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New Sounds

Friday, December 07, 2007
  • John Schneider
    Guitarist and Just Intonation specialist John Schneider shows host John Schaefer around the tuneable fretboard of this guitar (Haber/WNYC)

    Just Intonation

    Guitarist John Schneider and percussionist TJ Troy perform live works that draw on Asian and Near Eastern music, and on alternate forms of tuning. Schneider (also a Los Angeles radio personality) uses a guitar that features a tuneable fretboard for various types of Just Intonation. Incidentally, Lou Harrison (1917-2003) wrote his last guitar piece for a National Steel guitar, custom fretted in Just Intonation. For this New Sounds, we'll hear Schneider and Troy perform some music by Lou Harrison, and more.

PROGRAM #2742, “Just Guitars” with John Schneider (First aired on Friday, 12/7/07)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

John Schneider & T.J. Troy

Live

Lou Harrison: Us ul [4:00]
J. Schneider: Tombeau For Lou – Plaint [2:30]
Passacaglia [3:00]

Not commercially available. Due out as part of “Por Gitaro” in March 2008 on Mode Records.

More about John Schneider

Lou Harrison

Por Gitaro

In Honor of the Divine Mr. Handel [6:30]

Mode Records, due in March 2008 www.moderecords.com

John Schneider, w/ T.J. Troy

Live

L. Harrison: Jahla, Suite #2 [3:00]
trad: Semai’i Kurd [4:30]

Not commercially available. See above.

Harry Partch

Live recording Mills College 2007

Pollux, from “Castor & Pollux” [2:00]

Not yet commercially available.

Comments

  • [1] rus archer from portland, oregon January 18, 2008 - 01:59AM

    tuneable fretboard? how does that work? i want that


This thread is closed.


Twitchy Renaissance-Infused Minimalism

New Sounds

From the New Sounds Live concerts at Merkin Hall, Nico Muhly presents a series of new electroacoustic ensemble works, combining “twitchy Minimalism” and Renaissance polyphony. Hear brand-new works from "Mothertongue," along with other works, recorded live.

In Robert Moran's Kitchen

New Sounds

From October 30, 1989, the infamous "cooking show" with composer/raconteur Robert Moran. Recorded while cooking an Indian dinner in John Schaefer's kitchen, for reasons still not entirely clear. Along the way, we hear an "acoustic" version of Cage's 0:00 - for amplification of chopping vegetables and blender. And don't miss the teary conversation as onions are chopped. View the the recipes.

Michael Hedges and Michael Manring

New Sounds

The incredibly gifted and astonishingly original guitarist Michael Hedges left the planet much too soon in 1997. Avant-folk and ever-entertaining, Hedges made brilliant music with alternate tunings, harmonics and was known for striking the guitar’s body and strings with his fingers, palms and knuckles. His close friend and sometime collaborator, electric bass virtuoso Michael Manring, was a genre-bender, before music writers ever discovered that hyphenated term. He started out in the New Age bins, but moved all over with various projects, including the very first New Age-death-metal-jazz-funk-fusion record, among other things, with his “hyperbass”, (a fretless instrument which makes re-tuning mid-piece a little easier). On this October 10, 1987 edition of New Sounds, the two artists visited and played at the WNYC performance studios.

Caravan Variations

New Sounds

Like camels slogging through the sand, the exotic strains of “Caravan,” by Duke Ellington and his sometime trombonist Juan Tizol (with rarely heard lyrics by Irving Mills), have been played loose, fast, swinging, and/or slow by just about everyone. For this New Sounds program, it’s another of the occasional series of programs of Theme and Variations, where the premise is simple: take a single piece of music and explore what a number of musicians have done with it, through arrangements, deconstructions, and revisions of the original theme. This time around, it’s Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” Listen to arrangements by Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia, Hungary’s Kalman Balogh & The Gipsy Cimbalom Band, the California Guitar Trio, the ska group Hepcat, banjoman Bela Fleck, Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil, and trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell, among others.