Guns & Ammo

Much blog ink is spent on guys discussing their wardrobes:suits,shirts,shorts,sportcoats,ties,trousers,shoes and the like. I would much rather discuss the contents of my gun safe than the contents of my closets. Mind you,I own numerous suits...required by my profession, many sportcoats..required by my social life...and evening clothes sufficient for white tie occassions and black tie occassions...even a black watch dinner jacket and an off white dinner jacket.....I just do not get charged up talking about this pile of cloth and thread. I would rather be in jeans,cowboy boots and a button-down than anything...except maybe full Cabela's camo or Filson coat and chaps for upland game.
So rather than blather on about clothes, I thought perhaps some newly aspiring hunters or shooters would benefit if I blathered about a "wardrobe" of guns.
In other words, what should one fill one's gun cabinet with to be able to be properly geared for various hunting or shooting scenarios...well,I will make some suggestions for those who may be interested. If you are a sappy anti-gun lobbyist, please change the channel.
WATERFOWLING: A good selection for an all around duck and goose hunting gun is a Remington 11-87 camo 12 gauge. You definitely want a gun that takes 3 inch shells. This is an affordable choice. Deeper Pockets? A Berretta Extrema 12 ga is a nice choice also. I suggest a used model..readily available. Plus, when considering the mud, rain, snow and other conditions a waterfowler encounters, there is just no reason to take an expensive piece out on the marsh. I always chuckle when a rookie brings his treasured 12 ga over/under to a duck blind and then is quietly horrified at the end of a hunt when marsh-mud has invaded every crevice of the gun.
UPLAND GAME: To be properly equipped for pheasants I suggest a Beretta 686 Silver Pigeon 12 ga. This model is light enough to carry all afternoon and reasonably priced and sturdy enough to last many many seasons without problems. A 686 can also stand in on a Sporting Clay or Skeet shoot as it has changeable chokes. A slightly less pricey field gun is the Ruger Line...they make several good 12 ga guns. I also fancy Charles Daly...but again a C.D. over/under will cost a few bucks.
Now for quail,woodcock,grouse,doves...one should select a 20 guage. Browning has several models. The Citori 625 20 guage is light and handles very well and is sturdy.As with all field grade guns, weight is important because even at 7 lbs. carrying and mounting all day can be tiring and lead to poor shots.
Not many hunters have a chance to shoot railbirds...but if you do...a 20 gauge is the gun of choice. Rails are small and fast so the swing and light weight of a 625 Citori is a plus.
CLAY TARGETS: For Sporting Clays I prefer a over/under as I like having the 2 chokes for the different shots on a double. Many shooters like the Semi Auto for reduction of recoil. That is a personal choice. The Browning Synergy Classic Sporting 12 Gauge is a nice piece. The Beretta line has several nice selections for Clays.
Trap is a whole different animal and for serious trap shooters I direct you to a specific single barrel trap gun. I do not shoot much trap so I just make do with my Beretta 686.
BIG GAME: Generally, the only large critters I am after are White Tail Deer. I use a Marlin .35 lever action with a Leupold Scope. I shoot a 150 grain bullet and this set up is perfect for Pennsylvania woods and blasting thru brush for that big buck.
A 30.06 Winchester is also a great all around deer rifle.
AMMO: Ducks...#4 Hevi-Shot....Geese #2 or BB Hevi-Shot. Steel needed for Federal Reg.s
Pheasants..# 6 or 7 1/2 2 3/4 12 Ga. Grouse quail etc....7 1/2 or 8 2 3/4 shells
Railbirds... 7 1/2 2 3/4 steel 20 ga. hard to find...usually have to special order at Cabela's or Dick's.
Sporting Clays/Skeet: Usually mandated by the course...no larger than # 8
Lastly, a good gun, like a good suit, should be fitted. A waterfowl semi-auto...you can probably get away with not having it fitted. But a nice Beretta or Browning O/U..invest the cash in a fitting. Griffin & Howe does a nice job. Also, keep in mind that you do not have to buy new...Cabela's has a great selection of used guns. They are often great buys and in good condition. A fine shotgun is also a fairly good investment as they generally do not lose value and can quickly be re-sold for liquidity in a pinch.
Finally, if you have kids...lock 'em up...the guns...not the kids...although sometimes I have wanted to lock my kids away in the basement..another story for another post. Trigger locks in a gun safe and you can rest easy. When the kids are old enough, let them handle the guns and teach them to shoot. It is a great way to spend time together and teach responsibility. When I taught my kids to shoot, the first thing I did was to take a 1 gallon milk jug, fill it with water and then blast it at point blank range...this shows the kids the power and effect of a shotgun blast..then you tell them that if they are not meticulous about gun safety they end up blasted like the jug...it makes quite an impression. That is what my Grandfather did with my brothers and I and it is a lesson I remember to this day.
Hope this was of interest...see you in the field.

