4/5 Interview with Ervin Wilson
4/5 Transcript
Gary David (00:00):Did did at some point, what I'm hearing is that your interest shifted into scale formation instead of composition, or did you
Ervin Wilson (00:11):Propose the music in 31? No, I, in my mind, and, and that scale formation and composition are not two different things, that you compose the scale as you're composing and you use the scale that is Right. But I got, but I got this from, uh, uh, there were two gentlemen, way back in the tuley back there in Iowa. Earl <inaudible> got a grant to figure out whether we, whether we were actually tuning scales in J or in et
Gary David (01:04):Mm-Hmm.
Ervin Wilson (01:04):<affirmative>. And they started, that's boom's letter in three boom's. There you go. Thank you. And they, and they had the monies and they set up sets of equipment to measure very, very careful on a sliding string what people were doing. What they found out that people were not playing in either equal or just, they were just playing impossibly out of tune. Impossibly added two. And they, but they began looking at things and they said, but it looks like they're playing in one with one tuning when they're in one key. But if they moved in another key, they go to a different tuning. If the, like if you're in the key of C and you play a D chord, then the A will go upward by a comma. Uh, then if you're playing in, in C major, and in fact, two things will happen if you mod modulate from, if you just modulate from C Major to G major, you have to raise the F and you have to by a semitone, a chromatic semitone, and you have to raise the A by a comma. And I realized that, and they called that extended reference, and they wrote a number of articles published in the Yale Journal of Music Theory, which I devoured voraciously, and I swear I must have been the only person on earth who had the remotest idea of what they were talking about, because Yale was buying it up. They were publishing their articles right down the line, not realizing that what booms lit and krill were saying was pulling all of the prompts out from under et <laugh> <laugh>.
(03:24):Well, finally Blooms living in Creole for no particular reason whatsoever, ran out of funds. They couldn't, they couldn't get their funds renewed. And so the research dwindled, I mean, pe people out there where they were doing the university sponsor had no idea what they just do. You know, just a couple of nice young men who were, you know, doing some weird student studies and, and they, they were calling, um, they had their equipment and, um, they had to sort of close up shop and weren't able to continue their, they weren't just, weren't getting their salaries. And so this was brought prematurely to an unfortunate hall that they could only have been allowed to continue the research as they would've gone on. And because they, they believed that probably the same kind of extended reference patterns existed in other cultures as well.
(04:37):Well, of course they do. For the first example, that is Japanese and ese music, where they'll change the pitches depending on what key they're Right. And, um, but at any rate that I, somewhere around there, I got to meet I de Tillman Schafer and, and number of the people they had built 19 to in and, and de had built a quarter tone Viccor. They're just beautiful. But he didn't, he didn't have any idea about other divisions between, besides quarter tones. I had to teach him that there were other tunings. And then I found a little guitar shop, Conde's guitar shop that would re guitars for me. And I, and, and Glory b hallelujah. I got the first guitar built. It was a little 17 tone guitar, but I could get good 17 ET and pe There's still people out there that love 17 et What I like about it is when you make a 34 to scale out of it. And, but I had a number of guitars made to different tunings, and if I couldn't get the tuning, I could ship the bridge a little way.
Gary David (06:04):Yeah. Uh, you had me make a, I I had a 22 and a 41 made.
Ervin Wilson (06:10):Yes.
Gary David (06:10):Yeah. I still have it.
Ervin Wilson (06:12):Well, well, they, they were in here.
Gary David (06:14):Yeah.
Ervin Wilson (06:16):I You, do you have, do you have some too? Yeah. Oh, you do? Yeah. I thought I had your, okay. Alright. But I, I actually have your 22 and I
Gary David (06:26):Think I have your 22. I still have the 41. Yeah, he has my 22, but I have the 41. I think I have yours. Your can.
Ervin Wilson (06:34):Okay. That one, I'm not sure who that belonged to. Now it may have, uh, but anyway, somebody somehow, or the one of my guitars, oh, it was a Harmonic series guitar. Anyway, um, by that time I had, I had met Perry Parch.
