A Companion to
Slug
Frog Peak Music
Newsletter #15
May 2009
http://www.frogpeak.org
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PEAK PICKS
(contents)
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* NEW ARTISTS:
Cesar Bola–os, Tom Baker, Salvatore Martirano.
* NEW WORKS:
Barbara Feldman, Ron Nagorck, Eric Richards.
* SALE:
SOUNDINGS 13: The Music of James Tenney
* UNBOUND:
Daniel Goode: Mahler Symphony #10: Adagio
* FROG SPEAK:
Chris Mann, Ezra Sims
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NEW ARTISTS, NEW
WORKS
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Frog Peak is
excited to begin to carry some of the early works of pioneering Peruvian
experimental electronic music composer Cesar Bola–os, born in 1931, and
currently living in Lima. Bola–os is well known as an early computer music
composer from Latin America, as well as an important researcher of indigeneous
Peruvian music and instruments. Thanks to Frog Peak composer Ricardo dal Farra,
we are now making available the score and tape part for his Interpolaciones, a
remarkable work for electric guitar and computer synthesized tape from 1961, as
well as other scores from this period.
Frog Peak is
pleased to announce the publication of ÒChristian Music,Ó a limited edition set
of 2- and 4-part rounds on four colored cards signed and numbered by the
artists, Larry Polansky and Laura Gray.
========================================
SALE: SOUNDINGS
13: The Music of James Tenney
========================================
We have found a
few more copies of Soundings 13, a very important early compendium of work by
and about James Tenney. Regularly priced at $150, Frog Peak is now offering
this rare edition for $50. Please reference our newsletter when placing your
order.
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UNBOUND: Goode,
Mahler 10
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We have added a
new link to the UNBOUND section at our website, a piano transcription for four
hands of the Adagio movement of MahlerÕs 10th Symphony, done by
Daniel Goode. Please feel free to download this and other scores.
=================================
FROG SPEAK:
Chris Mann and Ezra Sims
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An invitation from Chris Mann:
i've been enjoying thinking of http://theuse.info as something of
a cross between go and an early model pin matrix synthesizer, so would like to
invite yous to make something using materials from it that could also then be
available at theuse as something like a demonstration or version of how it
might be played.
**************************
In celebration of Ezra SimsÕ 80th Birthday, we are
pleased to cite the following short excerpt from his 1988 article, ÒYet Another
72-NoterÓ (Computer Music Journal 12[4]: 29-31):
Working out the Vocabulary
I tried, poor brainwashed thing, quarter-tones at first (in, for
example, my Sonate Concertante [1960], or my Third Quartet [1962]). Despite the
fact that Penderecki and a few others were making them stylish and therefore at
least semirespectable (which had by now long ceased to concern me), I found
they would not do. They made compositional thinking easier for me, but not
fully so, and performers found them all but impossible to play accurately. A
24-note gamut seems to run counter to Western (all human, I suspect) acoustical
instincts. With a little more careful attention, I realized that I was hearing
in terms of a scaleÉ, a dense collection of ÒchromaticÓ notes organized around
the diatonic scale as a sort of armature.
It was clear to me that in this scale the six steps within each of
the major thirds, C-E and G-B, were essentially equal, as were the four within
the E-G minor third. It was further apparent to me that the scale determined a
tonal region (which I will often call a ÒkeyÓ even though that word ought
perhaps be reserved for only the keys of diatonic tonal music). That is to say,
the same succession of intervals could begin on another pitch and define a new
key, a new tonal region, with a different fundamental, just as transpositions
of the diatonic scale do and of the 12-note scale do not. This seemed to imply
a structured, asymmetrical set, founded on harmonic relations, like the
diatonic scale, not a structureless, symmetrical one like the chromatic.
What little acquaintance I had with the facts of acoustic life
made me recognize the 8th through the 15th harmonics in
there. Actually, the 13th is a bit higher than that, but not so far
that the 1/6-tone-high minor sixth cannot substitute for it, if one wants to be
working in equal temperament. The 7th and 11th are quite
nicely in tune in equal temperament, and my instinct is that they are the more
important intervals: developing a system that keeps the 13th snugly
in tune is the next eraÕs concern, not mine.
The concept of consonance–what intervals one may end and
rest on–in Western music has twice lurched up through the harmonic
series: first through the intervals up to the third harmonic (and their inversions),
next, through those between the third and sixth. I have noticed in
twentieth-century music a strong if sometimes uncertain, tendency to do the
same with the intervals between the 6th and 12th. So I
found the apparent congruence of what I was hearing with those elements of the
harmonic series reassuring. What I was doing could be put into a not
unreasonable (possibly even true) longterm historical perspective. Recognizing
this, I thought it seemed sensible–and it did prove comfortable and fruitful–to
fill in the rest. This makes a full 18-note scale made up of a succession of
six 1/3-tones, two 5/12-tones, seven 1/3-tones, and two 1/4-tonesÉ. I
Identified them with what seemed to me the most appropriate, relatively simple,
harmonic ratiosÉ, even though I would continue to write them as if
equal-tempered, the way we did for tonal music.
I was in those days still thinking in received terms of keyboards
and tempered approximations of harmonic ratios. But the life of microtones
enlarges the mind. I am still prepared for my music to be played in equal
temperament. I am even reconciled to its being played out of tune (Why should I
expect more than Mozart?). But I now think in terms of Just ratios, and, where
instruments of fixed pitch are not involved, I really expect the older practice
of tuning the current key in something like Just, but adjusting the relations
between keys to something like equal temperament in order to avoid going off
the instruments. Modulation on these terms is something done every day by good
singers and orchestral instrumentalists; now that we have the digital computer
to expeditiously provide the Just frequencies for each keynoteÕs scale, it
will, I expect, become possible on a manageable keyboard.
========================
The title of
this newsletter is from
the text of a
Shaker song. "Slug"
is one of many
Shaker monikers
for the Devil.
========================
We apologize if
this message is
an intrusion or
a duplication.
Email us at
fp@frogpeak.org with
REMOVE in the
subject to be
taken off this
list.
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