Daquiri Debacle

Twice in a fortnight I have ordered a Daquiri at a fine dining establishment and been embroiled in issues with wait staff. My wife and another couple were at a restaurant that holds itself out as a high end fine dining joint. When cocktails were offered I requested a Mount Gay Daquiri "up." Several minutes later a server returned and asked me whether I wanted stawberry or pineaple or peach. I was aghast at these selections and shocked that a barman at a supposed top flight bar would be such a dullard. I replied: " None of the above, I want a Mount Gay Daquiri...UP."
Said server returned with a glass of ice and some rum mixture contained therein....not what I ordered. I then caught the attention of the Sommelier...a lovely women who knew her trade...she knew what I was talking about and corrected both server and barman regarding this cocktail...the next offering was well mixed and delicious.
Last night I was at the Palm in Philadelphia for steak dinner with a longtime friend...Once again cocktail orders were taken. When I asked for a Mount Gay Daquiri UP...I was advised by the server " Oh sir...we do not serve blender drinks." I replied: " Just tell the bartender what I asked for and she will know." I did get a well chilled and proper daquiri at that point.
When did a classic cocktail like the daquiri become so associated with sickly sweet slushy blender concoctions that the bar trade and servers forgot about the original?
The Daquiri traces it roots to a Cuban Mining town of the same name...in the early 1900's an Admiral serving in the Carribean liked the drink and introduced it to the Army-Navy Club in Washington D.C. The drink became wildly popular and was embraced by Hemingway and J.F.K. The classic version is fairly simple:

1 1/2 Ounce Rum
1 Ounce Fresh lime Juice
1 Teaspoon simple syrup/bar syrup
Shake with cracked ice,strain and serve with lime slice in chilled cocktail glass.

Hemingway was said to have invented a version which included some fresh grapefruit juice and juice of maraschino cherry. He doubled the proportions being the hard core gent he was and the drink became known as the "Papa Doble."
Havana Club from Cuba,while hard to procure...makes a splendid Daquiri.I prefer Mount Gay for a Daquiri.
Now, keep in mind a slushy fruit nightmare using cheap rum at a beach resort is OK for what it is worth...and may indeed have the ancillary benefit of getting the ladies frisky..but nothing beats the classic.

The Road Kill Ball

One of the shooting clubs I belong to is fairly secretive and one can become a member by invitation only. An invitation is only extended after it is determined that the candidate is a proficient wing shooter who is also very safety minded, of fine character, and friendly with other members.The Club holds 4 shoots per year in a continental format at a private farm.The members are all serious hunters and wing shooters who take the pursuit of game quite seriously...whether the game be pheasant,quail,grouse,waterfowl,rabbits;or larger species such as deer,elk or wild boar.
Each year after the hunting seasons are closed, the Club holds The Road Kill Ball. This event is essentially a game dinner where the members and wives get together to cook and consume the various contents of our collective game larders. We hold the function either at a member's home or at a local private Club.We turn over our collective hoard of meats to catering staff for preparation and service.
This year we started at the Shooting Lodge of a local Club with cocktails and appetizers. The appetizers included smoked scallops and smoked wild salmon. The beverage accompaniment for this course included Veuve Cliquot Champagne as well as Manhattans made with Basil Hayden's Bourbon and Martini's made with Blue Coat Gin.
We then went to the dining room of the Clubhouse for dinner. This year's menu featured:
Wild Boar Ham
Prong horn Antelope Sausage
Venison Backstrap with cranberry juniper relish
Quail in mushroom cream sauce with morels and apples
Steamship Round of Elk with wild currant demi glace
Oven roasted fingerling potatoes
Grilled asparagus
Field greens salad with walnut oil and maple vinagrette
Elderberry Cheesecake

