Almeomusica

[sasasha]

Right.

I've worked on Almean music for... Wow... 3 years now.

I had a flurry of sharing ideas on here, then a spate of many emails with zomp (which I'm so grateful for: wonderful to work directly with the originator of this probably uniquely rich treasure trove of data and creative inspiration).

I'm shy, I have ADHD and I have some caring responsibilities, so with one thing and another, I've got rubbish at sharing my work.

I'm also a complete perfectionist. This has kinda got to stop. Otherwise I'll go mad!

So without anything like the kind of couching and context I would like, here is some stuff to listen to:

Caďinorian hexatonic modes
Song of Ervëa - taster
Dičura folk melody from Bolon / Pronel / Xasno

I haven't even shared these with Mark yet: there's much which I have, which he has encouraged me to share, so watch this space. Mark - and everyone! - please let me know if these are of interest or you feel miss or hit any marks.

(NB Caďinorians had music notation. Cuzeians didn't - but there are complex reasons for this; actually the 6th century work of a Cuzeian physicist called Einatu provides some fairly useful explanations of Cuzeian scales, and with it have sometimes been preserved as marginalia some seemingly nonsense Cuzeian poems, which have been suggested to encode melodies, but are rather difficult to decipher.)

What do you want to hear next? Something Kebreni? Something Lácaturian? Something Barakhinei? Something Ismaîn? Something Skourene?

Also to come: videos with demos. Notation systems. In-world musicology in English-translation. Encyclopedic material. Charts for you to print and even sticker templates to stick onto instruments to be able to play like an Almean.

Ask any and all questions! If I haven't thought about it already I will no doubt enjoy being prompted! I'm not pretending that these recordings ‘are’ Almean recordings, of course. Everything I've done are more sort of gateways. I also think it's still fair to say none of this is set in stone; at least, that's the way I'd prefer to continue to think of it, because I will always be at some risk of overlooking some detail in the 2.5million words out there about Almea. I like to be able to be corrected.

Final note: I'm not letting myself think (much) about the Almea＋400 period yet. Tens of thousands of years of history over four continents is scope enough (to last me the rest of my life, probably!).

[zompist]

Thanks for the update! I'm happy to hear new stuff, and I'm glad you have some tracks both explaining and exemplifying what you're talking about. (I think you can't underestimate how much music theory most of us know...)

I hope you'll go back to that Lácaturian song I wrote the lyrics for. I really want to hear some Kë Marã, but that can wait. Oh, and I want to hear some of that elcarin music.

Minor point: ë is pronounced [je], so Ervëa should be [εr 'vje a]. (Probably my single weirdest spelling, but it makes more sense if you know Russian...)

[Travis B.]

Minor point: ë is pronounced [je], so Ervëa should be [εr 'vje a]. (Probably my single weirdest spelling, but it makes more sense if you know Russian...)

I thought <ё> was [jo] or [ʲɵ] in Russian, and plain <e> was [je], [ʲe] or [e].

[Emily]

i think zompist was referring more generally to palatalized consonants being indicated by vowel letters rather than by consonant letters themselves

[zompist]

Minor point: ë is pronounced [je], so Ervëa should be [εr 'vje a]. (Probably my single weirdest spelling, but it makes more sense if you know Russian...)

I thought <ё> was [jo] or [ʲɵ] in Russian, and plain <e> was [je], [ʲe] or [e].

Russian <ë> is /jo/ or /ʲo/, the ʲ applying to the previous consonant. Verdurian shares the idea of indicating /j/ or palatalization with <ë>, but not the change in quality.

[WeepingElf]

Well, the usage of umlaut dots in the transcription of Verdurian is not very consistent: ö and ü are front rounded vowels as in German, but ä is long (the only phonemic long vowel in the language) and ë is /je/. This shows that we are dealing with a language that was started in his youth. But there are natlangs whose orthographies are equally messy.

[sasasha]

Of course! I ‘know’ how to pronounce Vd. <ë>, but it's another thing to actually do it!

I have to say I quite like the inconsistency wrt diaerises in Verdurian; after all, why should Cyrillic <e> and <ë> have their Russian values? And even ‘consistent’ orthographies, e.g. Turkish, have their serious imbalances...

Would you mind, Zomp, if I share the draft of the Lácaturian song? I do (still) need to make the changes to it we discussed... But for now, it might serve as a placeholder, and inspire amendment through scrutiny.

And ok, elcarin music... Yes! I need to break in to the nearby quarry with some mics in the dead of night.

