A couple of recent posts (here and here) have explored what I called "quartal-ish" language -- stuff that has lots of fourths in it and sounds kind of quartal but actually isn't. In the process we've seen the "quartal triad" (e.g. C-F-Bb) a few times and I thought it would be interesting to see what I could find in its complement, which has Forte number 9-9.

Here's a little thing I found while experimenting with the complement of the quartal triad from this post (more on that to come). It turns out there are a few more ways to combine three diminished triads without any overlaps than I'd expected and, as usual, I found some unpromising globs of semitones with musical possibilities hidden inside them.

The hexatonic set 6-z38 came up in relation to some material I was developing out of Yagapriya and at that time I put it aside for later. Well, later has arrived. Let's see what we can make of this awkward pile of semitones.

Games and music are two of the very few true universals of human culture -- although they take very different forms and have varying functions, it seems likely that all human societies feature music and games. In English we even use the same word for both activities: "play". While I wouldn't want to push the analogies too far, games have probably influenced my thinking about music more than I'm aware of. Today I realised that games-people have a name for much of what I do on this blog and I wanted to talk about it a bit.

Just a quick follow-up to my previous post about Yagapriya. We start with the 4-8 chord inside Yagapriya, which isn't quartal, and end up developing a little world of quartal-like harmony from it.

The formless form of divine light that dwells in all the temples of Kartikeya sounds like it would be pretty far out, if it were a musical scale, and indeed it is. Jyoti Swarupini is an unusual Carnatic scale that hasn't come up too often before in these parts so I thought I'd have a look at it. No more mangling of Hinduism, I promise.

Everyone is always saying something along the lines of "limitations breed creativity" but you rarely get much practical detail about that. Assuming it's advice, it seems to be suggesting that we choose to be limited. But what sort of limitations might be useful and what might they be useful for? I don't have answers but I do have some thoughts and reflections...

I've been thinking about the term "outsider artist" lately. When it was coined, the artworld (and in particular, for our purposes, the music world) was unrecognizably different from how it is today. I'm beginning to think that a lot of us could consider ourselves outsider artists and maybe that would be a fruitful response to our present predicament. A rambling monologue follows, but I promise some nice pictures to go with it.

Last time we looked at what we can make from the minor pentatonic scale plus two of the notes b2, 3, b5 and 7. This time we look at the remaining possible notes 2, b6 and 6. The previous batch of scales were rather well-behaved but these are a bit more of a mixture. We'll look through them all, recap everything and see if we can find a higher-level perspective on it all.

Some Sub-Saharan African communities celebrate annual festivals that are preceded by a mandated period of silence (or quiet, at any rate) in which music-making is banned (source, source). I don't know much about these musical cultures but the general idea has been weirdly impactful for me.