The Music of Coffee-Beans

The Music of Coffee-beans is a form of music used during marches and military engagements originating in The Equality of Foreknowledges. The rules of the form are applied by composers to produce individual pieces of music which can be performed. The music is played on one to three tiycod. The entire performance is at a free tempo, and it is to be soft. The melody has short phrases throughout the form. Only one pitch is ever played at a time. It is performed using the toipe scale and in the otep rhythm.

• Each tiycod always does the main melody and should evoke tears.
• The Music of Coffee-beans has a well-defined multi-passage structure: a theme, a bridge-passage and one to two brief series of variations on the theme.
• The theme should be composed and performed using grace notes.
• The bridge-passage should be composed and performed using grace notes.
• Scales are constructed from twenty-four notes spaced evenly throughout the octave. The tonic note is fixed only at the time of performance. After a scale is constructed, notes are named according to degree. The names are at (spoken at), iadok (iad), poqin (po), oti (ot), nuod (nuo), ojip (oj) and qat (qa).
• The toipe heptatonic scale is thought of as two disjoint chords spanning a tritone and a perfect fourth. These chords are named opoq and toki.
• The opoq tetrachord is the 1st, the 4th, the 11th and the 13th degrees of the quartertone octave scale.
• The toki tetrachord is the 15th, the 20th, the 23rd and the 25th (completing the octave) degrees of the quartertone octave scale.
• The otep rhythm is made from two patterns: the toad (considered the primary) and the dokot.
• The toad rhythm is a single line with thirty-two beats divided into four bars in a 8-8-8-8 pattern. The beat is stressed as follows:
• | - x x - - x - x | x - - - x x - - | x - x x x x x x | x`x x x x x x'x |
• where ` marks a beat as early, ' marks a beat as late, x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.
• The dokot rhythm is a single line with thirty-two beats divided into six bars in a 7-9-3-3-5-5 pattern. The beat is stressed as follows:
• | - x x x x - x | - - - x x - - x x | x x x | x - x | x x x - - | - x`x x - |
• where ` marks a beat as early, x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.

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