Dr. Mommy's Fest Report

Imagine, if you can, Jonathan Glasier putting an audience of about 50 into
dancin'-in-the-streets mode with didjeridu! (Actually he had help from Ernie
Crews on the tabla.)

I suspect that others will report on the microtonal gig in El Paso this past
weekend, but here's mine.

The short version is that most of the audience was new to unusual tunings, it
was fun, and it sure was great to meet all of these people, many for the first
time, and others after a long time.

Flavor the descriptions you're about to hear with the fact that these were
presented in a gallery about the size of a large strip-mall store. It has two
rooms. As you face the stage, if you can call it that, the room on the right
has that stage, and in the adjoining room Erv Wilson and others have setup
displays of tubulongs among other things.

The first night Neil Haverstick played a couple of pieces, the first on
classical 34-tone guitar with Ernie Crews accompanying him. That improv sounded
to me like what would have happened if India had invaded Spain instead of the
Moors. It had a decidedly Ravi-Shankar-like sound to it, but the timbre was
clearly that of a Spanish guitar rather than a sitar or veena for example. Neil
then played a solo on his 19-tone guitar, using a Roland guitar synth and
several delay pedals. With all of the delays, he stopped actually generating
more notes about 3 minutes before he finished the performance, which was pretty
wild. This improv he appropriately described as "space music".

I get the impression that about half of the audience was entraced or at least
interested by Neil's two pieces (I would guess that they lasted about 25 minutes
each), and the other half was looking for something a little closer to top 40.

In the afternoon of the second (and last) day, Erv Wilson, then Jonathan
Glasier, then Neil Haverstick, and then again Erv Wilson, put on "workshops".
Erv Wilson's first presentation highlighted his simultanous harmonic/subharmonic
tuning, which I believe was just a 90-degree flip of one of Denny Genovese's
student's diamond marimbas. He illustrated it using a composition by Warren
Burt (on tape; El Paso is a tad far away for Warren!). As I recall, it was a
semirandomish sort of thing in a typical electronic timbre, if such a thing
exists.

Jonathan then did his workshop on "vocal harmonics", wherein he would sing
the bass line with his voice, and simultaneously kinda-sorta whistle the melody
line - whistling in the sense of carefully shaping his mouth to resonate one
harmonic of that bass note. Even though he wasn't whistling as such, it sounded
kind of like that. Jonathan is very good at it, and can pick out a harmonic
nearly as powerfully as an old-time analog synthesizer's lowpass filter with the
resonance turned way up. Everybody seemed to enjoy that demo a lot. Jonathan
then demonstrated an autoharp retuned to harmonics (by matching to his vocal
harmonics only by the way), and then played the m'bira he built patterned after
one of Bill Wesley's instruments. You could think of it as the most ungodly
HEEEyyuuuuuuge kalimba you've ever seen. It had a resonating box roughly the
size, but not shape, of that of a 'cello, and I would estimate about 100 tynes.


Neil Haverstick then took the reins, and gave a very effective lecture on
what I suppose I'd characterize as the general nature of microtonal ideas from
his perspective, which is mostly that of a street-wise microtonal ET performer,
and a very entertaining one at that. He has a quite effective stage presence,
both in playing and in speaking. I can't recall exactly how it went from there,
but Jonathan and Erv also contributed to that toward the end as well.

Oh, I almost forgot! Rod Poole then explained his nifty 17-toned JI guitar
tuning. It was based upon a circle of fifths broken in several places, where at
each break he added in a new harmonic basis (I think it went something like 3,
then 5, then 13, then 11, then 7, but I can't recall for sure). He performed a
couple of (comparatively) short improvs in that tuning.

After that, still in the Saturday-afternoon session, Erv told all about the
22- and 70-tone-per-octave JI tubulongs he had in the adjoining room. But
before he did that, he played a corporate propaganda tape by Justonic Tuning
Inc. I had spoken with Rex Weyler before, but I didn't have much feel for how
serious a company they were. It seems likely from the tape and from Erv
Wilson's impressions, that they're very real and very determined to get their
automatically justifying synthesizers out on the market. Erv then briefly
described the 22-toned JI tuning, and played a tape of another three
compositions by Warren Burt illustrating successively more complex harmony
within this tuning, starting with a limit of 7, and ending with 31, the latter
of which sounded to me to have a lot of out-of-tune unisons and octaves.
Stylistically, for lack of any more specific way to decribe it in words, I'd
call it a semirandom piano composition.

After that, I (unscheduled) attempted to throw in a short presentation about
88CET, but we kinda ran out of time. Rod Poole seemed especially interested,
but then again, by that time there were only about six people left (this had
been going on for several hours).

That evening, Rod Poole played a long, and very intriguing-sounding
partly-improvised/partly-composed composition on his 17-toned JI guitar. I
would describe it as being - speaking in broad generalities - a little like the
typical Philip-Glass-like minimalist. A lot of it consisted of short figures
(e.g., fast arpeggios) that repeated many times, but slowly evolved over time.
Each time he would put a new note into that evolutionary sweepstakes, I found
myself cocking my head sideways like a dog encountering a strange phenomenon
it's never seen before. Jonathan then did a presentation somewhat like his
workshop contents, but in a much more concert-like idiom. That's where he
positively floored everbody with his didjeridu boogie!

If there was a bad point about the concert portions of this gig, it almost
certainly would be that there wasn't a stage. For various practical reasons,
Neil and others had to sit on the floor during their performances, so, for all
realistic purposes, nobody beyond about the third row could see the performance.
Not good.

Oh, by the way, Rod Poole did get an excellent DAT recording of the music,
and a TV camera crew from one of the local stations was there too. It was to be
aired Sunday night, but I didn't stay to see it (I'm back in Austin now).

Thanks go to Sonja Wayne (not on the tuning list) for putting it on. I think
if I understand the story correctly, it originated when Neil Haverstick wanted
to visit some relatives in El Paso, noticed that Sonja lived there, gave here a
buzz, one thing led to another, and next thing ya knew, they had a multimedia
event!


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