New Instrument In Meta-Mavila

Here is a new instrument that features a scale called Meta-Mavila (sometimes called mavila is some tempered version). It is only a nine tone scale. It could have been a 16 tone scale but when i had that version on organ, i was not as happy with it as much as only this subset. 

It will mark the first time i am working towards an ensemble with a scale of less than 12 pitches. But it is really only the third such endeavor of ensemble building i have undertaken. But I am far more instrested in ensemble of instruments or families instruments than individual instruments that might sound good but not with others. The other ensembles have been first a 31 tone scale with a 22 tone subset. The second is my Meta-Slendro 12 tone tuning which works well on retuned 12 tone instruments.

 Am i becoming more interested in less notes? It seems like it. More than anything it is more like a refinement of a musical poetic language, cutting out the unessentials and having some sense of what it is im most interested into exploring in depth. This scale has no real connecting points with European tuning outside of just being one. Some intervals that might have 3 steps on the piano are here subdivided something closer to 2. But it is not an equal scale at all. Each tone has it own unique place in the overall sequence of things of equal value and relationship. 

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 There were simpler ways to mount this, but I was missing having a scale with a generalized pattern where each scale or chord always has the same pattern over a keyboard, or in this sense a layout of bars. I plan to use it in an installation in April where others know nothing of the theory behind but will be able to play it.  Experimenting will let one discover they can take a pattern they like and repeat it or imitate another on a different places on the instrument and will sound the same. This will make it fun if more than one joins in being able to imitate someone else by working with the same pattern. 

The whole tuning based on a recurrent sequence has ways of reinforcing the harmonics found elsewhere so tends to all work together well in a environment of spontaneous playing. info on tuning is for the asking but too ponderous to try to cover here. i already have a hammer dulcimer which i have been tuning to this scale so plan on using the two together along with some bowed psaltries. Since i have two of my bass bars that coincide with this tuning, i need only add 7 more with if another project happens next year, it will be perfect for that. Remaining to be seen. Sound sample are coming but want to live with it a bit more before the introduction. Stay tuned~

Anaphoria: Creolization and Bricolage as opposed to Utopian Geography

In it amazing to find in reading ideas and expressions that fit so well with our own understanding Anaphoria as something besides a utopia and aptly describe what we are doing.

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Derek Walcott suggests that the fitting together of the fragmentary is characteristic of Antillean

art, which does not present a seamless or perfect unity of the fragmentary but results in a

multiplicity, reflected in the topographic image of the drifting archipelago of islands, broken

off from the mainland.

For other Caribbean theorists, bricolage has come to be seen as a cultural process that could also serve as a model for articulating identity in an increasingly globalized world. Such a perspective is reflected in Françoise Vergès’s definition of the relationship between bricolage and creolization:

Creolization is about bricolage drawing freely upon what is available, recreating with new content and in new forms a distinctive culture, a creation in a situation of domination and conflict. It is not about retentions but about reinterpretations. It is not about roots but about loss. It must be distinguished from cultural contact and multiculturalism because, at heart, it is a practice and ethics of borrowing and accepting to be transformed, affected by the other. In the current era of globalization, processes of creolization appear in zones of conflict and contact. They are the harbingers of an ongoing ethics of sharing the world.

Raphaël Confiant.......sees the Creole
person as cohabited by different gods or as a site where the pieces and parts of identity are
constantly mingling and disentangling, simultaneously embracing and excluding one another.
Confiant argues that this intermingled experience also applies to the domains of cuisine,
clothing, technology, and language. He reaffirms the view, previously articulated in the Eloge
de la Créolité,9 that a pluralistic identity prefigures globalization.10 Confiant’s description of
Creole bricolage seems to imply a utopian outcome in which the processes of colonization,
creolization, and globalization enable new forms of identity formation and processes of
communal enrichment through pacific intermixtures and aggregations.
While Confiant’s literary works offer more complex treatments of cultural fragmentation,
this affirmation is problematic because he ignores the possibilities for cultural impoverishment
as a result of the deliberate obliteration or unconscious repression of cultural fragments. 

 from

Colonization, Creolization, and Globalization: The Art and Ruses
of Bricolage
Knepper, Wendy.
Small Axe, Number 21 (Volume 10, Number 3), October 2006, pp.
70-86 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press

First Stage of Construction Has Begun

We are happy to announce the beginning construction of the Anaphorian Embassy of Australasia.  While Anaphoria has rare deposits of purple marble, it was only the work of Italian immigrants that began its being used in various buildings. Here you can see freshly installed as the chosen exterior for the structure structure. Outside of just being our field office it will also will function as the storehouse of the Wilson Archives.

Form with Mnemosyne (Memory) In Exile.

   The essence of all form might be memory, what holds and what and can be recalled. The post-war abandoned it possibly having little desire in returning, when that might have meant to the great destruction just witnessed. The latter minimalist kept it distance too. It extended the timeframe of the present and sought to exhaust the possibilities instead of encompassing what a reflection might cast about it. Both hovered in an endless unity that kept all within it borders. Shadows were the last either embraced.
    Must we keep memories pools and mirrors at bay, or must we remained blinded in a ‘been there, done that’ way to not face the unfinished or changed. Must all work stem from the perpective of the sun. The sun that sees no shadows.
   It took Zeus to have a  Mnemosyne (Memory) that could gave birth to the muses. Might we find some place for her and her children in a direct fashion? Might we now gain by presences that so symbolize inspiration that appear beyond us yet as close as our shadows?

Speaking on Erv Wilson.

Here is an excerpt of what i had to say on reflection on the work of Erv Wilson. This is an extract from Stephen Taylors' Sonic Sky

A message from the Anaphorian Ambassador in Canberra

Site of Embassy in progress

The Anaphorian flag

Back in 2010, we brought you these pictures on the progress of our Embassy in Canberra. As the purification rituals had run into problems due to constant contamination by our neighbors and the general surroundings, building has not progressed very far. The ambassador {who does not use his name in order not to confuse himself with his role} manages to stay on the move in order to accomplish those things that seem  always to be pressing. This last week we attempted to catch up with him but found it was only in his yearly  'State of the Island Address' where we actually crossed paths. There was a brief meeting at the Vanuatu Art exhibit in the National Gallery but he was leaving as we were entering. We were able to record the main section of his delivery which occurred within the James Turrell Skyspace where the ambassador explored the shifting resonance of the space.

Inside the SkySpace

Looking up

Beyond One Sided Listening.

    If we entertain there is something to Jung's Psychological types, and apply it to ways of listening things take on an interesting form.  If nothing else it exposes the fallacy of either one or the others being more ego based than the others. It would be the extrovert who we would find interested in the 'sounds around us'  while the introverts the sounds that come from our interior. Perhaps the further distinction into four types is better in showing other ways of hearing too. Sensation being the former with the intuitive with the latter. We  also have the functions of thinking which analyses, breaks into pieces and defines the parts and material. The emotional on the other side would accept what emotions  that come up spontaneously. Historically, music has been thrown back and forth between these, each claiming a superiority. It seems it is as if music is at odds with itself, even ill. We are constantly asked to listen to works in one way or another. Sometimes these are  demands, that we listen in no other way.  It is no wonder that in the midst of the so-called assumed freedom we find little that truly convinces of it. At this point, i would prefer some path to a complete way of hearing, a harmony or a even dialog between all of these.