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Re: Wav files and conlang and like pronunciation?

From:Sally Caves <scaves@...>
Date:Saturday, December 11, 1999, 20:52
And Rosta wrote:

> I cannot find the version of the Mizarian Porcupine Opera that I heard > this summer on holiday in Italy. That was the first opportunity I'd had > to get access to a PC with speakers, so I sought out the opera fragment, > loved it, and annoyed people by singing it for the rest of the holiday. > But I couldn't save a copy. I think it was a MIDI rather than Real Audio. > Is it still available?
I'm getting an error message for that site, too, which I had created a link for on one of my files. Also, Hermann, in updating some of your excellent sound bytes, you've moved ahead of me, and I have to get a new RealPlayer to play them! :-( Oh well, so what else is new?
> (BTW, I adore all the music I've found on your sites. I rather profligately > spent a couple of hours the other day trying to decide which Starling > song version I preferred.)
I like Hermann's music too. I hope, And, you decided that you liked each one equally! We're all so different!
> I'm also enjoying Sally-Teonaht songs, tho they seem both more and less > familiar than Herman's - more like musics I've heard before, whereas > Herman's are more like stuff I've heard only in my head but never > found outside it.
Is that because Herman's work deliberately stretches the common twelve-tone scale? He's got sixteen tone scales, I believe, which is what gives his Porcupine Opera such a strange twang. And the minor quality of his Starling Song is enhanced by a really powerful echo, edited in. My work is much more consciously European... I hate to say Celtic, but it's an influence! The Vul Vampin Song tinkers with expectations, a little bit, by going minor in a major scale. But for the most part, I stick to a twelve tones. And to fairly conventional (usually minor key) harmonies. A group I like is called (or that's the name of their CD) _Tra"_, the word for "wood" in Swedish. It's a a very talented group in Finland and the first song, in Finnish (they alternate between Finnish and Swedish), is a very strange and compelling piece wherein the male singers gradually begin to sing quarter tones, producing the most exciting kind of tension in a song that is already vatic and otherworldly. I think this technique is common in Bulgarian women's choirs--to produce quarter tones. Herman is experimenting with some exciting musical innovations. ANOTHER piece--while I'm at it--that I just adore, and which might be more familiar to most of you, is the weird song in Jocelyn Pook's new album _Flood_. It was originally entitled "Backwards Priests," and she included it in an arrangement for a ballet called "Deluge." When Stanley Kubrick was walking through the set for _Eyes Wide Shut_ he heard one of his actors playing "Backwards Priests" on a CD, and he was so compelled by it that he coopted it for the famous scene. That was the only part of the movie I really liked: Tom Cruise enters as poseur into the private world of the masked, and that's the music that is being played. It sounds like a Satanic Mass, and I only put my finger on what was so deliciously disturbing about the music when I got Pook's CD: the lyrics are sung backwards. I can't tell WHAT is being played backwards, probably Latin (since the rest of the CD is devoted to themes of death and the millenium: Requiem Mass, dies irae, etc.). Language recorded backwards, SUNG backwards, has a characteristic quality to it that is very eery: plosives are wrong, stops are wrong, diphthongs run backwards; imagine what this does to conventional melodies. I had thought it was an invented language at first. I'm still curious about Lisa Girard and invented languages. Anybody know her music? And what about Sally Oldfield? Is anybody old enough on the list and nuts enough about musical renditions of Tolkien to remember her? _Waterbearer_. Sally ============================================================ SALLY CAVES scaves@frontiernet.net http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves (bragpage) http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html (T. homepage) http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html (all else) ===================================================================== Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an. "The gods have retractible claws." from _The Gospel of Bastet_ ============================================================