Announcing a special LA event:  “Music From The Other Wakanda” explores a unique sonic palette using multiple microtonal tunings blended with 3 dimensional african rhythms to weave a wild  journey that will culminate with the LA premiere of the 40 minute piece, “Classical Music From A Parallel Dimension” that had its world premiere in San Francisco last November.  Some of the musical concepts grew out of the score he wrote for The Black Panther animated series in 2009.  Here he set out to write the classical music of Wakanda (the fictional African country from the Marvel movie/comic book, The Black Panther).  In so doing he found myself asking questions like, “What instruments would they have?” , “What is the nature of their musical culture?” “What indigenous scales and tunings would they use?” And “How does their music tie in to their cosmology and spirituality?”  Throughout the composition process these questions got answered in such a way that the music ended up becoming its own thing,… entering a parallel dimension of its own…hence the other Wakanda.

The Glendale Planetarium, with its 5.1 surround system is a perfect venue for this presentation as the music will be played back under the simulated night sky of their dome.

Ticket info below. All tickets must be purchased online in advance, and will not be sold at the door..

Hope you can make it.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/music-from-the-other-wakanda-tickets-57243929133

As I follow the curve of space-time, I spiral into my own activities and there I become an eddy of space-time itself and I “disappear” into my own vision. —Gary David

On Dec. 8, Erv Wilson took his leave from planet earth. While I feel a sense of grief, I don’t mourn. My past with him lives now as I write. He is inextricably lodged as a basic element in my being. George Spencer-Brown wrote, “Each being experiences what he, she, or it regards as the world as if of a dream of one’s own creation, and each of us is also an appearance in the ‘dream world’ of another. When the other dies, we too are lost from the dream. If we were prominent in that dream, we feel the loss acutely, and call it ‘grief’.”

“I myself prefer to be known as a “natural approximationist of (the) Augusto Novaro school (circa 1927). I will not be the one to split hairs in this matter; it’s the way one splits the tones that really matters, and I prefer to split them lengthwise, as opposed to those who split them sideways, or not to split them at all, for that matter. My entire philosophy of musical intonation can be wrapped up in one succinct little quote: “Nothing that exists is unnatural.” This includes the arts and artifices and artificiality of the musical imagination. Or, indeed, “why settle for the real thing when one might as well be having artificial?” (Lou Harrison, the 2nd funniest thing I ever heard him say). All scales are artificial, as are all other great works of art and products of the human imagination. You want to know what “natural” is. Let me tell you what “natural is. You don’t want to know. Well I’ll tell you anyway.” — Erv Wilson

He never did tell us. He showed us. Didn’t matter if it was pitch fields or corn fields, he was a unifying weaver of meanings. He uncovered unity wherever he found it. A friend of mine who met Erv said, “I never thought someone could render me so fascinated by the potential of individual corns on a cob! And his flying micro-tonal scales hanging from his ceiling amazed me.”

Once you become aware of this force for unity in life you can’t ever forget it. It becomes part of everything you do …. my conception of that force keeps changing shape. — John Coltrane

I will write elsewhere of Erv Wilson’s work, but here I give you a mere taste of my sense, feeling, and experience of the man. I’ve told the story of my first meeting with Erv Wilson many times, and I never tire of repeating that memorable moment. Harry Partch, was among the first of modern American composers to systematize microtonal music. In 1963, he was living in a chicken hatchery in Petaluma California with all of his instruments. I was living in San Francisco, and Emil Richards urged me to go see him. I visited him and we spent the day talking about music and tuning (and drinking). I told Harry I was moving to Los Angeles and he said, “You should look up Erv Wilson.” In 1964 I moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco. One of my first priorities was to meet Erv. One day I went to his apartment on Poinsettia Drive in Hollywood. I knocked on the door but no one answered. The door was ajar so I pushed it open and walked in. No one was there but there were a number of interesting instruments in the living room of the small apartment. I picked up some mallets and began to play a microtonally tuned marimba. I was engrossed in the sound when behind me I heard a gentle voice begin to describe to me what I was doing. We began talking about the tunings the sounds and numbers. No introductions. That began a 30-year conversation.

In all the years I worked with Erv and enjoyed our friendship, I learned that who he was and what he was were the same. No division. I experienced an aura of emotional safety whenever we engaged. He related to the novice I was in 1964 the same way he would relate to a master. That made it both easy to learn, as well as to accept my inability to grasp his meanings beyond my experience. There was little shame in not understanding.

If. . . the being I love most in the world came and asked me one day what choice he should make– what refuge is the most profound, the sweetest, the most immune to attack — I would advise him to shelter his destiny in the haven of a soul devoted to noble growth. — Maurice Maeterlinck, Sagesse et destinee, 1902

One of the innate traits of human life is curiosity. Those who lose access to that live an impoverished life. That fate never befell Erv, even later in life when his resources began to fail. His curiosity and his humor and his minimal egoism were hallmarks of both who and what he was.