Various wine were presented but I prefer a strong lager or pilsner with game feasts so I opted for several bottles of Pilsner Urquell.

After dinner the gentlemen adhered to an old custom of seperating from the ladies for an hour or so and we enjoyed Dow's 20 year old port and Arturo Fuente Cigars in the Club's Men's Grille.
As always, the Road Kill ball was a great evening with excellent food and camraderie equal to the cuisine.
I encourage my you all to try various game meats. When you are played out with the usual beef,chicken,pork,veal,fish,lamb routine...try some wild boar or venison...duck or quail...pheasant or elk. The purveyor D'Artagnan has a good selection by mail order if you cannot buddy up to a hunter you know who is purging his or her freezer/game locker.

Vadim Gluzman: Mixtures of Human Virtuoso plus Virtuosic Instrument

V    adim Gluzman believes the violin has a living soul and, from the pile of performance reviews on my desk as well as from my own ears, I believe he knows something about how to give it breath.”
  —  Laurie Niles, Violinist.

I    t has this unbelievable G string, it sounds like a del Gesu or a viola—dark, dark, dark; huge! If you think about both Glazunov and Tchaikovsky concerti, they both start on (A3) first position on the G string. Both were written for this violin.”
  —  Vadim Gluzman, interview with Laurie Niles, Violinist.

M y regular employment involves engineering—informatics and computer science mostly, but occasionally chemical engineering as well. Recently, I was working on a project that involved calculating percentages of different dissolved compounds to achieve an optimal net chemical reaction rate.

I  began, then, to daydream about how it is that we realize when a particular instrument is especially apt for us; how we realize when a particular piece of music is apt for us; how we choose combinations of these. Sometimes we realize this when we attempt to switch and try to play on an instrument (try to dissolve into a “solution”) that is less apt for us (in which we are less “soluble”), or when we attempt to play a piece of music that is less apt for us. Sometimes, we realize this when we serendipitously find an instrument that suits us particularly well, or encounter a piece that lies well under our “hand”, on account of cognitive and biomechanics reasons that we may or may not understand or be able to explain to others.

I n principle, could these highly subjective things be objectively measured? After all, enthalpies of transfer (ΔH_tr) of electrolytes from one solvent into another solvent are routinely determined by comparing enthalpies of solution in the two solvents, where solid electrolyte is dissolved in each solvent and the heat exchange is measured. Sometimes, the reverse method is used (in which ΔH_tr is derived from enthalpy of precipitation measurements, where electrolyte that was dissolved is caused to come out of solution as a solid precipitate). Waveform (enthalpic and entropic—) analysis of back-to-back digital recordings of Vadim Gluzman moving from Nino Rota to J.S. Bach? Put musicians and instruments in giant, room-sized bomb calorimeters and measure per-minute heat flux normalized to time-average identical sound emission?

O f course, musicians and instruments and compositions are not molecules or bulk-phase ensembles of large numbers of molecules, but nonetheless the statistical mechanics of solutions—the effects and the equations that are involved in these—are suggestive of phenomena we recognize when we are mixing musicians, instruments, and compositions. It is only half-serious, my daydream…



D o the components in mixtures of performer, instrument, and composition each have a property analogous to what, in chemistry, would be called ‘fugacity’? Suppose the answer is ‘Yes’: Performers-as-solutes; instruments-as-solutes; compositions-as-solvents; concert halls, recordings, etc., as ‘vessels’ to contain the resulting solutions.



