Michael Masley | |
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Born | 1952 (age 71–72) Trenton, Michigan, United States |
Origin | Berkeley, California, United States |
Genres | |
Occupation(s) | Instrumentalist |
Instrument(s) | Cymbalom |
Michael Masley (born September 22, 1952 in Trenton, Michigan, United States) is known for his musical work on the Hungarian cymbalom. His unique method of playing the instrument comes from his invention of the bowhammer, a cross between a fiddle bow and a dulcimer hammer, attached to the finger with a ring. [1] Since 1983, Masley has made his living as a street musician, busking and selling cassette and CD recordings on the streets of Berkeley, San Francisco, and other San Francisco Bay Area locations.
Masley describes his music as "earth-folk", "a contemporary Afro-Celtic variation of Free World and Country Eastern music.". [2] Others have categorized his music as new-age or world music. One musician has described Masley's bowhammer style of cymbalom playing as generating "a turkish steambath of overtones".
Masley studied creative writing at Northwestern Michigan College in the early 1970s. Starting in 1973 he studied hammered dulcimer with Robert Spinner. He played traditional two-hammer dulcimer until 1979, when he developed a ten-hammer technique, presumably by attaching one hammer to each finger. In the winter of 1981, Masley was a caretaker for an isolated fishing lodge in northern Michigan, and spent some of his time there with musical experimentation. At that point, he experimented with attaching horsehair to his fingers in order to bow at dulcimer strings. In 1981, he sometimes worked as a street musician in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1982, he ordered a cymbalom from William Webster in Detroit, Michigan and moved to Palo Alto, California. In 1983, he developed the bowhammer, and began working with guitarist Barry Cleveland as the duo "Thin Ice", releasing albums in 1984 and 1985.
In 1995, Masley formed part of a new quintet, named "Cloud Chamber". Other members included Barry Cleveland, bassist Michael Manring, cellist Dan Reiter and percussionist Joe Venegoni. The members of Cloud Chamber met through "The Lodge", an incorporeal musical concept channeled primarily through Barry Cleveland which manifests through musical events attended by three or more members of "the Tribe," a permeable-boundary group of improvising Bay Area musicians. Cloud Chamber released a CD, Dark Matter, in 1998.
Since at least 1993, during certain shows and conventions, especially computer and technology shows, Masley sets up as a street musician in front of San Francisco's Moscone Center and the adjacent Metreon. In 2004, security guards at Sony's Metreon were preparing to displace Masley from playing in front of the facility during the Apple MacWorld event, but listeners in the vicinity convinced them to allow him to remain. In 2005, Masley contacted the Metreon prior to MacWorld to ensure he would be able to perform there unimpeded. During the 2005 show, a Metreon executive inquired if he could be hired for private performances.
Masley has taken on the self-appointed title and persona of Artist General (along the lines of a Surgeon General) and claims to represent the interests of artists, issuing pronouncements such as "Conformity is addictive: don't abuse it".
In 1985, Masley moved to Berkeley, California and began to record his solo albums.
In 1993, Masley was arrested in Berkeley for selling audio cassette recordings without a business license. According to the East Bay Express of February 17, 1995, at the time of his arrest Masley told authorities "Go to Fremont or Hayward, this is Berkeley...this place is spiritual, and a business license is not a spiritual option." Masley spent one night in jail, and thereafter apparently continued vending without further citations or arrests.
In 2002, Masley served as Grand Marshal of the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade. As of 2007, Masley can frequently be seen playing all over Berkeley, particularly on Telegraph Avenue.
In 1993, Ry Cooder arranged to have Masley record music for the soundtrack of the film Geronimo: An American Legend . When the soundtrack album was issued, Masley's name did not appear in the credits. His soundtrack contributions were later used in the broadcast of the 1994 Winter Olympics, on an HBO program, and on Entertainment Tonight, with Masley receiving neither royalties nor credit.
Masley took legal action, resulting in an out-of-court settlement and a letter of vindication signed by Robert E. Holmes of Sony Pictures' music division. Masley described the case in an article titled "Credit is Not Negotiable" which appeared in Musician; in the article, Masley states "To gain access to an audience, artists make compromises that few executives would ask of anyone in the usual labor-for-wages domain. The upshot is that fair compensation must be measured in credit as well as dollars. Recognition is not a mere vanity issue. It is part and parcel of payment." Perhaps ironically, significant portions of the settlement were later spent buying Sony audio equipment.