Gary David (06:59):What year
Ervin Wilson (07:00):And are we talking about?
Gary David (07:01):Huh? What years are we talking about?
Ervin Wilson (07:04):He had been up north in that little town,
Gary David (07:11):Petaluma.
Ervin Wilson (07:12):Petaluma. And he had come down here and he lived out there in the valley. Uh, um, I don't remember some of the little town out in the valley there, just going across that little, taking the, the road up over the hill there, and you drop down into, um, a little area there. And I
Gary David (07:44):Can't remember, it doesn't matter. But this was in the sixties, early sixties was it? Or late middle sixties.
Ervin Wilson (07:50):Yeah. And, uh, early, very early sixties. Yeah. Uh, it was just after 1963 that I'd first met Harry Park. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
Gary David (08:09):What was that meeting like?
Ervin Wilson (08:13):Uh, it was nice. It was nice. How I got in touch with Harry Parch was interesting. And I was down on the beach one day, and this young man who was, happened to be there, he'd just come down from Petaluma. I just learned that he'd just come down from killed a and I asked him a few few questions and he knew Harry Park as it turned out. And I said, oh, do you have his address? And the guy was innocent because his author, his writing a book, and he, and he, and he appreciated the way I used words once in a while. I'd used words in a way that absolutely shocked him or just amazed him. So he, he, he pulled out of his wallet. He pulled out Harry Park, his address and gave it to me, and I wrote to Harry Park and, and enrolled him some of the things that I had been doing.
(09:16):And the, then Harry Parks moved down to the Valley, and I got in touch with him there and helped him, started helping him, put them the reverse him together and would slip him, schlep him around. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> over to UCLA where they had a workshop and we'd, we'd go over there and work free and he'd buy up all the redwood. I had helped him put the whole thing together, and it was really a privileged in place helping him put the diamond, reverse them together. And so he had to do a little bit of art work, but, but I always, and she says, well, he said, well, I'm gonna mention, I'm gonna mention my book for, you know, I, you didn't quite exactly understand the geometric relationship between the Diamond and the Diamond reverse. And I says, well, if you get down under the thing and turn upside down and look at it from underneath that in a just particular way, you get the diamond reverse him. And so he actually wrote that and down in his, in the volume of his book. And he told me, he says, and I says, oh, I'm going to be famous <laugh>. And he says, and he says, oh, stop it, <laugh>.
(10:41):But I began to show him by, by that time, I had come across these, rather by the sheriff's promptings of that silent voice that told me to keep on looking. I'm just, it's, it's written down there, but it, something told me to keep on looking. And I discovered that, uh, well, first of all, Paul Bieber explained to me what Pascal's Triangle was. I went over to Paul Beaver's place, and he had a group of very, very talented people who'd show up there about once a week or at least twice a month. And we would get together and discuss and show and, and, and tell and film composers that work with electronic music that did the music for Forbidden Planet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that did a, if
Speaker 3 (12:02):You can
Ervin Wilson (12:04):John and Baron, I forget. Anyway, they, they were doing, they did some very, very impressive electronic music for Forbidden Planet, which I thought I wasn't all that impressed by, but it was good music. Was it John and Baby Baron Couples? It was a couple married couple. Anyway, we wouldn't meet over there. And there was also a very, very accomplished vocalist who did vocal techniques over there and people like that. And, and I would go over there and show my things off, and Paul Beaver agreed to do some tuning for me. And he says, but don't tell anybody, but I've charged you. And he did the metal for the 22 tone metal for which Craig Grady now has in his ensemble. And then we started tuning up the transplant, which Mike created play, and they would beat it out of 10. And I had, I found out that I could use 22 E two, the ET that I wasn't happy with it. I, by that time, I learned how to make a interesting 22 just with seven amendment in the seminar. And you and I do a lot of theoretical experimentation on 22, we had a whole stack of 22 tunings. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:54):I still have.
