Mystic Crystal Revelation

My "tek" is finally coming along, to the point where I could play a little Maqsum rhythm along with a YouTube lesson. But that's not important.

I sat down at the writing desk* and actually managed to hammer out a revised 800-word prologue chapter. Complete with some physical stunts, some archaeological puzzle-solving by Our Hero, and the requisite glowing crystal Atlantean dingus.

*It's the same desk I'm currently eating dinner at, and if I had moved a little quicker this evening be soldering LEDs at. But the idea is there.

This might have been the most fun research I'll have the whole novel. I found a "paper" (actually, slides from a presentation) at Academia.edu claiming something novel about Minoan burial customs and I can totally use that. I don't need to see if this has any academic standing or if I'm understanding it right, because in the prologue scene everything is supposed to be styrofoam and matt paintings. So is a particular god Hurrian or Hatti, did they have bronze axes or only copper...who cares! I only need to make it look cool.

(The one difficulty in the scene is descriptions. I can't say "horns of consecration" because that makes an assumption that the viewer of the video knows Minoan iconography. I have to say "curving stone horns.")

I figured out my thematic problem. I think. I spent a morning at a cafe and wrote a thousand words of notes basically about her hair. It makes sense in context. The big thing I came to is that "becoming the mask" -- no, even putting on the mask -- isn't even an option until half way through the story. So in that first critical scene at the gallery reception she's not hiding behind her created character, because she has never immersed herself in that character in a real-world situation.

And the other thing is that the fact that Athena Fox is fictional is a totally open secret. In the reception scene, the challenge is to do a good acting job; nobody there thinks the character is real. But this is true later in the book(s) as well. The conceit I'm going with here is something many actors, and most stage magicians, have faced; the "Yes, but" response. As much as the magicians protest, or even demonstrate, that their act is nothing but trickery, the best they will get from one small segment of their audience is, "That may be, but even if you aren't aware of it yourself you do have Real Powers."

(The most piquant actor equivalent is the action star who despite protests get smacked on the nose by a fan who is totally sure they really can block a punch as well as their character can.)

Life is a giant game of wiki-surf

I hate weekends.

Well, I really need them to try to rest and unwind from work week. But I spend every week accumulating a giant list of things I won't have time to work on until the weekend. Setting up way too much expectation and ending up Sunday night feeling like I wasted an opportunity.

##

That's the thing, you know. Every time you learn something, or create something, you also create a sort of promise or obligation. You wrote a fanfic? Congrats -- now you have fans who are waiting for you to write something more. You learned how to run a lathe? Well, guess what? Now you need to find things to lathe to justify having spent that effort. And then stay at it because skills get rusty if not used. You built something? Good, now build a better one with all that you've learned.

And, sure, especially in the Digital Age we all of us have invested countless hours in learning how to work pieces of technology (especially software programs!) we will never, ever, need to use again. But as you age you also accumulate skills that you simply don't have the time, energy, interest in keeping up. I can't tell you how many people I've met who spent two years, three years, six years studying violin but haven't picked one up in longer than they can remember.

Everything is also connected in huge branching, multiply cross-linked trees. You get interested in ukulele and that gets you interested in guitar, in music theory, in Hawaiian culture, in Tiki kitsch.  Which gets you into rock music, fast-Fourier transforms, colonialism, Buck Rogers. And every one of those new interests is clamoring at you to give it some time. Especially after you've given in and taken a look and its good money after bad, all the way down.

##

So I've got a half-dozen projects I'm contemplating at the moment. Most of them want me to buy something, though, and since I just made a big credit card payment (still paying off the Greece vacation) I'm loathe.

Making a drum: I can scrounge some but even building an improvised steam box means buying a chunk of PVC. I can bend without but I'd get better results with a spring steel bending strap ("only" twenty four bucks at Stew-Mac). I can force myself to using recycled scrap wood for the bending form but the head? Yes; I experimented with mylar, cotton-poly, oiled muslin, sized muslin (the latter wasn't bad, especially when I took a tip from tabla players I'd met and, lacking wax, put some wood putty on to add weight). But the decent sound comes from hide and that's yet another purchase. Even if there are goat skins sold locally.

Making a ukulele is going to be more, even if I avoid the temptation of Stew-Mac's catalog. But that's not currently on a front burner. I still have a box in the closet that's filled with parts and plans for a solid-body uke or two, and that box was stashed before I discovered Road Toad strings and the kinds of new instruments those opened up.

