Hmm... well this is very much like philosophy. A couple of posts each year, then plenty of time off to cogitate over the ramifications. Hi cat, & everybody! Sorry I haven't been too active here (or at the Café in general) in a while. given the context, though, I think I have the best of excuses. Over the last two years I acquired a number of new instruments, and I'm in the process of learning to play them. Also putting together (finally) a home studio, so I spend my evenings screwing things into racks and plugging in cables. Among other things, I finally found a concert Zither in playable condition -- and a name brand (Framus) with relatively new strings, to boot. Been looking for one of these for at least 6 years, and acquired numerous wall-hangings purporting to be instruments from eBay in the process. These damned things are hard to play... but I'll get there, eventually. Last week my new Portuguese guitar (Caimbro) came in, and I'm currently waiting for the arrival of the waldzither I just scored on eBay. I think I'm going to hurt my brain, as well as my bank account. I spent decades getting comfortable with the 4ths tuning of guitar and bass; years learning the 5ths tuning of the mandolins; about 26 months working with the 3rds tuning of the Russian gypsy guitar -- and now I've got a Caimbro guitar tuned in 2nds. Well, if nothing else it's keeping me from falling into the rut of auto-pilot with comfortable fingering patterns. Dropped back in recently to get some info on a Portuguese company called "FolkReps", which is offering a very affordable Portuguese Mandocello, that I am sore tempted to spend next month's mortgage payment upon.
Well I continue to be compelled with these topics - theyre only more evocative for me now.. Harp and guzheng (and find vivid what you'd written before - on the thousand ways to touch the zither) are my predilection - I got out of my banjo/accordian gig and now back to lugging big stuff around). One thing I did recently which only helped me focus better was to give away most of my instruments - (drums, guitars, upright, electric gear..) a sudden move necessitated paring down to minimal - but i was able to give to schools, friends, folklore society .. i still have a closet full of banjos and accordians .. it goes around - I was given my main working harp from someone when they passed, and so it is used to give music to others in hospice. Otherwise, my studies lately are increasingly aligned with subject matter tossed around here..
I saw the best "European" zither ever on ebay about 2 weeks ago - 3 or 4 clusters and a big course on a well done box. even thought of acquiring it, even though I would not play it - I currently have more strings than i care to tune..
Oh and one more thing ... my son (with whom I share a predilection for sonic experimentation) has a toy called a "hexbug" - essentially a battery-powered cockroach; yesterday I applied it to the guzheng and found enough material for an entire performance - only one of the thousand ways..
------ catmandu2 sez: Well I continue to be compelled with these topics - theyre only more evocative for me now.. Harp and guzheng ====== Harp as in 'concert pedal harp', or more along the lines of 'Celtic folk harp'? Apropos the guzheng ... a friend turned me on to the fact that a great deal of contemporary music is currently being written for the zhong ruan (and performed!). there are a number of recent concertos featuring the instrument both with standard western orchestra, and the Chinese plectrum instrument orchestra. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz5JwsDsyU8 Being a crazy and impractical musician I of course decided that I must have one of these instruments. Got one, but it was a toy -- unplayable. So I sent it back, and am now looking into a pro-quality instrument from a Beijng maker, rather than an Amazon distributor. Ah, so many instruments; so little time! ------ One thing I did recently which only helped me focus better was to give away most of my instruments - (drums, guitars, upright, electric gear..) a sudden move necessitated paring down to minimal - but i was able to give to schools, friends, folklore society .. i still have a closet full of banjos and accordians .. it goes around - I was given my main working harp from someone when they passed, and so it is used to give music to others in hospice. ====== I don't know about giving away most of my instruments, but I may have to consider taking that step with some of them, for the simple reason that I am running out of places to put them. As a larger house isn't in the immediate future, few instruments may be a necessary prelude to acquiring any new toys. I have a concert string bass standing in the corner that, really, I only play once or twice a year these days ... I have been playing a lot with my charango family instruments, and also with my acoustic baritone guitar (B1 E2 A2 D3 F#3 B3), which I finally got professionally set up (best $200 I ever spent on an instrument!). ------ Oh and one more thing ... my son (with whom I share a predilection for sonic experimentation) has a toy called a "hexbug" - essentially a battery-powered cockroach; yesterday I applied it to the guzheng and found enough material for an entire performance - only one of the thousand ways.. ====== Oh, hexbugs are great! My bro' sent me one for Christmas a couple of years ago, and I've since discovered that there are several varieties, and if you get more than one, they interact. This was exactly what American culture needed: robotic vermin. They even make a fish, that swims in water, which from a short distance away looks like a believably real goldfish. But I think you may have found the thousand-and-one way.