Ervin Wilson (13:56):And, uh, so I had set it up in adjust tuning and was much happier in the just tuning and
(14:13):Well, but at any rate, I, um, when the hair parts came down here, I finally had the courage to actually live, well, actually at an earlier point, I had ordered all, all his, all of his at you. When I was at, at um, uh, BYU. I thought, oh, I shouldn't listen to any of Harry parts. I'll read his theories, but I don't want to be unduly influenced by his style. So I better not listen to him. But by the time I got his address from this very famous writer, by the way, who wrote a very, very successful book, and he would read me chapters of the book, and I'd say, well, that's good. That's quite good that that, and, uh, I could see why he was going to be successful, but I never dreamed that he would be such an outrageous success. He teaches now at Down at there at USC, he's on the teaching staff at USC. What's his name? Huh? What's his name? Teacher. I have to leave the name unspoken because it's too, it discloses a little bit too much more than I want the kitties to know. Okay. <laugh> off, off film. I'll tell you. Okay. <laugh>.
(15:46):I mean, some children do, at least in the Mormon church, have to have things sanitized. Not so much these days as they used to <laugh>. But, but by that time I was getting together with Harry p and I was doing Lattice works for him, and I did a lattice work for him, showing him, this is the way I would lattice your scale. And he looked at it non comprehending. But the next time I saw him, he called me this side. He says, I've been looking at your lattice. And he says, you know something, I understand <laugh>.
(16:33):I, he said, I understand. He was, he was so pleased with himself to see that somebody would be doing, and it, it wasn't until he saw that I was able to put his keyboard on the boon cake keyboard with only one redundancy and its mirror image that he began to see in his later years. He began to regret having burnt so many bridges behind him. He thought, oh, I sh I sh I I burnt too many bridges. Here I am isolated in the universe with no connection to any past whatsoever. When he saw that everything that he did could be placed right on the Boong case with uncanny mapping, I mean, it was what, the way it fits on there is absolutely uncanny. I, the mans that we intuition, he say he was not a good theorist. His theoretical nature was working over time and over.
(17:50):And these things says, um, he was a good therapist. And he says, oh, I'm not a prophet. I'm just a, I'm just a good, you know, I just, uh, like to make my own instruments and these scales are not, don't really mean anything. I was switching all over the place. He was a prophet. He literally was prophetic because he was doing things that he didn't have the words for. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And now we we're learning what those words are. He didn't know what the feeble series was. He didn't, <inaudible> Triangle was. He didn't, he didn't, uh, at any rate, um, parch is very, very central Yes. To the things that are going on. And it's, uh, pleasing. It pleas me that I can add and contribute to the understanding of what parch actually means. Right. No end. But <inaudible> Novarro was doing things quite parallel to the parch at the same time.
(18:59):In some ways, not up to, in other ways, somewhat beyond parts, but it's usually, it turns out that people who work with string lengths and strings get a very, very firm grasp of the ratio. Or if you, if they're just tuning things up with no strings there, their grasp of the ratio is not as tactile, they're not as visible. If you can see where the string is divided in this many parts. And then all you need is a string division to tell you, which, well, the Greeks do, that they, the Indians, the Greeks knew things that the people of India didn't know. The people of Indian knew things that they couldn't quite describe. They would call 'em by strange names and give the most awkward, well, they did awfully well with what they did, but they didn't have any concept for the Harmonic series. Mm-Hmm.
(20:10):<affirmative> when, and the, when they were using the Fifth Harmonic or the seventh Harmonic, they didn't know how to tell you the racial, the Greeks did. And it wasn't until around the 13th century when Indian music was profoundly influenced by Persian music, that the people in India finally came to begin to grasp this subtle idea of ratios <laugh> in the earnest of days. The, the, their verbiage is they understood how to tune the chain of fifths, and they could carry it out quite a few places. <laugh>, in fact, they could not only tune it out to 17 places, Hyron, they could add a few more tones and get their 22 shooty. And they worked miraculously, somehow they worked. And it is a miracle, but it's based, the miracle is based on the sch an interval that is so small that it can be hardly heard. And if you tune it up on your tuneable instruments, it's not likely that you'll not lose there. You'll lose it in your slippage. You'll, uh, nothing will hold.
