All I got were low-quality cell photos like this one, but I got something this time... unlike the free Ozomatli show earlier this year when I forgot my phone.

The backing band deserves as much props as Dweezil. I got to meet him along with multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Scheila Gonzales after the show, but special guest, local guitar legend Eric Johnson, he left too quick.

They opened with "Apostrophe". Other highlights of the night (imho): "T'mershi Duween/Keep it Greasy", "Crew Slut" (but no "Catholic Girls", a fan favorite), "Ms. Pinky", "Purple Lagoon/Carolina Hardcore Ecstasy", and "Muffin Man" as the closer. The encore was "A Pound for a Brown" plus some amazing solos (Pete Griffin made me wish I got to play more bass).

It'll be sixteen years since Frank's death next month, but I say he taught his son well.

Now I need to get a band together; I'd probably be bassist and lead vocalist* unless I find a really good singer. I want to do jazz fusion/progressive rock like this, but I've never had much luck finding musicians that can play, say, a jam in 19/16 time like the "Greasy" solo.

*or, theoretically, lead vocalist and conductor, with band behind me and orchestra pit in front...

I've decided to get my own free homepage, rather than host my music at imeem or Last.fm or Myspace. And I'm tired of moving, so unless it doesn't work out at all, I'm staying here.

http://dannywier.ucoz.com/ (very much in the early stages of construction; I'm just now uploading music)

I'm planning on hosting some of my writings here, not just music. I might also blog there, so I may leave LiveJournal, but not anytime in the near future. I've decided to keep LJ, but I might have two blogs, with the one at my homepage being focused on my work.

Внимание: я нуждаюсь переводить несколько записих на русский... я ленивый.

The major (and seemingly endless) project I'm working on has a whole lot of leitmotifs, or melodic themes representing characters, objects, places, situations and other nouns. One of them is the "Adam theme" (or "Everyman theme", but it mainly represents the protagonist, named Adam), which you hear a lot in "Come Out and Play!" for instance. It may appear in any key, or in any mode: major, minor or some maqam. These themes can be sped up, slowed down, inverted, reversed or distorted in various ways, these being increasingly important concepts in the theme-and-variation form, not to mention tone rows.

The movement I'm writing now already has one intersting variation I randomly came up with: the clarinet plays the "Adam theme" at 2/3 speed, but stretches intervals at a ratio of about 19/13, producing the experimental Bohlen-Pierce scale. Though often thought of as 13 equal divisions of the perfect twelfth, with equally-tempered steps of 146.304 cents each, it's actually derived from a type of just intonation.

This just scale uses only odd-numbered factors, thus leaving out the octave, so the simplest ratio in the matrix is 3/1 (called the "tritave" in BP terminology), the perfect twelfth. The "fifth" becomes 9/5 (the minor seventh in regular tuning), and the "fourth" 3/1 ÷ 9/5 = 5/3 (the old major sixth). The "whole tone" is now (9/5)²/3 = 27/25, actually lower than the orthodox 9/8 whole tone. Since the third prime is no longer five but seven, your new "major third" is 7/5, the "minor third" is 9/7, the "major sixth" is 7/3 and the "minor sixth" is 15/7. But translating an octave-based 12-tone melody to twelfth-based 13-tone is not often easy and not often practical, with the major third being stretched to a tritone and all.

This is the justly-tuned BP scale with more complex alternate ratios following the most important simple ratios, along with their size in 72-equal temperament commas in parentheses:

1. 27/25 (8), 49/45 (9)
2. 25/21 (18)
3. 9/7 (26), 35/27 (27)
4. 7/5 (35)
5. 75/49 (44)
6. 5/3 (53), 81/49 (52)
7. 9/5 (61), 49/27 (62)
8. 49/25 (70)
9. 15/7 (79)
10. 7/3 (88), 81/35 (87)
11. 63/25 (96)
12. 25/9 (106)
13. 3/1 (114)

Since such a scale uses only odd-numbered harmonics, this tuning is best suited for square wave sounds including the clarinet--and Stephen Fox of Toronto makes BP-tuned instruments. I'd still like to write a BP clarinet quartet (two sopranos, one tenor and one contra).

