A solo show, no hype man.

my new column is about personal stories, things that have happened to me in my life that I would like to try to remember better by writing them down. This column is by far my most self indulgent, so excuse me that.

In the early 90's things were different. The internet was an esoteric thing that a few techies used to communicate with each other via "bbs" systems, proto-chatrooms for the select few. CD burners were unheard of and people listened to tapes with no hint of anachronistic sentimentalism. Kids in those days still handed in their school assignments handwritten and listened to the radio to hear about new music. Cell phones may have existed in some form, but we certainly had never seen one.

I was 14 in 93, and it was my miracle year.

The west coast had birthed some of the most original rap music I had ever heard. Groups like the pharcyde, souls of mischief, hieroglyphics and others were making hip hop like nothing I'd ever heard, soon to be followed by the megaton bomb that was the wu-tang clan reestablishing new york city as the coolest place we had never been. Fugazi put out "in on the kill taker", and played all ages shows at the university, and like in so many towns, they had helped to create a thriving punk scene. Nirvana was the new Beatles and everyone I had nothing in common with was wearing their t-shirts. I lived in a town of about 80 000 people called Guelph Ontario, and I had just learned that life was something worth paying attention to.

As I spoke about in my "small is beautiful" post, I had met a group of kids through the magic of radical politics who had become my first real adult(ish) friends. My best friend at the time, who I will call N, was a writer and a musician and a tremendous advocate of drug use and I jumped on board. My father had played the drums when I was a kid and one day while helping him clean out a storage space I happened upon his old set. I talked my mother into letting me set them up in the basement and spent every available moment teaching myself how to make them work. We started maybe 60 bands the first day I got those drums, every possible combination out of all the people I knew had a band of their own. Mostly we just liked coming up with band names since very few of these groups ever got to the practicing stage. Gradually, we filtered down to a few combinations who actually played together and real bands were formed.

The photo above is from the coming out show of my generation. While there was a thriving underground music community in Guelph, none of us younger kids had the guts to ask to be put on a bill. I spent every weekend, and many weekdays watching bands play in community centers, rooms at the university and people's houses but it was almost a year before we felt up to playing in front of people. The show in question is one that we organized ourselves. A friend's father owned a yoga studio downtown and let us use the space. We invited maybe 6 bands to play, and asked people to donate money. I know that everyday in the world there are maybe 1000 shows like this, but this was the big one for me, the first time I ever played music in front of people. My current main project at the time, Third Eye Chakra, was the "headliner" for the night. There may have been 70 people there at most, but I don't think any show I've played since has quite captured the excitement for me. It was our first show, but we had released a little self made cassette which we'd given to all our friends, so people knew the songs and were very excited to see us play. Sad as it is, this was probably the first time in my life that I felt special. The feeling was quite addictive and it took me years of trying to realize that although I loved music, I was driven to play by the need to feel special, to feel like I did when we finished our set and everyone I knew was cheering. I think that's something that underlies a lot of people's motivations, and it's really not addressed or even thought about. What makes someone seek out a stage? I have met hundreds of people in the music world and it seems like at every level there is a deep need for approval, to be repeatedly affirmed of their specialness. This isn't to denigrate anyone, I respect people that have the dedication to be touring musicians. It can be a very hard life and if you don't have something driving you it's pretty much impossible. It's still odd.

Whithin my larger social group I formed an extremely tightly knit group with 3 other friends. We spent every day together, often all sleeping at the same house, wherever that was. We were basically inseparable. It was with these kids that I began my long, systematic study of the effects of lsd use. My first real attempts at writing were in zines we published ourselves. And my introduction to philosophy came through our discussions.

Once, we decided to spend a weekend in an abandoned building. There was an old house that had been empty for months, and we thought it would make a great weekend if we stayed in it. It was the middle of winter, and the roof was torn off the house, so we had to sleep in the basement. To make it interesting, we decided to take a vow of silence for the weekend as well. We had something of a party the first night, or as much of a party as a small unfinished basement with no heat could support. I took lsd, as I tended to do in those days, and somehow managed not to freak out. After everyone left we went to sleep, the silence would begin in the morning.