[zompist]

Would you mind, Zomp, if I share the draft of the Lácaturian song? I do (still) need to make the changes to it we discussed... But for now, it might serve as a placeholder, and inspire amendment through scrutiny.

No problem!

And ok, elcarin music... Yes! I need to break in to the nearby quarry with some mics in the dead of night.

Wear a hard hat!

[Ares Land]

That is a really great project! I'm a bit sad I can't ask much in the way of interesting questions... I don't know anything about music or musical theory!

If I can make suggestions, I'd love to know how Academy-era Xurnese music sounds like.
Just a tiny bit of it, or a brief sketch of the overall picture of course! I do understand this is probably one of the hardest parts of your project...

[Man in Space]

And ok, elcarin music... Yes! I need to break in to the nearby quarry with some mics in the dead of night.

Wear a hard hat!

Is it…is it literal rock music

[zompist]

And ok, elcarin music... Yes! I need to break in to the nearby quarry with some mics in the dead of night.

Wear a hard hat!

Is it…is it literal rock music

No... the elcari like to make special instruments and play them in specially constructed rooms. They aren't interested in melody so much as novel and interesting acoustic patterns. Paul McCartney would be a terrible elcar. You get famous in elcarin music by creating a sound no one has ever heard before.

[alice]

And ok, elcarin music... Yes! I need to break in to the nearby quarry with some mics in the dead of night.

Wear a hard hat!

Is it…is it literal rock music

(drumroll)

[sasasha]

Wear a hard hat!

Is it…is it literal rock music

No... the elcari like to make special instruments and play them in specially constructed rooms. They aren't interested in melody so much as novel and interesting acoustic patterns. Paul McCartney would be a terrible elcar. You get famous in elcarin music by creating a sound no one has ever heard before.

It's worth pointing out that originally, that possibly did mean literal rock music. Silices selected and optimised just for their spectral acoustic properties, left off the main pile, and taken in the evening to analogies of today's ‘music rooms’ (perhaps once parts of caverns, etc.) to get some enjoyment out of...

There's a museum of prehistory in Inde-sur-Loire I visited this summer, in the cellars of which is a film of a guy making replica silices in the Neolithic way; the sound is amazing, and a few of those going at once in a resonant space would provide some fantastic raw material for the musical imagination. Each type of rock and ore sounds different - hence the intense elcar interest in acoustic signatures of materials.

As elcarin manufacturing moved past solely working with rocks a long time ago, other materials get more of a look-in - and these days electronic music, again with a spectral focus, is all the rage in the khak.

I also see the elcarin musical aesthetic as fundamentally rhythmic as well as spectral (they enjoy mathematics); and obsessive about controlling and exploiting parameters such as mordents, decay, and reverb from surfaces of varying distance etc, hence the specialist rooms. It's not a uniform phenomenon, I don't think: if there are genres of elcarin music, they're probably split broadly into more ‘solitary’ and more ‘social’ practices. Not so much in terms of performance (a social affair) but in terms of whether the invention, building and practice processes happen by oneself or in groups.

I think I remember writing about horns and trumpets of various materials too; and the idea of mountain valleys as natural resonators. So not only are special resonators constructed for specific instruments, but special instruments are constructed for specific resonators.

I don't have any to show, but would like at some point to make some elcar-inspired music from the Western Wild; I've got a rhythm earworm for a piece called Čumolunma which, perhaps, one might hear in Funky...

[sasasha]

Here is (what I think of as a demo of) a ‘sad song of Lácatur’ which Mark wrote the text for and I worked on in 2020-21.

Velne Ažirei


Text

Zevu esë / läzne zëin
Ažirei bere / ilet im brakin
Žinî, řo yanu / zevum ziëi

My man / went to the sea
Ažirei locks / him in her arms
Girls, don’t love / a man of the sea

V1
E suedec dënî / isuvne zëin
E žodec dënî / řo onžane
Zëi pirode / Zëi prene
Velne Ažirei / veaďa esë

Sixty days ago / he left for the sea
Eighty days ago / he hasn’t returned
The sea bestows / The sea takes
Ažirei stole / my love

V2
Läznai Canan / mižao e lebi
Eta zevu esë / läzne zëin?
Aďnáen cuesnai / pruson cuesnai
Ay ca oternu / potece ce-zevum

I went to Cana / I said, is there news
About my man / (who) went to the sea?
I asked at the temple / I asked at the bar
Oh they knew / that man well

V3
Baruce im brakin / Ažireë ce-zevu
Nom lië e tot / žina ket tene
Ay žina de muďe / cure im mažulan
Velne Ažirei / veaďa esë

He lies in the arms / of Ažirei, that man
That was her name / the girl he has
Oh, another girl / he keeps in town
Ažirei stole / my love


Instrumentation

In 2020-21 I was studying at RNCM in Manchester and did a composition module in which I was paired up with a violinist and a soprano. Fantastic, I thought, I'll ask Mark for a text that would work for soprano and endivyón. Sadly Covid kinda kiboshed the other player’s/singer’s involvement; but the fantastic text was there ready to go.

