The Queen of Lace

The Queen of Lace is a devotional form of music originating in The Dungeon of Verses. The form guides musicians during improvised performances. The music is played on a usku. The entire performance should be fiery and is consistently slowing. The melody has phrases of varied length throughout the form. Only one pitch is ever played at a time. It is performed using the slulasp scale. Throughout, when possible, performers are to play arpeggios.

• The usku always does the main melody. The voice ranges from the raucous low register to the shrill middle register.
• The Queen of Lace has the following structure: one to two passages and an additional passage possibly all repeated.
• Each of the first simple passages is to be very soft. Each passage is performed in the zak rhythm.
• The second simple passage is to become softer and softer. The passage is performed in the ustrok rhythm. The passage should be performed using rapid runs.
• Scales are conceived of as two chords built using a division of the perfect fourth interval into eight notes. The tonic note is a fixed tone passed from teacher to student. After a scale is constructed, notes are named according to degree. The names are uto (spoken ut), nol (no), dab (da), agun (ag), ung (ung), stotho (sto) and bor (bo).
• As always, the slulasp pentatonic scale is thought of as two disjoint chords drawn from the fundamental division of the perfect fourth. These chords are named abo and ok.
• The abo trichord is the 1st, the 3rd and the 8th degrees of the fundamental perfect fourth division.
• The ok trichord is the 1st, the 2nd and the 8th degrees of the fundamental perfect fourth division.
• The zak rhythm is a single line with thirty-one beats divided into three bars in a 8-12-11 pattern. The beat is stressed as follows:
• | x ! - x'- - - x | X x - - x - - x x x x x | - - x`- - - x - - - - |
• where ! marks the primary accent, X marks an accented beat, ` marks a beat as early, ' marks a beat as late, x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.
• The ustrok rhythm is a single line with twenty-three beats divided into two bars in a 11-12 pattern. The beat is stressed as follows:
• | x - x - x - X x'- - - | x - x x - x ! x - x x x |
• where ! marks the primary accent, X marks an accented beat, ' marks a beat as late, x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.

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