I woke up first, and went up to the roof, which was to say the second floor. I did what I understood meditation to be for maybe an hour sitting at the top of the stairs with snow all over what once was a hallway with two destroyed rooms flanking me on either side. Eventually the others woke up. We spent the first little while clumsily avoiding speaking to each other with overwrought hand gestures. Eventually we kind of split up and hit the town, walking around in the quietest, snowiest parts not speaking. We had also decided to fast for the weekend, and my stomach began to hurt intensely from hunger and drug use. I realized that morning sitting alone on the stairs that I was going to have to occupy my thoughts for a long time with something and decided on the subject of “being okay with myself and who I was”. Truth be told, like many weirdo 14 year olds, I wasn't that cool with myself. So many years of social rejection had taken their toll. Now it was time to deal with all of that. I spent hour after hour trying to figure out what I needed to change to be completely cool with myself and independent of other people.

I went back to my spot on the stairs, and thought harder. I eventually managed to detach myself somewhat from my body. Which is not say that I had an out of body experience, but simply that I moved my focus inwards, away from what was going on in the world. Out of that experience I certainly became less dependent on what other people thought of me. I stopped paying much attention to the way I dressed, and developed a very cold, distant attitude towards people which I held onto for years afterwards.

These were two of my larger formative experiences. The development of the need for recognition, and the drive to perform seems not to jibe well with the detachment from the need for approval from others but if you look closer they are actually very similar. My need to not define myself by my social surroundings only fed my need to affirm my worth through the abstraction of applause. It drove me to work harder at music. I didn't lose friends with my cool detachment, if anything it seemed to make me more attractive to people, but there was a limit as to how close you could get, and i certainly wasn't going to let myself be defined by my friends. This led me to hop from social group to social group which I did for years and years. I would routinely switch out one set of friends and begin anew with an entirely new group. I never stayed in a romantic relationship for more than a couple months at most. The same went for bands, and even for music. I might listen to nothing but jazz for a while, then in a flash I would only listen to aleatoric composers or sufi devotional music or novelty performers from the 20's. I resisted forming an identity from external connections altogether.

This lasted years, as I said. My miracle year, 14 after my first big year (my birth) made me who I was for a long time to come, but almost 14 years after that I had the next big shift. At 27 something happened to me in the form of a new relationship which changed everything once again. I am still trying to wrap my head around those changes.

But we live in a different world. I can check my email on my phone. I can make an album and send it out around the world for free because mp3 has made CD burners almost obsolete. I have friends in other cities who I chat with on instant messenger (the new bbs) who I may have never met face to face. Today, 14 years after my 14th year I have overcome the world view that grew out of the early 90's. What happened in those days gave me an identity which gradually held sway as it developed and shifted for more than a decade. And only now, now that an esoteric invention which has always been about people sharing with one another has become so sophisticated and developed the blog, do I decide to sift through and make sense of the last 14 years.

Also, a new wu-tang album is coming out, coincidence?

the old blog gets a new purpose.

I used to have a blog over at jaimetambeur@blogspot.com. I barely touched the poor little guy and he never had a chance to shine. I have now decided to use him for a new purpose. I will be searching out as much as I can find about my former persona "Jaime Tambeur" and archiving it there. I'm starting with a series of tour diary emails I sent out while on the first unicorns US tour. I'll try to find interesting interviews that I did under that name and anything else that might be of interest. Jaime Tambeur is dead, long live jaime Tambeur.

never won emmy's but were real to me.

For the first installment of my new series about my favorite people, I figured I'd write about the guy who gave me the name I use for most of my endeavors these days. Actually, he didn't give it to me, I stole it, and for all I know his kids are going to sue me one day. These are the risks you run.