I've been thinking about video technology as well. I'm going to try throwing together a miniature LED-based soft-box. I can do the first one with what I have lying around, even though by the time you add labor I might as well have dropped the thirty bucks a pair of plastic ones cost on Anklezone. The more intriguing idea, though, is the combination of a retroreflective surface with an LED camera ring for low-hassle chroma-key. Glass beads don't come cheap, though...and somehow all my lengths of scrap green LED strip-light are already gone.

##

Writing, though. No work and a nice sunny day and it is terribly hard to keep from dozing off and feeling pressured to get "something" done just doesn't help. I've reached a tentative approach to the thematic issues I mentioned a post or two ago, and am currently trying to puzzle out just what the opening "tomb" looks like so I can re-write that scene.

This is far, far from me believing there was even a slim chance I'd have a rough draft done before the last show opened. That show is now closed and I'm having to rewrite what draft I have from the very first word.

Yeah, I know. There's a lot of people who don't sweat the details like this, whether they are people who self-publish through Amazingbone or a surprising number of best-sellers. And I have to admit I'd probably worry about Getting it Right even if I was trying to do a generic fantasy novel. My excuse for the current is this is pushing all my buttons; I care about supporting good science, and I care about reproducibility. Much of this story is framed as travel advice and I'd really rather that was good advice. And the rest is joining a current debate on ownership of history about which many people feel...strongly.

So, yeah.

Two characters in search of a concept

But first, the plot bunny of the day. There's a bit of optional overheard dialog in Mass Effect 3; "We need to design a gun that shoots Thresher Maws" (a very, very, very large example of that species had just killed a Reaper on the Krogan homeworld). So....what about going with biotech as the best chance to stop the Reapers? After all, the grafted-on endings of the third game reframe the Reaper cycle as being something about the inevitable conflict of "organic" and "synthetic" intelligences. Shepard herself is (after the first twenty minutes of Mass Effect 2) a fusion of both. And there's a tiny, tiny fetch-quest in the third game where you collect the material to Jurassic Park up some dinosaurs...for Krogan warriors to ride into battle.

It would be awesome. It also touches on another theme. The basic themes are cooperation, strength in diversity, and particularly in Shepard's case, indomitable determination. Well, these are similar themes to the original Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen; short, one-trick stories where the remorselessly logical city-sized killing machines of the title were owned by organic life being messy and complicated but ever so tenacious.

(And it being, you know, a third-person shooter sort of game, a meat-sack with a rifle is exactly the tool needed to take down a hostile base, starship, giant whatever. They might have weapons that can burn cities but get marines inside and their fate is just the same as a 20th century tank that's driven too far ahead of its crunchies.)

Hey, there's even more connection to the game. The big third act on Tuchunka is the effort to reverse the Krogan Genophage. Which was largely thanks to...Mordin Solus, everyone's favorite fast-talking, Gilbert-and-Sullivan singing, Scientist Salarian. So make Mordin the hero of the story, the one who leads the effort to gather all the civilizations of known space together to stop the Reapers. After all, "Someone else might have gotten it wrong."

So on to the topic. The problem I'm continuing to have with the current novel is with the basic underlying concept. How it works. If it works. I was reading the Scalzi-blog yesterday and they were talking about Impostor Syndrome. That is an idea I had for Penny/Athena. She's very much not a real archaeologist. She will end up in situations where she has to try to do the work of, pretend to be, or get mistaken for a real archaeologist.

But actually it is more complicated than that. This core element comes from a lame attempt to do an end-run around the impossibility of the Adventure Archaeologist archetype, and all the associated Lost Cities and Booby-trapped Tombs and Ancient Super-Weapons baggage. But, you see, I'm still on the fence about whether this stuff turns out to be just as much nonsense in the book as it is in the real world, or whether something different but just as implausible ends up actually being true.

On the smaller scale it seems to work. Various people can mistake Penny for her creation Athena, or at least treat her like it. And she can both get into situations that you would think only the fictional Athena would get into, and get out of them with stunts only that same fictional adventurer should be able to pull off. And lampshade it constantly, of course.

But...an actual Atlantis? Or, rather, something just as ridiculous? I don't know if it works.

