Inspiration ~ Mar23
New music ~ Penguin Cafe ~ the piano piece in this month’s playlist is something brand new from Penguin Cafe and Arthur Jeffes called Second Variety. It’ll be no surprised I enjoyed this simple, plaintiff piano sound…. but I was also excited to hear the melodica from recent shows, electronics layered in beautifully and the fact its composition was inspired by the best country in the world (Italy), specifically the sense of time passing and connecting the contemporary with the ancient past. The video below is another Arthur/Penguin performance for Sofar Sounds a couple of years ago.
Performance ~ J3PO ~ very cool session involving two of my favourite artists - Pocket Queen and Julian “J3PO'“ Pollack and also showcasing a nice new bit of kit called the Osmose by Expressive E which is like a keyboard with lateral ‘bendable’ keys so geeky keyboard players like me can pretend to be guitarists (sort of). Video here and clickable picture as always.
Music geek stuff ~ Tuning ~ I’ve been singing recently and was reminded of the sense of grounding provoked by a chord well tuned in just temperament.
The "Just Scale" occurs naturally as a result of the harmonic overtones of a note (there’s a good video by Leonard Bernstein on that), and, satisfyingly, all the notes in the scale are related by rational numbers. It sounds resonant and fundamental but it’s annoying in some ways as each scale needs to be tuned slightly differently. Just tuning works well when musicians match pitch with each other "by ear” (singers or string players) but other instruments like pianos and computers need to be tuned for all the scales and stay there. The "equal tempered scale" was developed so that they could be played equally well (or badly) in any key. It is a compromise tuning scheme in that it’s a little ‘out’ but pretty much imperceptible to the ear even if it doesn't FEEL quite as good.
An oscilloscope is a machine that graphically displays electronic signals of pitch. The video linked here and in the picture shows oscilloscope graphics of just vs equal tuning. I’d like pictures on my wall of the patterns nice chords make when tuned with just intonation because they look nice but they’d also remind me that life needs to be practical (choirs sing with piano accompaniments), imperfection is beautiful (singers bend notes ‘out’ of tune for drama) and sometimes close is good enough.
This month’s playlist:
