Re: glisses

on 12/9/00 7:43 AM, tuning@egroups.com at tuning@egroups.com wrote:

>
> ________________________________________________________________________
> ________________________________________________________________________
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Sat, 09 Dec 2000 01:27:52 -0000
> From: ligonj@northstate.net
> Subject: Two Minutes Gliss
>
> To all:
>
> I would like to inquire if there are any among us who have worked
> with controlled glissandi as a part of their compositional language?
> Particularly interesting to me would be some discussion from any who
> may have experimented with "crossing glissandi", in which chord
> pitches are sounded, then gliss to other chord notes by crossing one
> another - which could last for a few seconds, or up to minutes before
> terminating at the ending chord. This is an area of microtonal
> technique, that I do not recall being discussed in this forum.
> Xenakis is an important point of reference for me with this technique.
>
> This is an area of particular interest here. Ways that I've did this
> electronically, are by using portamtento, or alternately, drawing
> pitch bends with a controller window in my sequencer. But by far, the
> most impressive experiments have been with doing this with singing,
> where many voices begin on certain tones and gliss to others.
>
> Anybody out there that enjoys the bliss of the gliss?
>
>
> Jacky Ligon
>
>
> P.S. I know that we do have the Glissmeister himself, Seth Austen
> here, who definitely is no stranger to this important musical
> vocabulary.
>

Jacky,

I'm quite flattered by your titular addition to my name, however undeserving
I might feel of this accolade. I do love using gliss, my use of it is
entirely from an intuitive level though, as opposed to mathematical, and is
rarely the same from performance to performance of any piece.

Having read the numerous postings on gliss when I returned home has really
gotten me thinking about how to better notate this in my compositions. I
have always notated my slide pieces in 12-tET (shame on me), and merely
offered a few suggestions on intonation for pitches such as the third. I
think I could get much more exacting, these postings certainly inspire me to
try for this. Back to the drawing board :-)

Seth

PS I love group singing of glisses crossing over each other... I think I
first encountered this sort of thing to wonderful effect on Bulgarian
Womens' Choir and David Hykes Harmonic Choir CDs.

------
Seth Austen
http://www.sethausten.com
email; seth@sethausten.com

--
"To be nobody-but-myself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and
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