DulciMusings

This should properly be posted over in my Modal-Improv blog, but I wanted to keep some continuity here in the Stream of Consciousness section.

I’ve been doing web searches on Modal Harmony and Modal Chord Progressions for decades, and every once in a while I come up with something so valuable that I simply cannot keep it to myself. Such is the case with this great pdf excerpt on Modal Harmony for jazz composition:

http://www.berkleeshares.com/songwriting__arranging/modal_harmony_jazz_composition

Jazz musicians and composers use the modes in some very unique ways, including building chords in 4ths (quartal harmony as opposed to tertian harmony, or chords built in 3rds, which is our traditional “Tonal” harmony) so that they are more ambiguous, and able to be used in a wide variety of contexts.

Enjoy!

Jerry

If you go to pandora.com, you can sign up for their free online radio. It is really an incredible service, and I’ve gotten myself quite addicted after only 3 or 4 days. Basically, you set up your own “stations” and they make it real easy for you to give feedback so you get more of what you like, and less of what you don’t.

I have already discovered some great new recordings there, and I will continue to listen and take notes. They also make it easy to share your stations with others. I’ll try to post when I find some really earth-shattering stuff!

Jerry

I watched a great YouTube video (I think from Indiana University) of a performance of Vaughan-Williams’ Tallis Fantasia. What an amazing piece of music! Got me to thinking about how much I like all those early 20th Century English composers.

When people hear of Holst, they almost always get The Planets thrust into their faces. It was his BIG HIT for sure, and an amazing work on many levels. In fact I really need to get a really good performance of The Planets in my collection asap. But very few people know of Somerset Rhapsody (which has “Rosebud In June” as its main reference structure! Steeleye’s Below The Salt album has their great acappella take on this) or the First Suite in Eb, or the Second Suite in F, which all have wonderful settings of various English folk songs. I bought a great collection on iTunes yesterday: it is by Eugene Migliaro Corporan and North Texas Wind Symphony. What a great Holst album this is!!!! It’s got pretty much all the essential “non-Planets” Holst folk song must-haves, but I’m learning more and more every day how extensive Holst’s output was.

The other cool thing I did in the last few days was to sign up for an account on Pandora.com for their amazing radio player. I don’t think anybody has done this as well as they have: I set up three “stations” and, within a few hours of pleasurable listening, I had each station trained to play things that I really like a lot. Their Music Genome Project is a very innovative and pioneering effort, and I hope they have the greatest of success with it.

Jerry

Well…. it has been over two years, but the last two issues of the DulciTheory Newsletter that I sent out while it was a typical “broadcast” newsletter, never made it up to the web for some reason. I realized that these two issues, dealing with moving various melody lines through the Cabbage chord progression, fit rather nicely into some workshops I’ll be doing soon.

So I just got them up on the “DulciTheory On The Web” portion of my web site:

http://www.jcrmusic.com/dulcitheory_sub/index.html

Maybe I’ll even get inspired to continue with No. 24, where it gets much closer to jamming through the chords?

Earlier today, I recorded a few duets with my newest North Carolina Hourglass (walnut and redwood). I used my trusty Bill Lawrence magnetic pickup strapped on top of the strings — right around the 14th fret. This essentially turns the dulcimer into an “instant electric” or a “poor-man’s electric” as I often say.

Now, why not rely on the acoustics of an instrument of this quality for recording, instead of the more metallic-sounding and mid-rangey magnetic pickup sound? This is a good question. Actually I do some acoustic/electric hybrid recording with the strapped-on pickup using my Audio-Technica condenser mic on one channel and the Adrenalinn II with the pickup going into the other channel. But most of the time it is just too noisy around my house to get any serious acoustic recording done: there are space heaters going, my Quicksilver G4 mac has a very loud fan, and there is always a ton of traffic noise. Oh yes — and I have a terrible habit of moaning off key and grunting while I’m playing! Anyway, lots of good reasons to “go direct.”

