Paul Hirsh
jazz panpipe pioneer and designerRecent Comments
Category Archives: Music Theory
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
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 improvising
When making analyses of great solos, jazz teachers like to look at the scales and arpeggios used and try to relate them to the underlying chord sequence. The operation consists of extracting all the notes in a passage and stringing them out … Continue reading
Charting the Emotions
Once upon a time, inspired by Alain Daniélou’s Ragas of North Indian Classical Music, I mapped just-tuned frequencies into an infinite web that I call the Honeycomb. You can explore it in my interactive Atlas of Tonespace, by clicking on the notes … Continue reading
Musical Chromosomes
Working with whole tone panpipes has for me been a liberating experience, a shortcut to what they call stage 4 competence in NLP or what I call “mindless playing”. For those unfamiliar with Romanian panpipes, I should explain that the semitones are obtained … Continue reading
Six Seconds Make a Seventh
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 a thirteenth, which is also twelve seconds. … Continue reading
Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers 