Chronicle of the NonPop Revolution
It's the SesquiSolstice once again, the day of the shortest musical selections of the year. From now until the subsequent SesquiSolstice next June, the pieces we play each week will get progressively longer until they're so lengthy that they won't conclude until at least ten callers respond to our quiz, though we will likely accept any ilk of telephonical contact.
To pay tribute to the 20th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, today's episode of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour Expansive is entitled Fat-Lot-of-Good Day, and features music composed entirely in the metrical idiom. Duration of performances will not be measured in minutes and seconds, but rather in liternomes and per diems; centimantra and microphebes take the place of flats and sharps, and traditional melody and atonality become decaferbers and kilotunes. Additionally, the interview portion of the show becomes the millichatagram. The loudness of a piece is not affected, as the station's noisomometer registers in kylakadynes, which is both metric and generic in measurement. To illustrate how this works, we turn to former air traffic control hero Wrong-Way Corrigan, who earlier this week metrically converted from "alive and kicking" to "door as a deadnail, no longer requiring aftershave." In 1938, Wrong-Way took off in a small airplane from New York's Floyd Bennett Field en route to California, got turned around in the clouds, and accidentally landed in Dublin, Ireland, and how many times has each of us done the same thing! Anyway, at the time of his unexpected arrival, Dublin was already long steeped in the metric tradition, and had little difficulty in converting Corrigan's directional gaffe into an event which brought tears of joy to the eyes and ears of WrongWay's public relations agent, known throughout Europe as Le Flambeau Oriange.
As a tribute to Mr. Corrigan's preternaturally metrical character, we present "Wrong Way," a piece for calliope 4 hands in the conversely metric tradition, measuring 18 liternomes in length, and registering 160 microphebes on the kylakadyne scale.
"Wrong Way," a metrical decaferber to honor the recent termination of aviator Douglas Corrigan.
The next portion of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Sesquihour Expansive will be brought to you in meters specially designed for the holidays by the Sesquihour Independent Pro Mambo Research Council, a non-profit group the less said about, the better. And speaking of holidays, it's Best o' Sesq Day again today, in which we present a distillation of the previous five episodes in listenable snippet format for your holiday delectation, give or take.
Well, the caterer has not yet arrived, so we are still free to take your telephone calls as well as your holiday gift baskets, so please join me in setting a table for Sovlak of the LPs.