B orn in Ukraine, violinist Vadim Gluzman began playing with a remarkable fugacity at age seven. When he was 16 his family moved to Israel and he continued his studies at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and later with Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard. At age 19, he arrived in Dallas, where he was a participant in the New Conservatory summer music program and subsequently became a student of Arkady Fomin at Southern Methodist University. Vadim Gluzman plays the 1690 ex-Leopold Auer Stradivari on loan from the Stradivari Society of Chicago. He is currently on the faculty of Roosevelt University. Vadim’s wife, pianist Angela Yoffe, was recognized as a high-fugacity musician-in-the-making at age four. She studied in the Darzinia School of Music in Riga, the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and the Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas. Vadim and Angela perform as infinitely-miscible co-solutes all over the world and have recorded for Koch International and Bis.



N ino Rota’s solvent, ‘Improvviso in D minor,’ provides frequent exposure of A3 and other high-fugacity notes for the ex-Leopold Auer Strad, which facilitates Angela Yoffee’s accompaniment on her Steinway with an emphatic, dark lower register and nice miking on the recording.




    [50-sec clip, Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe, Nino Rota, ‘Improvviso in re minore, 1947’, 1.6MB MP3]



I mprovviso in D minor was composed in 1947, for the Gianni Franciolini / Carlo Ponti film ‘d’Amanti senza amore’ [Lovers without Love], adapted from Tolstoy’s novel, ‘Kreutzer Sonata’. Inharmonious doctor (played by Rolando Dupi) impulsively marries harmony-craving pianist (played by Clara Calamai)…



T he marriage is unhappy, and a despondent Calamai attempts suicide, only to be stopped by clueless Dupi. Desperate for real companionship, Calamai makes friends with the violinist (played by Jean Servais). Dupi suspects that his wife is having an affair, but when he obtusely discusses the matter with Servais, he discovers the suspicions are groundless.

S adly, Dupi realizes this after he has already murdered his pianist-wife.

C lara Calamai was 33 and Jean Servais was 38 when they played these roles, and Nino Rota was 36 years old when he composed this film music. Gluzman’s and Yoffe’s age, speed, passion, and fearlessness are especially well-matched (1) to Rota’s gypsy conceit, including its defiant, ‘diabolical’ coda, and (2) to the robust sonic preferences of their respective instruments.

G reat solution ‘chemistry’!

• Gluzman V, Yoffe A. Nino Rota: Improvviso in D minor. (Naxos/Bis, 2008.)
  
• Vadim Gluzman website
  
• Vadim Gluzman page at Roosevelt Univ, Music Conservatory of Chicago College of Performing Arts
  
• Niles L. Interview with Vadim Gluzman. Violinist.com blog, 25-NOV-2009.
  
• Lee L. Gluzman is a Modern Classicist. All Things Strings, 2009.
  
• Angela Yoffe page
  
• Rota N. Improvviso in D Minor. Schott Music, 1947.
  
• NinoRota.com
  
• Fugacity page at Wikipedia
  
• Chemical activity page at Wikipedia
  
• Fugacity lecture at Univ Iowa
  
• Trent Guidry fugacity page
  
• IRCAM.fr
  
• ISMIR.net
  
• Rao N, ver Heest F. Electrostatic dust modes in self-gravitating dense dusty plasmas with high fugacity. Phys Lett A. 2000;268:390-4.
  
• Gluzman V, Yoffe A. Fireworks: Virtuoso Violin Music. (Bis, 2008.)
  
• Gluzman V, Yoffe A. Auerbach: Ballet for a Lonely Violinist; Violin Sonata No. 2; Shostakovich: Violin Sonata; Jazz Suite No. 1. (Bis, 2006.)
  
