Algorithmic or Intuitive Music

The Middle is not all it might appear. It is a stance all it own as if getting one hands in mud or on the heights are to be avoided. So I do not think the solutions to things necessary lie there a priori. Analogies too have their own problems. Music is often compared to a recipe which truly captures that post experience whole. But a dish most often is the same from beginning to end while music often is not. So I am going to use the analogy of a trip or better yet a vacation. Algorithmic music would be like the planned package deal. Everything is laid out and one is guided from place to place with little surprise. The intuitive might be those who just show up with no plan at all and attempt to figure it out from there. It seems it is good to have some initial plan, but one has more fun if one can allow room to stumble into something and follow it. This might take up the whole rest of the time one has or quite often, will be a mere brief excursions. Sometimes we find out this is how people ended up moving to a new locale in the first place. It seems to be the route toward innovation.

One of the few times you will hear me sing!
I mentioned here that I did some recording in an anechoic chamber doing harmonic singing on 9 pitches of meta mavila just as a test.
While greatly limited in range and scale, i was able to throw this together using that recording.
Armed with nothing more than my Peterson tuner, each note is me overdubbed 8 times but staggered.
It is a mini requiem for the mini genocide
a Georgian Soundbite so to speak
http://anaphoria.com/miniREQUIEM2.mp3

Pentagonal Dream

Terumi needed this photo for a presentation on Takemitsu. Toru had seen the original photo from Man Ray and had a dream that night which lead to the pitch material he used in 'A Flock descends into a Pentagonal Garden' and later "In An Autumn Garden'. It seems to have been missed that he took Cages square method of bars and applied to pitch. Anyway an accident happen scanning the picture which only took a little bit of playing to finish what the machine might have been reaching for. For all the connected here, the influence of forces from 'without' shaping our directions. Some call it guides

A Long Meter

Long Metrics. I like to think they might add to longer ranging thinking, who knows. I do like how they create an timescape both unified and varied. While not giving too much away, one of the pieces I am working on is in 108 and uses much of my ensemble of instruments. At times I condense my pattern but at one point (maybe more, I am not done yet) I expand it out to 175.
Picture over the first row, 8 8 5 8 5 8 5 and the pattern is simpler than might be assumed. I had put up the numbers originally when writing this but I felt it destroyed the look which i really the reason i put it up. Most of these cross patterns, these being for three voices I work out by hand. But it was quite unwieldy in this case. I resorted to pasting one to the wall and this took over a meter, and the pattern to add had to be twice this length to compare all the options. Since the choice is based on taste, it is not really 'systematic'. Other non picture factors are at play. Finally I did resort to the computer to work it out and the real reason I put it up is I find it rather pleasing to look at. The dark dot is the actual Nuclear melody, the x a marimba, the star a vibraphone. The funny thing is pieces like can be only 12-13 bars long

Harmonic singing in an Anechoic Chamber

The University of Wollongong has installed an anechoic chamber in the Creative Arts building for various research. This was my third time in. Of Which i must thank Eva Cheng for making this possible. Yes you hear your ears and blood rather quickly. One becomes over aware of just yourself which is probably why they use it for torture. Actually the sensation reminded me of various experiments I did with Erv Wilson when his Scale-A-Tron organ was working. Because it manifest it pitches from a very high crystal driven pitch, if one picks the right key one can have chords in 'absolute' as opposed to just tunings. By absolute meaning not a beat in say 10,000 years. but i have digress, i guess to touch upon the similarity. During the second time end i tried doing some harmonic singing, not that i am a singer at all, but found afterwards, i felt quite altered on leaving. This time i went in with that purpose and had my pettersons tuner to give and allow me to see how steady my pitch was. Due to the quiet one can hear much higher harmonics in ones voice but as these get closer and closer, it gets harder to find the perfect resonant position to accent it. I found myself though for the first time moving much closer in between the harmonics and began to explore the space in between these strong points. Here were all types of subtle shifts of timbre that i hadn't been able to hear before. For today i picked Meta-Mavila to be the base pitches. In the 1/2 hour i recorded i sang only nine tones over a range of an octave and a third. i plan to put these together in the future. next i and planning to record on the subharmonic series to see how it all sounds when it is all put togethersince there will be one pitch all the harmonic series will have in common.

P is for Pope, P is for Plastic

Having a Lebanese stepfather, descended from Catholics, of course I at the age of 9 became one. This lasted till 12 but can say I did get things out of it. Seeing how the church has changed in the half theater put on in Sydney (the first night drove the in-laws at whose place we stay when in town away, all the way to Bathurst). We went to one event cause there was supposed to be dancing, but none was happening. We did see a Jesus Store and a statue that was going to be auctioned later, painted in a fake aboriginal pointillism. An ambulance taking someone away. There was group yellings and wavings of red and white (how Masonic!) flags. A hippie tambourine at one point. We missed the passing of the Pope pass all the people who lined the streets to see him. But at 90 Km a hour, there was much disappointment we heard. All night yelling like at a football game. Obviously the church has regressed, not like what I was exposed to. It was cheap evangelism.
How come they don’t do this for the Dalai Lama?

Tokyo- for the first time

Somehow i made it to one of the places i always wanted to go, Japan. I had an introduction to Japanese music when i was just 20, but took to it like a duck to water. So yes here i am seeing Noh again (there is a previous entry here of one that came to Wollongong) and then later some Kabuki. Both by the top artist in the city. Somehow even on an entertainment level, i preferred the Noh. The Kyogen sections seem to be enough to carry the weight of the more dramatic that follows it, and despite to reading translations of Zeami's book and hoarding every recording i could through the years, here for the first time did i experience all the different layers that takes it out of just drama into a more far reaching theater combined with music and dance each on an equal level. In between this and the Kabuki a day before we left, Carl Stone took us to the favorite bar of Takemitsu. It was barely bigger than two pool tables put together. a very small crowd at at time with people turned away for lack of room. One person came in and turned out to be the lyric writer for the tune A Man and a Woman. [ Ba ba ba da ba etc. ] well it worked somehow! The Kabuki we saw was a more modern one but there was no schism with it own past. There was some projected film on a scrim along with some prerecorded Buddhist chant at the beginning. The whole play had 4 people yet one was aware that there had to be numerous ones in back of everything just to have mountains flying around as the actors traveled. It created a field in which one becomes aware of greater forces beyond ourselves always acting around us.
We were staying a block from one of the busiest station Shinjuku station. Maybe the most crowded place i have been in my life [minus some demonstrations i have been to]. But here was a never ending flow where no one bumps into each other. Yet a great calm underneath it all... maybe the whole country is that way yet one knows that the opposite exist here just as hidden.