"Lever" harp - wire-strung clarsach actually, which may indeed be a harp but is a quite different animal than all the other harps strung with gut or various synthetics (it's a 'struck' rather than a 'plucked' instrument - such as the harpsichord/claviers). I do have a couple of synthetic-strung harps too, which I enjoy particularly in rhythmic-style playing like Latin styles. I recently met a S American flute player with whom I deploy charango, gtrs, violin, harp.. accordians are my other interest - so much can be done, and they're just so...squeezy fun; picking vintage Italian reeds off ebay is a particular weakness ... ive been looking for ronroco since I'd learned of them (here ), but still none.. Harping came to me and I'm giving to it, and it's eclipsing all the rest at the moment. Yes modern trends are certainly toward complex harmonic repertory seemingly everywhere in the world (how else would one get 'paid'? ). Same thing with harp - but my interest is the old stuff. Cool vid.
I have reluctantly pretty much decided to limit myself to fretted string instruments, as far as new purchases go. Given a choice, I'd probably live in a museum full of instruments of all types, but there's only so much space and only so much time. Frets have always been my real love, and there are plenty of variations out there to keep me busy for a long time. I enjoy both folk and classical harp music, but the instrument is outside my current boundaries. Still looking for a guitarron chileno, but have come to the conclusion that I'm either going to have to go to Chile to get one, or become friends with someone who lives there and is willing to buy one for me and ship it. Found a couple of dealers in Chile, but they tell me they are not permitted (by government?) to sell overseas.
I was in the habit for a while of regular ebay searching for g. Chileno, but no.. Now I'm finding allure with old stuff like old harpsichord, clav, old... it's wonderful growing old and permitting oneself eccentricities and anachronisms that a normal life precludes.. I guess a kind-of musical instrument museum , despite all the impracticalities, was in fact what I had, had to construct, within my means, to assuage my odyssey. Funny, despite being around pianos all my life, it's the one instrument I never had such affinity with - in the way as the others. I always 'reasoned' that I'm impelled to play all these other strings as a means of compensation for not studying piano - with all its registers. And I seem to need to engage as much of my body as possible working with an instrument. I think this is one thing I like so much about harps - it's a most intimate instrument. This choosing among and rendering of voices I find very compelling - actually the most compelling thing about it all, I suppose
Check out this nice piece - http://www.ebay.com/itm/Exotic-Large...p2047675.l2557
And I thoroughly enjoy btw reading your and Tom's refined writng and thoughts - always a pleasure. And continuing Toms's - one angle I've been finding alluring is the psychobio-onto/etymological basis of music platonic/prehellenist/prehistoric and all of that and where it's leading research in music therapy and the varied heuristic aspects and all that.. Something along that line that I find so resonant is a 'self as music' basis and the broad research and efficacies emanating from this field - keeping at least pace with various psychodynamic models, and of course developing literacy/language that can convey such. There's quite a variety of experience of course - models as 'lyrical' states of being, etc, research in altered state, in combination with the arts of writing/ theorizing, research in auditon, all great stuff..