(21:51):But anyway, by that time I was in touch with her and I was very, very aggressively moving. I had on the keyboard front. And even if I don't, and even when I didn't have any instrument at all, I could, I figured out ways, get fitting guitars and just had Larry's scale tron for a while where I could tune things up. I remember. And, uh, you still have that in there? What's that? Isn't that what you have inside? You have that inside still? It's still inside. Uh, the, the, the motor of it, the cooling motors not working. And I haven't actually used it. Some of the switches may have rested into the place that will need to be fixed up, but it is sitting in there. Uh, there is a, there are other scaler ones around somewhere in town. There's another one, um, that I, I don't, I have no idea where it is, but the, um, the reason I don't want, don't want to spend a lot of money returning the Tron. It does have one feature that I like. There are areas of the Tron where I can get into absolute mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and Absolute is a beautiful territory to be. And there's no absolutely no digital can duplicate. Absolute. If,
Gary David (23:44):If someone was not musical, how would you describe to them what absolute means if someone didn't know what you're talking about?
Ervin Wilson (23:56):I would say it's like, not just look daisy into paradise. It's going into paradise. It's a paradise of experience. And, uh, digital has, yet, I have yet to hear digital that can do absolute and be truly convincing. And on the, on the rapid, on the fly, you get people doing rapid trails and rapid, rapid moons. Hubs play so fast that sometimes the digital nature of what he's doing shows through. Anyway, Uhhuh <affirmative>. And people are saying, well, how accurate do you have to get, uh, as, as accurate he can get <laugh> and David, even David Rades has there, you know, there is sometimes, you know, he supposedly he was doing absolute for, um, yet young. But he says, sometimes there's, there's aberrations that slip in there. This little stuff. <inaudible>,
Gary David (25:20):Can I, can I interrupt for a moment? Yeah. Let's summarize kind of at this point. 'cause we have some musical questions we want to ask later after we take a break. Oh, sure. But there's something I wanted to ask you. If, let's assuming there was a generating tone to your life as, and how all of this developed, could, could you verbalize anything about that? What was the underlying motivation that kept taking you into all these various areas of interest that most people didn't follow?
Ervin Wilson (25:56):Because my, I could, I could hear them.
Gary David (26:02):What made you have a passion for what you heard? What, what, what, well,
Ervin Wilson (26:08):What makes me have a passion for growing corn? Yeah. Question. I was born in, I was born in a corn field. I was born into music, uh, <laugh>. The reason I have a passion for music is because I know that in some ways I'm very good at it. Not always, I, I don't have discrete control in my fingers. Uh, but in, in some aspect, aspects of music, I'm very, very good
Gary David (26:46):At it. I also sense a, some kind of ideological passion behind it too.
Ervin Wilson (26:52):Ideological. What does that word
Gary David (26:54):Mean? That means something you believe in, but you can't actually proof.
Ervin Wilson (27:01):No, no. It's not that. It's the music itself that lives in me. It's that a part of my brain thinks in music I wake up in, in the mornings and when I'm out in the quiet, I will wake up in a certain key. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I've been there <laugh>. I don't, uh, a good part of my brain is actually a musical brain. And that's, that's a way of, it's difficult to say anything rational about the musical brain, but it's a language that we have, a very valid language that we have for dealing with effer bowls.
Gary David (27:53):Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> for things
Ervin Wilson (27:55):That, that cannot otherwise be spoken. Right. Why do people write poetry? Why do people dance? Why do people do anything that they have a passion for?
Gary David (28:04):But I'm interested in what you did it for. Huh? I'm interested in what I know other, we've all done it in some way or another. But you in particular.
Ervin Wilson (28:13):Oh, because I couldn't help it <laugh>. That's about that. It just, if, if I don't, if I don't do music, I say, well, what are you gonna do? Feed the pigeons. <laugh>,
Gary David (28:37):Are we on tape? What's that? Are we, are you out of that? Uh, yeah. Have three minutes left. You have three minutes left? Yeah. Do you want a break take? Um, I don't care.
