MicroFest: Sonic Alloys concert 5/10 in Claremont California

M I C R O F E S T
presents
Sonic Alloys II

New music for gamelan, Western instruments, electronics, and video
by Bill Alves, David Doty, Kyle Gann, and Lou Harrison
Featuring the Euphoria String Quartet, pianist Aron Kallay, and the HMC American Gamelan

Sunday May 10, 8:00 pm
Lyman Hall, Thatcher Music Building, Pomona College
Corner of Fourth and College, Claremont California
Free Admission

For more information, see www.microfest.org or call 909-607-4170

The program will include:

Stellation for video and live, retuned string quartet (see http://www.billalves.com/stellation.html). I posted the tuning of the quartet here last March, but all 16 strings have been retuned.

The gamelan will also be performing a new work of mine, Breath of the Compassionate, with live video projection. Some of the still images are here: http://www.microfest.org/microfest20094.html

Three pieces in Pelog by David Doty, adapted from pieces you may remember on the Other Music LP Prime Numbers. The HMC gamelan is in just intonation, but a slightly different tuning than the Other Music American Gamelan.

Aron Kallay will play three pieces for microtonal keyboard by Kyle Gann. Here's what Kyle has said about them: Three Works for Microtonal Keyboard (2006). The title New Aunts appealed to me because the homonymous relation among "new aunts" (British/New England pronunciation), "new ants" (Midwestern pronunciation), and "nuance" is analogous to the slight melodic changes the piece is based around. I googled "nuance," and the most common noncommercial uses had to do with the need for more nuance in our political discourse, so perhaps listening to this piece will encourage that. Or perhaps not. There are 27 pitches to the octave here, in an 11-limit just-intonation system, though the entire melody takes place within barely more than a perfect fifth. About Triskaidekaphonia: IÕve finally, after years of trying, broken past the barrier of the 11th harmonic to base a piece on the 13th harmonic and its resultant intervals. This will seem a small achievement to some microtonalists, many of whom run wild with 43rd and 79th harmonics and 53- and 72-tone scales, but I have always found myself unable to compose merely theoretically, without internalizing and being able to hear, almost more in my heart than in my head, the materials IÕm using. Thus my approach to microtonality has always been slow and gradual, and IÕve had a devil of a time getting the 13th harmonic into my system. I figured out that I could make different scales within this network by taking all notes expressible by the form 13/X, or 11/X, or X/7, and the scales with the smallest numbers would be closest to simple tonality, while the larger-numbered scales will have a much more oblique relationship. Thus, by wandering through the 29 pitches on these different scales, the piece goes Òin and out of focus,Ó sometimes comically random-sounding, sometimes purely and simply in tune, with every gradation in-between Ñ and all with a tremendous economy of means. And, about Fugitive Objects: music with many more than 12 pitches to the octave can be difficult to play on a conventional keyboard, for if there are 30 pitches within an octave spread across two and a half octaves of keyboard space, one might be able to play intervals no larger than a major third with one hand. For a long time I had been thinking about obviating this difficulty by assigning keys on the MIDI keyboard nonlinearly - that is, put all the notes in a desired chord within reach of one hand, even if this means that contiguous pitches are scattered quasi-randomly around the keyboard. Fugitive Objects was my first experiment in this project. The various musical objects which make up the piece are scattered where they will be easy to reach, not where they would make musical sense. Thus, Òfugitive objects.Ó