E. F. Schumacher coined the phrase "small is beautiful" in a book of the same name. I bought this book because I liked the name so much. It's subtitled "a study of economics as if people mattered" which agreed with my sympathies at the time. This book was just lefty enough to draw my high school brain into the world of economics, which until then had seemed like the ultimate evil. It drew me in right from the start, and ignited an interest in a way of thinking that, along with a few other books which I'm sure I will eventually write about, shaped my thinking more than anything other.

So what did I hate so much about economics? At the time, I subscribed to socialism as a political philosophy. By that I mean I hated teachers and loved arguing and being a little shit disturber. I got into it the way most kids do I guess. I hated mostly all the kids in my school, I was punk rock, a skateboarder, and a vociferous reader. It was pretty much in the cards. One day I found a copy of a zine (my introduction to the concept) about how awful school was and how the administration were fascists hell bent on creating perfect little kid-bots who would tuck in their shirts and not ask questions. I was hooked immediately. There was information on how to join the collective publishing team in the back. basically, you go to this common room at the university at this time, so I went to the next meeting. The group was made up of kids from 3 different schools, all silly rebels like me. These kids ended up being my first real adult (ish) social group, and it was the first time I ever felt like I fit in. After the meeting I went to one kid's house, named Amanda with a few others and I smoked pot for the first time. What a world. The group had a de facto leader named Tom, who was leader by dint of his absolute confidence that he was the leader. The guy came from a fairly well to do home (as radical leftists tend to) and even at his age, which was older than most of us by at least a few years, had made his mind up that he was going to be a revolutionary socialist and dedicate his whole life to the poor workers. It seemed terribly romantic to me at the time. We formed the Guelph chapter of the International socialists, and I somehow ended up on the "steering committee" which was pretty much just Tom's favorites. We were a pretty successful little group of shit disturbers and brought to the task the enthusiasm that rarely exists outside of the world of 14 year old kids (which most of us were). Our biggest triumph was a citywide walkout of all high schools, the pretext for which was some proposed cut to funding which would raise tuition, but we all knew it was more an excuse to organize a big protest. We were able to effectively shut all the schools down for that day and had thousands of kids marching through the streets of downtown Guelph chanting whatever the popular slogans were at that time (hey hey, ho ho, x and y have got to go!). This eventually led to me being hounded out of that school, which gave me more time to devote to politics, and increasingly, doing drugs.

The drugs eventually started getting in the way of the politics, as any sXe kid will tell you. Not because I was too lazy or stoned to go to meetings, we went to meetings all the time. By this point we had secured enough signatures from students at the university to get our own room there (this from a group composed 90% of high school kids, and led by 3 of us, all under 17) but when us stoners got stoned, we would read other books besides the IS material and the international worker newspaper. We talked about other subjects, we made our own zines and kept politics out because this was to be a reflection of our little group. We started bands and sang about things besides politics. I hate to think that drugs helped me mature, there's something really sad about that, but they did certainly get me out of the routine I was in long enough to realize that it wasn't really the content of what we were doing that I agreed with, it was the social atmosphere and the fun of causing trouble. My break with the group came at one of our fundraising newspaper sales, which we used to try to bring new people into the group. I had a conversation with a man who asked me this question "I work for a small businessman, it's just the two of us, and he pays me what he can afford to pay me, and he created the job, which I wouldn't have otherwise. How am I being exploited in this scenario?" I actually said "I don't know" this wasn't the obvious exploitation of some greedy monopoly character, this was a guy with a job that he liked, and paid what he thought was a fair wage. Another member came over and spewed some kind of "well, we all know capitalism is exploitative by it's very nature" line, textbook stuff really. It sure didn't convince the man, and i realized it didn't convince me. I didn't know where I stood anymore. On one hand, my emotional connection to socialism was such a close one. It meant so many things to me, but intellectually it just didn't add up. It must be what kids who are raised religious feel like when they start going "wait a second, how do we know all this stuff is true again? Because of one book?" It was a crisis time for me and unfortunately I turned to my other vice of the time, which my other ex-politico stoner friends were more than happy to help me with. I spent a good 6 months in anti-intellectual bliss. Breaking down every notion I ever held onto. At it's peak, I was so LSD'd up all the time that anything was just as true or false to me as anything else, there was nothing to believe because everything was interconnected this and whatnot and the tree of life etc... It was a fun little sojourn from reality, but like all drug fueled utopias, it turned dark.

