source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 14:37:33 -0800 Subject: James Wood tunings From: Franck Jedrzejewski Last year, Garry asked me about James Wood Tunings. I don't know what tunings he used but I read in the booklet of the CD Spirit Festival with Lamentations & Village Burial with Fire Mode Records / New York that he designed and built an instrument : the microxyl. "The straight microxyls consist of 36 pieces of wooden dowel laid over a resonating box - the total range of each microxyl is between a 3/4 tone (150 cents) and a minor third (300 cents). Thus the interval between the individual keys of each microxyl is between 4 and 8 cents. The instrument is designed to be stroked, (not struck), and it's resulting pitch-bending has the potential to be extremely expressive. The idea behind this instrument was to represent the inner sadness of the mourners. In contrast, the elliptical microxyl has a very different, almost cosmic character -it has 45 keys whose individual pitches from an elliptical curve, the intervals between 2 cents at the bottom end and a perfect fourth at the top end. This represents the mourners outward joy over the freeing of the soul into the spirit world" (James Wood - september 1995) --franck Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 23 Jan 1997 23:56 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA13420; Thu, 23 Jan 1997 23:55:58 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA13379 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id OAA23165; Thu, 23 Jan 1997 14:55:54 -0800 Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 14:55:54 -0800 Message-Id: <9701231154.ZM24526@frollo> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu