Indian Territory Dulcimer Celebration E-Newsletter
"Mothers Day!"
"Memorial Day!"
May 2005 Volume 25, Number 5
Sections:
| This Month | From the Prez | Chords |
| Last Month | Group Tunes | Photos |
This Month
Meeting: Saturday May 21, 2005 5:30 PM
From the Prez....
From the Prez:
Mountain View and the Dulcimer Jamboree at the Ozark Folk Center was entertaining, as always, with a lot of new situations there this year, and also a sad one. The Jamboree ran from Tuesday thru Saturday for the first time (it's been Thursday thru Sunday morning in the past). That made for more workshop possibilities, more performers, more mini-concerts, and (unfortunately) more fees for attending. The attendance was down, but not by a lot. It's kinda tough for some folks to take off for a whole week of dulcimer shenanigans. Many folks came for just two or three days.
The sad note was that William K. O?Neil, the folklorist at the Center, passed away early Wednesday morning. He was known to so many of us as Dr. Bill, and we cherished any time spent with him. He not only could tell you when a tune was written, but the composer's name and what he had for breakfast on the day that he or she wrote the tune. He was known to be able to do more extensive research than almost all of his colleagues, and someone once said that he was the ?greatest friend that anonymous ever had.? We will miss him a whole bunch. Wow, what a guy.
Our next club meeting will be on the 21st in May, as late as it can get. By then, some might have gone down to Glen Rose for the LSSDS shindig, and some other gatherings around the country. If you go to any festivals, bring back some news for the rest of us, okay? We love to hear about them.
Here's a proposal I'll bring up now since I might not be at the May meeting. I have tentatively reserved the new Family Life Center at Yale Ave church for our August meeting and birthday party, and I've been talking to some of our club's champions, and trying to see if they're available then. Also, since another group is now meeting at the church on the fourth weekend of each month in the room we use, I'm proposing that we not meet for the month of September since many folks go up to Winfield on our normal meeting date. Let me know what you think, okay?
Dennis.
"Notes" from the Editor!
Well its Mothers Day, and Memorial Day all the same month. How about a tune for each?
Lets see while I am in the rambling mode, I will be out of town next month so the June newsletter needs to be created by someone else! Volunteers?
And while I am on the topic, last meeting I asked for feedback and got zero. Nobody. So.. if my efforts here are for my one personal pleasure, it could be optimized by ceasing this effort. Again I ask: Volunteers?
Oh another thought, the server crashed about a month ago and I had to reload it from backup, if you notice any files missing, let me know! If you are reading this let me know! Anyway we are running on a new computer now, hopefully without any changeover glitches..
Enough-
Dana
Chords!
Just what is a chord? As i was explaining last month- a chord is one or more intervals combined in a way that is pleasing to the ear. Seems like an innocent enough definition.. but wait.. There's more!
What follows is the simple English reason "WHY" the major chord sounds so good to our ears!
The "musical" intervals are very convenient mathematical ratios of the frequencies of the notes. (See the April Newsletter) When playing our instruments this level of detail is not important, as we concentrate on the mechanical and artistic aspects of dulcimer playing. But these ratios combine mathematically to form multiple interval relationships that make very clean fractions. The more clean the fraction of the ratios the more pleasing the chord is to our ears. The major chord has the simplest pair of ratios: (Here is a great web site on the subject.)
This set of ratios explain why all 12 possible notes are not members of the major scale, and why certain notes are "skipped" in such a seemingly irrational pattern. Since when we are playing we cant see the intervals, we have to memorize scales the hard way. Because our ears are preferential to this particular group of ratios that are invisible without scientific instruments we end up spending years of experimentation finding how to play our dulcimers in a pleasing manner. I think knowing the physics behind harmony doesn't help much with learning any instrument tho. I am not aware of any tendency towards musical prodigy amongst physicists, so keep practicing! Its the only way, its just nice to know there is a real reason for music being musical!
Now back to the subject- as the ratios become less related to each other a chord becomes a "discord". So there is the mathematics in simple English, now how about the names of the chords? Why is a chord given a name like "major third", or an "augmented ninth"? What is diminished about a diminished chord?
In very simple terms augmented and diminished refer to making the "perfect" interval, then moving one semitone sharp or flat. Again I found a series of web sites explaining the specifics of the names of the intervals, What chord names mean, A musical notation explanation, More info from the perspective of bass players, and A site on the notation of chord names.
Now we have all this info on chords, how about applying that to dulcimers? Here are some more sites that are dulcimer specific:
Mountain dulcimer chord charts: DAD also DGD.
Hammered dulcimer chord charts: Modal
Picking chords: What chord do I play? This link is a great explanation by Paul Goelz of how to know when to switch chords and which one to go to. I think this should be of interest to both mountain and hammered dulcimer players.
Enough chording for a newsletter, time to practice, in my case anyway!
Dana
Photos from our most recent meeting-
See the photos from April!
Last Month
See you at the meeting!
Dana