GERARD E. BRUNETTI. Born TRANSCRIPT OF OH 1942V.

Transcription

1 GERARD E. BRUNETTI. Born TRANSCRIPT OF OH 1942V. This interview was recorded on March 9, 2014, for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program. The interviewer is Jamie Mohatt. The videographer is Kelly Herman. The interview was transcribed by Susan Becker. ABSTRACT: This video recording is a continuation of the audio recording (OH 1941) with the same narrator. In this recording he talks about a musical notation system and a musical instrument that he has developed, showing a drawing of the instrument. The last part of the recording is audio only. NOTE: This interview is part of a series with people who are or have been homeless in Boulder. The interviewer and narrator are identified by their initials whenever there is a change in speaker. Added material appears in brackets. 00:00 [This recording appears to be a continuation of the audio recording of Gerard Brunetti made for OH OH 1942 adds a video section to the interview. The recording begins with narrator in mid-topic] GB: Like I said before, this publication on the notation I pretty much put in the public domain. It was part of a patent-pending I filed in 2012, but the notation system I invented in I didn t realize its potential until 2012, because they wouldn t give me a copyright on the notation, because it falls under the category of a design patent. And then the research I did online from the internet: when you invent or enhance a language, whatever kind of a language it is, even if it s a musical language the most basic part of it hasn t changed in a thousand years, and here I am changing it. Well, 29 percent the majority of people would say that if you re going to do something with the language, let it go. Put it out there, don t expect to get any money or anything in return. It s just one of those things that if you want people to absorb it, or take hold of it, or do something with it, then it s just one of those things you have to give away. That s just the way it is. So the language, the new musical language, is just something that I put out to the public domain. JM: Okay. GB: All right. JM: Would you like to play us something? Do you have a recording? 1

2 GB: I don t. I do have a recording of the instrument stuff that was made in I don t know if I can pull them up here or not. I should be able to. JM: Katie [the project organizer] just gave us a flash for time, so we can wrap it up. KH: Why don t you try real quick, and we can see. JM: Yeah, go for it. GB: I also have the patent file here in my computer, so you can see pictures of the instruments. JM & KH. That would be wonderful/great. GB: The actual photographs that were taken of the instruments are in the archives of the National Music Museum, the seventh largest music museum in the world, which is what made me throw caution to the wind and take on the sometimes homeless, sometimes not, as an inventor to follow this idea all the way through you know, make the money and use the money to pay for the patent work and stuff like that when I needed to do it. The patent attorneys weren t doing any better than I was doing on my own, so I did all the legalese, all the paperwork and drawings, everything all myself. So it s been let s put it this way Bill Gates with three partners, it took him longer than it took me all by myself. And I m getting a utility patent, not just a design patent. JM: Cool! 02:37 GB: Let s see, let me pull up here Okay. Okay. What have we got? Pictures of the instruments. JM: Mm-hmm. Now you created, you built these instruments? GB: I built an instrument, and it is in the yeah, I have one instrument. JM: And where does it reside? GB: It s in my storage space right now. And photographs of it reside JM: On your computer. And also at the museum. GB: At the National Music Museum. Seventh largest in the world. I could not believe it when they asked me to bring that in and take photographs of it. I really thought it was like some people that I knew joking, jerking me, trying to pull my JM: pull your chain. 2

3 GB: So I starred-69 and called back and: National Music Museum. How may we direct your call? Click. I hung up really quick, because I didn t know what to say! And I was like, Oh my So I went online and I was like, Oh!. So I called them back and said, I would love to do JM: Did you find your photos? GB: Yeah. Oh yeah. JM: Great. May I see it? 03:49 GB: Sure. But now, what do you know about the history of musical instruments? The bow. The oldest instrument in the world is the bow, from the eastern hemisphere. On the western hemisphere, the development of musical instruments never took place. The closest thing to the bow was something that was invented in the United States. All I did was take a bunch of old guitar parts in 2002 and slap them on my old deck. But yes, that s a snowboard deck that you re looking at how about that? But also [trying to adjust his computer] um, I just can t get a very clear picture of that, but you see that the snowboard deck, when it s turned on its side, has the same shape of a bow. That s better. JM: That you for sharing that. Okay. GB: So, I don t know if this helps or not, to hold it up on on its side like that [turns laptop computer on its side]. So basically, 15,000 years ago, the bow was of course a hunting it was part of it hadn t been used until 15,000 years ago. They have a pictograph of a bow being used as a useful instrument. The next thing that comes up is the rabab, an Indian instrument, which is a bow with a gourd attached to it and is the grandfather to the violin. And then the violin comes along, 1,500 A.D., which is 2,000 years later 2,000 years later? yeah, 2,200 years later. All I did was take this, attach a gourd to it, thus making it a stringed musical instrument indigenous to the western hemisphere. And then I did the same development I have gourds and then wood and then plastic and then solid-body instruments, electric instruments, digital instruments, and a nano-panel instrument. So I covered all of the musical instruments indigenous I invented all the instruments indigenous to the western hemisphere without any parallel to the instruments of the eastern hemisphere. The great thing about the snowboard and its body is it remains flexible. Now on the electric guitar, we have a whammy bar. And dragging the stem when you hit the whammy bar dragging the stem as far as, obviously, pitch-bending on the piano. Or if you had a bowed instrument that you could flex the body on 3

