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Dwo Durtle Doves

The turtle dove sings around a C♮ and C# in sets of three. Click and drag over each phrase above. Those are trills of 64th notes, or maybe even 128th notes. You can call them “hemdemisemiquavers”. To check his pitch, just click the Rabbit Face on the Color Keyboard up top. That’s a C Natural baby!

His trills sound like “turr, turr, turr”, the onomatopoeia that named him. The first trill bends up from C to C#, and the other two bend down from C# to C. In musical notation, a trill is written like so:

A trill is a rapid alteration of adjacent notes. The turtle dove trills notes within a semitone. Like all birds, he is working at a much quicker musical pace than us. In a single trill, he’ll hit 15 or so notes, but the three phrases essentially follow the “up, down, down” movement as indicated above. Up, down, down, rest. Up, down, down, rest. Isn’t it such a dovey thing to mournfully slide down your final note?

If James Joyce were writing this, he’d pun up like this and call it a day:

Mozart’s Ghost


Do You Know Your CBA’s?

KnowyourCBA_medium

Have you ever been on your way to a gig, when the police and their portamento cries pull-over your tour-car, and force your band to perform all manner of hazing rituals and musical games? Musicians and civilians alike are expected to recite things never learned by rote, or learned at all—retrograded songs, inverted childhood concepts—and all the while, maintaining bodily integrity.

Well, hold on there officer, I’ve got a mnemonic device in the glove.

Here’s your ABC’s in reverse. Of course, it may be incriminating if you sing the colloquial sections backwards.

“The Reversed Alphabet Song”

♬ ♬ ♬ “Me, with play you won’t time next, C’s, B A, My know I now. Z ,and Y, X, Double U, V, UTS, RQP, ONMLK, JIHG, FEDCBA.” ♬ ♬ ♬


So when you reverse the above song, you’ll hear the familiar tune to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”.

“The Reversed Reversed Alphabet Song”


amadeus_l

The “Alphabet Song” and “Twinkle, Twinkle” are all based on the same folk melody written by…get this: Fuckin’ Mozart!

Next time your band gets pulled over, why not subject the cops to a breath test of your own—a “Hold-Your-Breath-The-Longest” Test!

Because of your melodic inversions and lung capacity, I’m letting you boys off with a warning. Rock on. And rock safe.

(And if you couldn’t get enough, here’s the original…)

Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Good

The high B and C on a pianoforte drive the spirits away. Every house should have a baby Steinway, just in case, for bustin’s sake.

Oh, but don’t you go anywhere poltergeists! You can rap upon the walls, bewitch the acoustics and electronics. Add some much-needed white noise. Watch Murray hit this little semitone upside down on the youtube below.

I just love piano humor. Ya know? Like Victor Borge?

Owlisimo

Igor Stravinsky relates the following story in his “Conversations with Robert Craft” (Now with computerized sounds!):

“On a recent visit to Asolo, to see the composer Malipiero, I was strongly reminded of D’Annunzio. Malipiero has a most extraordinary and not entirely un-D’Annunzian house himself, a fine Venetian building on a hillside. One enters under a Latin inscription and plunges into darkest night. The dark is in deference to pairs of owls who, from covered cages in obscure corners, hoot the two notes,

in tune with Malipiero’s piano after he plays them. There is evidence in the garden of affection for other of God’s feathered creatures: chickens have been buried in marked graves; Malipiero’s chickens die of old age.”

Reading this little passage so many years ago, I realized animals can make notes as well. Not just sounds, but music too. Non-human animal music is as glorious as any human, aleatoric, or industrial music.

The breakup of the narrative with a single little score, provided the inspiration for the blog you’re reading now. Notes and text, side by side, like they used to be, when poetry was sung. When Beowulf was a Pop Song.

I’m not sure what kind of owls Malipiero kept on his property, as his personal strigine piano tuners, but they apparently hooted a high Eb and D over and over (Drag over the score above). That’s a semitone interval, the very smallest interval there is.

Think of Igor, entering this strange manor, under moonlight, with the portamento winds blowing, and two bassy owls taunting the poor Russian with their darkling semitones. Not unlike, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, a completely semitonal score featuring F’s and F#’s.

Thank you Stravinsky, you caprine-miened Rusky!

Simiophone

Yo, listen to this gorilla’s territorial jam on the youtube below.



First, the gorilla warms up with a series of ascending hoots like an owl, like a walking bass line, before pummeling out a thunderous drum fill on the membranophone of his own body, where every pec is a tom tom. This 4/4 chest beat carries for miles, letting other silverbacks in the jamboree know who’s got the fastest fists, or tightest pecadiddles or whatever. (And these guys are freakin’ vegan too!)

Gorillas use music for intimidation. They wardrums are found right there on they chests. It’s probably the same for human drummers. Los Doggies is all for raging against the dying of the machines and whatnot. It’s like the Yellow Emperor said,

Music begins with fear, and because of this fear there is dread, as of a curse. Then I add the weariness, and because of the weariness there is compliance. I end it all with the confusion and because of the confusion there is stupidity. And because of the stupidity there is the Way, the Way that can be lifted up and carried around wherever you go.

Musicquito

This mosquito’s got the high E. She plays it on her wings like all the other insects.
Roll over the notehead below.

Should you hear this Blood Tone, you’d do well to make haste. Mosquitoes kill more people than any other animal. Or, if you practice ahimsa, maybe you can vamp on the mosquito’s drone. Just hit a high E on your guitar!


e—–12-12-12-12-12-12-12———-
b————————————————–
g————————————————–
d————————————————–
a————————————————–
e————————————————–


The Interspecies Orchestra is jamming all the time. Try not to kill or be killed by your bandmates. Peace babies!