This was when I quit doing drugs (well, those drugs at least). My social group disbanded, and I, having broken down in a typically Cartesian fashion my whole belief system had to start fresh. I started with Science and mathematics, which were in some ways my first loves. I reintroduced myself to music through spending time volunteering at the university radio station and playing jazz, which represented some kind of opposite to whatever it is I had been involved in before. And slowly but surely started to form an identity again. Then I stumbled onto "small is beautiful".

The reason I gave this long back story is that I suppose I want more to explain why Schumacher is important to me. Wikipedia does a perfectly good job of providing the bare facts, so I there's no real need for me to expend too much energy just to tell you about the man. I do have a real passion for his work though, and maybe if I can provide some context, well... I hope that it might make more sense to you too.

So I bought the book based on the title, but also because of the enigma that economics represented for me. As mostly everyone knows, Karl Marx is the granddaddy of all socialists and his major work, capital, is a book of economic analysis, but in opposition to all other economic theory. I had dredged the massive tome years earlier in a vain attempt to prove to myself how smart and serious I was, and had gleaned just enough economic theory to feel comfortable talking like an expert about it. I had no need for any other work of economics because, well, this was Marx, and goddamnit the book is so huge. When I saw the subtitle to Schumacher's book, it seemed like a great place to start learning what other people had to say about my old hero's subject. I started reading small is beautiful in a coffee shop near the bookstore, and I am not lying when I tell you I read the whole thing in one sitting.

So who is this guy Schumacher?

The short story is that he's a statistical economist who, when working for a British coal company (I believe it was coal) in Burma had a revelation about the nature of capitalism in third world countries. There existed a huge disparity in the levels of technology between the developed world he knew in England and the third world, as would be expected. The general idea that existed at the time in international development (I think it's still pretty much the mainstream) was that we need to export as much of our technology as possible to get these people up to speed with the way things are done in the rich countries. It's not an evil idea, and it certainly makes some intuitive sense. The problem that Schumacher (henceforth referred to as "Fritz") saw was that importing some new, advanced technology into a country doesn't mean that that country can simply adopt it and begin using it the way that the rich countries do. The developed world has evolved along with this technology and as such it is (for the most part) appropriate to their economies and to their way of life. This was far from true in Burma.

Take for example, a tire factory. Some beneficent leader of a rich country might give millions in aid to a poor country and have their resident economist decide that because they have a lot of rubber trees they should make tires and sell them on the world market. Lot's of export capital flows in, people get rich, trickles down to the poor, yadda yadda. This would work fine if there was a large workforce available locally to staff the factory, sufficient food production and other basic necessities to support that concentration of workers in that area, infrastructure to transport the raw materials to the factory, and the tires away, local technicians who could service and repair the machinery, not to mention available parts and materials to keep it running and maybe a hundred other important factors. None of these, of course, existed. So the tire factory is set up with millions in development aid (or worse yet, loans) and fails miserably. This pattern has repeated again and again and Fritz couldn't deal with it anymore. What was missing was any kind of concern, or interest at all really, in how these people actually lived. What did they need in their day to day lives? A tractor isn't going to help subsistence farmers who are tilling the soil with bones, but maybe a decent hoe or shovel might. Maybe a wheelbarrow? These things were cheap and plentiful in England, yet in many places they were virtually nonexistent. what about a simple water pump? What about a spinning wheel or a loom? These were technologies that had long become obsolete in the developed world, and as such, were of no interest to the western development experts who were deciding where the money would be spent.

He coined the term intermediate technology, and it's brother appropriate technology to describe his method of development. He would much rather see a less advanced tool brought into a society if would legitimately help, than a newer, flashier one which the recipients won't learn how to build, fix, and incorporate into their lives. He expands on this concept in the most beautiful ways, I suggest that you pick up the book if you can find it.

