2018: Pet the Tiger

David Samas, Bart Hopkin, Peter Whitehead, Daniel Schmidt, Stephen Parris, Ian Saxton

Pet the Tiger Inventors Collective is a San Francisco Bay Area ensemble led by David Samas that plays in a wide variety of idioms exploring new timbral dimensions through extended techniques, new instruments, xenharmonics, and fringe acoustic phenomena. They will present new composition for their Harmonic Series Gamelan entitled “Music for Fairies and Elves,” original incidental music for Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Harmonic Series Gamelan is a collection of instruments are tuned to the 8th octave of the Schumann Cavity Resonance (62.4 Hertz/ B1+19). Pet the Tiger declares, “It is fundamental to the physics of sound and can be observed widely in nature (which is not true of any other tuning). It is entirely comprised of the lost order just intonation ratios and is un-tempered, meaning there are no commas, and no false octave equivalency. In this way it is pure, natural sound.” The instruments are inspired by the work of Bill Colvig and Lou Harrison, and were assembled in honor of their centenaries in 2017.

Stephen Parris (photo by Michael Zelner)

Pet the Tiger (photo by Michael Zelner)