• Gluzman V, Yoffe A. Auerbach: 24 Preludes for Violin & Piano. (Bis, 2003.)
  
• Pitzer K. Thermodynamics. 3e. McGraw-Hill, 1995.
  
• Clara Calamai page at Wikipedia
  
• Jean Servais page at Wikipedia

A    ll violin sonatas are microtonal. ;-)”
  —  Steve Gregoropoulos, 27-FEB-2010, FaceBook.

Sporting Art

The prints shown here are by renowned sporting artist A.B. Frost. I was at a friends antique store on Thursday last week. He deals in fairly high end furniture and decor with a very high end client base...(think Philadelphia Style furniture which can be as expensive as a small home for a dining room set.)
My friend said I had to see something that was quite unbelievable...and I was intrigued. We went to the upper floor of the shop and there was a complete set of 12 A.B. Frost Sporting prints. The entire set was signed and set in incredibly tasteful frames. Frost is a particular favorite of mine...and also of fellow blogger Man of the 50's/James( a thoroughly well bred,like minded, and agreeable gentleman by the way.) Forget the cost for the set...but let's just say one could pay for a year tuition at a pretty good private university for the same price. I certainly coveted the set but could not and would not buy them as I have 3 kids between 13 and 17 and college cash is being hoarded as we speak...I was content to drool over them and perhaps fondle the framed beauties for a few minutes.
His body of work includes a variety of illustrations for Scribners, Harper's and other publications. I feel these prints are wonderful scenes that capture time, mood ,color and experience of a day in the field or on the marsh hunting birds.The rail bird hunt is a specific favorite as I enjoy hunting railbirds on the Maurice River rice marshes while being pushed in a 100 year old cedar skiff by a member of the Camp Clan.

Yo-Yo Ma: Ask Not What Your ‘Ax’ Can Do for You, but What You Can Do for Your Cyborg ‘Ax’

B    asically, everything I’ve learned about Art has been from ‘finding my way inside’. [searching and growing through relationships with other artists, with history, and with the Spirit of all humankind].”
  —  Yo-Yo Ma, Gramophone, 2005.

I f your cello feels like dancing, by all means go! Take it out for a night on the town. Bounce your bow on its strings. Hug it. Cradle its neck tenderly. Praise it in the presence of others, when it can hear you. Fondle its tuning pegs as though they were earlobes, as Yo-Yo Ma did during the superb performance last night in the Harriman-Jewell Series in Kansas City.

Y our instrument has rights, and you have duties—toward your instrument as well as your co-performers.

Y o-Yo Ma shrugs his shoulders after performing—not after each and every piece, but after many of them—as if he were surprised that the result was so felicitous as it turned out to be, and as if he and the pianist Kathryn Stott were not wholly ‘in-charge’. It is not an ‘apologetic’ shrug, just one of genuine modesty and self-effacement. Gee. Aw, shucks.

I n these collaborations, too, Ma sometimes plays as though he were accompanist to pianist Stott: another aspect of Ma’s well-known modesty, incongruous with his stature and fame.

• Franz Schubert: Sonata in A minor, D. 821
  
• Dmitri Shostakovich: Sonata in D minor, Op. 40
  
• Astor Piazzolla: Le Grand Tango
  
• Egberto Gismonti: Bodas de Prata & Quatro Canto
  
• Cèsar Franck: Sonata in A Major

M a’s main performance instrument is the 1733 Montagnana called ‘Petunia’. (The instrument was named this by a young girl after she asked Ma whether it had a name and Ma replied that it did not.) Another of Ma’s cellos, the 1712 Davidov Stradivarius, was previously owned by Jacqueline du Pré and by the Vuitton Foundation.

J    acqueline du Pré’s unbridled dark qualities went ‘against’ the Davidov [conflicted with the Strad’s personality]. The more you ‘attack’ it, the less it returns.”
  —  Yo-Yo Ma.

