Paul Hirsh
jazz panpipe pioneer and designerRecent Comments
Yearly Archives: 2014
Getting towards a tipping point
Paul von Jankó was a man ahead of his time. His ideas fell on stony ground and he ended up spending the last 17 years of his life laboring on a Turkish tobacco farm. Perhaps to get away from his … Continue reading
How to convert your panpipe to wholetone tuning
So your Gran bought you this beautiful Romanian nai for Christmas and the first thing you want to do is convert it to wholetone tuning so you can play all your favorite Charlie Parker tunes on it – in all … Continue reading
Posted in Intuitive Instruments
Tagged dajoeri, how to tune panpipes, nai, Romanian nai, Romanian panpipe, tuning panpipes, tuutflutes, wholetone panpipes
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Learning one halfstep at a time
If you want to know what quartertones sound like, get your class of kids to sing the Beatles song When I’m 64. The second line is supposed to sound like this: And what you will generally get, when you average … Continue reading
Posted in Interval Training
Tagged Chromatic scale, deep purple, Halfsteps, Herbie Hancock, Semitones
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How tots discover they don’t like “music”
Early learning materials conceived to initiate tots into the making of music suffer from conflicting design aims and manage to put quite a few little fellows off from the outset. It is often wrongly assumed that kids who don’t pursue … Continue reading
Visualizing the Seven Dwarfs + Cinderella
No I haven’t suddenly taken to designing embroidery patterns for Romanian shirts. I used this old toy I found in the basement to show you how the player of the double-wholetone-row xylophone or wholetone panpipe player visualizes Messiaen’s seven “modes … Continue reading
Olivier Messiaen’s seven dwarfs
One of the fun things about playing wholetone panpipes is the way they make short scales – not just the whole tone scale – ridiculously easy. Short scales are my name for a large family of interval arrays that includes … Continue reading
Why kids give up
“I did a bit of piano when I was little” How many times have you heard that? Do you even need to ask what went wrong? The piano keyboard, whose design dates back to before the discovery of equal temperament, … Continue reading
Making it intentional
If there is one constant theme in everything I try to do in music, it is the idea of intentionality. I once read both John Cage’s books in praise of chance operations and ambient sounds, and found them highly entertaining, … Continue reading
Posted in Musicianship
Tagged improvising, Intentional improvising, John Cage, John Coltrane, Michael Brecker
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Six Seconds Make a Seventh
Originally posted on Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers:
Six seconds make a seventh? Is time expanding? How do they do that? Simple! The same way as two thirds make a fifth! Two fifths make a ninth, but three of them make…
Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers 