I have a Tibetan bowl with a lovely tone that I always wanted to use for a microtonal piece, because it sounds good software-transposed to any pitch level. I wanted to use "bowl" in the title, and Tibetan bowl might not have suggested Tom Bowling except that I happened to begin the piece on Thoreau's birthday; "Tom Bowling" was Thoreau's favorite tune to play on his flute. As the lyrics say, Tom Bowling's "form was of the manliest beauty, / his heart was kind and soft!," so worth an elegy. The piece uses 24 pitches per octave (just intonation, not quarter-tone). The bowl's tone is rather complex, with a marked fifth harmonic (major third), which creates some rather odd pitch illusions as the melody interacts with the bass. The bell-tone itself rather overwhelms the harmonic aspects of the piece, nature overcoming art, as Thoreau would have appreciated.

- Kyle Gann

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