His unique method of playing the instrument comes from his invention of the bowhammer, a cross between a fiddle bow and a dulcimer hammer, attached to the finger with a ring. [1] The bowhammers, one worn on each finger except thumbs, allow Masley to bow, strike, and pick the cymbalom's strings. These bowhammers, along with a pick on each thumb, allow for the creation of unique musical effects and highly complicated music. Cymbaloms are most commonly played with two dulcimer hammers, one held in each hand. While playing with eight bowhammers and two thumb picks, Masley has been known also to use pan pipes attached to a neck bracket, as well as rhythm instruments such as shakers and rattles attached to his legs.
In addition to the bowhammer, Masley has invented several musical instruments or modifications to existing instruments. These tend to be constructed from mass-produced consumer materials, such as rubber bands and suction cups, often coupled to traditional instruments such as drums.
Instruments include:
Perhaps most innovative at a conceptual level is The Sonic Mess Kit. This is made from a cinema film reel cover. The edge (lip) is scored to allow two sets (courses) of rubber bands to be strung across. The two courses are at different depths in the lid and are mostly perpendicular (a right angle) to each other. Parallel to the lower course is a spring, divided into three segments. The tension of each rubber band and spring segment can be individually adjusted.
The lid can be flexed, which will bend the pitch. While many stringed instruments can pitch bend, others bend along only one direction, altering the pitch of only a single set of strings, and by changing the tension of all strings together, their musical interval relationships stay constant. By having two courses of strings which are not parallel, the pitch bending changes the tonal relationships between the two sets of strings. If the instrument is flexed parallel to one set of strings, that set of strings remains unaltered, but the perpendicular set of strings deepens in pitch. If the instrument is flexed at an angle to both sets of strings, the pitch of both sets varies in a mathematically related fashion. Past a certain degree of flex, the two courses of strings touch and dampen each other, and the sounds produced by the spring dominate.
L. Maxwell Taylor wrote about the Sonic Mess Kit in the September 1993 issue of Experimental Musical Instruments:
Masley's tunings also have a random character to them, as though no particular pitch matters to him, only that there be a multiplicity of the pitch. Yet there is a great precision to the relationship of the Sonic Mess Kit's random courses. They are somehow the aural equivalent of funhouse mirrors or comic page impressions on Silly Putty, preserving the contours of the images they reflect while radically altering the appearance of those images from moment-to-moment. The result: a pitch universe in which no stable center governs yet which, for all its randomness, demonstrates an elastic stability.
NPRs All Things Considered broadcast a segment on (August 15, 1995) and featured Masley on All Songs Considered, an online music program (July 2001). A feature-length movie about Masley, entitled Art Officially Favored featuring Steven Tyler, Joe Elliott, Michael Boddicker and Grand Mixer DXT, and produced and directed by Martin Yernazian, is planned for release in 2018-2019.
The guitar is a stringed musical instrument that is usually fretted and typically has six or twelve strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected strings against frets with the fingers of the opposite hand. A guitar pick may also be used to strike the strings. The sound of the guitar is projected either acoustically, by means of a resonant hollow chamber on the guitar, or amplified by an electronic pickup and an amplifier.
The hammered dulcimer is a percussion-stringed instrument which consists of strings typically stretched over a trapezoidal resonant sound board. The hammered dulcimer is set before the musician, who in more traditional styles may sit cross-legged on the floor, or in a more modern style may stand or sit at a wooden support with legs. The player holds a small spoon-shaped mallet hammer in each hand to strike the strings. The Graeco-Roman word dulcimer derives from the Latin dulcis (sweet) and the Greek melos (song). The dulcimer, in which the strings are beaten with small hammers, originated from the psaltery, in which the strings are plucked.
In musical instrument classification, string instruments or chordophones, are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when a performer plays or sounds the strings in some manner.
Zithers are a class of stringed instruments. Historically, it could be any instrument of the psaltery family. In modern terminology, it is more specifically an instrument consisting of many strings stretched across a thin, flat body, the topic of this article.
An electric piano is a musical instrument that has a piano-style musical keyboard, where sound is produced by means of mechanical hammers striking metal strings or reeds or wire tines, which leads to vibrations which are then converted into electrical signals by pickups. The pickups are connected to an instrument amplifier and loudspeaker to reinforce the sound sufficiently for the performer and audience to hear. Unlike a synthesizer, the electric piano is not an electronic instrument. Instead, it is an electro-mechanical instrument. Some early electric pianos used lengths of wire to produce the tone, like a traditional piano. Smaller electric pianos used short slivers of steel to produce the tone. The earliest electric pianos were invented in the late 1920s; the 1929 Neo-Bechstein electric grand piano was among the first. Probably the earliest stringless model was Lloyd Loar's Vivi-Tone Clavier. A few other noteworthy producers of electric pianos include Baldwin Piano and Organ Company, and the Wurlitzer Company.