This duet is a kind of stream-of-consciousness poem on the general outline of Drunken Sailor. It doesn’t really use any of the melodic material from the folk song, but the chord progression is unmistakable, and the design of the motives and phrases have something to do with “Drunken Sailor” and whatever that conjures up in my frazzled little noodle-brain. I’m in open D-A-D, so you might want to play along: the chords are just Em, D, and A7.

rs3_dorian_duet1a_011908.mp3

DulciTheory Dicussion Group Coming Soon

Hopefully, before the weekend is over, I will have a link to a new discussion group for DulciTheory. I’ll probably make a new post here, but there will also be a prominent link on my home page. I’m looking forward to some stimulating topics, and helping you to get more music and joy out of your mountain dulcimer. I think the discussion group format is the way to go this time around, because it is absolutely essential for me to keep my finger on the pulse of the general community of dulcimer players out there. Stay tuned!

All the Best,

Jerry

Well, my body is back from Iceland, but my spirit is definitely still lingering over there quite a bit. I will have to force myself out of “stun mode” soon and get back to the real world here in Southeast Ohio.

Basically, I seem to have gotten back into flatpicking arpeggio/chord-melody style with a whole different feel than ever before — offering a true alternative to my typical fingerpicking style which has become like a default style for me. Here are some of the amazing advantages of flatpicking that I see right away (they were way too blurry and ill-defined in the past):

1.) Flatpicking seems to let me generate more melodic LINES than fingerpicking. I play in a more linear fashion when I have a flatpick in my paws.

2.) I’m always playing more focused — playing LESS — with a flatpick than with fingerpicks. I think I still am in the overwhelmed-child mode with the fingerpicking: so amazed at the ridiculous possibilities that I go out and do as much as I can all the time.

3.) Flatpicking doesn’t seem to sacrifice the independence of a two-part polyphonic texture (during the very brief interludes in which I am able to really be present enough to manage two discrete lines simultaneously!!!). Even though I don’t often fingerpick in syncopated-melody-over-alternating-bass style much, I used to think that there was something in my fingerstyle playing that made for instant, easy polyphony — or maybe “almost-polyphony” because I’m not talking about it in a strict academic sense — but my flatpicking creates a sparser, and perhaps more LINEAR two-part texture probably more often than the fingerpicking. Curious and intriguing.

4.) Not too long ago, I was worried about all the alternating pick directions that I have to keep constantly in mind while flatpicking, and how fingerpicking is so automatic and no-brainer-esque. Well, if I just shut up the thinking, worrying mind and get to some flatpicking, it all seems to take care of itself. ANSWER: shut off brain and play music!

5.) Dynamics and timbral color seems to be MUCH, MUCH more powerful and yet more intimate and subtle at the same time with a flatpick. With 4 fingerpicks on, I can’t get anywheres near the place where the strings come off the bridge (Mr. BITE! in Neal Hellman’s classic terminology), nor can I get very far towards the Mr. MELLOW places at the 14th fret, without clicking too much on the fingerboard itself. The flatpick and its various hardnesses, stiffnesses, and materials allow worlds more color and dynamics to be coaxed from the dulcimer.

6.) I used to think that there was something about my fingerpicking that allowed me to get into a baroque basso-continuo style — something that wouldn’t be possible with a flatpick. NOT SO! After fingerpicking through this progression, which I learned from a chant CD I recently purchased:

Bm / / / | / / / / | D / / / | / / / / | G / / / | D / / / | A7 / / / | / / / / ||

….and getting some wonderful, but decidedly non-baroque results, I tried flatpicking melodies-through-chords, and I could not believe how much of a driving, relentless, continuo-esque jam I was able to create right on the spot.

I may try and post some tab at some point so you can try some of these things yourself. It’s really kind of hard to explain in words.

All the Best,

Jerry

Howdy Folks:

There are so many mp3 portals of different types these days, it has been very hard for me to decide which ones, if any, are worth joining and uploading my audio to. Well, to make a long story short, I’m pretty sure I have found the absolute best site for new and challenging folk-oriented music:

http://www.efolkmusic.org/

I have just joined as an artist myself, and plan on building my artist page soon, as well as uploading some mp3 files to their system. They have a great instruction area, too, that I plan on providing some content for soon.