Tom said - == For the purpose of this topic I will add that I find that theory interests me less as time goes by. The philosophy I have settled into is that music defines itself, and we don't gain much by talking about it as a thing. I leave to Derrida, or similar, discussions of meaning. If we could learn by talking about it we would not need music. There are some "meta" questions, though. For me, interesting issues include to what extent music is not arbitrary (hardly at all in terms of rhythm and simple melody, I think), and how performance techniques are useful in carrying the listener. For the former question, sometimes people will propose the universality of music, to which I ask whether Beethoven's funeral march would not sound like a snappy number to an elephant or whale. It is true, I think, that tempos are universal for humans, since we have a narrow size range, thus a narrow range of walking or running or heartbeat pace. Harmonic and scale preferences can be culturally induced, but natural harmonics are heard in the vibration modes of strings and pipes, so we all hear the satisfaction of the tonic and the close relation of dominants, the primacy of major over minor thirds, etc. So it is not that hard to imagine that music enjoyment came from shared primal experience, and is by now genetically selected. (The ability to recognize a song is essentially universal.) We can imagine that music induces body states (sympathetically) that correlate to actions and emotions (such as the emotional significance of a tremulous voice). We can reasonably conclude that some further conventions have added to the primal sources. And college students can write papers about it. .... I was looking back through the string and noticed the dean (for his master's thesis) telling Dr H "You'll just have to say in words what you said in the music." I read somewhere that a writer characterized fiction as "saying with words what you can't say with words". It's not only a clever phrase, it makes sense because the way words are being used is in story, not analysis or argument. As such it talks to your deeper feelings, and the reaction is more in your body than in your head. So of course he can't do what the dean asked, but he could indeed talk about the music. This is what we all enjoy when reading or listening to/watching interviews with artists. It sometimes increases the sense of understanding one has of the work, but the artists of course never (or rarely) starts off with intention of explaining the work via media presence. The traditions of philosophy assumed a couple of conditions, as I see it: 1) Because we can think, we need to think in order to understand and explain thinking, and 2) The most logical thought constructions suffice to explain us and the world. It was a worthy effort when we lacked data and effective physical theory, but many issues of philosophy drop away now that we have learned more stuff. === Like you, I'm increasingly interested in practical matters of music, and generally less so in theorizing - why I'm not going back to school to earn the licensure: music therapy - subsumed as it is by many disciplines - is asking these very questions; science (our language) is helping interpret the realm for us in ways that we can understand. Moderns' penchant for objectification limits and potentially eradicates the phenomena, but as we develop wherewithal to apply our methods peripherally the phenomenon begins to reveal. We don't much talk about the music as a 'thing' as there is so much more to consider. At this point - in combining my love of performing music, improvising, and the shared perception and exploration of experience - the opportunity to explore with music and at the same time synthesize the arts and senses without having to explain it - is appreciated. For now, the full effect of music, sound and audition is still (or rather, again for us) a potent catalyst of experience beyond our measure. However, our literacy (through research) is beginning to get its feet; the phenomenon has great general efficacy via processes only now deemed by moderns as important. It's a very young field, yet. While the 'science of sound' is one aspect, its essences and capacities are still largely unknown. Up until very recently, everything's been quantified purely through its physical aspect; phenomenological music is subsumed by so many social variables, so many efficacies in the field are wrought through expanding mobility of cultural understanding - to say nothing of 'pleromic' realms. New approaches to a still 'unknown language' / modern research in related/subsuming fields - (re)develops literacy in these realms. H's thesis paper might be better able to discuss the phenomenon 10 years hence, but even now relative to given approaches, purview and terminology. Apparatuses for academic theses evolve (I hope!). Words fail, but our lexicon advances.
And H - maybe fate can someday have it that we collaborate on a suite and variations for piano and maybe a dozen variously-sized robotic vermin, or something.
