The tragically destroyed neo-segregationist verandah where President Bush is "looking forward to sitting" (hopefully as a premature retiree) now has its own website.
JD Considine has analyzed the chord that Bush is playing in the famous guitar picture, taken at the height of the Katrina disaster. It seems to be a strongly dissonant sonority consisting of the notes G, G#, A, B, C, and D. Considine speculates that Bush was trying to play a G-major chord and messed up, but I suspect that our Commander-in-Chief, mindful of the inherent tendency of the musical material, has followed Schoenberg over the threshold of atonality. Here he plays the pitch-class set named 6-Z11 in the Allen Forte system — a hauntingly ambiguous chord that brushes against the ghost of a now defunct tonality even as it stares ahead remorselessly into the chromatic future. I am looking forward to the rigorously atonal works that Bush will have time to write on Trent Lott's porch.
Update: Paul Mitchinson has cast doubt on Considine's description of the Katrina dissonance. He says it's a different collection of discordant tones, namely B, C#, E, F, G, G#. Now, I know less than nuttin' about gee-tar-playin', so I will let these two gentlemen duke it out amongst themselves. But I am excited by the news that Bush might be playing pc set 6-Z49 rather than 6-Z11. He thereby shows awareness of the possibilities of octatonicism as the basis for a coherent atonal language.
