source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 10 Nov 1996 20:15:36 -0800 Subject: Dr. Mommy's Fest Report From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@CompuServe.COM> Imagine, if you can, Jonathan Glasier putting an audience of about 50 into dancin'-in-the-streets mode with didjeridu! (Actually he had help from Ernie Crews on the tabla.) I suspect that others will report on the microtonal gig in El Paso this past weekend, but here's mine. The short version is that most of the audience was new to unusual tunings, it was fun, and it sure was great to meet all of these people, many for the first time, and others after a long time. Flavor the descriptions you're about to hear with the fact that these were presented in a gallery about the size of a large strip-mall store. It has two rooms. As you face the stage, if you can call it that, the room on the right has that stage, and in the adjoining room Erv Wilson and others have setup displays of tubulongs among other things. The first night Neil Haverstick played a couple of pieces, the first on classical 34-tone guitar with Ernie Crews accompanying him. That improv sounded to me like what would have happened if India had invaded Spain instead of the Moors. It had a decidedly Ravi-Shankar-like sound to it, but the timbre was clearly that of a Spanish guitar rather than a sitar or veena for example. Neil then played a solo on his 19-tone guitar, using a Roland guitar synth and several delay pedals. With all of the delays, he stopped actually generating more notes about 3 minutes before he finished the performance, which was pretty wild. This improv he appropriately described as "space music". I get the impression that about half of the audience was entraced or at least interested by Neil's two pieces (I would guess that they lasted about 25 minutes each), and the other half was looking for something a little closer to top 40. In the afternoon of the second (and last) day, Erv Wilson, then Jonathan Glasier, then Neil Haverstick, and then again Erv Wilson, put on "workshops". Erv Wilson's first presentation highlighted his simultanous harmonic/subharmonic tuning, which I believe was just a 90-degree flip of one of Denny Genovese's student's diamond marimbas. He illustrated it using a composition by Warren Burt (on tape; El Paso is a tad far away for Warren!). As I recall, it was a semirandomish sort of thing in a typical electronic timbre, if such a thing exists. Jonathan then did his workshop on "vocal harmonics", wherein he would sing the bass line with his voice, and simultaneously kinda-sorta whistle the melody line - whistling in the sense of carefully shaping his mouth to resonate one harmonic of that bass note. Even though he wasn't whistling as such, it sounded kind of like that. Jonathan is very good at it, and can pick out a harmonic nearly as powerfully as an old-time analog synthesizer's lowpass filter with the resonance turned way up. Everybody seemed to enjoy that demo a lot. Jonathan then demonstrated an autoharp retuned to harmonics (by matching to his vocal harmonics only by the way), and then played the m'bira he built patterned after one of Bill Wesley's instruments. You could think of it as the most ungodly HEEEyyuuuuuuge kalimba you've ever seen. It had a resonating box roughly the size, but not shape, of that of a 'cello, and I would estimate about 100 tynes. Neil Haverstick then took the reins, and gave a very effective lecture on what I suppose I'd characterize as the general nature of microtonal ideas from his perspective, which is mostly that of a street-wise microtonal ET performer, and a very entertaining one at that. He has a quite effective stage presence, both in playing and in speaking. I can't recall exactly how it went from there, but Jonathan and Erv also contributed to that toward the end as well. Oh, I almost forgot! Rod Poole then explained his nifty 17-toned JI guitar tuning. It was based upon a circle of fifths broken in several places, where at each break he added in a new harmonic basis (I think it went something like 3, then 5, then 13, then 11, then 7, but I can't recall for sure). He performed a couple of (comparatively) short improvs in that tuning. After that, still in the Saturday-afternoon session, Erv told all about the 22- and 70-tone-per-octave JI tubulongs he had in the adjoining room. But before he did that, he played a corporate propaganda tape by Justonic Tuning Inc. I had spoken with Rex Weyler before, but I didn't have much feel for how serious a company they were. It seems likely from the tape and from Erv Wilson's impressions, that they're very real and very determined to get their automatically justifying synthesizers out on the market. Erv then briefly described the 22-toned JI tuning, and played a tape of another three compositions by Warren Burt illustrating successively more complex harmony within this tuning, starting with a limit of 7, and ending with 31, the latter of which sounded to me to have a lot of out-of-tune unisons and octaves. Stylistically, for lack of any more specific way to decribe it in words, I'd call it a semirandom piano composition. After that, I (unscheduled) attempted to throw in a short presentation about 88CET, but we kinda ran out of time. Rod Poole seemed especially interested, but then again, by that time there were only about six people left (this had been going on for several hours). That evening, Rod Poole played a long, and very intriguing-sounding partly-improvised/partly-composed composition on his 17-toned JI guitar. I would describe it as being - speaking in broad generalities - a little like the typical Philip-Glass-like minimalist. A lot of it consisted of short figures (e.g., fast arpeggios) that repeated many times, but slowly evolved over time. Each time he would put a new note into that evolutionary sweepstakes, I found myself cocking my head sideways like a dog encountering a strange phenomenon it's never seen before. Jonathan then did a presentation somewhat like his workshop contents, but in a much more concert-like idiom. That's where he positively floored everbody with his didjeridu boogie! If there was a bad point about the concert portions of this gig, it almost certainly would be that there wasn't a stage. For various practical reasons, Neil and others had to sit on the floor during their performances, so, for all realistic purposes, nobody beyond about the third row could see the performance. Not good. Oh, by the way, Rod Poole did get an excellent DAT recording of the music, and a TV camera crew from one of the local stations was there too. It was to be aired Sunday night, but I didn't stay to see it (I'm back in Austin now). Thanks go to Sonja Wayne (not on the tuning list) for putting it on. I think if I understand the story correctly, it originated when Neil Haverstick wanted to visit some relatives in El Paso, noticed that Sonja lived there, gave here a buzz, one thing led to another, and next thing ya knew, they had a multimedia event! Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 11 Nov 1996 09:38 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA03947; Mon, 11 Nov 1996 09:39:30 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA03952 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id AAA06652; Mon, 11 Nov 1996 00:39:28 -0800 Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 00:39:28 -0800 Message-Id: <199611110339_MC1-BDF-9BF7@compuserve.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu