Category: Original Compositions

I used a tuning that Partch ascribed to panpipes from Mt. Olympos. This was based on the a storyline of two time travelers meeting throughout their lives at different points relative to one another. I worked to create one melody, reverse it, and harmonize with it in another direction.

Time Travelers’ Bridal March

I cobbled the instrument used here from a shower-curtain rod and the head of a low whistle, to which I later add an extending pole from a clothing rack. This is completely in a natural overtone scale.

We are having massive windstorms where I am, which synaesthetically feel like what I tried to portray here.

• This CD is about the seeds to see us through a winter of the mind. This is the seed of Devotion. Ani-la (Auntie-honorific) is a term of address in Tibetan for Buddhist nuns. If I remember correctly, this is set in a just-intonation variation of the hirajoshi scale.

It probably comes as no surprise, if you’ve read anything else on my page, that I enjoy the BBC’s Dr. Who. This piece was inspired by the episode “The Beast Below” (Season 5, Episode 02, 2010.) In the same way I used images from open source science in last week’s fractal post, I used whale recordings to create an sfz-format instrument for this recording, to be able to play whale sounds on a keyboard. Alas, that was at least 14 years ago, so I’ve lost tract of my sources. It features sounds of balaenoptera musculus (Blue Whale), delphinapterus leucas (Beluga Whale), megaptera novaeangliae (Humpback Whale), and orcinus orca (Orca.)

The tuning I set this in is a Korean pentatonic Just Intonation scale, the original name of which translates to the “Wonderful” scale.

Those of you who are familiar with musical history know that Pythagorean tuning is based on extending the ratio of a perfect fifth to create a complete scale. It still works for some current music, but sounds more odd to our ears the more chromatic a piece becomes. This composition is the result of a scale I calculated with the question- what if ancient people created a scale based on a series of perfect fourths instead? The result is a scale that sounds very naturalistic and familiar in certain intervals and chords, and completely exotic to western sensibilities in other intervals. While working on a project that led to this, a particularly large spider scurried across my desk, to which I shouted something that sounded similar to “You Jazz Spider.” The challenge in composing this was the syncopation, meant to suggest the difficult to predict eight-legged motion.