About time to drop in for that annual bit of philosophizing, isn't it? Or maybe I should start a new thread about weird ethnic instruments... Since I last dropped in I have acquired a couple of fascinating Portuguese instruments, and been doing some experimenting with classical guitar stringings and tunings. The Portuguese instruments are a viola da terra, and a viola da terceira -- guitar-like instruments made in the Azores. The first has 12-strings in 5-coures; the second 15-strings in 6-courses (yep, there are triple strung courses. Details posted here: https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/s...23729-Folkreps The Vd Terceira is a monster -- feels like a very small 12-string guitar with a super wide neck, but with the tripled courses and light build it's louder than my Washburn 12-string dreadnaught. Tuned like a standard guitar, so despite the wide neck it's been fairly eash for me to pick up. The Vd Terra is smaller yet, also very lightly built, and with very light gauge strings for the pitch range. It's tuned like a banjo with an added low A course. The super light strings make it play a bit like a scalloped-fingerboard instrument -- you have to finger very lightly, else you stretch the strings out of tune, simply by pressing them to the fingerboard too hard. Now I need to work on that interesting Portuguese fingerpicking technique, where they use a special pick tied to the index finger, and pick in both directions with that finger and the thumb. (Oops, rambled on for too long and ran over the character limit... see next post.)
Part II... My other pursuit has been experimenting with so-called "regular tunings" on guitar. First, I picked up several cheap, virtually identical Yamaha classical guitars. I have one tuned in all major thirds (F-A-C#-F-A-C#), one all in fourths (E-A-D-G-C-F), and one tuned in all fifths (C-G-D-A-E-B). Also been experimenting with the strings to find those that best support these tunings (JustStrings carries a host of different nylon string gauges). The one I was most easily able to play right off was -- surprisingly -- not the all 4ths, but the all 5ths instrument. Guess all that messing around with mandolins finally had an effect. Stringing was fun: I got a special heavy-wound nylon string for the C (tuned below the guitar low E). For the high B (seventh fret note on a standard high E string), I had to go to monofilament fishing line. Yep. About 0.022 monofilament. It actually supports the high B (though it can take a week or so to finally settle in), and I've had them on there for a month before they finally broke. They do always eventually break, but hell, in the mean time I've got a guitar that basically spans three full octaves and a bit in first position. Playing around with this has actually brought me to a philosophical question -- which I'm sure has probably been brought up in these fora multiple times, but which I'm going to bring up again, because I'm lazy. The question is, "What is it that makes a "mandolin" a mandolin?" Or maybe, is such a thing even qualifiable to a non-ambiguous degree? Tuning in fifths, certainly, gives certain prominent resonances while playing, which are unlike those of the guitar, tuned mostly in 4ths. And my 5th-tuned guitar does produce certain suggestions of "mandolin". But it doesn't really sound like a mandolin; it sounds like a guitar with an unusually wide range. Doubled courses? Partly. Truth to tell, I started wondering about this sort of thing a while back when I acquired an "octave mandolin" -- 8-strings arranged in four double-unison courses, tuned like an octave mandolin -- but with essentially a guitar body and round sound hole. That instrument sounds more like a mandolin to my ear than the 5th-tuned 6-string. And yet, the body resonance says "guitar" more loudly than "mandolin". It lacks a certain mid-range "tubbiness" which seems to be characteristic of both "flat" and bowl-back mandolins. What about the Gold Tone GM-6? Mandolin body, but six single strings, tuned like an octave guitar. The body sound (to my ear) is more like a mandolin, but the single courses still come off as "guitar played above the 12th fret". This ambiguity is reflected in the names that people come up with for these hybrid instruments. Is there really a difference, for example, between a "banjitar" and a "guitanjo"? Sometimes yes; sometimes no. Having encountered a lot of these now, I've developed a tendency to prefer giving the body name first (since it seems to provide the most obvious sound connection, first), and then the neck name. So I actually prefer "banjitar", because my first reaction is usually, "gee, that banjo sounds a little strange..." Not everyone agrees, of course. Yamaha, for example, has a instrument with a ukulele body, and a guitar neck. "Guitalele" they call it. To me, it's more of a "Ukatar", since the first thing I usually pick up on is the ukulele body sound ("gee those are unusually big chords for a uke!") Admittedly, "ukatar" doesn't roll quite as trippingly off the tongue as "guitalele" -- but hey, I guy's gotta take a stand somewhere. Or maybe I'm belaboring a moot point. Maybe sharp lines can't be drawn between these instruments, and eventually we'll only be talking about "stringed instruments," at which point the Mandolin Café will become the "String Café". And the next thing you know we'll be besieged by a bunch of theoretical physicists.