The concept of appropriate technology, and his ideas about the virtues of smaller scale projects could be applied in other ways too. For example, he found that small business people in a particular part of India he was working couldn't secure bank loans to expand their businesses. These were really small businesses, like a food cart or a local tailor who had become successful enough that they wanted to expand, but their needs were small, too small for the banks to take notice. Nobody could get a loan of say $500. The banks gave out loans of $20,000 to larger businesses but had no setup to approve such a small amount of money. His solution was to setup small business collectives which could be made up of many such small businesspeople. With a modest startup which he provided, the cooperative banking collective became both a great tool for helping small scale development, and a quite successful little enterprise of it's own, charging reasonable interest and quickly paying back the initial investment to become self sustaining.

These sorts of ideas were very new to me. I hadn't really shaken off my distrust of capitalism in general, but here was this man, an economist, a player for the bad guys' team, working fully within the world of the free market to achieve what were ultimately the things that we had wanted to win through global socialist revolution. He was vastly improving the lives of the worlds poorest and least powerful people. And underlying it all was this philosophy that really could be applied to anything. Do what is appropriate to the needs of the situation, don't try to force the situation to fit your preconceived notions of what it should or shouldn't need. I can think of very few more fundamental tenets of my current belief system.

The funny thing, in retrospect, is that even now that I've moved on so far from my younger self's socialist world view, I can see how being a radical leftist was absolutely appropriate to my situation. Before that I was just an angry kid who knew he hated school, even if he was somewhat good at it. Although I think that small shifts in one's world view and moderation are great tools for living, sometimes you need a huge revolution to get you on the right track. If I hadn't jumped so wholeheartedly into Marx, Trotsky and Tom's managerie of misfit kids, I wouldn't understand the world as deeply as I do now. I doubt if I would have been so attracted to a book on economics, and maybe I'd just be a middle of the road liberal democrat now, with half formed ideas about social justice forming a background to a more or less status quo take on the world. Maybe Fritz Schumacher's smallness revolution wouldn't have had the same weight for me if I hadn't been so enamored of the hugeness of Marx's worldwide revolution.

It's oddly appropriate how things worked out.

quick note

I have decided to write my blog as several concurrent columns about different topics. I will continue the "I never really loved indie to begin with" series about music that means something to me. I need to come up with clever titles for my other threads, which should grow to include news, science, politics, law and policy, film, books, personal things, linked movies, music downloads, photography, and whatever else I come up with. Each one will have a title that identifies it so that you know what you're getting into before diving into what might end up being a lot of words you don't really care about. I'm nice like that. No, it's ok, you don't have to thank me. Seriously, it's ok.

I never really loved indie to begin with

I have decided to start writing about music that I love. Here's my take on Harry Partch.

There's a great essay at the start of Harry Partch's book "genesis of a music" which discusses what he calls corporeal vs abstract music. For him, the main difference is that the melodies of corporeal music derive naturally from the rhythms and inflections of speech. Imagine a singer who delivers the line "I love the way you talk to me", each syllable held over several notes in the manner of Christina Aguilera showing off. "I-I-I... lo-oh-ovvve the, waaay-y-ayy you tttttalk-o-ah-alk to meeeee". This kind of singing is a very poor reflection of the way that you would say this to someone in conversation. It's the message subsumed to the delivery. For Partch, the most beautiful music is an extension of the body, singing being the way humans have explored the inherent beauty of language from the beginning of music. I recall the author Milan Kundera writing about the composer Leos Janacek in his book "the art of the novel". He speaks about the way that even Janacek's instrumental works are completely recognizable as extensions of the language of the Czech people, that everything he wrote contains the spirit of the people because it contains the life of their language within it. The wonder of melody deriving naturally from the spoken word seems historically intuitive. Many of my favorite singers of all time have seemed to be speaking the words to me, and although there may be other factors involved, my favorite singing has always seemed to me like really inspired speaking more than simply putting words to notes.

