Re: [crazy_music] Congratulations and praise

> From: <xed@...>
> To: <crazy_music@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2001 11:53 PM
> Subject: [crazy_music] Congratulations and praise
>
>
> Congraulations to Joe Monzo for his invitation to speak
> at the European get-together. For those of you who didn't
> have the privilege of hearing Joe Monzo speak at the April
> 2001 microtonal conference in Claremont CA, Joe is a superb
> public speaker.

Hi Brian,

Thanks very much for all the compliments you give me here.
I'm glad you got so much out of my Microfest lecture --
I really put a lot of hard work into that one, and it's
nice to know that it was appreciated.

> Here's a question for Joe Monzo... Call me dense, but I'm still
> not clear on something you mentioned when you discussed the procedure
> you use to compose.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the joke I sent about this, honoring
His Ultimate Holiness Arnold Schoenberg. :)

But seriously now...

> Joe, do you hear a specific microtonal melody in your head,
> and then try to find the ptiches in ratio space? Or is the process
> interactive? In otherwords, do you hear a kind of template, and then
> refine it (sort of like twisting a telescope into focus) as you move
> through ratio space?
> ...
> What I'm interested in here is whether the process of
> working in ratio space is interactive, or wheter you have to wander
> through a forest of closely spaced pitches until you find ones that
> seem to match something that's already in your head.

As always, your metaphors are very imaginative.

This is probably going to seem like a bit of a cop-out, but the
reason it's taken me several weeks to respond to this question is
that I've been thinking of how to answer it properly, and the
only answer I can really give is that musical inspiration comes
to me in a wide variety of different ways. So I'll go into
some detail about all of them.

Sometimes I hear a melody, a tune, and generally try to plug in
the nearest 12-EDO pitches first to fix it in my memory before
I forget it. Usually (since about 1990) the tune has distinctive
microtonal characteristics, and I try to fix these either as
fractions of a Semitone, or as low-integer JI ratios, depending
on how familiar either of those measurements are in specific
contexts, or on what the harmonic background seems to be.

Often, the original inspiration comes from a chord progression
I imagine. This is almost always in terms of low-integer JI
ratios, where I imagine the pitches being highlighted on a
lattice as they sound in my mind, when I get an idea like this.

And perhaps most often of all, a distinctive rhythm, in the
form of a drum-set pattern, will pop into my mind, and that
will be the germ from which a piece is generated. Often I
actually start absent-mindedly tapping out the rhythm on
some surface with my fingers without realizing I'm doing it.

Then, there are other times when I'm *really* inspired -- most
often when I'm extremely tired or otherwise only semi-conscious
-- when entire symphonic episodes come to mind. Unfortunately,
these are the hardest to write down, mainly because these days
they're always microtonal and I simply can't scribble down
the ideas fast enough to catch them as they keep flowing.
So usually in these cases I somehow force my memory to retain
what I'm thinking of, and it generally works pretty well. Then
eventually one day I start a MIDI-file for that idea, and
everything gushes out.

There are still other methods. My recent Bulgarian Choir piece
was written entirely by drawing horizontal lines for pitch
durations in my Cakewalk "piano roll" window. And I just wrote
a mantra piece (which Jacky Ligon will be engineering for me
shortly, then I'll upload it) in which the tuning was specified
by opening the pitch-bend window and drawing pitch-bend values
by eye, and somewhat randomly, and the result is fantastic (I think).

Hope that gives you some idea of how I work. I'd be willing
to try to examine these processes further and write more about them.

-monz
http://www.monz.org
"All roads lead to n^0"

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