A 19 tone extension of Centaur for Strings- Silenus

While my Centaur tuning was originally designed for 7-limit ear training back in the days when electronic means were too unstable to use, it has been imposing itself in recent years for a variety of projects. The occasion for this has been in having to write for ensembles to play music in another tuning but one that is also manageable to those not specializing in such things.

 One such project was for the Australian group, Ensemble Offspring and it soon again became useful in composing a String Quartet to be work shopped in Aberdeen. The latter had its real premiere last Nov. in Los Angeles by a string quartet led by Melinda Rice. As I invited to do another piece by Melinda as well as a another group, Locana, which includes a cello and violin, a new question arose: is there a 7 limit tuning that preserves the open string tunings in fifths yet gives some of the basic material also found in Centaur.

Since a shape of an interval learned on one string easily translates to another, the limitation to 12 pitches was unduly restricting. Hence the next point where things fell into a nice shape was with a 19 tone scale which differs by only one note from one worked out by Terumi Narushima in a lesson. Since the context is its use with strings, certain options present themselves as easily transposed from one string to another.

Landini in Exile

This is a little experiment with transposing sections of a piece of Landini into Wilson's Meta-Ptolemy.This gets us close to 7 equal country without degenerating into it. Hence it has more shape and contour as can be seen above.
 The piece uses the same 3 instruments and 3 lines but transposed to different places in the scale with the lines also being exchanged in the instruments.

IN A PENTAGON ROOM CD AVAILABLE

The Archives of Anaphoria is pleased to present its first release in 8 years 

IN A PENTAGONAL ROOM

Performed by Clocks and Clouds

Kraig Grady Meta-Slendro vibraphone

Terumi Narushima Meta-Slendro organ

http://anaphoria.com/music.html

IN A PENTAGONAL ROOM is the first CD of microtonal performance duo CLOCKS AND CLOUDS. The title refers to the unique five-sided reverberation chamber in which the recordings are made. The shape and surface of the room produce sounds and decays that last as long as 12 seconds enhancing the unique sounds of the duo's specially tuned instruments. The interaction of harmonics produced by the Meta-Slendro vibraphone and organ is captured via a special five microphone setup, resulting in what will probably be considered the definitive recording of these instruments. The album is totally acoustic and free of overdubs or enhancement. Even equalization is by-passed in order to retain the high quality of the original sounds.

              Dawn Crossing of the Bridge- Beginning Excerpt available here

http://anaphoria.com/music.html

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. 

Add caption

 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.

-->

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?