Partch was a product of the western academic music tradition, which he saw as the antithesis of corporeal music. At the time, post-romantic music and the influence of Wagner was everywhere. This music he considered to be largely concerned with pure form. Form is often at the root of classical music, which has never been an appealing approach for me. The idea is an old one, likely preceding but certainly finding it's voice in ancient greek thought. There exists, so the theory goes, immutable laws of aesthetics that we can derive mathematically and receive from general rules handed down which should govern our attempts at creating beauty. Anyone unfamiliar with the classical tradition can listen to the works and remain largely unaware of the formal restrictions that have gone into creating it, but there is a serious scholarly background to all of this, as evidenced by the tremendous complexity of harmonic theory in the western tradition. For Partch, to approach music from this direction misses the point entirely. The starting point for music should be the sounds of speech in the world, and not an extensive formal theory. He also rails against the excessive technical displays which had become an integral part of the music experience. Music for him was about more than simply showing off the contralto's range or the ability to score for hundreds of instruments to blow people away, as much as these tactics might appeal to the concert going audience of the time.

So what did he do to escape? Like any self-respecting outcast of the 20's he became a hobo. Partch rode the rails across America. This experience would later lead to one of his major works, which is a setting to music of various collections from his experiences, including hitchhiker graffiti, newsboy shouts, and letters and sayings picked up from fellow hobos on the trip.

He also went to the library, and in doing so he single handedly revived an incredibly important aspect of music theory that may have disappeared altogether.

We live in a world of 12 notes. Anyone can look at a piano and see that there are 12 different kinds of notes, 7 white ones and 5 black. Each note is the exact same distance from any adjacent note. It seems as though music-god himself handed it down and said "here you go... 12 notes. Go crazy". A bit of research however shows that the process of getting to these 12 notes was a long and messy one. It turns out that the whole thing goes back to Pythagoras. In his studies on numbers he became interested in music and he discovered an interesting thing about taut strings. Using a tool called a monochord he discovered that a string divided in half will produce a note exactly an octave higher. You can see this on a guitar, where the octave fret is exactly halfway down the string. He tried other divisions, divide the string in three and you get a perfect fifth (the distance from c to g, or 7 frets on a guitar). He found that all different notes could be found by dividing up the string by different numbers. We now understand that these notes sound musical to us because sounds have harmonics in them. In a sense every note contains many other notes. A c, for example, will also have an octave higher c, a note a fifth higher, one a third higher and so forth. You can see for yourself on a guitar. Pluck an open string and then gently place you finger on the 12th fret. You will hear an octave harmonic. Now raise your finger and pluck the string again and you should be able to hear the higher note in the open string, you can do the same for the 7th fret and many others.

You can arrange the notes of the harmonic series into a scale and you'll have something sort of like the scales we have on our pianos, but not quite.

The problem is that the notes of the harmonic series are all different distances from one another. They are based off of a single note, so if C is your beginning note, and you derive a scale from it, it's all good as long as you are playing in C, but if you try to switch and play in G the ratios are all screwed up and it will no longer work. Nobody in Pythagoras' time knew why this was and they tried very hard to fix the problem. Pythagoras tried to derive all the notes by taking a note as a root, then it's fifth (2/3) then that note's fifth, then that note's and so on, thinking that he would eventually come back around to the same note (only many octaves up). It turned out that this will never happen. After 12 times through the cycle you get pretty close, but not quite back where you started. I guess he thought that that was good enough. He calculated the difference between the 12 fifths and the nearest octave and called that distance a comma. He shifted the pitches around a bit and created the Pythagorean scale which is the basis of our 12 notes system that we have today. Rather than being handed down from high, the notes come from the fact that it takes 12 x 2/3 to reach a power of 2.

