3/2

So yesterday I stayed up until 6 doing all of my homework. I went to bed and slept for 4 hours, and woke up in time to turn my project in and start my day a little later than expected.

But late start aside, I've had a really good day. My composition project looked fancy, and I got an 87 on the previous project. Singers was fun and I wasn't too behind in Percussion Group, which was unusual. I had a test in Aural Skills that I did pretty well in, and African was pretty fun. Then I came home and watched some Hulu stuff and relaxed and made up for sleep I lost.

Today in composition we talked about microtonality, and how 20th century composers got sick of sticking to 12 notes in a scale and split each interval into lots of pieces. A half step, or a semi-tone, can be split in half to create a quarter tone, and has even been split enough to make a sixteenth tone, or 8 notes in between a C and a C sharp.

We spent a lot of time today discussing Harry Partch, a 20th century composer who went off into his own little world and changed the way some people look at not only music but sound and communication in general.

Mr. Partch started just like the rest of us, using a 12 tone scale, but I guess he decided one day that he was sick of it, so he burned all of the music he wrote using that method and adopted a 43 note scale which is more suited to natural speech inflections. He designed his own instruments that use this scale, and they have cool names like the Boo, the Spoils of War, the Chromelodeon, and the Marimba Eroica. He described himself as a "philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry," because his thoughts and ideas about how music should be played led him to make his own instruments to accommodate these ideas.

During the Great Depression he lived as a hobo and traveled the country doing little jobs wherever he ended up. He wrote about his adventures in "Bitter Music," and this is probably an influence on his work "Barstow." The piece's text is based on things he found written on a makeshift hobo message board outside a station in Barstow, California, which he probably visited as a hobo himself.

"Barstow" was originally written for "intoning voice," or voice "singing" or inflecting on his 43 note scale, and adapted guitar, which had a longer neck and more frets to play all of the notes in his scale. But over the years, his collection of functional 43 note instruments grew, and he modified the piece several times to add new instruments and voices. One of his later versions calls for three vocalists, surrogate kithara, chromelodeon I, diamond marimba and boo, and each of these instruments uses a different notation system, which makes the score almost illegible to anyone who doesn't understand his music.

I just thought he was a very interesting character, and he was something I could write about and make into an interesting little blurb. Another composer, Julian Carrillo, used numbers to designate a tone, from 0=C to 96=C an octave above, with 96 intervals in between, or 8 per chromatic note. So his music would read: 88 92 88 84 80 84 88 92 88 84 80 etc., and would really be a hassle to understand and read quickly.

So I wrote about Mr. Partch instead.

Hopefully I won't be staying up all night again tonight, but it wasn't so bad last night.

M