Which is probably why every time I try to hit the first scene where Penny is (possibly!) mistaken for either a professional archaeologist or for someone who actually goes traipsing around the world addressing people in six languages (when they aren't shooting at her) and digging up the local equivalent of Excalibur (King not necessarily included), I run into problems.

I want her to have a conflicted relationship with the role. To recognize that playing Athena can get her into places...and into trouble. And to recognize that the character archetype and, more broadly, pseudo-archaeology and other misconceptions about archaeology are both wrong and potentially harmful.

So I keep veering back and forth about whether she is fully conscious of what she's trying to pull off as she acts her way through a situation, or whether she immerses in the role. And there's where Impostor Syndrome comes in; she of course recognizes she doesn't have, on one hand, the real-world professional skills she is pretending to, and on the other hand, the Protagonist skills of an Indiana Jones type. But does she think of this as pretending to be Athena and getting away with it, or that when she "dons the mask" of Athena -- lets herself be immersed in the character -- things become possible? I can't decide.

And there's specific issues with the first story. Basically reader trust and the contract with the reader. Played straight, in this key scene in a reception at a classy antiquities gallery we have an average-girl passing herself off as a professional and showing up people who might actually have degrees in the appropriate fields. And various people (herself and others) are speaking confidently and persuasively about a couple of pseudo-archaeological concepts.

At this point the reader doesn't know that these theories are going to be shown up as garbage. They might assume that this version of the Dorian Invasion is my own personal hobbyhorse as well. They also don't know that Penny is going to be very firmly lectured by an actual practicing archaeologist on just how insulting her pretense is.

There's an unconnected thread as well. This is the origin story, and large parts of the first half are Penny learning how to actually be the world traveler she pretends to be when she plays Athena. So the first chapters will show her visiting the typical tourist spots and acting like a typical tourist and seemingly not realizing all that she's getting wrong. Which is to say; I'll be looking like I only looked up the typical tourist places and if I visited, acted like the Ugly American.

Oh, and did I mention that she is making mistakes, mistakes about history, mistakes about dates, mistakes about people that she's not going to realize she made until many chapters later? First person she has dialog with, she describes as an Eritrean immigrant. Actually, he's a resident and his family has been in Greece for generations.

So, yeah. I want to keep the reader long enough to get to where Penny re-visits Athens. And gets out of the big Western-style hotel to live a little closer to street level. And where she questions the Return of the Heracleidae story she was told earlier. And where all the everyman-hero and Chosen One garbage is taken and thoroughly shaken out.

And here's another thing I'm on the fence about. There's a real tendency for the First-Person Sarcastic character to drop pop culture references everywhere and I'm trying to avoid that. There's enough to deal with (and enough wealth in potential historical references) that I don't want the narrator to be constantly comparing what is happening to something from a recent movie or, worse yet, a video game.

Trouble is, this is a legit part of her backstory. Her YouTube channel paid for the trip. Some of the conflict comes specifically from the way social media can leap on and amplify something (like the stupid Dorian theory someone in the story just dragged out). And, heck, if I'm talking about the reality of travel, talking about travel in the world of Google Street View and e-tickets and selfies is, well, part of the story.

Thing is, it would make sense with her character and background and within the larger plot -- all the way out to the meta-plot about public perception of what an archaeologist is, etc. -- for her to be media savvy, image conscious, social-media active, etc. And for various key plot points to unfold via the new technologies.

Here's some specific examples. I already have in my notes that the bad guys are tracking her across Europe because her too-helpful business manager has been updating her Facebook status for her. And a key moment in her shift to immersion in Athens is when her phone is damaged during her unplanned swim in the Adriatic and she's forced to interact more, actually ask for directions and attempt to read street signs and so on. (And it also figures in the plot where the bad guys lose track of her and thus it isn't until she returns to the gallery that...) Heck, I even had a thought about someone thinking the evidence was destroyed until she tells them she uses cloud storage for all the pictures she took (and the incriminating picture had its flag set, alas, to public).

Some of this, heck, most or even perhaps all of this, can be solved with sufficient skill. For instance, the same reception where the Dorian nonsense is trotted out, someone else is going on about Atlantis. All that might be necessary is to carefully frame it so both stories are presented in the same way, thus planting that necessary doubt even as the narrator takes the former at face value. Heck, Biro, the Athenian student whose dad cooks a mean tsebhi, could be shown rolling his eyes as Penny hails yet another taxi.

But this still doesn't answer my basic questions.