The Pythagorean a scale was not the scale that we now use, it was still weighted on the note that you use to derive the scale. You could switch to scales that were close to you on the cycle of fifths, but not far away scales. After several hundred years humans invented the keyboard instrument, the organ, the harpsichord etc... This presented a problem because unlike in vocal music, or with string instruments like violins or wind instruments, you had to pick a tuning and stick with it. For centuries musicians had been making subtle tuning adjustments by ear based on what scale they were playing in but with the keyboard this was impossible (with the organ especially, since tuning a note meant cutting a huge metal pipe). This was a time when temperament really came into it's own. A temperament in music is the way that you shift the notes around from their natural place to make a scale. Bach was a major investigator of temperament and many of his students were especially influential in developing some of the most famous historical temperaments. He even wrote one of his masterworks "the well-tempered clavier" as a celebration of a new temperament, which was called "well temperament" (it's not such a clever title I guess).

The Development of temperaments follows the development of western harmony (or leads it?). Bach was so interested in them because he was a keyboardist and he liked to change key with freedom. This love of key change in western music only increased and increased. By the time we get to Partch's day we have composers like Wagner's disciples changing key 6 times before the first melody is finished. The progress of Science had brought us the ability to use the scale system that we all know and love, the one that every piano you see is tuned to, the one that a "tuner" will tune your guitar to. This is equal temperament, we've figured out how to smooth out the comma over the entire scale such that every note is the exact same distance from it's neighbor. This means that composers can switch to any key they want, and the scale will be exactly the same.

But, it also means that none of our intervals are actually in tune anymore.

The fifth, you remember is 2/3 of the note it's based off of, this is true of string length. but the inverse ratio applies to the frequency of the note, so a perfect fifth of a note the vibrates at 200hz is 300hz (sorry if this is confusing, I didn't sit down with the intention of writing all this so you'll have to bear with me, anyways 3/2 instead of 2/3 when dealing with frequency) . G is the fifth of C, but on a piano the G note is not quite 3/2 of the C, it's about 2/100 of a semitone off. A semitone for anyone who doesn't know is the name for the distance between two adjacent notes on a piano, or a frets on a guitar. It gets worse when you try other intervals. The distance between C and E, which is a very common interval to use, is more than 1/10 of a semitone from where it should be. It's way off.

Our ears are totally used to the equal tempered scale, it's what we all grew up on. It's what the Beatles used, what Glen Gould used, what Bruce Springsteen uses, what Daft Punk and My Chemical Romance and whatever other bands that people listen to use. We are accustomed to it's inharmonic notes. It's the sound of western music at this point. It was in Harry Partch's time too.

He spent a lot of time at the library as I said, and it seems like he spent some of that time listening to music from other cultures. Many westerners find the scales and melodies of music from other cultures to be "sour", "out of tune" and generally can't make sense of them. Until recently, when western culture took over the entire world, 12 note equal temperament didn't exist anywhere else. China had developed several different scales, mostly based on a 5 note system, India had developed extremely sophisticated scales sometimes with hundreds of notes in them, Indonesia had it's own scales for different gamelan ensembles. all over Africa, the middle east, Australia, the South Pacific, Eastern Europe, every place had it's own subtly different scale systems. The consensus among ethnomusicologists at the time, and to a large part today still, was that these were primitive forms of music which lacked the depth western music enjoyed. The reason for this pronouncement? These other cultures hadn't developed the rich harmonic language that western music had, which is to say, they don't change key that much.

This of course brings us back to the beginning, to his essay at the start of his book. What these non western music traditions have that the Wagnerites lacked was melody derived from natural speech patterns. They didn't have the need for key change because they weren't trying to expand the harmonic language, they were trying to sing their own language. You can hardly call Indian classical music, Balinese gamelan, or the polyphonic chant of the bibayak pigmies unsophisticated, it's just not trying to do what Mozart was trying to do.

So Partch created what is known as "just intonation" which is a scale system based on the natural notes of the harmonic series. In place of key changes he simply divided the scales into more notes (why stop at 12?) and in doing so he started a revolution in music that, well, isn't that popular. But it has influenced many of my favorite musicians, who I will write about in further installments of "I never really loved indie to begin with".

But what's important is that it all comes from wanting singing to be beautiful speaking, which I think is a beautiful thing to say.