Ervin Wilson (00:11):Propose the music in 31? No, I, in my mind, and, and that scale formation and composition are not two different things, that you compose the scale as you're composing and you use the scale that is Right. But I got, but I got this from, uh, uh, there were two gentlemen, way back in the tuley back there in Iowa. Earl <inaudible> got a grant to figure out whether we, whether we were actually tuning scales in J or in et
Gary David (01:04):Mm-Hmm.
Ervin Wilson (01:04):<affirmative>. And they started, that's boom's letter in three boom's. There you go. Thank you. And they, and they had the monies and they set up sets of equipment to measure very, very careful on a sliding string what people were doing. What they found out that people were not playing in either equal or just, they were just playing impossibly out of tune. Impossibly added two. And they, but they began looking at things and they said, but it looks like they're playing in one with one tuning when they're in one key. But if they moved in another key, they go to a different tuning. If the, like if you're in the key of C and you play a D chord, then the A will go upward by a comma. Uh, then if you're playing in, in C major, and in fact, two things will happen if you mod modulate from, if you just modulate from C Major to G major, you have to raise the F and you have to by a semitone, a chromatic semitone, and you have to raise the A by a comma. And I realized that, and they called that extended reference, and they wrote a number of articles published in the Yale Journal of Music Theory, which I devoured voraciously, and I swear I must have been the only person on earth who had the remotest idea of what they were talking about, because Yale was buying it up. They were publishing their articles right down the line, not realizing that what booms lit and krill were saying was pulling all of the prompts out from under et <laugh> <laugh>.
(03:24):Well, finally Blooms living in Creole for no particular reason whatsoever, ran out of funds. They couldn't, they couldn't get their funds renewed. And so the research dwindled, I mean, pe people out there where they were doing the university sponsor had no idea what they just do. You know, just a couple of nice young men who were, you know, doing some weird student studies and, and they, they were calling, um, they had their equipment and, um, they had to sort of close up shop and weren't able to continue their, they weren't just, weren't getting their salaries. And so this was brought prematurely to an unfortunate hall that they could only have been allowed to continue the research as they would've gone on. And because they, they believed that probably the same kind of extended reference patterns existed in other cultures as well.
(04:37):Well, of course they do. For the first example, that is Japanese and ese music, where they'll change the pitches depending on what key they're Right. And, um, but at any rate that I, somewhere around there, I got to meet I de Tillman Schafer and, and number of the people they had built 19 to in and, and de had built a quarter tone Viccor. They're just beautiful. But he didn't, he didn't have any idea about other divisions between, besides quarter tones. I had to teach him that there were other tunings. And then I found a little guitar shop, Conde's guitar shop that would re guitars for me. And I, and, and Glory b hallelujah. I got the first guitar built. It was a little 17 tone guitar, but I could get good 17 ET and pe There's still people out there that love 17 et What I like about it is when you make a 34 to scale out of it. And, but I had a number of guitars made to different tunings, and if I couldn't get the tuning, I could ship the bridge a little way.
Gary David (06:04):Yeah. Uh, you had me make a, I I had a 22 and a 41 made.
Ervin Wilson (06:10):Yes.
Gary David (06:10):Yeah. I still have it.
Ervin Wilson (06:12):Well, well, they, they were in here.
Gary David (06:14):Yeah.
Ervin Wilson (06:16):I You, do you have, do you have some too? Yeah. Oh, you do? Yeah. I thought I had your, okay. Alright. But I, I actually have your 22 and I
Gary David (06:26):Think I have your 22. I still have the 41. Yeah, he has my 22, but I have the 41. I think I have yours. Your can.
Ervin Wilson (06:34):Okay. That one, I'm not sure who that belonged to. Now it may have, uh, but anyway, somebody somehow, or the one of my guitars, oh, it was a Harmonic series guitar. Anyway, um, by that time I had, I had met Perry Parch.
Gary David (06:59):What year
Ervin Wilson (07:00):And are we talking about?