Read Ryder

I was musing on the thirty-minute walk back from work what a Mass Effect: Andromeda story would look like. Here's the thing; I like Ryder as a character and I like idea of the situation she finds herself in, but I hate the execution. Similarly, there are some fun ideas in the world building but it all falls very flat (and well before the end).

There is potential, though. With the death of the Pathfinder, the only man who seemed able to inspire the shell-shocked colonists and lead them to a new home, his daughter is in a unique position; potentially able to save the expedition if she is only good enough...and if she can only get others to trust her. In the game, though, there's almost no question and she really doesn't have to earn that trust. It just happens. No tension, like I said. I want to read the story where she has to fight for this, both against those who doubt her and against her own internal demons.

The expedition is desperate because their selected "Garden worlds" turned out to be anything but. They need to find fertile ground before they can even afford to thaw out the rest of the colonists. Let's leave aside any thoughts of hydroponics and space industry for the moment and accept this as a challenge. Except the game immediately undercuts this by showing; 1) Kadara, the requisite hive of scum and villainy where deserters from the expedition are surviving quite nicely, thank you. 2) Aya, the verdant homeworld of the Angara, an alien civilization that is open to diplomatic approach. 3) The Krogan colony, who look at the scorching sands and dangerous wildlife and say, "Hey, this is our kind of world!"

Instead Ryder spends the game running around solving Sudoku puzzles so some handy alien machines can magically fix the radioactive deserts and acid lakes. To which there is so little in-game effect most players stop bothering after the first few.

So...where is the option to colonize the Angaran homeworld by force? Or at least have some Milky Way faction strongly considering it. Or where is the option to recognize novel approaches (and needs, and physiologies) and recognize that the Krogan can colonize where humans can't, or that the shattered airless moon is actually just great for some nice big pressure domes, or that the rebels have figured out something useful and the colony leaders are either total idiots or there was a lot more to the attempted mutiny than anyone is saying.

And then there's the Kett. Who are sort of an organic version of The Borg; they've perfected a mutagenic virus that turns other humanoid life forms into more of them. They approach this with a religious fervor, truly believing that this is a gift they bring to other races. Well, where is a real philosophical exploration of whether they are right? Especially if it turns out the Kett form is an adaptation that can better survive the mysterious conditions of the Heleus Cluster than most of the Milky Way species can.

So, yeah, the problem is that one might, just might, be able to write a decent story with this material, but really you want to just trash half the world-building and do the damn thing right (or, at least, better.)

The first sequence of the game is Ryder awakes on her colony ship, the ship runs into some sort of negative space wedgie Mysterious Energy, takes severe damage, and is on the point of having to abandon ship. Ryder, her Pathfinder father, and a small select team take one of the surviving shuttles down to the very scary looking planet which is in the process of being ravaged by the Mysterious Energy in hopes of finding a way to save the ship.

Long story short, they run into an alien species who shoots at them, check out the Ancient Building of Alien Technology the other aliens were trying to get into, Ryder Senior throws a switch turning off the lighting storms and then falls to his death. Everyone else goes back to the colony ship which is mysteriously not damaged nearly so badly now and they all fly off...never to return to that planet again.

I say, fie on this! Ryder's dad is killed much, much earlier. The ship remains in danger. The planet is potentially viable. Ryder and the remains of the Pathfinder team have to survive and understand what is going on and struggle all the while to get the panicking people on the critically damaged colony ship to trust her, with the big turning point where they abandon ship and land on the planet she has staked all their chances on.

And then they have to deal with the Angara, and there are diplomatic overtures with the Kett, and a struggle of competing philosophies both of which seem to offer clues to the puzzle of what the Mysterious Energy is, what connection it has to the Ancient Aliens, how physics itself is different in the Heleus cluster and how the Milky Way immigrants can survive and adapt.

Oh yeah, and Sam, the talkative AI that was illegally placed in Sara's brain by her own father, is looked on with a lot more suspicion, including by Sara herself, and those suspicions are partly born out when Something Goes Wrong.

Build it and they will drum

I picked up a cheap Typhoon darbuka* and have started learning the strokes (my doum and tak are...okay...but the dak or left-hand tak is going to take a bit to develop. Unfortunate, because it's the rolls I need for the song I'll be working on soon). The sound is a little too...bright? Metallic? Anyhow, it doesn't seem right for the Gue piece I'm trying to record now.

