coming along slowly..

I was watching "The Guitar Artistry of Bill Frisell" last night. One thing
he was talking about was, unconsciously, bending the neck of his guitar to
try and get "G" to fit inside the C chord. The fifth always sounds out of
tune to him....

Micah

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John F. Sprague [SMTP:JSprague@dhcr.state.ny.us]
> Sent: Thursday, November 04, 1999 6:49 AM
> To: tuning@onelist.com
> Subject: Re: [tuning] 9000 year old flute
>
> From: "John F. Sprague" <JSprague@dhcr.state.ny.us>
>
> Although of interest to know how many tones in the scale, it would be much
> more useful to know what specific frequencies it produces, so that
> intervals can be calculated. One should not assume that only one hole was
> open at a time, as still other pitches could likely be produced, beyond
> the number of holes. Without this information, many people will simply
> assume that it plays some close approximation to equal temperament. That
> broken pieces of other flutes werre found at the same site would indicate
> that there may have been ensemble playing, with harmonic possibilities
> which could be of interest.
>
> >>> "Darren Burgess" <dburgess@acceleration.net> 11/04 9:13 AM >>>
> From: "Darren Burgess" <dburgess@acceleration.net>
>
> Hey folks,
>
> I thought this post from the oddmusic list may be of interest to some of
> you.
>
> Darren Burgess
>
> From: "Monty H. Levenson" <monty@shakuhachi.com>
>
> Odd music indeed! The work of an ancient colleague unearthed:
>
> Chinese archeologists have unearthed what is believed to be the oldest
> known playable musical instrument, a seven-holed flute fashioned 9,000
> years ago from the hollow wing bone of a large bird.
>
> The instrument, about nine inches long, is the best preserved of six
> intact
> flutes found with fragments of about 30 others at Jiahu, a remarkably rich
> but little-known archeological site in the Yellow River valley in Henan
> Province in central China. Radiocarbon dating shows the site was occupied
> for 1,300 years beginning around 7000 B.C., during the early Neolithic
> period in China.
>
> Nine millennia after lips last touched it, the flute was played again and
> its tones analyzed. The seven holes produced a rough scale covering a
> modern octave, beginning close to the second A above middle C. There is
> evidence that the flute was tuned: a small hole drilled next to the
> seventh
> hole had the effect of raising that hole's tone from roughly G-sharp to A,
> completing the octave.
>
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[Micah:]
> I was watching "The Guitar Artistry of Bill Frisell" last night. One
thing he was talking about was, unconsciously, bending the neck of his
guitar to try and get "G" to fit inside the C chord. The fifth always
sounds out of tune to him...

Hmm, you might've thought he'd have said along the lines of "to try
and get "E" to fit inside the C chord," or some such... though it
really hardly matters, because *whatever* he might have been trying to
do, it ended up sounding GREAT.

Dan

PS - I opened (a duet Jean Lozaraitis) for Bill and Tim Berne when
they were touring after doing the beautiful record "THEORETICALLY"
(check out "Carolina"), and he was definitely (consciously or
unconsciously, though I'd suspect the latter) a very 'microtonal'
player... his whole sense of pitch was so full of innuendo and
wonderfully blurry inflexions. I also opened for Atlanta based
guitarist Glenn Phillips a bunch of different times, and he's
definitely another guy who has a whole very personal sense of
intonation... a very natural microtonal equilibrium spoken through a
plain old 12e guitar.

>From: bedwellm@wellsfargo.com
>
>I was watching "The Guitar Artistry of Bill Frisell" last night. One thing
>he was talking about was, unconsciously, bending the neck of his guitar to
>try and get "G" to fit inside the C chord. The fifth always sounds out of
>tune to him....
>
> Micah

And does he think that only G will change when he bends the neck?

>> Chinese archeologists have unearthed what is believed to be the oldest
>> known playable musical instrument, a seven-holed flute fashioned 9,000
>> years ago from the hollow wing bone of a large bird.

Let's remember that the original musical instrument is the human voice, and
that it has no limitiation of a small number of pitches per octave.

John Link
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