Name: Three Mikros by David Woodhead
Duration: 3 min 1 s
Description: Three Mikros - Well, what if that sort of thing was played on fretted stringed instruments? Here are some piano improvisations in the spirit of Bartok’s Mikrokosmos to which I added mandolin, acoustic guitar and bass, with a bit of ebow thrown in for #2. Three pieces totaling three minutes, trying to keep that modal, enigmatic, off-balance feeling that is so…fascinating.

by David Woodhead, Graham Campbell and Charles James

Three composer/musicians working together in isolation - one musician  starts with a 30-second piece (any instrumentation, genre or tempo) and sends it to the next, who can then add another 30 seconds of music to it with the option to overlay sound or instruments to the previous recording. In this case there were nine segments, and some of the transitions are hard to spot (even to me!) with some of what appear to be transitions are actually done by one person. Additions can be similar or complete left turns.  Here we go - the participants are (in order) David Woodhead, Graham Campbell and Charles James. We're all multi-instrumentalists, and most sounds are not samples, though some synths and digital manipulations are involved!

Epic Musical Tag #3

"This Is It!" #15 The complete piano music of Neely Bruce. This piece is a quasi-random scramble of fragments of dozens of Schubert waltzes. The waltzes themselves were also chosen at random. Sometimes the right and left hands are coordinated, more often they are not. Photocopies of the waltzes were cut up and taped together according to the taste of the composer. All key signatures have been removed, resulting in a giant pandiatonic collage, played entirely on the white keys. The composer acknowledges his profound love of the original Schubert miniatures, which he first heard played by Leonard Fletcher in the early 1960s in Birmingham, Alabama. He also acknowledges his debt to the Liszt "Soirée de Vienne" and Ravel's "Valses nobles et sentimentales."

Furniture Music in the Form of Mutilated Schubert Waltzes

Live from the Guelph Jazz Festival 2019, a solo performance on vielle à roue (hurdy gurdy/zanfoña/Drehleier etc).

Completely improvised, there are no electronic effects used at all, just the amplified instrument.  Please excuse the noisy archival-quality recording.

Live at the Guelph Jazz Festival 2019

Three Mikros - Well, what if that sort of thing was played on fretted stringed instruments? Here are some piano improvisations in the spirit of Bartok’s Mikrokosmos to which I added mandolin, acoustic guitar and bass, with a bit of ebow thrown in for #2. Three pieces totaling three minutes, trying to keep that modal, enigmatic, off-balance feeling that is so…fascinating.

Three Mikros

Live performance from November 24, 1994, Trinity St-Paul Centre, Toronto

Three Mikros

David Woodhead

Related tracks