Concert 2 at Berklee, Bohlen-Pierce Symposium 2010

Concert 2 at Berklee College of Music
Bohlen-Pierce Scale Symposium, Boston, March 8, 2010

All composers are performing on their own home-made Bohlen-Pierce Scale instruments.


Folk Tune Improvisation by Arturo Grolimund
Bohlen-Pierce Pan Flute

Free-Improvisation by Ron Sword
Ron Sword, 9-string Bohlen-Pierce Guitar
Paul Erlich, BP Synthesizer

Stretched-Chromatic Etude by Ron Sword
13-tone Bohlen-Pierce Classical Guitar
(Ron builds micro/macrotonal guitars for a living)

Love Song by Elaine Walker
Elaine, BP-tar
Dr Boulanger, BP-sonome and CSound
Dan Sedgewick, BP-piano
Marji Gere on a BP-tuned violin
(Elaine rearranged the keys on all three keyboards for the Bohlen-Pierce Scale.)

Color Me Grey by Jinku Kim
Jinku Kim, Monomes and laptop
Dr Boulanger, LaunchPads and laptop

- - -
Bohlen-Pierce Scale Symposium, Boston 2010

There has been enough interest lately in the Bohlen-Pierce Scale - a macrotonal musical tuning system based on a 3/1 frame (three times the frequency, called a "tritave", as opposed to the 2/1 "octave") divided by 13 equal steps - that an entire symposium was organized in Boston. It included the support of three major music educational institutions - Berklee College of Music, the Goethe Institute and New England Conservatory. Heinz Bohlen and Max Mathews skyped in at various times. It included three full days of talks and three full nights of music. I will type more information here soon and upload more videos as I get them digitized. Professional cameras were covering the entire symposium. Here I will just upload what I captured on my own camera. This symposium was very overwhelming for me, thinking I was among just a handful of interested BP fans. There were at least 40 people actively involved in this event and many more in the audience! See also: http://bohlen-pierce-conference.org/schedule/ http://bohlen-pierce-conference.org/concert-1/

Category:

Music

Tags:

• guitar
• violin
• pan
• flute
• Arturo
• Grolimund
• Paul
• Erlich
• elaine
• walker
• dr
• boulanger
• jinku
• kim
• ron
• sword
• dan
• sedgwick
• marji
• gere
• love
• song
• performance
• bp-tar
• piano
• sonome
• macrotonal
• bohlen-pierce
• scale
• symposium
• berklee
• college
• of
• music
• boston
• microtonal
• hexagon
• keyboard
• zia

[JakubKubazMarian]

Are there any ”normal“ compositions in this musical system? I understand that I cannot hear it properly, since I heard this kind of music for the very first time, but I cannot overcome an impression that all the artists play styles that would be considered very marginal even when played in the classical context. I would like to hear some music bearing emotions and beauty, not only the music suitable for a horror film.

[miselaineeous]

@JakubKubazMarian - My songs are probably the most "normal" that I've heard. Try first two songs in this playlist "Love Song" and "Stick Men" if you haven't already. It doesn't get much more normal that that as far as the Bohlen-Pierce Scale goes (so far).

[RogueBagels]

Never introduce musical instruments to an insane asylum.....

[JakubKubazMarian]

@miselaineeous The two songs mentioned sound quite all right, but when I wrote “normal”, I was thinking of something more classical, such as some deeply elaborate orchestral music :-). The songs differ from the rest in that they seem to really have some overall concept and pleasant harmonies; other performances sound to me like playing random notes. Do you think that the performing musicians really “feel” what they play, or are they just playing “geometrical” sequences on their instruments?

[nomuell]

I like the little light apple sign in "Color Me Grey".

[clumma]

chewing gum on stage - that's the old school!