He was what I call a fluid learner. Human awareness is both explicate and implicate – focal and subsidiary. Erv relied heavily on subsidiary awareness, while his focal awareness was a guide. He took literally, “the world is a dream.”

I have always been attracted to those with both a high and wide sense of life. To the overly focused, they appear either crazy or dangerous. Jimi Hendrix depicted this way:

I can see my rainbow calling me
through the misty breeze
of my waterfall.

Some people say day-dreaming’s
for the lazy minded fools
with nothing else to do.

What Erv saw in his waterfall, was no fantasy. He made it available to all of us. He created a unified field that will be mined for generations to come. I am ever grateful to have participated with him.

“I begin by imagining The impossible

And end by accomplishing
The impossible.” ― Sri Chinmoy

“The earth has music for those who listen.” – William Shakespeare Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? — — Lawrence Durrell

Though COME ALIVE is not a visual product it can be played on any DVD or Blu-Ray player hooked up to a 5.1 surround system.  This was the first piece of music to ever use a technique Erv Wilson suggested called “Continuous MOS” whereby the generating interval constantly changes in the background as the music material develops in the foreground. The result is that of a gradually changing array of scales that only occasionally pauses in any particular MOS tuning.

The music perpetually traverses the vast MOS territory in an linear fashion. Though technically a classical composition it borrows freely from multiple musical styles to create a unique trans-tonal approach to rhythm, harmony and melody.

DVD is available only at:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/stephenjamestaylor7

It will screen during a two hour block of short films starting at 5pm and will be the 7th in the order of the nine films to show. The Roxie is located at 3117 16th St, SF 94103. Tickets are available at :

http://www.ticketweb.com/t3/sale/SaleEventDetail?dispatch=loadSelectionData&eventId=5147235

Stephen James Taylor will likely only be coming up for the night, so unfortunately won’t have much time to hang out this trip. Nonetheless, we would love to see you there if you can make it. If not, please pass this info along to anyone else in the Bay Area who loves music and might be interested in a very provocative take on the subject.

From Stephen James Taylor and Aaron Rapoport comes a new SciFi short that applies some of the musical principles of Transcendent Tonality to the world of narrative fiction.

I AM HERE chronicles a female astronaut’s solo journey into inner and outer space aboard a new class of spaceship that responds to musical data and the emotions of the pilot. Due to an unexpected gravitational anomaly that diverts her course she is faced with the possibility of being stranded in space. She ends up working her way into an altered state in what turns out to be a vision quest in outer space..

This film represents a marriage of story, symbology and musical cosmology. It is driven by music written from the transcendent tonality paradigm , incorporating a broader universe of frequency relationships than those available on conventional instruments (as examined in Surfing The Sonic Sky). Additionally, most of the superimposed artwork and iconography in the film draw from the musical graphics of Ervin McDonald Wilson. This even includes the patches on the astronaut’s uniform.

Unofficially rated PG.

Check out this album on iTunes:

These songs are all created using a new musical paradigm called Transcendent Tonality. Think of it as a broad and inclusive mode of perception embracing all possible notes… “regular” notes as well as those that hide in the cracks between the usual notes obtainable on conventional instruments. By accepting all possible systems of frequency relationship an infinitely vast tonal world opens up, one where the composer is free to follow his ear anywhere inside or outside of the conventional tuning systems at will. The ability to change the underlying system now becomes part of the creative process. We did a film, Surfing the Sonic Sky, on this topic among other videos and musical examples.

When people hear about this they often tend to think that any music resulting from such an orientation would be dissonant and abstract. Sure thing if you WANT to go there. But the purpose of this album is to put forth the opposite. All the songs here are easy to listen to, use conventional song formats with memorable melodies and riffs, employing the production techniques of today’s pop culture. I generally used a soup base of hip hop elements into which I sprinkled various other ingredients. One instrument used extensively is the 31 tone 9 string guitar which is able to play things no other guitar can do. Tuning systems used on this project range from 11 limit Just Intonation, to 31 equal, to a hexatonic Tanzanian tuning, to Wilson MOS scales, to 23 tone Fibonacci, to a tuning based on theoretical levitation frequencies of the Coral Castle, and even the usual 12 equal (as it deserves equal inclusion as part of an infinitely large family of microtonal tunings).

Feel free to let me know your impressions, leave a comment below, share the album with your friends: Fbook, Twitter, social media share of your choice, email or some good old fashion conversation. You can also contact me at thesonicsky.com/contact/. Most importantly do how the Trantonal Pop Spirital Moves YOU.

Embrace It All!

Thank you so much for your interest and support.