008 - The Queen of Coins
I’ve had enough unusual experiences in my lifetime to know better than to completely blow off various divination methods as nonsense. In point of fact I’ve had such acutely accurate results with the I-Ching (one of John Cage’s favorite compositional tools) that I don’t dare ask it anything for which it could give me the kind of answer that could be devastating.
With that in mind a few months ago I happened upon a set of Tarot cards by Patrick Valenza, the Deviant Moon Tarot, with artwork that is absolutely amazing:
I bought them on the basis of the artwork alone with no intention of actually using them for divination. I’ve never done such a thing with Tarot and had no intention of starting. FYI, there is also a Tarot game which can be played with these decks.
So today we are having weird winter weather and both me and Teresa were wondering whether or not to head out into it to go to work (I have a part time gig with the KC Ballet as an accompanist) so, since they were out on the table I got the bright idea why not see what happens if I pull a card from the Deviant Moon Tarot deck with the intention of seeing what it would be like to go to work in this weather, see what it says, just for fun!
So I dutifully shuffled the cards and cut the deck several times and pulled up the Queen of Coins (sometimes referred to as the Queen of Pentacles). The is the card featured on the outside of the Deviant Moon box:
I thought that was pretty cool. Looked it up and came to the conclusion it meant if I went to work I’d be paid, well, yeah, that’s kind of what I expected.
Teresa saw this and said hey why don’t I do that for me too? So I did. I shuffled the cards, cut them several times, restacked them, cut to the middle and pulled a card.
It was the same exact card! the Queen of Coins again! I told her looks like if you go to work you’ll be paid too!
As it turns out, neither of us went to work - work today was cancelled due to weather.
The whole experience taught me I’d best respect this deck of cards if I’m going to try anything like this again!
English concertina isn’t diatonic - it’s fully chromatic. Indeed it has buttons for both the enharmonic pairs for G#/Ab, D#Eb etc to aid in non equal-tempered tunings). However adding every flat (or sharp) moves a finger away from the home position, and hence takes mental effort to achieve, which takes focus away from interpreting the music. Many non-keyboard instruments have similar key preference - e.g most woodwind instruments. Maybe you should provide a download link for ABC of the tune as supplied, and another of a minimal sharps/flats version ideally F/C/G/D/A (within a couple of tones of the original). Then see which gets downloaded most? I’m happy taking ABC and manipulating or transposing it - see https://pghardy.net/tunebooks/index.html., which are all generated using ABC.
I've said this before, and I know you had an exercise of using every possible key, but now you have made a new start, why not transpose tunes to friendlier keys? I play English concertina, and although it is possible to play in 6 flats, it's very awkward, and playing in 1# (Gmaj/Emin) would be far easier and only a semitone away!