The Silkiness of Drumming

The Silkiness of Drumming is a devotional form of music originating in The Wayward Confederacy. The rules of the form are applied by composers to produce individual pieces of music which can be performed. A speaker recites The Lyrical Embrace while the music is played on a nid and two pestrat. The musical voices bring melody with harmony. The entire performance is to become louder and louder. The melody has phrases of varied length throughout the form. It is performed using the nithros scale. Throughout, when possible, composers and performers are to glide from note to note and match notes and syllables.

• The speaker always should be fiery.
• The nid always should be forceful. The voice is confined to the heavy high register.
• The Silkiness of Drumming has the following structure: a chorus and a verse all repeated one to two times.
• The chorus is voiced by the melody of the nid and the speaker. The passage is at a walking pace. The nid covers its entire range from the warm low register to the liquid high register. Chords are packed close together in dense clusters in this passage. The passage is performed in the ani rhythm. The passage should be composed and performed using frequent modulation.
• The verse is voiced by the melody of the pestrat, the harmony of the nid and the speaker. The passage is slow. Each of the pestrat is confined to the heavy high register and the nid stays in the warm low register. Only one pitch is ever played at a time in this passage. The passage is performed in the apu rhythm.
• 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, the root note of chords are named. The names are lastta (spoken la) and cish (ci).
• As always, the nithros pentatonic scale is thought of as two disjoint chords drawn from the fundamental division of the perfect fourth. These chords are named ilpi and kasmko.
• The ilpi trichord is the 1st, the 2nd and the 8th degrees of the fundamental perfect fourth division.
• The kasmko trichord is the 1st, the 4th and the 8th degrees of the fundamental perfect fourth division.
• The ani 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 apu rhythm is made from two patterns: the almef and the bepa. The patterns are to be played over the same period of time, concluding together regardless of beat number.
• The almef rhythm is a single line with two beats. The beats are named onod (spoken on) and osp (osp). The beat is stressed as follows:
• | x x |
• where x is a beat and | indicates a bar.
• The bepa rhythm is a single line with four beats. The beats are named noloc (spoken no), kes (ke), suku (su) and rorec (ro). The beat is stressed as follows:
• | X x x x |
• where X marks an accented beat, x is a beat and | indicates a bar.

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