I want yet another drum. Something like a 12" side drum that's 4" deep and has a goatskin head. I could build one... but it turns out the techniques of bending wood appropriate for guitar and ukulele are different from those best for bending drum shells. So much for building a drum as a learning project on the way to building a uke.

Thing is, do I want to build a uke? That's the real question.

It's a strange place to be. Way back when, I started making music on keyboard and rack-mount synthesizers. You'd compose something for, say, violin and guitar and piano, but you'd play it all on a keyboard, capture your performance as MIDI data, and plug that data into a machine that made sounds like violin and guitar and piano.

I talked to musicians and read about orchestration and the thought started even way back then that you'd get better results with that keyboard and those rack modules if you had experience with the "real" instrument.

Meanwhile I was in theatre, and learning how to make things that looked like they were made of polished wood and solid brass but were really plywood and styrofoam and paint. And instead of making things that worked, we made things that looked like they could work and then faked it with fishline, hidden lights, sound effects, re-purposed toys.

My paychecks improved enough over the years to where I could actually afford a decent computer, and make the move to Software Synthesis; the same electronically-created guitar sounds, but without so many trailing wires.

I still dreamed of getting my hands on a real trumpet or even a real violin, but that was a dream that seemed financially out of reach.

Meanwhile the Maker movement was changing the options. I welded for theatre but TechShop offered the chance to work metal in an entirely new way.

I did pick up a ukulele along the way. The face of mass production was changing in the electronic age, and there were starting to appear $40 instruments that actually played.

Yeah, I'd owned a recorder for years. A couple of them (recorders are cheap, as long as you stick to the higher-pitched members of the family). But the uke was an eye-opener. Your first experience with a guitar is going to be buzzing frets and painful grooves in your fingers. A uke has such a light action it doesn't do that. You can start chording the first day. And gain the confidence to face that full-sized steel-string later.

The Maker movement was growing, with processes formerly used only in big companies moving to the small shop and the individual maker. And thanks to the VA, I got a membership to the local TechShop and was able to try some of that myself.

This changed utterly how I looked at prop construction. Sure, I could and still did fake it with styrofoam and paint when appropriate, but I could now actually build out of "real" materials. Metals and hardwoods and so forth were no longer out of reach.


And then I got a day job. The title is a lot less prestigious than "Resident Sound Designer" but boy does it pay more.

That revolution in production was still going on. I took a chance and blew a couple hundred on an electric violin. And that opened the gate. As the paychecks kept coming in, I realized I was able to afford, first, a Chinese-made trumpet, then, an actual German-made student-quality acoustic violin.

And I was learning enough in the process that I could take the risk of cheap instruments and trust I could fix them or work around them anyhow.

I went back to the composing bench with the idea of doing the synthesis-based stuff I'd always been doing but folding in a part or two from a real instrument to improve the articulation and realism.

But then it occurred to me I'd collected enough instruments by this point to actually be able to play all the parts. And that was a really attractive idea.

The prop-building was still going on and the revolution in electronics led me to lean more and more on computing power; "fix it in the mix" works for props as well as it does in the recording studio (or, rather, on the DAW.)

Thing is, I already came out of sound design where altering real sounds to new purposes was a central part of the game. I'd long been exposed to the variety of a similarly utilitarian approach to music, from the washtub bases of various folk music traditions to the experiments with vacuum cleaners and air raid sirens of composers like John Cage to the hectic and oft-compromised business of live sound where often you had to improvise some combination of mic placement and board EQ to get the sound that was musically appropriate for that night's show.

So it really shouldn't have taken the arrival of a jointer-planer at the shop I work at to make me think of making musical instruments -- leveraging the available processes and skills in working real materials other than styrofoam and paint -- that could be used in a musical way -- leveraging here the skills both in playing technique (on "better" instruments) and in musical understanding of how to make use of those sounds and, of course, the electronic tools that could warp and shape the result to fit into a final composition.

There's an element of experimental archaeology in this (going along with my renewed interest in history) as well as ethnomusicology. And that's a dangerously attractive road; not only does every instrument have a playing tradition and an idiom that the composer can learn either to mimic or to learn from, instruments also have a building tradition that the luthier could chose to learn.

My own Shetland Gue is a visual mimic of Charlie Bynum's museum replica, down to the stick bow and the twisted-fibre tailpiece. But I was entirely happy to use power tools to build it.

