Balloon Drum Music

Today's podcast is a performance of my latest piece, called Balloon Drum Music. It is scored for Balloon Drums, Oboe, Flutes, Guitar, and Finger Piano. The piece starts out with a simple chord progession for the winds, with finger piano bass, that sounds sort of like this:

• Bb major
• Eb major
• G minor
• and so on.

When it is played, it sounds like a conventional progression. But in actuality, the chords are from the Partch Tonality Diamond, and their names in Sagittal notation are shown on the blog post at podcast1024.libsyn.com. There are notes in each key that are in common with the next key, and some that are slightly different. Some are off by very small ratios, and at later points in the piece when the flutes and oboe slides from one to another, the slide is unsettling to the non-microtonal ear.

For example, in the movement of chords from the B 16/9 major to the D 8/7 major, the B 16/9 goes down by 27:28 to fifth of the D 8/7 chord, which is A 12/7. There's another movement of a 35:36 and a 15:14. Each of these movements are decidedly different from conventional 12 tone equal temperment, whose minor second pitches approximate a 15:16. But even with these movements, the chords sound rather conventional at the start of this piece. When the slides come in, things get more microtonal.

The oboe has the ability to be in more than one place at the same time in this piece, or think of it as two oboists. The timbre of the oboe is subject to some alteration by choosing samples that are higher or lower than originally recorded. The result is kind of an English Horn sound, or sometimes like an angry cat.

As with most of my pieces, this one has a lot of indeterminacy. Each instrument can choose what to play next, by selecting from many alternative pitch and rhythm sequences. There are programmatic controls that drive the choice of sequences either towards or away from repetition.

The basic structure of the piece is a chord progression as a bridge between the longer sections of B 16/9 major. There are lots of triads based on 4:5:6 overtones, or 7:9:11, or slides between the two. These triads alternate in the chords and arpegiations. Other chords take advantage of wider intervals, like the 5:7:11:16, 6:9:13:20, 8:11:18:24, and other quasi fourth-based intervals.

The balloon drums are made from a four foot long sewer pipe with a balloon membrane over one end. I recorded one and use Csound to bring it up in pitch. Each note played on the balloon drum is actually 5-10 strikes of the drum separated by a few milliseconds. It gives it a sense of many drummers playing at once.

Listen now to a version of Balloon Drum Music by Prent Rodgers.