Gary David (07:01):Huh? What years are we talking about?
Ervin Wilson (07:04):He had been up north in that little town,
Gary David (07:11):Petaluma.
Ervin Wilson (07:12):Petaluma. And he had come down here and he lived out there in the valley. Uh, um, I don't remember some of the little town out in the valley there, just going across that little, taking the, the road up over the hill there, and you drop down into, um, a little area there. And I
Gary David (07:44):Can't remember, it doesn't matter. But this was in the sixties, early sixties was it? Or late middle sixties.
Ervin Wilson (07:50):Yeah. And, uh, early, very early sixties. Yeah. Uh, it was just after 1963 that I'd first met Harry Park. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
Gary David (08:09):What was that meeting like?
Ervin Wilson (08:13):Uh, it was nice. It was nice. How I got in touch with Harry Parch was interesting. And I was down on the beach one day, and this young man who was, happened to be there, he'd just come down from Petaluma. I just learned that he'd just come down from killed a and I asked him a few few questions and he knew Harry Park as it turned out. And I said, oh, do you have his address? And the guy was innocent because his author, his writing a book, and he, and he, and he appreciated the way I used words once in a while. I'd used words in a way that absolutely shocked him or just amazed him. So he, he, he pulled out of his wallet. He pulled out Harry Park, his address and gave it to me, and I wrote to Harry Park and, and enrolled him some of the things that I had been doing.
(09:16):And the, then Harry Parks moved down to the Valley, and I got in touch with him there and helped him, started helping him, put them the reverse him together and would slip him, schlep him around. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> over to UCLA where they had a workshop and we'd, we'd go over there and work free and he'd buy up all the redwood. I had helped him put the whole thing together, and it was really a privileged in place helping him put the diamond, reverse them together. And so he had to do a little bit of art work, but, but I always, and she says, well, he said, well, I'm gonna mention, I'm gonna mention my book for, you know, I, you didn't quite exactly understand the geometric relationship between the Diamond and the Diamond reverse. And I says, well, if you get down under the thing and turn upside down and look at it from underneath that in a just particular way, you get the diamond reverse him. And so he actually wrote that and down in his, in the volume of his book. And he told me, he says, and I says, oh, I'm going to be famous <laugh>. And he says, and he says, oh, stop it, <laugh>.
(10:41):But I began to show him by, by that time, I had come across these, rather by the sheriff's promptings of that silent voice that told me to keep on looking. I'm just, it's, it's written down there, but it, something told me to keep on looking. And I discovered that, uh, well, first of all, Paul Bieber explained to me what Pascal's Triangle was. I went over to Paul Beaver's place, and he had a group of very, very talented people who'd show up there about once a week or at least twice a month. And we would get together and discuss and show and, and, and tell and film composers that work with electronic music that did the music for Forbidden Planet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that did a, if
Speaker 3 (12:02):You can
Ervin Wilson (12:04):John and Baron, I forget. Anyway, they, they were doing, they did some very, very impressive electronic music for Forbidden Planet, which I thought I wasn't all that impressed by, but it was good music. Was it John and Baby Baron Couples? It was a couple married couple. Anyway, we wouldn't meet over there. And there was also a very, very accomplished vocalist who did vocal techniques over there and people like that. And, and I would go over there and show my things off, and Paul Beaver agreed to do some tuning for me. And he says, but don't tell anybody, but I've charged you. And he did the metal for the 22 tone metal for which Craig Grady now has in his ensemble. And then we started tuning up the transplant, which Mike created play, and they would beat it out of 10. And I had, I found out that I could use 22 E two, the ET that I wasn't happy with it. I, by that time, I learned how to make a interesting 22 just with seven amendment in the seminar. And you and I do a lot of theoretical experimentation on 22, we had a whole stack of 22 tunings. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:54):I still have.