I got stuck in a rut for a couple months, but I'm back to work on what might be the most difficult thing I've ever written: a scherzo this time, for a scene that takes place in Istanbul, Turkey. The city has added significance, as it is the only major city in the world built on two continents, a metaphor for the mixing of Eastern and Western ideas in a (post)modernist sense. (I'd rather think of myself as a transmodernist, since postmodernism is too often associated with antimodernism--and nihilism.)

For the record, Turkey's largest city and former imperial capital is on the short list of places I plan on going, along with New York and Paris. "Come Out and Play!" takes place in the Australian Outback between Alice Springs and Uluru-Kata Tjuta, for example.

This is one of my "kitchen sink" works. Among other things, there's a fugato passage, several Arabic-Turkish maqams, and all sorts of microtonal intervals approximating up to 31-limit JI. And like much of what I write, it involves perpetuum mobile and changing meters, except this time most of it is in a fast 12/8, with occasional shifts into 9/8 and 4/4. And by 9/8, I mean both the "triple triplet" form and the karşılama/"Blue Rondo" 2+2+2+3 rhythm (so along with maqams, I'm using usuls). Once so far, I'm alternating 12/8 and 5/4.

(ETA: I'm actually using the aksak rhythm, 9/8 version, which is also 2+2+2+3.)



This is Primus performing "Eleven", from Sailing the Seas of Cheese. The drum solo at the beginning does a 11/8 rhythm like what I'm using: six triplets and a quad. It can also be counteд as a measure of 12/8 plus a measure of "Mission: Impossible 5/4", i.e. 3+3+2+2.

Someone on LJ, specifically in outsider_music, mentioned the ANS Synthesizer (Russian: Синтезатор «АНС»). If you're a fan of the Theremin, you might like this.



It was invented by the engineer Evgeny Murzin and was finished in 1957 after twenty years of work. The British experimental band Coil has used it for some of their recordings. It operates by photoelectric sensors and has a range of ten octaves, 72 microtonal steps per octave. (I've been an advocate of 72 equal temperament for a while and use it for most of my compositions. I know I've mentioned it before...)

Taiwan's Acer has overtaken Round Rock, TX-based Dell as the second largest maker of computers in the world, also leaving Apple in the dust. Hewlett-Packard is still number one; Lenovo and Toshiba are fourth and fifth.

Reason: Acer, along with compatriots Asus, are having a great deal of success selling netbooks, those small, cheap laptops designed for internet, e-mail and light word processing, while Michael Dell, whose company does sell them, considers them "toys".

I use an Asus netbook myself, since I can't afford a full-size laptop right now, and I'm not a hardcore gamer anyway, so all I need is, besides internet and such, something I can use to compose music and write short documents. The lack of CPU power, smaller keyboard and smaller monitor can be limiting, but I hardly consider this netbook a toy. It gets the job done for me, and is just as powerful as the seven year-old Dell desktop I had been using. I just hate my netbook being called "cute".

I also run Ubuntu Linux from a 16 GB memory stick I got for free with the thing, along with Windows XP Home (not Vista), which I need for Noteworthy Composer (I know, I can run it in Wine, but it works kind of weird, and I'm too cheap for Sibelius).

You can never praise it enough--the bass that is. That double neck is making me break the Tenth Commandment. (Shouldn't one neck be fretless or an 8-string?)

I hope to high heaven I'm not getting the flu. I'm feeling kinda "fluish", if that's a real word.

If I get really sick, I can always listen to classical; it's been my "sick music" since I could remember. Our station is KMFA 89.5 FM. But right now, I'm getting myself better acquainted with Turkish classical and folk music (check out TRT--click "TRT Radyo" to the right then "TRT Radyo 4" below; also, "TRT Radyo FM" plays contemporary Turkish music. See also Wikipedia).

