User:Thomas Österheld/withfred

=#withfred=

is a set of suggested improvisation rules (or in GEMA categories even a composition by Thomas Österheld) for TonArt Ensemble and electric guitar player(s) -- hopefully premiered with Fred Frith performed in April 2019, Westwerk Hamburg.

Background
TonArt often features humbly soloists in the concert and the ensemble demonstrates its perfection in playing very simple things very very well. But, sometimes, to our surprise (or not) composers just humbly integrate into TonArt Ensemble like Christian Wolf, Phil Corner and last not least Manfred (Stahnke) on viola. #withfred now is a balanced approach.

Part1: In the Tradition

It is interesting that Violin, Viola, Cello, Doublebass are the instruments in our ensemble with the big heritage (Stradivari...) but at the same time the heritage is wildly ignored. This is most likely not a bonmot that helps to improve the upcoming next concert but may cause some frustrations -- so it has to be explained from a musicologists view. Even the 12 Million $ Stradivari is a very primitive "low tech" instrument: Strings, terrible simple tuner (compared to guitars!), a fret, a body that resonates. Maybe even the Dan Bao Michael is technically more sophisticated: A Tuner that really works and makes vibrato so easy, playing just overtones are already identified as a better way to play than to press a string with your finger on a piece of wood, which makes it fairly complicated to find the right pitch, create the beautiful sound etc. If I want to spoil the Orchestra party I come up this: This is the best approach to earn money with thousands of students that need a violin teacher for roughly 15 years of (15.000 - 20.000 EUR income for the starving musician). While Stephane Grapelli picked up the violin with 17, joined Django Reinhard at the age of 19 and is even admired by Yehudi Menuhin. Even worse: I know many Sinti or Roma that play by ear, have the cheapest Violind, do not practise at all but play a partita from J.S.Bach like any jazz standard or pop tune by ear. With very relaxed technique, against all classical rules... but totally makes sense: If you hold the violin against your stomach and the instrument is not directly on your ear its easy to get a nice sound. I totally agree that in a group of 24 players the "orchestral" approach has some advantages. Now Sinti and Roma are often holding the instrument like a guitar strumming chords or playing pizzicato. Try it -- you can play things you can never ever play in the "by the ear-position". If you check out al the other string-bow instruments around the world usually they are played in a different position: The instrument resides on your knee, and the resonating body is not in touch with you. Actually many indian musicians play like this with regular violins. So you will immediately recognize that my violin and my viola do not have the unhealthy and heavy thing called... ???

Cello
Sitting is the new smoking. So why play Cello sitting...? Bad idea. I use a carbon sting and play it like the Double basse As I am a member of the Union (Verdi), no kidding I try to implement this as a very healthy approach. Krischa or someone also demonstrated that you walk around with the instrument using a strap. I hope to change the bad habits that cost Millions of EUR per year (or even Billions): Sitting and playing ist so wrong. Pizz can be play for finger style like a classical guitar. Also on the double bass you should not sit but stand and move around in a more dynamic and not fixed position.

Double Bass
As no one teached me to play double bass I just tuned the bass in fiths when I joined the school orchestra at the age of 15 or so. My teacher and conductor of the school orchestra Jeremias Jeremias (who was first violinist in the Orchestra in Kassel) just grinned but never dropped a word.

This said, our string Tentett (Georgia on Viola) is already on the #withfred path where some suggestions come from the traditional approach to other string instruments:

Delta Blues
played with a slide also our Tentett creates a unique sound: Its really obvious but I never heard it before. Think of the Paris-Texas Ry Cooder Effekt etc. (and listen to my demo recordings). If you run wild on this you are also in 128 tones per Oktave microtonality which daria loads on microsynth later.

Take a pick
In many cultures people use picks to play strings. Faster, louder, clearer, etc. you will be suprised what you can play if you use a pick...

Preparations
Please come up with new ideas and do not copy someone else.

Tunings
For my ears the regular tuning of a guitar or cello create a kind of drone feeling. Though there so many tones "between" the regular tuning its still a nice E-Minor that we hear below anything on guitar. So for our piece I suggest a simple 36 tones per Octave tuning in a by ear tuning: tune the Guitar EAD = G and ghe = g and then, only by ear (!) tune ghe in 1/3 halftone so it feels nice if you play g g+ g++ ab. Based on remark by Michael Haase -- our dan bao player: you can ignore the theory here and play this complety by ear: little bendings, glitches etc. finally cover a 1200 tones per Octave.

Detuning string instruments open a cosmos of new sounds, some suggestions: -- same or slighty different tuning for two strings -- way to low tuning with "loose" strings -- odd detunings based on "intuition" or -- a detune-by-chance method: you randomly detune without hearing anything, than you start with very odd system of open strings, play them slowly, try to find out, whether you can generate something with it -- just one tone (octave) -- bohlen pierce or anything else that supports microtonality or other tunings for you

Manfred or someone else maybe comment on this but I think there are not too many composers that tried to dig deeper in this.

Everything is a drum
o.k. just listen to the examples

7 9 11 13 15 17 ... Rhythm and microrhythm
so you may use two metronoms to go into a 70bpm / 90 bpm (etc.). Loop stations like the RC-30 are very nice to do this. While accelerandos are often fairly simple movements from one tempo to the other, jazz musicians are used to play slightly behind or ahead of the beat. Funk often has a tricky dragging-pushing relation between the players or even within the drumset, finally this is called the magic groove.

Download a metronom on you mobile.