Ervin Wilson (13:56):And, uh, so I had set it up in adjust tuning and was much happier in the just tuning and
(14:13):Well, but at any rate, I, um, when the hair parts came down here, I finally had the courage to actually live, well, actually at an earlier point, I had ordered all, all his, all of his at you. When I was at, at um, uh, BYU. I thought, oh, I shouldn't listen to any of Harry parts. I'll read his theories, but I don't want to be unduly influenced by his style. So I better not listen to him. But by the time I got his address from this very famous writer, by the way, who wrote a very, very successful book, and he would read me chapters of the book, and I'd say, well, that's good. That's quite good that that, and, uh, I could see why he was going to be successful, but I never dreamed that he would be such an outrageous success. He teaches now at Down at there at USC, he's on the teaching staff at USC. What's his name? Huh? What's his name? Teacher. I have to leave the name unspoken because it's too, it discloses a little bit too much more than I want the kitties to know. Okay. <laugh> off, off film. I'll tell you. Okay. <laugh>.
(15:46):I mean, some children do, at least in the Mormon church, have to have things sanitized. Not so much these days as they used to <laugh>. But, but by that time I was getting together with Harry p and I was doing Lattice works for him, and I did a lattice work for him, showing him, this is the way I would lattice your scale. And he looked at it non comprehending. But the next time I saw him, he called me this side. He says, I've been looking at your lattice. And he says, you know something, I understand <laugh>.
(16:33):I, he said, I understand. He was, he was so pleased with himself to see that somebody would be doing, and it, it wasn't until he saw that I was able to put his keyboard on the boon cake keyboard with only one redundancy and its mirror image that he began to see in his later years. He began to regret having burnt so many bridges behind him. He thought, oh, I sh I sh I I burnt too many bridges. Here I am isolated in the universe with no connection to any past whatsoever. When he saw that everything that he did could be placed right on the Boong case with uncanny mapping, I mean, it was what, the way it fits on there is absolutely uncanny. I, the mans that we intuition, he say he was not a good theorist. His theoretical nature was working over time and over.
(17:50):And these things says, um, he was a good therapist. And he says, oh, I'm not a prophet. I'm just a, I'm just a good, you know, I just, uh, like to make my own instruments and these scales are not, don't really mean anything. I was switching all over the place. He was a prophet. He literally was prophetic because he was doing things that he didn't have the words for. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And now we we're learning what those words are. He didn't know what the feeble series was. He didn't, <inaudible> Triangle was. He didn't, he didn't, uh, at any rate, um, parch is very, very central Yes. To the things that are going on. And it's, uh, pleasing. It pleas me that I can add and contribute to the understanding of what parch actually means. Right. No end. But <inaudible> Novarro was doing things quite parallel to the parch at the same time.
(18:59):In some ways, not up to, in other ways, somewhat beyond parts, but it's usually, it turns out that people who work with string lengths and strings get a very, very firm grasp of the ratio. Or if you, if they're just tuning things up with no strings there, their grasp of the ratio is not as tactile, they're not as visible. If you can see where the string is divided in this many parts. And then all you need is a string division to tell you, which, well, the Greeks do, that they, the Indians, the Greeks knew things that the people of India didn't know. The people of Indian knew things that they couldn't quite describe. They would call 'em by strange names and give the most awkward, well, they did awfully well with what they did, but they didn't have any concept for the Harmonic series. Mm-Hmm.
(20:10):<affirmative> when, and the, when they were using the Fifth Harmonic or the seventh Harmonic, they didn't know how to tell you the racial, the Greeks did. And it wasn't until around the 13th century when Indian music was profoundly influenced by Persian music, that the people in India finally came to begin to grasp this subtle idea of ratios <laugh> in the earnest of days. The, the, their verbiage is they understood how to tune the chain of fifths, and they could carry it out quite a few places. <laugh>, in fact, they could not only tune it out to 17 places, Hyron, they could add a few more tones and get their 22 shooty. And they worked miraculously, somehow they worked. And it is a miracle, but it's based, the miracle is based on the sch an interval that is so small that it can be hardly heard. And if you tune it up on your tuneable instruments, it's not likely that you'll not lose there. You'll lose it in your slippage. You'll, uh, nothing will hold.
