untravelledpath

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

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Shoki Family***Kalimba Family***Bowus Family
Doing Music Differently****Notation***Practice***Performance***Unspecialized
Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****The Indian Music Scene
Home****Buy Our Music

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We started making instruments and playing them together in 1991 when we were living in Varanasi, India.  ( The Indian Music Scene, The Street Singer, Doing Music Differently )
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( To hear our instruments go to our
Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog )
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Since then our instrument craft and our music have grown in parallel like siblings in the same family, and it’s impossible to understand either without looking at the other.  ( Unspecialized )

For one thing, by allowing us to weave music from never before heard sounds, our instruments guaranteed we would produce music that’s very different.

This is doubly true because our self-made instruments have not been engineered to produce only tones from the official chromatic scale ( 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 our instruments want to make and sounds they just will not make, so in effect they’ve taught us how they want to be played and put us in a position to discover our new music, a much less dauntingly difficult task than having to invent it.
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Despite centuries of hard work by dedicated designers, conventional instruments also do not produce totally uniform and regular sounds.  String and brass instruments have wolf notes, while the lowest notes of a piano are only somewhat there.

However players of such instruments, rather than being encouraged to take advantage of these interesting irregularities, are instead strictly disciplined to avoid them.

Consider for example the fate of someone learning to play the cello, a totally awesome instrument capable of making an astonishing range of different sounds.  But pretty quickly frowns and harsh comments from their teacher make it quite clear most of these are absolutely forbidden.

So they’re 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 ( a most laudable object ), but if one is looking to produce musical newness this sort of training is counter productive since it puts the seeker into a mental straightjacket.  Because by the time someone has become proficient on 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 ( Notation ).  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 after concentrating for a while on making instruments, when our focus shifted back to playing them, we always discovered our music had grown.

But now we accept this as yet more proof our unspecialized approach to creating new music works.  Or to say this another way, we believe if we live music more completely, if we do things like making instruments instead of just playing them, more interesting music is one natural result.
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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 they’re “tuned” by the spacing, size, and shape of their finger holes, partial closings and mouth-tongue-breath control allow one to slide smoothly among their notes and produce a whole universe of microtones.

This combined with the way shokis can whisper, blast, quiver, and generally twist notes in intoxicating ways, makes them instruments well suited to madness and getting lost, and this is the way we’ve used them.

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 our minds, and before we’d even noticed it 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 pianos which were their ancestors and original inspiration.

This became obvious by 1998 when we built basus ( short for bass chromatic kalimba ), an instrument 26 inches wide with 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 quartertone instruments each of which is 37 inches wide and has 48 keys tuned roughly a quartertone apart.

These four instruments are the only keyboard like instruments we know where sound is made by striking something directly with one’s fingertips.  More commonly keyboard 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 their tone quality and volume.

Also since each of their keys is individually hammered out from high carbon steel rod and so 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 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 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 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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When we say we make these instruments, we mean we actually build them with our own hands. ( Unspecialized )

The next two pictures show us hammering out quartus keys in our driveway and 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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Shoki Family***Kalimba Family***Bowus Family
Doing Music Differently****Notation***Practice***Performance***Unspecialized
Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****The Indian Music Scene
Home****Buy Our Music