Two reasons I'm doing this: first, work on ear training and get my perfect pitch keen on pitches of less than a quarter tone's difference, and get better acquainted with each makam and usul. (It might help to learn the language, but I already got started... still beginner level.)

I'm also getting better acquainted with the music of Debussy, and contemplating what he might've sounded like were it not for the 12-tone-per-octave limit imposed on the piano and Western theory in general. He was familiar with Indonesian gamelan music, after all.

I got 21 minutes of orchestral music (synth-generated, sadly) available for listening and free download.

I should look for a new place to host my files, since Last.fm now charges a €3 per month subscription fee unless you live in the US, UK or Germany. Or can you folks in Russia, Australia and everywhere else hear it for free anyway?

I finished it this morning, and I'm making it available for listening and downloading. It's part of that "soundtrack" to an imaginary video game again.

Я завершал это произведение сегодня утро, и вы можете слушать и загружать её. Эта часть «саундтрек» подложному фильму или игре о кторой я пишу.

I keep complaining about the Live Music Capital Of The World's music scene, and how we're becoming less like Austin and more like Houston. But at least we're not Tehran. Classical Iranian musician and Austin resident Fared Shafinury paid a visit to his homeland recently and found out the hard way.

Jim Swift of KXAN-TV did a report on him, being aired right now.



In case you're wondering, a setar (meaning "three strings", not to be confused with the Indian sitar, a very different instrument with the same Persian name) is a long-necked fretted lute, related to the Turkish saz and Greek bouzouki. It has tied frets, dividing the octave into 17 unequal steps and using quarter-tone intervals, required for the radif (classical repertoire).

I want to write an opera now. Problem is, I've never been that much into opera, but that is bound to change. I recently saw parts of PBS broadcasts Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and Berlioz's La damnation de Faust, and had records of Mozart's Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte back in the day.

Oh yeah, I need to borrow those Wagner CDs from a friend of mine...

I didn't read enough of the classics growing up, but I was always a fan of Mark Twain. Someone's already operatized Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; it can be done again. But since I suck at writing lyrics, this may just be a tone poem, or "instrumental opera" as I call it.

There's a timely political significance to all this, because so much of Texas and the South is seeming much like Twain's Missouri nowadays.

This conclusion was met after a session of stream-of-consciousness Googling and reading about a certain phrase from when circuses were more interesting. I also have a fascination and identification with, combined with a minor fear of, clowns. (The icon in reference to a series of nightmares I had in early childhood concerning a grotesque painting of a clown in my bedroom, and also a Bart Simpson quote.)

Боже мой, этому видео уже тридцать года.

Давно, я решал что я устал строя единсвенного двенадцатего полутонов в октава. Около деяать давно, я обнаружил арабскую нузыку, что использует 24 тонов в октаву. К тому же, он изображает очень хорошо натуралный строй (и систему Хэрри Партч).

После эти тех лета анализа и много дискусии с мной, я решал что я нуждаюсь 72 тонов, или, на самом деле, «коммы» (каждый шаг 16⅔ центов зовут «комма», греческое слово). Этот строй содержит полутоны, трети тонов, четверти тонов, и так далее. Другие кто использовали: Иван А. Вышнеградский, Алоис Габа, Хульян Каррижо, Яанис Ксенакис и Джо Манери.

Расторанния и его отношения:

• октава, 2/1: 72 коммы
• квинта, 3/2: 42 к
• кварта, 4/3: 30 к
• больпав терция, 5/4: 23 к (не 24!)
• малая терциа, 6/5: 19 к (не 18!)
• малая терциа «блюз», 7/6: 16 к
• 8/7: 14 к
• целый тон, 9/8: 12 к
• 10/9: 11 к
• 11/10: 10 к
• средний тон, 12/11: 9 к
• полутон (диатонический), 15/14 или 16/15: 7 к
• 21/20 или 22/21: 5 к
• треть тоны, 25/24 или 28/27: 4 к
• четверть тоны, 33/32 или 36/35: 3 к

Есть большее я писал по-английски на моего блог.