This one happened fast. I've been intending to do a second "book" of solo piano music soon but it came together with the theoretical things in my last two blog posts and the next thing I knew I had an album of music.

As usual, listen here or on Bandcamp for free now, pay what you like to download it and it'll appear on all the streaming services and whatnot over the next week or two. Some ruminations about the music below the fold.

The major scale is constructed as a stack of perfect fifths, so it contains the maximum number of them of any seven-note scale: six, in fact, because of that pesky diminished fifth between the 5 and 7 of the scale. I wondered which other scales (in 12EDO) contain lots of fifths.

I like really far-out alien tunings (like the ones I used on The Moses of Stuttgart) but there's also a place for tunings that are grounded in something more familiar. One idea I've used in the past is the melakata tunings, which turned out to be pretty fruitful for me. I recently watched a really good Levi McClain video that gave me a hint about how to expand this idea.

I've had one of these for a few years and recently picked up a second to keep it company, so I decided it was a perfect time to wrestle with the poorly-documented tuning implementation. I don't have anything novel to say here but I had to figure some of this out by trial and error so thought documenting it might help the next person out.

The music is in quarter-tones, but taking a different approach to what I'm used to and I liked this way of working a lot. I'll say a bit about that below the fold.

Obscurity isn't invisibility; the "occult" or occluded isn't truly the hidden. It's what you can just make out, but not fully. You can tell it's there but can't quite see what it is. The obscure as an aesthetic principle has interested me for a long time.

After a wee hitch came up in my life plans earlier this month, I made a resolution to be prolific this autumn/winter and get on with some of the stack of projects I've been saving for later on when the time is right. The time is now!

Today I found words for something that's probably been bothering me in my playing for forty years -- a tension between two fundamental forces or organizational principles that I've been aware of but found difficult to see: the flexibility of time in jazz and the seemingly similar flexibility in classical music. I don't want to labour the point or be self-indulgent here so I'll try to get right to the point.

I'm clearing out my house in more ways than one at the moment -- this project has been in the "nearly done" category for a very long time and I'm delighted to be able to release it at last -- more info below the fold:

There's a technique that occasionally pops up in discussions of post-war serial music that seems to exemplify the idea of "paper music" -- music written to be studied an analyzed but not actually listened to. Let's see if we can make any sense of it.