From 5 against 4, Steve Peter’s The Webster Cycles:

It gets its name from the fact that the musical material originates in the Webster dictionary; Peters has taken all words that include just the letters A to G (being musical notes), arranged them in alphabetical order, & given them to players as a musical score.

You can listen to a few performances of the piece at the ensemble Interrobang’s Bandcamp page.

(via 5 against 4)

I wasn’t able to attend the recent Bohlen-Pierce conference in Boston because I was out of town, but this is a fun vid/article from the Boston Globe about the scale.

“A different tuning system is almost like a different language,” said Ross W. Duffin, a music professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of the book “How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care).” “There are other languages that sound completely different [from English] - that have different grammatical systems, that have different words for the same thing. And yet those things coexist, and it’s recognized there’s great beauty in a French poem, for example.”

(via The Boston Globe)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Karawane, on Dada et la Musique

This is the version of Hugo Ball’s sound poem I was familiar with before my little internet video foray in the last post. I’m sure part of it is that it was the first version I heard, but I find this recording far more compelling than any other version (including the recording of Ball himself!). It might be the accent, or how she delivers the nonsense words as if they were real words, without the self-conscious, drawn-out “ooohssaaaaaaaakaaaaa” stuff of the other versions.

Marie Osmond performs part of Hugo Ball’s sound poem Karawane. I remember finding this on Hugo Ball’s page at UbuWeb back when I was doing more work on Dada. It is amazing.

It is also interesting how “wrong” Marie sounds when you are only familiar with the one recording. I recommend listening to the Hugo Ball version on the UbuWeb page before looking below, if only because it puts the tedium and discomfort of some of them in context.

(via immanent discursivity, recently on fire with good videos)

and because I felt like finding more examples of Karawane videos:

guy in fake hugo ball-style crab/chef/card-suit:

Ensemble performance:

someone animated the score that’s available at UbuWeb:

The Dada Crew, bringing you a sung version of sound poetry:

I think this is probably the Vimeo equivalent of YouTube bedroom pop song singing:

and I have no idea why this turns into some sort of anti-imperialist techno song, but maybe that is the point:

Solresol was invented by François Sudre (1787-1864). He started working on it in 1817 and work on it continued until 1866. Sudre hoped Solresol would be used to facilitate international communication and deliberately made the language very simple, so it would be easy to learn, and unlike any natural language to avoid giving an advantage to any particular group of people.
Solresol was the first artificial language to be taken seriously as an interlanguage. It is also the first and only musically-based interlanguage; or at least the only one to make any headway.
Solresol has seven syllables based on the Western musical scale: do re mi fa so la si, though you don’t have to be familiar with music in order to learn it. The total number of Solresol words is 2,660: 7 words with one syllable; 49 with two syllables; 336 with three syllables and 2.268 with four syllables.

Yes, no advantage to “any particular group of people.” Aside from those who come from a Western musical tradition involving solfege. (Neat idea though, for a language that can be transferred by pitch alone.)

(via omniglot)

On the island of La Gomera, in the Canaries, “silbadors” communicate over large distances through a language that is made by whistling!

(via Boing Boing, a while ago)