So my draft became the real thing. It's me singing, and me playing a £15 violin I got off Amazon. For reference, I've never played the violin.

I was already on a voyage of discovery, prompted by discussions in the Music of Verduria thread, about a folksy ‘baďul’ style of playing the endivyón, where the strings are hit with the back of the bow, which is optimised (including tip-weighting and being coated in Nanese rubber) to provide as excellent a beater on one side as it does a haired bow on the other.

In baďul playing, the strings are stopped with a srava in the left hand (literally a ‘shell’). This can be any sort of slider: specially-made, ornamental ceramic ones eventually became popular, but anything of more or less the right properties will do (a pestle I had was great). For this recording I literally used a shell which was a handy shape: I could hold its bulbous joint area firmly on the strings and slide it, but I also had some fingers free to do jobs like muting strings and producing harmonics. I was beating with a stick I found in the forest: then I got a dulcimer hammer with a leather strip on its head, a bit like the rubber tip I'd been imagining. The overall effect is a bit like Hawai'ian guitar crossed with a hammered dulcimer: you get slides, and you get a distinctive beaten tone.

You also get ‘ghost notes’. More on these another time.

I spent about a billion hours trying to improve my baďul endivyón playing. Far more hours than I had to fit in the module. It was particularly time-consuming because I was also designing a...


Tuning System

I can't discuss this at length right now: but I developed a tuning system whose history stretched from Xurno to Bolon, to odd corners of Eretald such as Rhânor via Naviu and Somoyi-Methelyi peoples, and took root in Barakhûn and Lácatur. I have a piece of psuedo-musicology which I'll link here later; it explains it a bit more. Edit: ok, it's here.

Suffice to say, whilst some of the interesting tuning moments you might hear in the piece will be my amateurish endivyón technique, there is an intentional schema going on. I'll try to explain it over time!


Musical notation

Yes, I invented a Verdurian music notation system and tried to notate the piece. You'll have to wait though: reinventing the wheel so much was time-consuming as hell. I got through about 10 bars of it. But watch this space!


Revisions

Mark was very encouraging about this draft. IIRC he was keen to see a more passionate, concerned emotional quality come in to the 2nd verse. A new version is still planned which will make these and other changes!!


I had some very interesting tutorials that went along the lines of ‘Why on earth do you want to do that?’ - then 45 minutes of intense waffle later ‘OK, well, that's the first time anyone's reason has been quite that nerdalicious’ etc.


Please let me know what you think of the piece. Despite it seeming rough and ready, it was still a labour of love! It will be great to revisit it so please let me know if you have any suggestions.

The piece can be heard here (and at the top of this post).

[sasasha]

More sounds from the Western Wild:

Beliaun

To supplement the recording of Velne Ažirei, I'm sharing a piece which is prototypical of the Barakhinei/Lácaturian baďul endivyón style; I've named it Beliaun after a place-name deep in the foothills of the Elkarin Mountains.

It must needs represent a little community performance as there are several endivyóns going at once in parts where the main tune needs bolstering up. It has a quieter section for one player too. It's intentionally ‘rough’ feeling, energetic and percussive in a folsky, semi-precise way; that is all intrinsic to the style. I think of it as good accompaniment music for a storytelling, dance or even a village show/play... And its structure makes it orally didactic: young players first learn to follow a tune, then listen to adults make up something a bit more subtle for contrast.

I like its bouncy, chaotic drive against a rhythmic drone... In the middle section you can also hear some of the more mysterious sonorities that can be found in this style. Its scale is not part of the ‘Barakhinei Scales of the West’ system alluded to in the last post, but natively Eretaldan*. It is hexatonic (in Eretald, that's a marker of archaicism), though it is not in the ‘classical’ Caďinorian hexatonic modes - which equal our dorian or aeolian modes lacking a 7th, but rather lacks a 6th (and focuses on its minor 7th - in our terms it's the dorian without a 6th).

