The Wooden Roots

The Wooden Roots is a devotional form of music directed toward the worship of Aye the Furs of Heather originating in The Jump of Bristling. The rules of the form are applied by composers to produce individual pieces of music which can be performed. A speaker recites any composition of The Natural Bud while the music is played on one to two thilama. The musical voices are joined in melody. The entire performance is very fast. The melody has mid-length phrases throughout the form. It is performed using the lari scale and in the soya rhythm. Throughout, when possible, composers and performers are to use mordents and make trills.

• The speaker always should be joyful.
• Each thilama always does the main melody and should feel mournful.
• The Wooden Roots has a well-defined multi-passage structure: a lengthy theme, an exposition of the theme, a bridge-passage and a recapitulation of the theme.
• The theme is to be very loud. Chords are packed close together in dense clusters in this passage.
• The exposition is to be loud. This passage typically has some sparse chords.
• The bridge-passage is to be loud. This passage features only melodic tones and intervals.
• The recapitulation is to become louder and louder. This passage is richly layered with full chords making use of the available range.
• Scales are constructed from twelve notes spaced evenly throughout the octave. The tonic note is fixed only at the time of performance.
• The lari heptatonic scale is constructed by selection of degrees from the fundamental scale. The degrees selected are the 1st, the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, the 5th, the 7th and the 9th.
• The soya rhythm is made from two patterns: the pama and the mathuva. The patterns are to be played over the same period of time, concluding together regardless of beat number.
• The pama rhythm is a single line with two beats. The beat is stressed as follows:
• | x - |
• where x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.
• The mathuva rhythm is a single line with seven beats. The beats are named bulifo (spoken bu), ada (ad), mamo (ma), icithi (ic), arile (ar), opa (op) and eli (el). The beat is stressed as follows:
• | - x x X - - x`|
• where X marks an accented beat, ` marks a beat as early, x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.

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