The Sweet Butterfly

The Sweet Butterfly is a devotional form of music originating in The Amusing Nations. The rules of the form are applied by composers to produce individual pieces of music which can be performed. The music is played on a ucshug and a athrab. The musical voices bring melody and counterpoint. The entire performance should be delicate and is at a free tempo. The melody has phrases of varied length, while the counterpoint has mid-length phrases throughout the form. Never more than an interval sounds at once. It is performed in the stral rhythm. Throughout, when possible, composers and performers are to use grace notes, use mordents, make trills, locally improvise and alternate tension and repose.

• The ucshug always does the counterpoint melody.
• The athrab always does the main melody.
• The Sweet Butterfly has the following structure: a theme and a series of variations on the theme.
• The theme is to be loud. The athrab stays in the flat low register and the ucshug stays in the watery high register. The passage is performed without preference for a scale.
• The series of variations is to be soft. The athrab stays in the flat high register and the ucshug stays in the rippling low register. The passage is performed using the stalcon scale. The passage should often include a rising-falling melody pattern with glides, rapid runs, arpeggios and staccato, always include a falling melody pattern with rapid runs and legato and often include a rising melody pattern with legato.
• Scales are constructed from twenty-four notes spaced evenly throughout the octave. The tonic note is fixed only at the time of performance. Every note is named. The names are nek (spoken ne), lastta (la), cish (ci), ani (an), shato (sha), almef (al), onod (on), osp (osp), arin (ar), umo (um), rostfen (ro), hiner (hi), ohe (oh), nazweng (na), tod (to), zomuth (zo), bepa (be), noloc (no), kes (ke), suku (su), musda (mu), uzu (uz), onaf (on) and agthreb (ag).
• The stalcon heptatonic scale is thought of as two disjoint chords spanning two perfect fourths. These chords are named kasmko and othag.
• The kasmko tetrachord is the 1st, the 6th, the 7th and the 11th degrees of the quartertone octave scale.
• The othag tetrachord is the 15th, the 18th, the 20th and the 25th (completing the octave) degrees of the quartertone octave scale.
• The stral rhythm is a single line with two beats. The beats are named leto (spoken le) and renal (re). The beat is stressed as follows:
• | x x |
• where x is a beat and | indicates a bar.

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