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Doing Music Differently,  Shoki Family,  Kalimba Family,  Bowus Family,  Work-In-Progress, Help-Us-Pay-the-Rent

Doing Music Differently*** Shoki Family*** Kalimba Family*** Bowus Family*** Notation*** Practice
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( To hear our instruments, click on this link to our Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog )

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We started playing music together and started making instruments in 1991 when we were living in Varanasi, India.
( The Indian Music Scene, The Street Singer )

Since then these two efforts have grown in parallel, like siblings in the same family, and it’s impossible to understand either one without looking at the other.

For one thing, by allowing us to create music from sounds that never before existed, our instruments almost guaranteed that we would produce music that is very different.

This is especially true because our self-made instruments have not been engineered to produce only tones from the official chromatic scales ( Notation ).  Instead their individual notes are funky with strange harmonics and differ in tone quality as well as in pitch.

Even beyond this, there are definitely sounds they want to make and sounds they just will not make, which in effect means that they have taught us how they want to be played.  And so we have found ourselves in the enviable position of being able to discover our new music, rather than of facing the dauntingly difficult task of having to invent it.

Of course, despite centuries of hard work by dedicated designers, a conventional instrument also does not produce totally uniform and regular sounds across its entire range.  So string and brass instruments have wolf notes, while the lowest notes of a piano are only somewhat there.

However players of conventional instruments, rather than being encouraged to take advantage of these interesting irregularities, are instead thoroughly disciplined to avoid them.
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Consider for example what happens to someone learning to play the cello, a totally awesome instrument which is in fact capable of making an astonishing range of different sounds.  Pretty quickly the frowns and harsh comments of the teacher makes a student understand that most of these are absolutely forbidden.

And so the student is trained to avoid sounds that fall between the official notes ( Notation ), to avoid squeaks, to avoid whisper tones, and to produce a consistently loud round sound ( Practice ).

Which is perfectly reasonable and correct if one’s object is to learn to play Bach ( and this is of course a most laudable object ).

However if one is looking to produce musical newness, this sort of training is counter productive and in fact puts the seeker into a kind of mental straightjacket.

Because by the time a student has become proficient at playing the cello, they’ve learned to avoid 90% of the sounds which their instrument is capable of making.
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In any case the manifest irregularity of the sounds produced by our instruments has forced us to listen carefully and to learn to hear very small intervals.

And obviously this sensitivity has been vital for our evolutionary approach to music, where for learning, listening must take the place of studying.  ( Practice )

However initially we found it less easy to understand why it was that after concentrating for a while on making instruments, when our focus shifted back to playing them, we always discovered that our music had grown.

But now we accept this as yet more proof that our unspecialized approach to creating new music works.  Or to say it another way, we believe that if we live music more completely, if we make instruments as well as playing them, more interesting music is one natural result.

Shoki Family
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The simple bamboo flutes in our Shoki Family ( versions of the traditional Japanese shakuhachi ) first introduced us to the world of microtones, since even though it is  “tuned” by the spacing, size, and shape of the finger holes, partial closings and mouth-tongue-breath control allow one to slide smoothly among its notes and so to produce a whole universe of microtones.

This combined with the way a shoki can whisper, blast, quiver, and generally twist notes in all sorts of intoxicating ways, makes it an instrument well suited to madness and getting lost, which not surprizingly is the way we generally have used it.

No doubt this protected us from getting stuck in the limitations of conventional shakuhachi style.  Instead of using our flutes to diligently practice tunes from the sadly shrunken traditional repertoire, they quickly became tools for freeing up our breathing, and before we’d even noticed, our shoki playing had morphed into sadhana ( spiritual exercise ), had gone way beyond being just a prelude to performance.
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Kalimba family
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The newer instruments in our Kalimba Family have evolved to the point that they are only distantly related to the African thumb piano which was their ancestor and original inspiration.

This became obvious by 1998  when we built basus ( short for bass chromatic kalimba ), an instrument 26 inches wide that has 24 linearly arranged keys tuned a half note apart.  Since then we’ve gone on to build Four-woods, a second chromatically tuned kalimba, and two quatertone instruments each of which is 37 inches wide and has 48 keys tuned a quarternote apart.

These four instruments are the only keyboard like instruments that we know of where the sound is made by striking something directly with one’s fingertips.  More commonly a keyboard’s sound is indirectly produced by something that hits or plucks a string, by a hammer that strikes a piece of wood or metal, or by dancing electrons.

And this simple directness makes possible the very sensitive and sensual control of both tone quality and volume.

Also since every key is individually hammered out from high carbon steel rod and has its own funky tone quality, the tuning of our kalimbas is less uniform and regular than that of any conventional more machine-like keyboard.  Add to this that each key has a very different “touch”, and it means that playing one of our kalimba keyboards is more like walking over a mountain trail than marching along a perfectly flat and regular city sidewalk ( Notation ).
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Bowus Family
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We developed our Bowus Family because we wanted low pitched fretless bowable instruments that we could play while seated cross legged.

Bass bowus, the most recently completed of these instruments is eight feet long and has only a single string.
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All of the members of our bowus family are fretless and so like our shokis are well suited to playing microtones.  This of course is also true of fretless official instruments like the cello, but as we’ve noted, students of these instruments spend years learning to avoid the tones between the notes, whereas we’ve given ourselves permission to seek them out.
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……with our own hands
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Incidentally, when we say we make these instruments, we mean we actually build them with our own hands       ( Unspecialized ).  The next two pictures show me hammering out quartus keys in our driveway and Mitsuko filing them in our little portal.  The metal we’re working is very hard high carbon steel, which probably explains why we both look somewhat stressed out.  ( It’s supposed to be impossible to cold hammer high carbon steel, but when we first did it we didn’t know it couldn’t be done, and so our keys have turned out just fine….. )
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Doing Music Differently*** Shoki Family*** Kalimba Family*** Bowus Family*** Notation*** Practice
Unspecialized*** Home****Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****Buy Our Music