L ate in her life, du Pré confided her frustration with the ‘unpredictability’ of this cello. Ma, however, has opined that the variability and her resulting frustration with the instrument came, not from the instrument, but instead from du Pré’s impassioned and autocratic style of playing. He has been famously quoted as saying that this Strad cannot be ‘dictated-to’ but instead must be ‘coaxed’ by its player. He speaks of his ‘rehabilitating’ the instrument after he had received it from du Pré—in much the same manner as a physical therapist or a rehab physician or nurse might speak of the journey helping a human patient recover some function that had been lost—after, say, a stroke.

T   here is a mysterious relationship between performer and instrument. Since 1983, this cello’s sound has been ‘growing’—growing constantly during the years I have had it—becoming richer, deeper, and fuller. Partly, this can be attributed to now-constant playing that it receives, which causes it now to vibrate more fully than it did when it first came into my possession ... I had to learn not to be seduced by the sheer beauty of the sound in my mind before trying to ‘coax’ it from this cello. Many instruments sound beautiful in an intimate setting but may lose their quality of sound in the vastness of a concert hall. The Stradivarius does not. The integrity of its sound-picture, the warmth, the clarity and overtone structure—these are, I think, maintained through space much like a laser beam.”
  —  Yo-Yo Ma, Foreword from the book, Antonio Stradivari: The Cremona Exhibition of 1987, by Charles Beare.

If your aging cello develops some kind of ‘Cello Alzheimer’s’, Ma is the kind of gerontologist you would want to look after it—one who could and would bring out the best of its strengths and minimize vulnerability associated with its limitations. He would take it to gatherings where familiar subjects will be discussed by familiar people and not too fast. He would not sedate it or park it, mute, alone in a chair in an atrium.”

I n other words, according to Yo-Yo Ma, your instrument is not ‘instrumental’ in a superficial, ‘ends-justify-the-means’, deterministic, teleological, human-centric, master-slave way. Instead, it has its own spirit: its own personality; its own capacity for belief and intention; its own ‘free will’; its own inalienable dignity and moral standing, in much the way that a pet has these things.

W e often say ‘Take care!’ off-handedly—as routinely or thoughtlessly as a quick ‘Goodbye!’ or some abbreviated, perfunctory expression, devoid of emotion and, really, devoid of attention, except for our attention to habitual protocol.

B ut even then it does convey some sense of connectedness. When said with feeling and forethought, it means something like ‘Take care of yourself, because I care about you.’ I thought about this as I watched Yo-Yo and Kathy on-stage, during the works that they performed after the intermission.

T ake care!’ is something that one can (should!) say to a companion animal—or to a musical instrument; it is not something that must be restricted, to say only to human beings. Yo-Yo Ma’s interaction with his companion instrument—his empathetic attacks with the bow; his jocular brushing of its shoulders; his playful querying of its tuning with the fingers of his left hand; etc.—are gestures of a loved-one/lover toward a belovèd person, not the gestures of a ‘craftsman’ toward a mere ‘tool’. Watching Ma handle and play his belovèd cello, I wonder whether, later in the evening, he will wish it ‘Good night’ and settle it in [its] bed. The cello is a ‘subject’, not an ‘object’. The generosity and dignity that continually flow from Ma make this fantasy entirely plausible.

T he same generosity and moral standing are bestowed upon each composition as well—reflecting the person-like regard in which Ma holds it. Some of the pieces afford more opportunities to detect and assess this; others (esp. Baroque ones) somewhat less. Take, for example, Piazzolla’s ‘Le Grand Tango’, composed in 1981, originally for Mstislav Rostropovich. Ma and Stott animate the strange, tango-ish blend of tenderness and vigorous resolve/conviction that inhere in the score--they do this in a generous way that no one else does.

A nd, in various passages, Ma takes a back-seat and ‘accompanies’ Stott’s piano’s robust expressions—robustness that is implied and authentic, consistent with Piazzolla’s score and the spirit of tango as an intimate-yet-public lovers’ dance—a ‘duet’ of equals. To hear Kathy and Yo-Yo play together is to gain new understandings of the possibilities—and of the depth and breadth of truly ‘collaborative’ musicianship.

