Ghost Town (1994)


When choreographer Shellie Cash-Muller asked me to collaborate on a dance for the Bucknell Dance Company, she expressed interest in both the Nancarrovian tempo structures I was working with and the bizarre array of sampled noises I had used in my incidental music for Alice in Wonderland. I was interested in working with a tuning system of septimal just intonation (scale: 1/1, 9/8, 7/6, 21/16, 4/3, 3/2, 12/7, 14/9). The combination, as it turned out, sounded darkly humorous, and I added the title Ghost Town because of the loneliness of the sampled goose calls (which are tuned to Harry Partch's 43-tone scale). - Kyle Gann

See a tuning chart for Ghost Town

Return to List of Compositions

return to the home page