Disharmonies

Yet another gratuitous Tudela fiesta pic. This time of V getting swept along by an unharmonious little Basque orchestra in the narrow streets of the old part of town...streets that were for the most part deserted, but we could hear the band moving around noisily somewhere in the maze for a while before we eventually ran into it.

V recalled chasing around Antigua's more spacious grid looking for slow-moving Lenten processions wrapped in a swirling mist of incense. And similarly, the groups of instrumentalists that follow the andas in Antigua are usually not musicians in the strictest sense of the word. Each has carefully mastered the particular notes they have to play on the day, and in aggregate something like a (rather doleful) tune emerges. England's World Cup band are a comparable phenomenon.

(Which rather bizarrely reminds me of the controversy surrounding Searle's famous Chinese Room thought experiment and the issue of whether syntax can ever explain semantics. )