A    nd when Kathy Stott played ‘Tres minutos con la reálidad,’ people whispered, ‘She must be Argentinian!’ ”
  —  Horacio Malvecino, liner notes, ‘Soul of the Tango’ CD.

T hrough their playing and their treatment of each other and through their rapport with their companion instruments, we learn something—or are vividly reminded—about being fully human, and about the joys of behaving well, virtuously even, despite challenges and provocations and injustices that we face: an experience far more fulfilling than witnessing admirable technical achievements or finding delight in a [musical] story well-told.

F uturists at MIT and elsewhere talk as though advances in robotics and A.I. and cloud-computing and so on will change our relationships to technical devices and systems in new and unprecedented ways (see links below). I doubt this—at least the ‘new-and-unprecedented’ part. Thoughtful, empathetic musicians like Ma and Stott have, for a long time, been in full-fledged symbiotic ‘relationships’ with their [companion] instruments, and with compositions, and [within limits of ‘partial personhood’ and philosophy of Mind] vice versa. To recognize or appreciate this, you have only to look and listen.


    [50-sec clip, Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott, Astor Piazzolla, ‘Le Grand Tango’, 1.6MB MP3]

I    can tell if someone else has touched my Quenoil bass, [even touched it] ‘by accident’. The instrument takes on a ‘different’ energy from my own—a different quality that I can detect and that persists for a considerable time after the other person’s touching it has ended.”
  —  François Rabbath, in Barry Green: Mastery of Music, p. 129.

• Yo-Yo Ma website
  
• Kathryn Stott website
  
• Benford G, Malartre E. Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs [and cellos! and pianos!]. Forge, 2008.
  
• Caicco G, ed. Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place. UPNE, 2007.
  
• Danielson P. Artificial Morality: Virtuous Robots for Virtual Games. Routledge, 1992.
  
• Downey G, Dumit J, et al., eds. Cyborgs & Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies. SAR, 1998.
  
• Eldridge R. On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-Understanding. Univ Chicago, 1989.
  
• Green B. Mastery of Music: Ten Pathways to True Artistry. Broadway, 2005. [see pp. 22ff, on "merging" with your instrument]
  
• Haraway D. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1990.
  
• Haraway D. When Species Meet. Univ Minnesota, 2007.
  
• Haraway D. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm, 2003.
  
• Hayles N. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Univ Chicago, 1999.
  
• Held V. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global. Oxford Univ, 2007.
  
• Held V. Justice And Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics. Westview, 1995.
  
• Heuertz J. Yo-Yo Ma shows why he's probably the world's greatest. Kansas City Star, 19-MAR-2010.
  
• Hughes J, Louw S, Sabat S, eds. Dementia: Mind, Meaning, and the Person. Oxford Univ, 2006.
  
• Larrabee M, ed. An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge, 1992.
  
• Levy D. Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. Harper, 2008.
  
• Ma Y-Y, et al. Soul of the Tango: The Music of Astor Piazzolla. (Sony, 2007.)
  
• Menzel P, d'Alusio F. Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species. MIT, 2001.
  
• Noddings N. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. 2e. Univ California, 2003.
  
• Slote M. The Ethics of Care and Empathy. Routledge, 2007.
  
• Smith C. Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture. Oxford Univ, 2009.
  
• Storrs-Hall J. Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine. Prometheus, 2007.
  
• Wallach W, Allen C. Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford Univ, 2008.
  
• Walters J. What is a Person? An Ethical Exploration. Univ Illinois, 1997.

A    prodigy who played for President Kennedy at age 7, Ma is no snob, performing Bach to pop to tangos… If Yo-Yo Ma didn’t exist, no novelist in the world would have dared invent him. The combination of virtues—musical, intellectual, personal—is simply too implausible.”
  —  Joshua Kosman, Smithsonian Magazine, NOV-2005.