An action point for me: it could be fleshed out by percussion. In this part of the Western Wild, alongside drums we get a lot of metallic unpitched percussion. And a disclaimer: Almean endivyóns are optimised for this style; I think their string tension is higher than my model, their beaters are coated in rubber, and in various ways that I can't really say because I'm not (yet!!) a luthier, the sound of the beating should be a little less abrasive and a little more pleasing when produced by the correct instrument and an experienced player.

(From a Verdurian perspective, the chief Lácaturian instrument, beside the endivyón and more rustic representatives of the vyon family, is the tent-pegs**. Like the spoons. In fact, it's a little deeper than that: found/discarded metal objects have been around in these parts for far longer than uesti have understood metallurgy. They've always been good to hit together and fill the steep valleys that fall down to the savannah with echoes. Lácatur might be said to have osmosed a tradition of metallophonic percussion from its proximity to the elcar; tent-pegs are just a portable example that fits with the Verdurian perception of Lácaturians.)


*Although it has some markers of that sound-world, as its minor 3rd is usually a bit high like the confusingly named ‘Lácaturian 4th’, and from 1'27 you hear alternation between the Eretaldan minor 3rd and the just slightly lower ‘Lácaturian 2nd’. I promise more clarity on these scales and their nomenclature... in time!

**Zomp, a term for this instrument would be fun to have. The lexicon has čayma for tent (borrowed via Barakhinei from Naviu), sfica for ‘nail’, and rožek (< Caď. ‘little horn’) for ‘peg’. If you like this thought about the peoples in closest proximity to the elcar sometimes using elcarin scrap as elements of their culture, I wooonder if it we could coin a Verdurian borrowing/calque of a Barakhinei term that might once have meant ‘discarded, pointy bit of metal the elcar seem to have left lying around which we can probably use for something’ (something in the field of scrap/debri/leftovers...), and fill in the slight semantic gap between ‘nail’ and ‘little horn’ to name a metal peg that people in this parts might have been using for a long time for various useful jobs. Imagine pre-industrial people finding a discarded bunch of perfectly machined long screws, for instance. It's something you'd probably want a name for.

[bradrn]

An action point for me: it could be fleshed out by percussion. In this part of the Western Wild, alongside drums we get a lot of metallic unpitched percussion. And a disclaimer: Almean endivyóns are optimised for this style; I think their string tension is higher than my model, their beaters are coated in rubber, and in various ways that I can't really say because I'm not (yet!!) a luthier, the sound of the beating should be a little less abrasive and a little more pleasing when produced by the correct instrument and an experienced player.

I’m a drummer, and would be willing to help out if possible.

[sasasha]

An action point for me: it could be fleshed out by percussion. In this part of the Western Wild, alongside drums we get a lot of metallic unpitched percussion. And a disclaimer: Almean endivyóns are optimised for this style; I think their string tension is higher than my model, their beaters are coated in rubber, and in various ways that I can't really say because I'm not (yet!!) a luthier, the sound of the beating should be a little less abrasive and a little more pleasing when produced by the correct instrument and an experienced player.

I’m a drummer, and would be willing to help out if possible.

Fantastic; I'm very happy for you to try out some stuff that could work with this and send it over. Collaboration is amazing and something I can't simulate well by myself!

I think the ethos of this is: think through the parameters until they feel right, improvise, tweak parameters, rinse repeat. I record my improvisation sessions (some hours long) and listen back a lot, making note of what grabs me to inform the next session.

The parameters here are:

• What kind of instruments would the people I'm imagining be most likely to fashion?

• How can I simulate the sounds those instruments would make?

• What kind of performance contexts make sense for this culture, this piece and these players?

• How can I simulate those?

• How would the people I'm imagining think about, talk about, learn etc the sounds and patterns of sound I'm arriving at though this method?

• How can I imbue myself with (at least as many as possible of) those thoughts, rather than solely the ones instilled in me by own training and culture?

I've given you a few pointers in the previous posts, and Zomp may have more to say (I find that ‘discovering’ playing styles etc is a lot easier when there's an in-world mental scaffolding e.g. I can think ‘it's going to be an endi er srava piece in the baďul style, as might be heard in Beliaun at a local storytelling and dance event’, so the terminology being narrowed down may help). I'd be more than interested to hear what you as a percussionist might do with that brief!