The tsymbaly is the Ukrainian version of the hammer dulcimer. It is a chordophone made up of a trapezoidal box with metal strings strung across it. The tsymbaly is played by striking two beaters against the strings.
The cimbalom, cimbal or concert cimbalom is a type of chordophone composed of a large, trapezoidal box on legs with metal strings stretched across its top and a damping pedal underneath. It was designed and created by V. Josef Schunda in 1874 in Budapest, based on his modifications to the existing Hammered dulcimer instruments which were already present in Central and Eastern Europe.
The Appalachian dulcimer is a fretted string instrument of the zither family, typically with three or four strings, originally played in the Appalachian region of the United States. The body extends the length of the fingerboard, and its fretting is generally diatonic.
The trapezoidal yangqin is a Chinese hammered dulcimer, likely derived from the Iranian santur or the European dulcimer. It used to be written with the characters 洋琴, but over time the first character changed to 揚, which means "acclaimed". It is also spelled yang ch'in. Hammered dulcimers of various types are now very popular not only in China, but also Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, Iran, and Pakistan. The instruments are also sometimes known by the names "santoor" and "cymbalom". This instrument had an influence on the Thai classical instrument, known as Khim (ขิม).
The Marxophone is a fretless zither played via a system of metal hammers. It features two octaves of double melody strings in the key of C major, and four sets of chord strings. Sounding somewhat like a mandolin, the Marxophone's timbre is also reminiscent of various types of hammered dulcimers.
The ektara is a one-stringed musical instrument used in the traditional music of the Indian subcontinent, and used in modern-day music of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.
An acoustic guitar is a musical instrument in the string family. When a string is plucked, its vibration is transmitted from the bridge, resonating throughout the top of the guitar. It is also transmitted to the side and back of the instrument, resonating through the air in the body, and producing sound from the sound hole. While the original, general term for this stringed instrument is guitar, the retronym 'acoustic guitar' – often used to indicate the steel stringed model – distinguishes it from an electric guitar, which relies on electronic amplification. Typically, a guitar's body is a sound box, of which the top side serves as a sound board that enhances the vibration sounds of the strings. In standard tuning the guitar's six strings are tuned (low to high) E2 A2 D3 G3 B3 E4.
In music, a bowhammer is a device used when playing a cymbalum to strike, pull across or pick the strings in order to make them vibrate and emit sound. It was devised to replace the mallets that were traditionally used to play the cymbalum. Unlike mallets, which almost exclusively are used for striking, the bowhammer allows for greater versatility, "expanding the sonic and expressive scope of an ancient instrument."
The string drum or Tambourin de Béarn is a long rectangular box zither beaten with a mallet. It is paired with a one-handed flute with three finger holes, similar to a pipe and tabor. It has also been called tambourin de Gascogne, tambourin à cordes in Catalan, Pyrenean string drum, ttun-ttun in Basque, salmo in Spanish, and chicotén in Aragonese. It was known in the middle ages as the choron or chorus.
The épinette des Vosges is a traditional plucked-string instrument of the zither family, whose use was confined to two areas in the Vosges mountains of France approximately 50 km apart: around Val-d'Ajol and around Gérardmer.
Guitar picking is a group of hand and finger techniques a guitarist uses to set guitar strings in motion to produce audible notes. These techniques involve plucking, strumming, brushing, etc. Picking can be done with:
Damping is a technique in music for altering the sound of a musical instrument by reducing oscillations or vibrations. Damping methods are used for a number of instruments.
The santur, is a hammered dulcimer of Iranian origins.
The Indian santoor instrument is a trapezoid-shaped hammered dulcimer, and a variation of the Iranian santur. The instrument is generally made of walnut and has 25 bridges. Each bridge has 4 strings, making for a total of 100 strings. It is a traditional instrument in Jammu and Kashmir, and dates back to ancient times. It was called Shatha Tantri Veena in ancient Sanskrit texts.
Music technology is the study or the use of any device, mechanism, machine or tool by a musician or composer to make or perform music; to compose, notate, playback or record songs or pieces; or to analyze or edit music.