Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.21.1802130530520.17917@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: webartery@yahoogroups.com
Subject: 1920s? brass Ganges water jar instrument
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 05:34:05 -0500 (EST)
1920s? brass Ganges water jar instrument for John and Uli, who gave me this wonderful gift. http://www.alansondheim.org/gangajal.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/gangajal.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/gangajalb.mp3 Listen to both with earphones if you can; the 2nd version has added filter correction and reverb; the frequencies tend, more than one might believe, to resonate in the subsonics. "Whew, I've been researching the jar; it's a gangajal or ganga jal jar, probably from the 1920s, used for transporting water from the Ganges for purification; it has writing on it in three places that I can't decipher." "I recorded the jar. As you know, descendents of water jars are used in Indian music (think of the ghatam) and I found if I turned the jar upside-down, sealing the mouth on a mouse-pad, I could use it in a similar way, and the sealing created an interior that seems to resonate into the subsonics as well." Compression pulses are set up in the jar; the air couples with its container. I think of this as containing a universe. The recorder, an H2n, was inside; the compression pulses surrounded the microphones. Playing the outer surface, I'm literally creating sound and music that is beyond me, the secrecy of the contained and its resistance. http://www.alansondheim.org/gangajal.jpg (I can never reach music; music is a problem for me.)