#tihai

Thème : La fuite Contrainte : Un personnage doit faire face à une langue qu'il ne comprend pas.

David Bruce about the rhythms of Tigran Hamasyan

A tihai is a musical phrase repeated 3 times. It can start from any beat, but it usually ends on sum (the 1st beat of a rhythmic cycle).

On Nov. 8th, the day before I finish my residency, I am excited to be performing at Whispering Pines. I'll be playing with a pair of very talented local musicians: Orion Walsh and Amy Schmidt. So, on the off chance that someone reading this will be, or knows anyone who will be, in Nebraska City on November 8th, come join for a night of brand new Dylan Thomas songs and reimagined Woody Guthrie tunes. More info about the show at the Whispering Pines blog. On to this week's song, 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower'. In the music, I incorporate an idea that I've been baffled and fascinated with for years: the 'tihai'. It is a North Indian rhythmic concept that consists of three repetitions of the same pattern. Just as jazz/blues/classical music most often uses harmony to give a sense of tension and release, Hindustani music uses rhythmic cadences such as tihais. The tihai creates tension by breaking from the cycle and then returning to it. For the intro and outro of my song, I made a tihai that divides a 32 beat cycle into three equal parts. By the second part, I'm out of sync with the original accents of the cycle, but at the end, my last note resolves this by landing on the downbeat of the next cycle. Here, I use the bass notes to indicate the the original downbeats so you can hear when the pattern gets in and out of sync. Audio below. Ciao! Green Fuse Tihai