Anchored Harmony and Tonalities
The new Tonalibus album Cooperation A is now available online globally! On Spotify, YouTube Music, Deezer, Apple Music / iTunes, and on many more music platforms. It features fourteen spontaneous improvisations by Christina Braun, voice, and Ulrico on various instruments. These pieces span close to one and a quarter hours of diverse original world music. Detailed information you find under Cooperation A — Album in the Fidibus Shop.
At the concert In the Happy Garden – sound & song in Basel on February 10, exotic sound worlds, with gongs, cymbals, fujara, vichitra veena, and other instruments played by Ulrico, met the prolific poetic songwriting with classical guitar accompaniment by Marcel Haag. They both love and live for their music and harmony, although their approaches to music are quite different. Marcel revels in poetic song texts, melodies, and intricate combinations of diverse harmonies in exact successions. Ulrico, on the other hand, relishes the continual flow of harmony by deeply attuning to and exploring fundamental sounds and harmonics, akin to sound mantras and meditative music. (This context further appears in the blog post Imperfect perfection).
(Through February 13, 2022, the captured live stream video of this concert was very briefly made available for viewing online. That was on Marcel’s Facebook page Marcel Haag Music, though with limited sound and image quality.)
The 75-minute concert program included the following fifteen mostly short pieces:
Brief intro: «Gong Medley» – gongs (Ulrico) «I bin es Lied» – voice & classical guitar (Marcel) with singing saw (Ulrico) «Öffne die Tür» – voice & classical guitar (Marcel) «Courage it takes / Es braucht Mut / Le courage qu’il faut / Il coraggio che ci vuole» – voice & 8-string guitar (Ulrico) «Fahne vom Thurgau» – voice & classical guitar (Marcel) with alto fujara (Ulrico) «Wolfesfährten» – strings, voice & classical guitar (Marcel) «無為 Wu wei – soundscape» – Nepali & Tibetan tingsha cymbals, crotales, sound bowls, gongs, bass fujara, singing saw (Ulrico) «Im glücklichen Garten» – voice & classical guitar (Marcel) with bass (Ulrico) «Gartentag» – voice & classical guitar (Marcel) «Blessings may be» – vichitra veena (Ulrico) «Es soll Blumen geben» – voice & classical guitar (Marcel) «Ein Liebeslied» – voice & classical guitar (Marcel) with selje flute (Ulrico) «Guggisbärg-Melodie» – 8-string guitar (Ulrico) «Du Baum» – voice & classical guitar (Marcel) Close: «Sound/rhythm scape» – gongs & crotales (Ulrico) & voice (Marcel)
The February 2022 tonality of the month is BlueMin, a tritone or blues tonality.
The tonality of the month of February 2022 is BlueMin, a tritone or blues tonality. As the name indicates, the octave of a tritone or blues tonality includes the tritone. Further it includes one or more Reach steps (augmented seconds), generally off the fundamental or quint. And there may be consecutive half steps. As such, BlueMin, a fully anchored tonality, is exceptional in that it contains three consecutive half steps or four consecutive halftones. However these may not (or only very rarely) be all consecutive.
You may enjoy a sound sample or tonality loop as sound mantra for contemplation or meditation. This can help with upliftment, purification, and focusing. Or it could simply be used as soothing background sound for relaxation and regeneration. If you care to hum, chant, or sing along, you could do so using a spiritually charged syllable like HU or Ōṁ / Aum ॐ, or another mantra syllable that suits you.
This January 2022 Tonalibus update highlights an upcoming cooperation concert in Basel. Then it touches on playlist expansions in the Fidibus shop. And it announces the recent release of two new Tonalibus singles on global music platforms. It concludes with inspiring quotes and a sweet image.
February 10, 19:30, QuBa, Bachlettenstr. 12, Basel — with Marcel Haag, an avid troubadour song writer, and Ulrico.
In this concert, exotic sound worlds — from gongs, bells, fujara, vichitra veena, and other instruments — meet poetic songwriting in German, Thurgau dialect and English, accompanied by classical guitar. The two solo artists Ulrico and Marcel explore new ways of sounding together in uplifting songs and soundscapes.
This all new playlist features a selection of twelve spontaneous improvisations with Christina Braun, voice, and Ulrico on various instruments. These unique musical cooperation creations span more than an hour with recordings from the past year and a half.
By now, this still expanding playlist High Mountains on Fire, Light, and Sound has grown to eight pieces. So far, they explore the far reaches, the simplicity, and also inversion contrasts of harmony. The latest one of them received its own blog post, चैतन्य Chaitanya. While the second most recent piece, Blue Courage (below), is a blues in a regular diatonic tonality.
The following two singles were released in mid January on all the global music platforms also used for the album Tonalibus A, B, & C. They include Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, and many more.
This piece is part of the collection Tonalibus D. Initially it swings into what later turns out to be an inverted harmonic contrast; and it gently resolves some far reaches of harmony into unity beyond duality.
This spiritual blues is one of the most popular pieces of the album Tonalibus A, B, & C. Thus it now became available also as a single.
“Do not partake in the evil of another. If you are quiet and calm, your calmness and quietness will make a greater effect on the other than his anger — so that true resistance is the practice of contentment.” — p. 32
“[This] is love. The love that makes all things beautiful. Yes, and breathes divinity into the very dust you tread. With love shall life roll on gloriously throughout eternity, like the voice of great music that has the power to hold the hearer’s heart poised on eagle’s wings far above the earthly world.”
— p. 40, Stranger by the River, Paul Twitchell
“If you see many here, they are in reality only a few . . . if any.”
— منطق الطیر, Manṭiq-uṭ-Ṭayr or The Colloquy of the Birds, Farid Ud-Din Attar
Being good starts with recognizing the good in one and all, and that any one is never the only good one. That much humility is required to be spiritually positive. This includes seeing the good in others as well as in oneself, to nurture the good in all. Only second, one needs to see also the negative, as objectively as possible, in order to survive and keep it at a safe distance, out of reach both ways.
As humans, we live in duality, if not plurality. But as soul, we are beyond all that. Creativity aims to open windows and doors, vistas beyond one’s divisive limitations and allows the unlimited, divine love to flow in. Images and music, light and sound can allow for that, when carefully tuned in, as can words at times.
Tonalibus is one of my, Ulrico’s, efforts to to grasp some of the good, the harmony around us and to make my findings available to others, for the possibility they may help someone in some way, as they help me. On this website there are some of my discoveries, as I go my way. You go your way. There is no one and only way. Your way is yours. My way is mine. Now, in this very moment that you read this, our ways cross each other. My aim is to make this uplifting and encouraging, to nurture the good in both of us. And I sincerely hope you too can see the good, not so much the bad in me.
We all have our shortcomings and are at times off target. Nobody is perfect as human being. As soul with love in the heart we can bridge the gap between what we see as good and bad, the illusions of the absurd, of being human. This is the miracle of divine love where beauty blossoms and joy fills the heart beyond the reach of challenges and attacks, which invariably come about and try to keep one down. This seems to be what we’re here to learn in life and love.
We exist through working together, not against each other. Life is not about survival of the fittest. It’s about survival by working together. One cannot be good and well when at the expense of others. We learn to somehow carry our own weight by working together, allowing others to do the same.
This is what I have to give right now. Please don’t condemn me for that. It’s all I have. I put my heart into this, my love, and my life. You may trample it with your feet or relish it for what it is. That’s your freedom, as it is mine to pass this on in an effort to work together and strengthen the good in all, in you and in me, in spiritual freedom.
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