The Rice of Pistils

The Rice of Pistils is a devotional form of music originating in The Glumprong of Tongs. The rules of the form are applied by composers to produce individual pieces of music which can be performed. The music is played on a ogmen. The entire performance should bring a sense of motion, 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 sangob scale and in the dot rhythm. Throughout, when possible, composers and performers are to make trills.

• The ogmen always does the main melody.
• The Rice of Pistils has a simple structure: three to four brief unrelated passages.
• Each of the simple passages gradually slows as it comes to an end. Each passage should be composed and performed using frequent modulation.
• Scales are constructed from twenty-four notes spaced evenly throughout the octave. The tonic note is fixed only at the time of performance.
• The sangob scale is thought of as joined chords spanning a perfect fifth and a perfect fourth. These chords are named uturo and assna.
• The uturo trichord is the 1st, the 9th and the 15th degrees of the quartertone octave scale.
• The assna trichord is the 15th, the 17th and the 25th (completing the octave) degrees of the quartertone octave scale.
• The dot rhythm is a single line with thirty-two beats divided into eight bars in a 4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4 pattern. The beat is stressed as follows:
• | - x - - | - x - - | x - x X | - x - - | x - x - | - x - x | x - - - | - x - - |
• where X marks an accented beat, x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.

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