Any of these paramaters, btw, may have already been documented somewhere: I search the Almeopedia, check any relevant lexicons, search in grammars for key words, and seach here to double check whether these ideas have been treated before. If in doubt, I ask Zomp!

Edit: I may have misunderstood: I thought you meant help make a percussion element to this track; perhaps you meant help me work out how to optimise the sound of the beaten endivyón? In either case, by all means!

[bradrn]

The parameters here are:

• What kind of instruments would the people I'm imagining be most likely to fashion?

• How can I simulate the sounds those instruments would make?

• What kind of performance contexts make sense for this culture, this piece and these players?

• How can I simulate those?

• How would the people I'm imagining think about, talk about, learn etc the sounds and patterns of sound I'm arriving at though this method?

• How can I imbue myself with (at least as many as possible of) those thoughts, rather than solely the ones instilled in me by own training and culture?

I've given you a few pointers in the previous posts, and Zomp may have more to say (I find that ‘discovering’ playing styles etc is a lot easier when there's an in-world mental scaffolding e.g. I can think ‘it's going to be an endi er srava piece in the baďul style, as might be heard in Beliaun at a local storytelling and dance event’, so the terminology being narrowed down may help). I'd be more than interested to hear what you as a percussionist might do with that brief!

Oh dear… I’m starting to suspect my Almeological knowledge is not nearly sufficient for this. For all that I’ve been here for a while (and been lurking for even longer), I don’t actually know very much about Verduria, let alone anywhere else on Almea.

Edit: I may have misunderstood: I thought you meant help make a percussion element to this track; perhaps you meant help me work out how to optimise the sound of the beaten endivyón? In either case, by all means!

I did mean the former, but I’d be fine to help with anything I can. I do have a violin, but it’s 10 years old, child-sized, and half the hair in the bow has fallen out. (Also, ‘have’ is probably too strong a word… there’s a distinct possibility that it disappeared into the aether at some point.)

[sasasha]

The parameters here are:

• What kind of instruments would the people I'm imagining be most likely to fashion?

• How can I simulate the sounds those instruments would make?

• What kind of performance contexts make sense for this culture, this piece and these players?

• How can I simulate those?

• How would the people I'm imagining think about, talk about, learn etc the sounds and patterns of sound I'm arriving at though this method?

• How can I imbue myself with (at least as many as possible of) those thoughts, rather than solely the ones instilled in me by own training and culture?

I've given you a few pointers in the previous posts, and Zomp may have more to say (I find that ‘discovering’ playing styles etc is a lot easier when there's an in-world mental scaffolding e.g. I can think ‘it's going to be an endi er srava piece in the baďul style, as might be heard in Beliaun at a local storytelling and dance event’, so the terminology being narrowed down may help). I'd be more than interested to hear what you as a percussionist might do with that brief!

Oh dear… I’m starting to suspect my Almeological knowledge is not nearly sufficient for this. For all that I’ve been here for a while (and been lurking for even longer), I don’t actually know very much about Verduria, let alone anywhere else on Almea.

I didn't mean to intimidate! If you want to play around with this, please feel free! Even if you don't tie it all in with some dense Almean neural scaffolding, it might still be useful and interesting!

Plus, doing all this was a great way for me to learn about Almea.

[bradrn]

The parameters here are:

• What kind of instruments would the people I'm imagining be most likely to fashion?

• How can I simulate the sounds those instruments would make?

• What kind of performance contexts make sense for this culture, this piece and these players?

• How can I simulate those?

• How would the people I'm imagining think about, talk about, learn etc the sounds and patterns of sound I'm arriving at though this method?

• How can I imbue myself with (at least as many as possible of) those thoughts, rather than solely the ones instilled in me by own training and culture?

I've given you a few pointers in the previous posts, and Zomp may have more to say (I find that ‘discovering’ playing styles etc is a lot easier when there's an in-world mental scaffolding e.g. I can think ‘it's going to be an endi er srava piece in the baďul style, as might be heard in Beliaun at a local storytelling and dance event’, so the terminology being narrowed down may help). I'd be more than interested to hear what you as a percussionist might do with that brief!

Oh dear… I’m starting to suspect my Almeological knowledge is not nearly sufficient for this. For all that I’ve been here for a while (and been lurking for even longer), I don’t actually know very much about Verduria, let alone anywhere else on Almea.

I didn't mean to intimidate! If you want to play around with this, please feel free! Even if you don't tie it all in with some dense Almean neural scaffolding, it might still be useful and interesting!

No worries… I’m just not someone who likes to do things by half measures!