Many years ago I bought a Tibetan bowl with a lovely tone, and I always wanted to use it for a microtonal piece, because it sounds good software-transposed to any pitch level. I wanted to use "bowl" in the title, and Tibetan bowl might not have suggested Tom Bowling except that I happened to begin the piece on Thoreau's birthday; "Tom Bowling" was Thoreau's favorite tune to play on his flute. As the lyrics say, Tom Bowling's "form was of the manliest beauty, / his heart was kind and soft!," so worth an elegy. The bell-tone itself rather overwhelms the harmonic aspects of the piece, nature overcoming art, as Thoreau would have appreciated; and so I wrote a second movement less human-centered and more in tune with nature, letting the beats between closely-spaced bells carry the sonic interest.
Both movements use the same 24-pitch-per-octave, just intonation, unequally-spaced scale:
Pitch: A A13 B77b A^ A# B7b B7 B13^b- B C C^ C13 Ratio: 1/1 65/64 49/48 33/32 25/24 21/20 35/32 143/128 9/8 6/5 77/64 39/32 Cents: 0 27 36 53 71 84 155 192 204 316 320 342
Pitch: C# D7 D^- E137b E F77+ F13 F# F#^ G7 G13 A7+ Ratio: 5/4 21/16 11/8 91/64 3/2 49/32 13/8 5/3 55/32 7/4 117/64 63/32 Cents: 386 471 551 609 702 738 841 884 938 969 1044 1173 I generated the scale in the Elegy simply by writing what I wanted, and then decided to limit myself to the same pitches in "Walden Wind" as a kind of natural, found artifact. The bowl's tone is rather complex, with a marked fifth harmonic (major third), which creates some rather odd pitch illusions as the melody interacts with the bass. The overall form is similar to that of my 2011 virtual piano piece Echoes of Nothing: two movements using the same microtonal scale, one meditative and the other more playful, though here reversed in order.
- Kyle Gann
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