Re: Wav files and conlang and like pronunciation?

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


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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)
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Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an.
"The gods have retractible claws."
                                from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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