SCHMEARY GLISSARY

Schmeary Glissary is a mallet percussion instrument using aluminum tubes. Its most notable feature is the tuning of the tubes, with 84 equally spaced notes per octave. That’s seven times as many notes per octave as the standard western tuning system, so there’s a huge number of tubes with notes very close together and the intervals between them very small. This may sound like something an obsessive tuning perfectionist would go for: “I need such fine divisions to get just the pitch I want in every case!” But my own wishes in making it were the opposite. I like the fact that you can play it sloppily, schmearing and glissing around the intended pitch, enjoying a world in which individual tones blend together to create something close to a continuum of pitch.