reduce the impact of buildings on its surroundings
Develop and encourage “green” building practices, both for public buildings and houses.
Improve indoor air quality
Protect natural resources
Reduce the use of plastics and other products made from petroleum
Recognize the environmental impact of food
Purchase and encourage products grown or made nearby

This list is hardly exhaustive. In fact, I have deliberately omitted any mention of political activism. As I broaden my understanding of sustainability, I will blog about some topics that I haven’t mentioned before. I doubt if I will write about what I think the government ought to do any more than I have in the past. In my youth I was active in promoting a bottle bill and I don’t remember what else that, when enacted, did not turn out to have as much impact as we all thought. And all the time that we were trying to tell the government what to do, we were not developing an awareness of what we could do as individuals regardless of what did or did not become law. I would rather become part of a grassroots movement that governments will follow by example than part of any more political pressure groups.

How many hundreds or thousands of sermons have been preached on those texts trying to scare the hell out of people? But that is not my intent. This, after all, is Holy Week, when we remember that Christ died for our sins. I want to explore how to appropriate the benefits of his sacrifice. When we work, we expect to receive the wages we deserve in exchange. Grace by definition means receiving what we do not deserve. We can’t work for grace.

Consider the contrast between works and fruit. Here, Paul writes about the works of the flesh and fruit of the spirit. “Flesh” is his metaphor for that part of the human personality that has no use for spiritual things and makes choices based entirely on sense knowledge or can be reasoned on that basis. Although every translation I have ever seen contrasts “flesh” with “Spirit,” the capitalization indicating the Holy Spirit, I suggest it should have a lower case “s” and refer to the reborn human spirit that is justified by faith.

In this list of the works of the flesh we see all the old bugaboos and prohibitions about sex, drinking, etc. Let no one think that “don’t cuss or drink or chew or run with those that do” makes anyone saved. Following prohibitions like that are works of the law! Following them does not make anyone either righteous or holy. People who don’t have particular bad habits often take a very judgmental attitude toward those who do. Too often, people who are the most loudly judgmental turn out to be covering up their own weaknesses in that same direction, and when exposed, appear extremely hypocritical. Paul includes the wickedness of judgmentalism in his list, where we also see things like hatred, jealousy, envy, and outbursts of wrath.

The works listed in this passage fall way short of following the law, and “falling short” is the root meaning of “sin.” Therefore, these works of the flesh deserve wages, and the wages they deserve is death. Is there any work we can do to earn the benefits of righteousness? No. That’s why Paul contrasts works of the flesh not with works of the spirit, but fruit of the spirit.

Has anyone ever seen a fruit tree working? Someone has to work awfully hard to keep cultivated trees in orchards bearing as much fruit as possible, but it is not the tree. The tree produces fruit by its very nature. So it is with the reborn human spirit. It does not work to produce fruit. Someone else may have to work hard, but just as no tree can work to take care of another tree, no human spirit can work to take care of another spirit. God himself does that work.

[Photo credit : Apples in an small orchard (Graham  Thomas) / CC BY-SA 2.0]

And what is the fruit of the spirit? Notice that Paul said “fruit” and not “fruits.” The fruit of the spirit is love, as defined by eight different attributes. By grace, God justifies the ungodly as soon as the ungodly confess sin and express faith that God can clean them up. By grace, the spirit of this newly righteous person comes to life. By grace, that spirit produces fruit that demonstrate the genuineness of the faith received as a gift.

We all want to get paid what we deserve in order to provide the food and shelter we need for ourselves and our families, so we work. God’s economy is different. Don’t work at all to get anything from God; you won’t enjoy the wages you earn. Instead, feed your spirit with the means of grace, let God prune away whatever does not belong to the perfected you that he is making, and bear fruit.

The name William Tanzer appears in the baptismal register at Dunchurch in 1706, the son of a common laborer named Edward Tanzer. As an adult, William adopted the spelling Tans’ur, very likely in an attempt to appear to have come from a higher social class. His prose writings exhibit a particularly pretentious style, and he took to signing some of his prefaces with “University of Cambridge” after his name on no firmer basis than the fact that his son William became a chorister at Trinity College there.

Nonetheless, he performed a significant service for English rural churches an an itinerant teacher and organist by giving them hymns and other worship music of a higher quality than they had known before and by writing instructions for how to sing them. In 1735 he published two collections of hymn tunes, A Compleat Melody, or, The Harmony of Sion and even more popular, The Melody of the Heart. Tans’ur subsequently issued seven more volumes of psalm tunes, hymn tunes, and anthems. One of them, The Royal Melody Compleat, or, The New Harmony of Zion (1755), introduced a new style of sacred music called the fuguing tune. It appeared in America in 1771 with the title The American Harmony.

Students of American musical history surely know the name William Billings, the earliest truly notable American composer, He adopted the fuguing tune, which became a much more important feature of American music than it probably ever did in England. Although I have not compared Tans’ur’s instructions on the rudiments of music with Billings’, I expect Billings leaned heavily upon them as he did the hymns themselves, and that his contemporaries did as well.

Tans’ur dominated the composition and publication of English psalm and hymn tunes much the way his contemporary Handel dominated what would later become classical music and the way Arne dominated the beginnings of English popular music at about the same time. While writers of histories of English music can ignore rural populations , it is not possible to ignore the same kinds of music once they were transplanted to America. Billings and others wrote music in the same basic styles and forms as Tans’ur and began to develop a distinctly American school of composition. No American composing in any other genre attempted anything of the kind.

A generation or so later, Lowell Mason attempted to wean American churches from this lowbrow country music and replace it with a more mainstream (that is, urban and better educated) European style. Bach’s chorales appear to have been completely forgotten by then. To my taste, anyway, Mason’s tunes are at best no better than Billings and his harmonies and rhythms much less interesting. Meanwhile, the New England contemporaries of William Billings devised the shaped-note system of printing music to make it easier for the untutored to learn to read the hymns.

This system migrated to the American south, where a number of important publications, notably The Sacred Harp kept the rural style of hymn singing alive. As in Tans’ur’s England, it became an essentially underclass music, hardly noticed and certainly not embraced by more urban audiences until late in the twentieth century. Many of the tunes found a permanent place in standard hymnals that use only round note notation and more European harmonizations. The shaped note notation and old rural harmonization (with the tune in the middle of the texture instead of the top line) remain relatively unknown despite the renewed interest over the past half-century or so.