tashi wada: gradient

Tashi Wada is a San Francisco-based composer and performer whose recent work focuses on sound perception as a basis for direct modes of listening. His work has been performed throughout the United States and Europe, and for several years now he has performed alongside his father, Yoshi Wada. Gradient is two sustained tones, a fourth apart, positioned along a wall, one at each end. The string player produces a very slow glissando from one pitch to the other while physically moving from one pitch to the other -- in other words, the string player moves so that pitch distance coincides with spatial distance. The two possible directions form a sculpture-like presence shifting through all of the blue notes. Harry Partch often worked with this type of harmony, so Tashi and Marc Sabat used one of his adapted violas for the recording.