Re: OT: Chinese zither

At 10:13 AM 9/18/03 +0100, you wrote:
>Staving Isidora Zamora:
>
>>>End blown, side blown, with or without a block?
>>
>>What's a block?  Side blown.
>
>A block is found in the English flute, or recorder. It seals one end of the
>tube, apart from a narrow channel through which the air is blown. Just
>after the block is the edge which generates the vibration. IIRC, the German
>for recorder is Blockflöte.
No, no block flutes, as far as I know.  Those are more difficult to make,
due to having to get that sharp lip in exactly the right place.  I suppose
that they could make a block flute; they are good at decorative
woodcarving, so they have the precision necessary to get the edge in the
right place, and they have the animal-based glue neccessary to keep the
block in place.  How do you hollow out a block flute made of wood?  I've
seen it done on TV with Colonial-era drills to make a recorder, but I'm not
certain what sort of drills the Cwendaso have.  The Trehelish (and
Nidirino), OTOH, do have a lot of hand-tool up to about Western 18th
century standards.  (Though there are other things that Westerners had in
the 18th century, such as eyeglasses and telescopes, that they don't
have.)   An idea that I just had was a large wooden blockflute with heavy
relief-carving over the entire (exterior) surface of it.  (If it's
Cwendaso, they would almost certainly paint the relief carvings.)  That
would be a neat-looking instrument.  But I wonder how the carving would
affect the tone of the instrument?

What I'll probably do is go over my options for musical instruments and
then assign one to several instruments from each class to each of my three
concultures.  (There are other cultures beyond them, but they don't figure
into the story, so are not currently being developed.)  The playing or
singing of music is an important part of the story at many points, so I do
need to fully develop the ideas for musical instruments.

>>>How many holes, if any? Or do they make
>>>overblowing flutes?
>>
>>Overblowing sounds familiar, but I can't recall the meaning of the term.
>
>Exciting a higher harmonic by blowing harder, especially on the English flute.
Duh!  If I'd had to guess, that is what I would have guessed it meant.  I
did once know the term.

Yes, I'm pretty certain that they overblow, or at least that the better
players who play for serious perfomances do.  It's not really possible to
get a very extened range on the instrument without overblowing, and
overblowing is a very natural thing to do.  (Though I think that the flute
has to be made for it; my bamboo flute starts to go radically out of tune
when I overblow to get a second octave -- I can only get the first two or
three notes of the second octave.)

As far as scales, I really don't know much about the structure of their
music.  I think that an octave may be a basic unit of their music because
flutes are an important instrument, and the octave is a very natural thing
on the flute because of overblowing.  (There's also the issue that if two
people sing an octave apart, the notes naturally blend in a pleasing
fashion.)  It it possible, of course, for musical systems not to be based
on scales at all, and theirs may not be.  I strongly suspect that they use
semitones, and perhaps even quarter-tones (or similarly small intervals),
especially in singing and on strings.  If Cwendaso music is even tonal in
character, then it is possible that it was pentatonic at an earlier time
and evolved into a much more comlplex system.  Somehow, I can't imagine
their music being pentatonic at this point in time.

As far as the trios of flutes which are tuned to each other, I have
considered that they could be played in a polyphonic manner somewhat
reminicent of old Russian put' chant.  (All Orthodox liturgical music is
acapella, so put' was purely vocal, but a similar thing could be done with
instruments.)  In put' chant, if I am getting this correct (if I am not, my
husband will correct me), there are three parts, all of them melody.  The
ranges may overlap, but one part sings high, one low, and one in the
middle.  There are three individual melody lines which do not move in
unison with each other, but complement each other.  So I'm thinking of
Cwendaso flute music doing something like that.  (I suppose that I lean
this way because I like Bach and Telemann immensely -- for the intricately
interwoven melodies.  Harmonization is not nearly so fun.)

>>Bison horns are fairly short, I think, but I have read of aurochs horns
>>being up to 6 feet in length.  (It's not actually an animal that you want
>>to mess with.)
>
>Here's an idea for you. Get an Aurochs horn, hollow it out, make a
>mouthpiece at the narrow end, and add finger holes in various places. You
>now have a form of serpent.
Serpent?  Is that some sort of horn?  Any idea what the mouthpiece would be
made of?  I would think that you could make a pretty impressive instrument
out of an aurochs horn (of course, the things have been extinct for several
centuries, but that doesn't stop me from having them in my little conworld.)

Isidora

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