4 JM: I see. I see what you are saying. GB: then you have an entirely different instrument, which is why the cursive notation, because the body remains flexible, you don t need to add a whammy bar, you can make something like a violin do same thing differently now without having to put a whammy bar as pulling the bow away. One of the biggest problems about making an electric violin is once you pull that bow away, that s it! There s no there s nothing. You can hook up all the effects in the world, but you cannot pull that bow away. Your technique has to and one of the things about the western hemisphere is our music oh, it is kind of stagnating, starting to spin it s wheels, we sample a lot of other people s music. But once again a catalyst like the electric guitar, which changed the face of music the guys who invented it, and then the guy who defined what it could do Jimi Hendrix. But a lot of things run their course. Sometimes folk music faster than others. But this now that we have new instruments that we can write and orchestrate for we can move forward into that realm, orchestrating symphonic music in the western hemisphere. So now we can move forward again, because we have new stringed musical instruments to write for that function differently and play differently because they remain flexible. So I made the notation system to go with those instruments 08:02 JM: I see. Okay. GB: It just so happens that the notation system works for all other styles of music, because the existing notation system works only for classical and opera. But now we can record and preserve gospel any kind of music for the ages. And now when we write music we have a way to write it and preserve it rather than relying on ear-training only. The great thing about the classical world is they have the written page, and what they hear. In our music, all we have is what we hear. But now we have both. Now we can take the music and have great performances with both. That s what it said there, right? JM: Yup. [crosstalk] GB: But that is the idea of the instruments. Plus the great thing about the instruments is I reuse every part of it. And if music is at the foundation of our youth, then these instruments take their snowboard and reuse it entirely, then we begin the process of instituting reuse and recycling at a very young age. Because a lot of people still have their first decks and turn it into a musical instrument is about the coolest thing they can do with it instead of sitting on it like a bench. [interview continues, but without video there is audio only for the remaining of the recording] GB: Okay, now, I m also working on oh, crap I could have shown you that. And we re going to leave., right? 4

5 JM: Yes, I did. GB: So the thing with the chords. I m working on the addendum for chords, because obviously that s more to it than that. Basically um how about that? So this is what I ve been doing while I m here. That s why I m here now. Plus there s a patent attorney that has helped my out before, free of charge. So here s the addendum on chords. Basically, you know, the chord, you know the two notes, right? So basically just by adding the cursive element to that note, when you strum the guitar there s these two notes, one you bend and the other one you slide up: [makes guitar-playing sounds]. And so I m just adding the to I have a better example ah! So if I were to go ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bam, then we know this note is being bent just by the curve in the scale. That s the chords. Now, we need rhythm on the guitar. So here s the chord. And here s the notes that are part of the lead, the value, and the note they re being bent up to, whether they re in between the lines or on the line. Whole note. Same thing. Whole note. Whole note. But this is like an example of a. Like I said, an example of a symbol in the treble. And the cursive one is on the outside. So that would be like you were going to do a chord that way. [turning pages] And you know and so oh! They are whole note chords. And understand with the whole notes, you know, you re bending that you read all of that, right? JM: Yes, I did. GB: This thing is very self-explanatory. JM: It is. It s very well written. GB: Except for the except for chords. So that s why the addendum on chords. JM: Okay. I really like the this down. GB: Well, you ve got to do the pictures before you write pictures first, then that. So that s what I m working on now today, tomorrow, this week. The addendum for the addendum on chords. KH and JM: Thank you very much for sharing with us. Thank you. 11:19 [End of interview] 5