Superstition Be Damned

Do I detect a little Ravel here? Some nice sounds!

Nice work! Also I highly enjoyed the explanations on scale structure. This seems like quite fertile material.

I'm curious about how you think of your melodies. Is there some scale-related structuring underlying the melodic and rhythmic shapes themselves? I have the impression that all the chromas you have are used in very diverse ways, so that it seems that the notes can have many sorts of function; sometimes, the great gamut seems to be used for extra passing notes, sometimes for more stable harmonic scale effects, sometimes for "licks" where it's quite more active and I lose the harmonic sense a little. Or is it rather based on a free melody within a 'scale progression chart'? If you can expand on that, I would be very interested.

Wonderful music! There is more discussion by the composer and some microtonal fans at http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/MakeMicroMusic/

See especially Kyle's explanation of the rhythm and tuning choices in the messages.

What an incandescently beautiful piece. By the way, there's a name for your scale -- it's a Farey Series. Not that it makes any difference, since as we all know maths have no meaningful connection with music, just as science proves perenially powerless to explain it. (Someone else seems to have said the same thing: My last science class was in 11th grade in 1971 - I think the periodic table was up to aluminum - and from hearing too many lousy pieces of new music based on scientific models, I've developed a possibly unfortunate bias that science has nothing to offer art. Gann, Kyle, 31 October, 2003) In any case, Warren Burt has done a splendid Farey Series just intonation piece in his Portrait In Sines Of Erv Wilson. Quite different from yours, albeit worth checking out.

I do rather wish more chaps would give us insight into the internal construction of their compositions, as you have done here. Nowadays, in the 21st century, older musical forms like the fugue having become passe, we poor listeners find ourselves confronted by a bewildering cornucopia of new musical forms. Often, one-of-a-kind musical wiwaxids which seem to have crawled straight out of the compositional equivalent of the Burgess Shale.

They make perfect sense in retrospect; but, in so many cases (viz., Basinksi's The Disintegration Loops or Dodge's The Earth's Magnetic Field) it helps ever so much to have the composer along as tour guide so the listener daren't get lost. Best of all, the web's ideally suited for these sorts of divers excursions through compositional minutia -- as your ever so helpful link to your explanation illustrates. The web can combine graphics with mp3 clips. Infinitely superior, I should think, to the customary muso journal article.

You remarked: I have always found myself unable to compose merely theoretically, without internalizing and being able to hear, almost more in my heart than in my head, the materials I’m using.

Bravo! Well said...as always. As Blaise Pascal averred, The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. One of the most contemptibly infantile conceits of the so-called "modern" era remains the delusion that all of human life takes place above the neck, whereas the reverse remains true. The most important parts of human experience usually occur from the nape of the neck down, not to say below the belt.

Pardon me, Jean, but would you define wiwaxids?

The number 13 certainly has some interesting properties. It is a Fibonacci number. The sum of its digits is 4, the sum of its square, 169, is 16, which is 4 squared. Also, the square of 31 is 961, the reverse of 169.



All this info is from Bryan Bunch's excellent "field guide" to numbers, The Kingdom of Infinite Number.



But wait, there's more:

13 is prime. And for some reason it is associated with bad luck. Bunch associates 13 with the apostles -- Judas would have been the 13th. However, 13 was considered lucky by the Maya.



Still, the number-theoretic properties of primes are always fascinating. Have you tried 17?

To address Samuel's questions: I wrote out all the scales on sheets of paper, with the 13-based scale first, then the 11-based, then 9, 7, 5, 3, and 2. Then I just composed freely, starting with the least intelligible scale (13) and moving to the most intelligible (2), back and forth as I wanted the music to go in and out of focus,

Jean, thanks for all the lovely comments.