(21:51):But anyway, by that time I was in touch with her and I was very, very aggressively moving. I had on the keyboard front. And even if I don't, and even when I didn't have any instrument at all, I could, I figured out ways, get fitting guitars and just had Larry's scale tron for a while where I could tune things up. I remember. And, uh, you still have that in there? What's that? Isn't that what you have inside? You have that inside still? It's still inside. Uh, the, the, the motor of it, the cooling motors not working. And I haven't actually used it. Some of the switches may have rested into the place that will need to be fixed up, but it is sitting in there. Uh, there is a, there are other scaler ones around somewhere in town. There's another one, um, that I, I don't, I have no idea where it is, but the, um, the reason I don't want, don't want to spend a lot of money returning the Tron. It does have one feature that I like. There are areas of the Tron where I can get into absolute mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and Absolute is a beautiful territory to be. And there's no absolutely no digital can duplicate. Absolute. If,
Gary David (23:44):If someone was not musical, how would you describe to them what absolute means if someone didn't know what you're talking about?
Ervin Wilson (23:56):I would say it's like, not just look daisy into paradise. It's going into paradise. It's a paradise of experience. And, uh, digital has, yet, I have yet to hear digital that can do absolute and be truly convincing. And on the, on the rapid, on the fly, you get people doing rapid trails and rapid, rapid moons. Hubs play so fast that sometimes the digital nature of what he's doing shows through. Anyway, Uhhuh <affirmative>. And people are saying, well, how accurate do you have to get, uh, as, as accurate he can get <laugh> and David, even David Rades has there, you know, there is sometimes, you know, he supposedly he was doing absolute for, um, yet young. But he says, sometimes there's, there's aberrations that slip in there. This little stuff. <inaudible>,
Gary David (25:20):Can I, can I interrupt for a moment? Yeah. Let's summarize kind of at this point. 'cause we have some musical questions we want to ask later after we take a break. Oh, sure. But there's something I wanted to ask you. If, let's assuming there was a generating tone to your life as, and how all of this developed, could, could you verbalize anything about that? What was the underlying motivation that kept taking you into all these various areas of interest that most people didn't follow?
Ervin Wilson (25:56):Because my, I could, I could hear them.
Gary David (26:02):What made you have a passion for what you heard? What, what, what, well,
Ervin Wilson (26:08):What makes me have a passion for growing corn? Yeah. Question. I was born in, I was born in a corn field. I was born into music, uh, <laugh>. The reason I have a passion for music is because I know that in some ways I'm very good at it. Not always, I, I don't have discrete control in my fingers. Uh, but in, in some aspect, aspects of music, I'm very, very good
Gary David (26:46):At it. I also sense a, some kind of ideological passion behind it too.
Ervin Wilson (26:52):Ideological. What does that word
Gary David (26:54):Mean? That means something you believe in, but you can't actually proof.
Ervin Wilson (27:01):No, no. It's not that. It's the music itself that lives in me. It's that a part of my brain thinks in music I wake up in, in the mornings and when I'm out in the quiet, I will wake up in a certain key. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I've been there <laugh>. I don't, uh, a good part of my brain is actually a musical brain. And that's, that's a way of, it's difficult to say anything rational about the musical brain, but it's a language that we have, a very valid language that we have for dealing with effer bowls.
Gary David (27:53):Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> for things
Ervin Wilson (27:55):That, that cannot otherwise be spoken. Right. Why do people write poetry? Why do people dance? Why do people do anything that they have a passion for?
Gary David (28:04):But I'm interested in what you did it for. Huh? I'm interested in what I know other, we've all done it in some way or another. But you in particular.
Ervin Wilson (28:13):Oh, because I couldn't help it <laugh>. That's about that. It just, if, if I don't, if I don't do music, I say, well, what are you gonna do? Feed the pigeons. <laugh>,
Gary David (28:37):Are we on tape? What's that? Are we, are you out of that? Uh, yeah. Have three minutes left. You have three minutes left? Yeah. Do you want a break take? Um, I don't care.