And that's where I am now. I am conflicted musically, as I want to go in so many directions and finding the hours to practice becomes increasingly problematic (heck, finding storage space is becoming problematic!) I wish I could do as a composer friend of mine did and pick a dozen sounds (yes, on the rack mount synths, but the principle still holds) and just work within their sonic possibilities.

And, yes, the "bardic cover" idea is still amusing. Doing not just acoustic covers of existing music, but doing them with archaic instruments whenever possible, seems like both long-term fun and a decent "brand."

But I like all music, and all instruments excite me. I'm not the type to just do guitar, do everything on that guitar, and, yes, admittedly get very good on that guitar. I'm not cut out to be an ace, but rather a jack.

And same goes for instrument building. As attractive is the idea of getting deeper into tonewoods and sinew and hand-axes and natural materials -- and the concurrent idea of recreating ancient instruments -- is the idea of finding ways to laser-cut and machine and electronify and create things that are unique. And, yeah, to find how the available technologies, both the newest CNC mills and the old theatrical standbys, could be used to make things that look one way and play entirely different.

Like...a playable Goddess Harp.

* Darbuka, doumbek, dumbek, tarbuka, tabla....the closest thing you'll get to an agreement on what to call the "Middle-Eastern Goblet Drum" is that the "Turkish" style with the exposed tuners should probably be called a darbuka.

Uncharted Worlds

So I hauled my ukulele through the local woods (not an unusual euphemism) to get some footage. Snagged some free footage off YouTube (simpler than jumping through all the hoops at the free stock footage sites), and cut the video.

Trying to keep things simple. Really, I'd rather be playing music then messing around in video editors. Especially free video editors (unlike the usual suspects, making smaller frames which zip around the screen is practically impossible in the editor I'm using. So I have to reach for different language in order to highlight the various instruments being performed.)

At least the show is down. I can spare a little more time towards writing...music and prose.

Dorian Inversion

So I decided to write my "Shetland Gue Improvisation" in Dorian mode. For no particular reason. D Dorian, which is basically the related minor of C Maj, only with that major sixth.

That is to say, it is the white-note scale (only starting one pitch up). Since my soprano and tenor recorders are pitched in C Maj, I get the D Dorian just by starting on the second hole from the bottom (if you are wondering what the Dorian mode sounds like, think Scarborough Fair). My penny whistles are a little more troublesome. The D whistle starts on that D, but plays in D Maj. My low Bb whistle comes closer; starting from the second hole it plays C (which is in D Dorian), then the D, then...Eb. And there's no fork fingering for E♮ -- it can only be played with the more difficult half-holing.

Things get more intriguing with my two lyres. The Gue should probably be tuned with the melody string on D, being the root of the D Dorian scale. The fourth is strong with this one in the Dorian mode and traditional for the interval to the drone anyhow, bringing it to a G natural. Which, funny thing, is the pitch of my other two recorders, the alto and the sopranino, as members of the recorder family are pitched a fifth apart.

The downside to this idea is that the drone is (sort of by definition) always sounding, so it really should be tuned to the tonic. This is one of the dirty secrets of modes, really all modes (including major and minor). You are playing from the same collection of twelve notes. The only things that define your composition as being a Maj or it's related Minor or some other mode entirely is the relative frequency of major versus minor triads in the harmony and what note the composition ends on (and neither of these are cut-and-dried).

Oh, yes. And because of the design of the Gue, traditional playing style gives you only five scale tones. If you are tuned a fourth up (to the G) the highest you can reach is the root at an octave. There's no way to play the root of a II or III chord. (not to mention that drone D isn't in the II or III triad -- it only shows up in in a II7.)

My 3/4 size Sutton Hoo lyre has only seven strings. Typical is to tune diatonic, say tuning in C Maj but starting up a third. Remember what I said about wanting to be able to play the IV, or or V chord? Well, if the root of the chord is already on the fourth string, you can only play the second degree of the chord before you run out of strings, having to flip around to the first inversion for the top of the triad. If your bottom note is already the third degree of the scale, you can play all the way up to the V chord and still be in root position.

But again that means you can harmonize to a melody in D Dorian but you can't play it: not without jumping the octave for the root, second, and the leading tone below the tonic -- which the C recorders play quite easily, of course.

Yah. Music theory is another one of those places where a seemingly simple set of starting axioms turn out to lead to a giant set of contradictions.