For a while now there's been a discourse in the visual art world around so-called "zombie formalism", coined as far as I know in this 2014 article by artist and critic Walter Robinson. Since we have a decade of to-and-fro about this phenomenon it might be interesting to ask what we can learn about analogous phenomena in the music world.

I recently revisited this post in search of some new harmonic ideas and thought I'd take a closer look at Yagapriya, a rather exotic scale for us Westerners that's very far removed from the diatonic scales we're used to. It also doesn't harmonize easily using my usual tricks so I wanted to treat it more as a unique thing in itself and see where it led me. (As usual I'm using "Yagapriya" as the name for a 12EDO scale; I won't have anything to say about Carnatic music in this post.)

Just some quick materials I've been playing around this over the last few weeks -- one very nice resource that's existed for a while but is newly online and some stuff I invented. Enjoy!

This one is a collection of pieces that I hope people find pretty despite (or because of!) the dissonance. These pieces unify a lot of things I've been doing over the last year and I feel pleased to have made them speak with what I hope is a very clear voice. Some of the music uses one of these tunings but some is in 12EDO.

As usual, listen for free here or on Bandcamp, pay what you like to download it and it'll appear on all the streaming services and whatnot over the next week or two. I don't have anything clever to say about this one, or even anything dull-witted. I hope you enjoy it, though!

I've been thinking for a few years now about the role of things in my music. By that I mean musical things -- tunes, riffs, chord progressions and so on -- that you're inclined to name and identify and repeat. A lot of the music I like doesn't really have those, which can seem like a form of improverishment but I think it's a question of style rather than "something missing". What follows is a meandering think-piece around this stuff, which I imagine will remain a problem in my music until the last note I play.

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.