I promised to post this several days ago but never got around to it. It's the first tune I composed after first stumbling on a pentaquartal harp in a group of five Magic Harps that Jason Ricci tossed out on a table in front of me at Chickie Wah Wah in New Orleans in early November, 2018. We were both there to teach at the Harmonica Collective along with Rick Estrin, Hank Shreve, john Nemeth, and Catriona Sturton, and Jason had recently acquired the harps in an eBay auction.
Designed and patented by Magic Dick and Pierre Beauregard in the early 1990s but never commercially produced, Magic Harp tunings all put the draw note in each hole higher than the blow note, have a pattern that repeats, and presents some interesting combination of chords. A few were built by customizers, these ones having been built for a client by Jimmy Gordon.
Jason wanted me to map out the tunings so we could sell the harps. I mapped them quickly and played each one briefly. This one was so strange that I wondered why it was tuned that way. Instead of normal chords, the notes produced a stack of fourths (hence Catriona Sturton's remark that the chords sounded both calm and tense at the same time, which turned out to be the stimulus for writing this tune), and the blow and draw chord were just different voicings of the same chord. Also, the pearwood comb was really musty (I later replaced it with one of Tom Halchak's linen combs).
I eventually ordered more harps in this tuning in different keys from both Hohner and Seydel, and continue to use them to compose and play music that otherwise wouldn't occur to me, including the "Morning All Around Us" clip I posted about ten days ago.
That was unusually pleasant! Personally I think that is an amazing composition. ---------- Wisdom does not always come with old age. Sometimes old age arrives alone.
Your combination of a deep understanding of theory and your ability to put theory into practice with high level playing skills never fails to impress me. ----------
