Introduction to musical composition with the Semantic Danielou-53

Just Intonation 2-days workshop with Jacques Dudon, 16-17 May 2020, in Paris

Due to the coronavirus, the workshop is postponed to a later date.

Just intonation is both the art and science of harmony between sounds.
Microtonal by nature, just intonation comprises an almost infinite diversity of what are known as “natural” intervals, bestowing incomparable sound quality on musical instruments and applications: clarity, fusion of harmonics, coherence of difference tones, and more besides.
Omnipresent in the human voice, the origin of all the systems used to tune our instruments, it spans the ages and the vastness of the world’s traditional music cultures, albeit not limited to any specific formal “style”.
Similarly, it is open to the creation and playing of new scales, harmonies and sound colours. 
 What are these harmonic consonances that make sounds vibrate together, resonate in us, and how can we find them in order to tune ourselves, experience, play, sing together, and create music in just intonation?
With the aid of the Semantic Daniélou-53 and other microtonal instruments and using various collective musical games, we shall discover the intonations of different traditional musical scales and how and by means of what harmonic resonances they arouse our ear and touch us emotionally.

The Semantic Danielou-53, its manual and microtunings can be downloaded free of charge on this page.

Using the Semantic, our voice, various acoustic instruments tuned to natural scales, as well as the participants’ own instruments, this course develops the musical and pedagogical possibilities of the musical system conceived by Alain Daniélou, stemming from Indian rāgas.

Essentially hands-on, this course is also designed to answer the specific questions of each participant concerning his/her own vocal or instrumental practice.

Theoretical knowledge is not needed in order to participate.

Participants are only asked to be ready, during the course, to open their ears fully, using the practical exercises and musical skills suggested.

Some of the subjects tackled during this workshop:

– the scale of natural harmonics,
– just intervals common to different traditions,
– harmonic limits,
– the gesture and practice of tuning,
– just intonation instruments,
– discovery of the 22 Indian shrutis,
– intonation modes of some of the principal Indian rāgas,
– other non-European scales,
– musical practices taking advantage of the Semantic Danielou-53,
– the novelties of version 2.0 (scheduled for the end of May 2020).

Jacques Dudon: sound researcher, composer in just intonation and scientific director of the Atelier d’Exploration Harmonique [Harmonic Exploration Workshop] (Saint-Affrique, France), specialist in the creation of experimental instruments, microtonal music, psycho-acoustics, sound-colour relations.
After a year’s study with Sri M.R. Gautam, director of vocal music at the University of Benares (1970), Jacques Dudon has, since 1979, taught just intonation, instruments making, harmony of colours, voice training, microtonal composition, polyrhythms and musical pedagogy at various courses and workshops. Exploring the intonation models of the world’s music has for years inspired him to seek new means of expression in the service of multicultural music, based on new sound environments. He has created over 500 new musical instruments, using water, light, air, strings, electronics, including the “photosonic disk” (1972), an optical instrument that led him to create thousands of microtonal scales and to develop the new concepts of “Harmonic temperaments“, “Differential Coherence” and “Fractal Waveforms“.
His collaboration with the works of Alain Danielou (Sémantique Musicale, 2005; Semantic works, 2007) led him to conceive the musical and pedagogical aspects of the Semantic Danielou-53, an instrument of introduction to just intonation music, freely downloadable together with its manual and microtunings, from this page.

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