>"Now I need to work on that interesting Portuguese fingerpicking technique, where they use a special pick tied to the index finger, and pick in both directions with that finger and the thumb."< One of the most effective and evocative techniques in stringed instruments is the single-string downstroking finger - rapping or stroke style on banjo; forms of abanico and upstroking thumb alzapua in flamenco, etc. Latin strings and styles are eminently compelling - the variety of idiomatic rasqueados and rhythmic devices of all the cultural traditions. What a wonderful study. Often when I play at home I use my fingernails in both directions - on mndlns, banjos, ukes, et al - it's a hard habit after so much flamenco and frailing banjo. I use a pick to perform as I get more volume that way. Harps are weird because it's all (conventional technique) closing the hand, rather than opening the hand.
The Portuguese tradition that I stumbled into is called "Fado". The island music is different, but the playing techniques are similar. I've done bidirectional picking with the thumb, in flamenco, but only used the backs of the fingers in strums (Rasgueado, etc.) In fado the index finger is used in both directions, almost like a flat pick, but in conjunction with the thumb, so it's somewhere between fingerpicking and flat picking. There's a hole in the pick that sets the front of the pick under the edge of the nail, and the whole business is tied or taped to the finger. It's kind of like the "Alaska Pik", but more extended, and it predates the Alaska my almost 200 years. Odd feeling technique. The one other place where I spotted a similar technique is that for an instrument for which I've still not tracked down a live example -- the guitarron chileno.
Love that form - would love to get into it myself but my hands are beat from too much 12-string. That multi-course, steel strung stuff is my first love - my first steel-string gtr as a boy was a 12-str. Then we (gtr geeks) were all big Towner fans. I wish I'd been exposed to more Latin music when I was young. I'm old and sore now and cheating with bellows and buttons and bows.. But I still manage a bit of charango fun. There's like a tactile need (well, actually there IS a tactile need...I think the variety of tactility/playing is largely how I survive in the world. Kottke once said - that playing "gives him something to do with his hands"). >"bidirectional picking ... index finger is used in both directions, almost like a flat pick"< Probably lots of older cats used thimbles, though perhaps not as refined as the fado players...*That technique where they double the treble is cool. And the thumb 'inside' is more like lute technique..
I am starting to wonder a bit about what caused the Portuguese to wander "off the rails" in their guitar tradition. With other cultures, other than tunings and size, there doesn't seem to be all that much difference between, say, a Russian gypsy guitar, a Spanish guitar, a German guitar, or even Japanese Niibori guitars. Maybe an extra string here or there. Then you get to Portuguese instruments: different body shapes, tripled courses, radically curved fingerboards, double-loop-end strings, Preston tuners, elaborately weird finger picks, radically different picking technique. And apparently every Island in the Azores has it's own unique version of the guitar. It's like a whole different world that time forgot. I'm finding the Portuguese guitar to be the most problematic of these to play. By this point I'm fairly comfortable with various combinations of 4ths, 5ths, and 3rds. But the PG features two M2nds in it's standard tuning, and I still haven't gotten comfortable with the logic of that, after two years of hacking away at it. Although it does feel more like a big mandolin, than a guitar.
Ya I think that is an eminently compelling field of study. The longer I live i'm increasingly attracted to music from Southern origins. The whole field of which foreign to me growing up anglo in the North. I think I'm just a drummer - maybe on all the 'non'-drum instruments I've encountered too. I just want to dance anymore.
