Indian Territory Dulcimer Celebration E-Newsletter
"Daylight Saving Time!"
April 2005 Volume 25, Number 4
Photo from the February meeting.
Sections:
| This Month | From the Prez | Musical intervals |
| Last Month | Photos |
This Month
Meeting: Saturday April 16, 2005 5:30 PM.
From the Prez....
Hey, here it is early April, and my mind is on dulcimer festivals instead of getting the taxes done! Gotta stop fooling around with important stuff and get busy on the nasty chores, huh?
I'm really looking forward to the Dulcimer Jamboree in Mountain View AR this year. They have a new time frame now, running from Tuesday through Saturday, April 19-23. Its going to be really interesting to see what kind of crowd they draw with the new dates. The instructors have all been chosen (there are a lot of them, too!) and are listed on their web site. Go to http://www.ozarkfolkcenter.com and you can get more information, including the names of the instructors, prices, etc.
Then, just a couple of weeks later, it will be time for fun and frolic at the LSSDS Annual Festival at Oakdale Park in Glen Rose TX. I have the web site somewhere for this one, also, but I can't find it right now, dadburn it! I'll keep digging and bring it to club meeting with me. The next meeting, of course, will be on Saturday, April 16th, at Yale Avenue Christian Church, 36th and Yale, Tulsa. We'll see you there at 6:00, okay? Or maybe 7:00 if you have a hamburger date at 6:00!
One more thing: Recently, our friend Linda Lowe Thompson from Texas was in a bad auto accident. She rolled her vehicle several times, and had to be cut out by rescue workers. Her worst injury at this time seems to be a shoulder broken in three places, but she's also banged up and bruised all over. And I doubt that she was very pleased about the helicopter ride to the hospital, either. Please keep LLT in your thoughts and prayers as she goes through surgery and rehab in the next several weeks.
Dennis.
"Notes" from the Editor!
Its daylight saving time again.. more time to practice! We lost an hour, but now we get the extra daylight to see our fingers with! Its easier to play when we can see what we are doing isn't it?
I'm looking forward to the meeting, to find out what I missed last month.
In the meanwhile I wish the very best for Linda Thompson, that sounds like a pretty horrific wreck.
Dana
Intervals!
Just what is a musical interval? In very simple terms it is the relationship between two notes on a scale. If you count the notes while playing a major scale "do" is "one", and ending again with "do" being "eight". (The concept of an interval is the same regardless of the mode in use.)
Intervals are named as the number of "tones" between two notes including the upper and lower notes themselves. If the notes are both moved up to the next note in the scale the interval is the same. So the spacing between the notes on the major scale is the interval.
The most trivial interval is two notes that are exactly the same. Such as two unison strings on the hammered dulcimer, or the two little D strings on the mountain dulcimer. When the notes are the same the interval is a "first", or the first note in a major scale.
Next what is an octave? "Octo" is the Latin word for "eight". An octave is a musical "eighth" interval. An octave also has a natural physical basis, which is: the frequency of a note exactly doubles (1:2), or is half of its original value. That doesn't mean much without having expensive equipment to measure it, it is also the note produced when a string is struck at half or double its original length. The octave fret for any note is always exactly half the length from the note to the bridge.
Another physical interval that is important in music: the "fourth", the frequency ration is 3:2. Making this interval come from basic physics like the octave. The "fifth" has the physical frequency ratio of 4:3. The "third" has the frequency ratio of 5:4. These natural ratios make the interval seem particularly pleasing to the ear, and account for the notes being spaced in the seemingly illogical way in the major scale.
There are 12 semitones in an octave, and each octave above and below a note repeats the same sequence over until the notes exceed the capacity of our ears to distinguish them. Although there are 12 notes per octave, there are only 8 of the twelve notes that seem to make natural steps based on the natural ratios I was speaking of.
The intervals are the building blocks for chords, so next month I plan to relate intervals to chords, as chords are the easiest forms of harmony to understand, and the building blocks for the structure of tunes. If you have questions on intervals, ask me at the meeting!
Hope that wasn't too boring!
Dana
Photos from our most recent meeting-
Photos? Did anyone take any pictures? If so I will put them online and update this link!
Last Month
(Since I wasnt at the meeting last month this is from two months ago.. forgive me!)
See you at the meeting!
Dana