One of the main things that sticks out with eFolkMusic.org is its commitment to QUALITY: they are a “filtered site” and you have to send samples of your music before you can join as an artist. This is such an important decision to make when building a music portal!!! So often, I have become very discouraged with the larger, more general portals, because I just hate to wade through hours of boring, humdrum, poorly recorded music just to find the one gem that is worth a listen. With eFolkMusic.org, they’ve done all the filtering for you: the artist roster they have is truly vast —- just scrolling down the listing takes a good, long while! And there is such a diversity of music, all under the “folk” moniker somehow. There are many, many famous people, along with many others whose names are not so well-known yet, but who might be very pleasant surprises for you to discover.

CEO Chris Frank has a blog now, where I’ll be spending a bunch of time and posting some comments. It is the top enty in my blogroll, over to the right. Check it out!

All the Best,

Jerry

Howdy Folks:

There seem to be a whole bunch of cool developments on the podcasting front here in early 2007, and I wanted to make sure you knew about them.

The main thing is that Steve Seifert, in addition to publishing his groundbreaking state-of-the-art dulcimer instructional DVDs (I think there is a brand new one that just came out!), has actually started a series of mountain dulcimer podcasts! What’s even more shocking is that he had me as his first guest!!!

Go to Steve’s web site and click on the Podcasts button, and see what you get. He’s still trying to slay some of the tech dragons, so it should be easier and easier to access as time goes on:

http://www.stephenseifert.com

Then there’s my new Modal-Improv blog, with a discussion list associated with it at Google Groups:

http://www.jcrmusic.com/wordpress/

Pretty soon I will be uploading more of my backing tracks —- which are basically just jumping off points for discussion and trying to stimulate some modal improvisation on the part of the subscribers. It is too early to tell where this all will lead, but it will be fun to see where it goes.

All the Best.

Jerry

I have started a new discussion list on google groups, called Modal Improv. This will be focused on learning how to improvise and compose melodic material over simple, purely diatonic chord progressions.

Unlike DulciTheory, this list is open to all instruments and vocals. I will probably be playing the lion’s share of the backing tracks using dulcimer, but subscribers should be free to play their favorite or principal instrument, whether that be synth, guitar, mando, ukulele, mt. dulcimer, hammered dulcimer, harp, or whatever.

I will probably be setting up another instance of this wonderful WordPress blogging software in another directory off of jcrmusic.com — dedicated to modal-improv, and I hope to have mp3 files and standard music notation up there soon. I’m also thinking about some podcasts some time in the future.

DulciTheory had a pretty long run, and now I have some legacy content to gather into a book at some point. We had to shut down the list for security reasons: our ISP’s mail server was hit very hard with all sorts of malicious attacks, and all the lists were inundated with bots and spam. The back issues will remain on the web indefinitely, though, so you can access them whenever you want.

Thanks!

Jerry
Oh yeah, here are the particulars for the modal-improv list:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/modal-improv

for making SEODfest 06 such a fantastic workshop! I thought the concert last year at SEODfest 05 was great, but this one was a new high for me.

We’ll have to see about whether there will be another festival next year. My sense is that the small audience we had in 2005 dwindled even more this year, so that many workshops were like private lessons. This is really wonderful for the students, and I’m really excited that everyone learned so much, but we have to face some financial realities (including some fairly recently discovered unknowns on the status of FVRC).

Perhaps the upcoming Open Stage/Concert Series will provide some ideas and local support for the festival. Also, some of the photographers and videographers that came by to shoot footage this year seem to have some stake in the festival’s future. Maybe I can rope them into a steering committee or something?

If you have thoughts on this, you might consider dropping me an email (jerry at jcrmusic.com), since I had to disable the comments here because of so much junk and robots.

All the Best,

Jerry