new/old microtonal folk-rock

Every once in a while someone on MMM (or one of the other tuning lists)
de-lurks and says something like, "Why doesnt anyone make
normal sounding music using all these weird scales and techniques"?

I remember wondering the same thing myself when I first encountered
microtonality, although "normal" for me (at the time) meant
a sort of folk-rock aesthetic. [Picture long hair, scraggly
beard, and an earnest look on my face.]

I was making copies of some old music and uncovered
some compositions from 1990-1. These were composed and
recorded on a "portastudio" (a 4-track cassette based recorder)
and then mastered onto cassette. Last weekend I transferred
them to my computer and then ripped them into mp3s.
It then took about a week to gather up the courage
to post them.

Anyway, for your amusement, I've uploaded the first of these,
which is a song called "Signs". The lyrics summarize an episode
in the Popol Vuh. Here's what I wrote about it at the time:

***

The Popol Vuh is one of the primary Mayan religious texts. At the
simplest level, the Popol Vuh tells the story of a pair of
brothers who journey to a neighboring realm that is ruled by
a dozen evil Gods. The Gods challenge them to a ball game and
they accept, only to lose their heads. Years later, their sons,
also ball players, journey to avenge their fathers... how they
outwit the evil lords time after time and return victorious is
an epic in the spirit of the Odyssey.

But the Popol Vuh is much more than an adventure story. It is
a creation myth, a chronicle of astronomical observations, a
story of human nature, of people's place in the universe, of
the relationships between the animate and the inanimate.
The characters of the Popol Vuh are adept at reading the
signs of the world around them... the voice of a crow that
directs them on their journey, the messages of insects that
give them the true names of the evil ones, the meaning of
the painted eye, the importance of the arrangement of the
clouds, the significance of a rustling in the night. By
reading the signs of their world, the way becomes clear,
and their path to victory is opened.

***

The song is recorded in one of the tunings of Archytas,
so it is a tetrachordal-based tuning closely related
to certain Just Intonations.

Bill Sethares

--- In MakeMicroMusic@y..., sethares@e... wrote:
> Every once in a while someone on MMM (or one of the other tuning
> lists)de-lurks and says something like, "Why doesnt anyone make
> normal sounding music using all these weird scales and techniques"?

What is wrong with people like that? Won't they ever learn??? :)

Well, balls, Bill - Yahoo is still timing out for dialup lines, so I
couldn't get more than 800k of it! Could you upload to microtonal.org
(as you did last time) and I'll put something on the page?

Gad, this is so convoluted...

Looking forward to 'signs',
Jon

Hi Bill

I liked your signs!

Robert