MicroFest Gamelan+ this Sunday in Claremont California

This Sunday May 8 at 8:00 pm in Lyman Hall, Thatcher Music Building, Pomona College.

MICROFEST GAMELAN+

Retuned keyboards, retuned guitar, and trombones will be joining the HMC American Gamelan, an orchestra of Javanese gongs and metallophones, in new beguiling hybrids. Free!

We will be performing works of Bill Alves, Jonathon Grasse, and Andrian Pertout as well as Lou Harrison's formidable Concerto for Piano and Javanese Gamelan with pianist Aron Kallay.

For more information and a video preview, go to: http://www.microfest.org/microfest20115.html
and
http://www.hmc.edu/newsandevents/alves-microfest-2011.html

Info about Andrian Pertout's work La Homa Kanto (2005) for four tuned keyboards: In the 1950s, the American composer Lou Harrison began an intensive study of just intonation. At the same time, he was also deeply immersed in the study of musical scales from throughout the world and the international language Esperanto (an interest not unconnected with these musical concerns). He set out many of his ideas and catalogues of these scales in his 1970 Music Primer. Of these scales, the one sometimes called the "major pentatonic" or "prime pentatonic" found on the black keys of the piano (but tuned according to just intonation) Harrison found so common throughout the world that he called it "practically the Human Song." In this piece written in honor of Harrison following his death in 2003, Andrián Pertout takes us on a kaleidoscopic tour based on ten of the five-tone scales Harrison catalogued. This set of variations works up the harmonic series on which just intonation is based, from 3-limit all the way up to the 31-limit. These modes include versions of Chinese scales, the Indonesian pelog and slendro scales, and the Japanese hirajoshi scale. La Homa Kanto is Esperanto for "the Human Song."

Aron Kallay will also perform my Paths of the Wind for piano tuned to 1/1, 49/48, 9/8, 147/128, 81/64, 21/16, 189/128, 3/2, 49/32, 27/16, 7/4, 63/32.

John Schneider will perform my Concerto for Guitar and Gamelan with a guitar refretted to match the gamelan.

Finally, we will be performing Jonathon Grasse's The Informal Sector for mixed pelog and slendro gamelan and two trombones.

A microtonal feast+!

Bill