The Lavender Canyon

The Lavender Canyon is a devotional form of music directed toward the worship of Ral Oilypainted originating in The Humid Volcano. The rules of the form are applied by composers to produce individual pieces of music which can be performed. A singer recites nonsensical words and sounds. The entire performance is consistently slowing. The melody has phrases of varied length throughout the form. Only one pitch is ever played at a time. It is performed using the bidok scale and in the thatthil rhythm.

• The singer always does the main melody, should feel calm and is to fade into silence. The voice uses its entire range.
• The Lavender Canyon has a simple structure: three to five unrelated passages.
• Scales are constructed from nineteen notes dividing the octave. In quartertones, their spacing is roughly 1xx-xxxx-xx-xxx-xxx-xxxxO, where 1 is the tonic, O marks the octave and x marks other notes. The tonic note is a fixed tone passed from teacher to student.
• The bidok heptatonic scale is constructed by selection of degrees from the fundamental scale. The degrees selected are the 1st, the 4th, the 8th, the 11th, the 13th, the 17th and the 18th.
• The rhythm system is fundamentally polyrhythmic. There are always multiple rhythm lines, and each of their bars is played over the same period of time, regardless of the number of beats. The rhythm lines are thought of as one, without a primary-subordinate relationship, though individual lines can be named.
• The thatthil rhythm is a single line with thirty-two beats divided into four bars in a 8-8-8-8 pattern. The beats are named gostang (spoken go), libash (li), lakish (la), asdos (as), roder (ro), nel (ne), biban (bi) and ugog (ug). The beat is stressed as follows:
• | x x x - - - - - | - - x x - - x - | - x - - - - - - | x x x x x x x x |
• where x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.

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