Scott Scholz – Whip Sigils
Digipak CD out Autumn 2023
Electroacoustic/Early Music/Microtonal

In the early days of the COVID pandemic, composer and music librarian Scott Scholz started a project to explore  how previous cultures had addressed pandemics musically. This simple premise became an ever-expanding series of inquiries over the next three years, leading him in directions he never imagined. “I dived into parts of music history I’d only glossed over before. I listened to dozens of albums of early music, electroacoustic music, and contemporary and ancient music from the Middle East. I taught myself to transcribe Medieval neumatic notation into modern notation. I studied musical systems of the Middle East, and compared how they intersect with early Western music. I taught myself the basics of granular synthesis.  I learned how to play instruments like the oud and the saz/baglama. I re-fretted a guitar to add microtones. I rebuilt an old kurdish tanbur that had been a wall decoration at a luthier shop that went out of business. I gutted the electronic gadgets I’ve been running guitars through for 20 years and built a new system.”

The result is “Whip Sigils,” a suite of pieces incorporating melodies drawn from Medieval self-flagellants and victims of the Albigensian Crusade. The source melodies are embedded in the music horizontally and vertically in a variety of ways analogous to creating visual sigils out of letters: they are embedded in counterpoint, transformed into texture through granular synthesis, or blended within harmony. Where the melodies can be plainly heard, they are often microtonally altered in tribute to Middle Eastern influences on the early secular songwriting traditions of Western civilization. Performances are realized with a combination of electrified versions of ancient middle eastern instruments (oud, saz, and tanbur), microtonally modified guitar, and software synths. 

Stylistically, elements of Early Music (West and East) remain, but they are reshaped as electroacoustic treatments, contrapuntal sections that sometimes dissolve into microtonality, and passages that recall 70s Turkish Anatolian psychedelia, holy minimalism, post-rock, ambient, new age, and noise. As Scholz notes in his detailed album liner notes, “My approach to manipulating, transforming, and further composing atop these fragments has little to do with early music revivalism. Instead I’m looking for universal elements contained in the music, for various kinds of musical and conceptual contrasts, and for hidden cultural implications of the times.”

V Le Bouvier

IV Chi Vollo Mondo Desprezzare

III Nu Tret Herzuo

II Maria Unser Frowe

I Nu Ist Diu Betfart So Here

Our wedding was a kind of faux-ominous opera buffa performance. Here's a recording of the ceremony/music, My reference point as I was composing this was thinking about adding some levity to the general style of Michael Nyman's music for Peter Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" film in particular.

Heidi & Scott's Wedding, 8-31-2003

Closing

As Nuptial Agreements Have Been Made...

Ceremony, Part 2

Passing of Rings

Ceremony, Part 1

This is a Very Monumentous Occasion...

I just realized tonight that KPTM Fox 42 cancelled their news programming in May of this year. Here's a demo from around 2008 that was made for my band at the time, Shinyville, that's essentially a creepy arrangement of this old jingle they used to play on the station regularly that had very cult-like lyrics...

We're Your Station

Musician. Music librarian. Tymbal Tapes. Occasional music journalist. Radio host. Aural adventurer. Debut solo album out October 1, 2023 on NO PART OF IT: https://nopartofit.bandcamp.com/album/whip-sigils

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