The Silks of Phrasing

The Silks of Phrasing is a devotional form of music originating in The Nations of Competing. 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 Skirt of Venerating while the music is played on two izrol. The musical voices are joined in melody. The entire performance is consistently slowing, and it is to be moderately soft. It is performed using the ramet scale and in the tod rhythm. Throughout, when possible, composers and performers are to make trills and match notes and syllables.

• Each izrol always does the main melody.
• The Silks of Phrasing has the following structure: a lengthy chorus and a verse.
• The chorus should bring a sense of motion. Each of the izrol ranges from the rich low register to the rugged middle register. The passage has phrases of varied length in the melody. Only one pitch is ever played at a time in this passage.
• The verse should be stately. Each of the izrol is confined to the fragile top register. The passage has mid-length phrases in the melody. This passage features only melodic tones and intervals.
• Scales are conceived of as two chords built using a division of the perfect fourth interval into eight notes. The tonic note is fixed only at the time of performance. After a scale is constructed, notes are named according to degree. The names are icmon (spoken ic), ozi (oz), stalcon (sta), nek (ne), lastta (la), cish (ci) and ani (an).
• As always, the ramet hexatonic scale is thought of as two disjoint chords drawn from the fundamental division of the perfect fourth. These chords are named agtha and woge.
• The agtha tetrachord is the 1st, the 2nd, the 5th and the 8th degrees of the fundamental perfect fourth division.
• The woge trichord is the 1st, the 5th and the 8th degrees of the fundamental perfect fourth division.
• The rhythm system is fundamentally polymetric. There are always multiple rhythm lines, and the beats are always played together, even if one rhythm line completes (and then repeats) before the other is finished. The rhythm lines are thought of as one, without a primary-subordinate relationship, though individual lines can be named.
• The tod rhythm is a single line with twenty-nine beats divided into five bars in a 6-5-9-5-4 pattern. The beat is stressed as follows:
• | x - X x x - | x x x X - | - - x x x x x - X | X x x x x | x x - X |
• where X marks an accented beat, x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.

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