Pipe organ piece in 1/4 comma meantone

Here's my new piece for small renaissance organ in 1/4 comma meantone (12 notes). It explores, among other things, the septimal possibilities of the tuning.

http://soundcloud.com/juhani-nuorvala/pr-lude-non-retouche

The organ is one of the three organs in the organ hall of the new Music Centre, Helsinki. It has only one small keyboard plus one diatonic octave of pedals doubling the keyboard bass notes.
This is a live recording from the premiere in 21, Oct. Susanne Kujala is the wonderful organist.

JN

Whoa, this is amazing! Thanks for posting!!

-Carl

At 12:18 PM 2012/10/25, you wrote:
>Here's my new piece for small renaissance organ in 1/4 comma meantone
>(12 notes). It explores, among other things, the septimal
>possibilities of the tuning.
>
> http://soundcloud.com/juhani-nuorvala/pr-lude-non-retouche
>
>The organ is one of the three organs in the organ hall of the new
>Music Centre, Helsinki. It has only one small keyboard plus one
>diatonic octave of pedals doubling the keyboard bass notes.
>This is a live recording from the premiere in 21, Oct. Susanne Kujala
>is the wonderful organist.
>
>JN
>

I've linked to this over on the microtonal reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/microtonal/comments/1230qb/pr%C3%A9lude_non_retouch%C3%A9_by_juhani_nuorvala_recorded/

-C.

At 12:18 PM 2012/10/25, you wrote:
>Here's my new piece for small renaissance organ in 1/4 comma meantone
>(12 notes). It explores, among other things, the septimal
>possibilities of the tuning.
>
> http://soundcloud.com/juhani-nuorvala/pr-lude-non-retouche
>
>The organ is one of the three organs in the organ hall of the new
>Music Centre, Helsinki. It has only one small keyboard plus one
>diatonic octave of pedals doubling the keyboard bass notes.
>This is a live recording from the premiere in 21, Oct. Susanne Kujala
>is the wonderful organist.
>
>JN
>
>

Juhani,

I like it - a lot! Can you tell us a little bit how you went about
composing this?

And I did Carl one better ;-) - I posted this to the main classical music
subreddit. Some microtonal pieces have done well over there - and really
they are the target audience for a lot of this community's work and contain
way more than 250 ish members.

And while we are on the subject - microtonal ambient seems to, in general,
do quite well with the normally 12 equal crowd as well and I recommend
posting that genre there as well. On the other hand other microtonal work,
especially rock music in non-12 gets handed back to me with a lot of
rejection (be it mine or other microtonal rockers) - who'd thunk rock
listeners would be so conservative... but it seems to be true....

Chris

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Juhani <jnylenius@...> wrote:

> **
>
>
> Here's my new piece for small renaissance organ in 1/4 comma meantone (12
> notes). It explores, among other things, the septimal possibilities of the
> tuning.
>
> http://soundcloud.com/juhani-nuorvala/pr-lude-non-retouche
>
> The organ is one of the three organs in the organ hall of the new Music
> Centre, Helsinki. It has only one small keyboard plus one diatonic octave
> of pedals doubling the keyboard bass notes.
> This is a live recording from the premiere in 21, Oct. Susanne Kujala is
> the wonderful organist.
>
> JN
>
>
>

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Thanks Carl and Chris, for your nice feedback, and the reddit linkings (I wasn't aware of reddit before).

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:

> Can you tell us a little bit how you went about
> composing this?

The organist commisioned it - we'd been talking about a piece before and she had a concert coming up in this hall that has a meantone organ so I suggested I write a piece for that instrument. She demonstrated the organ fro me, and I tried out some of the sketches I'd written. This was in the spring. I wrote most of the piece in the summer while out of town, using softsynths tuned to meantone, mostly Aaron Hunt's Microsynth with a pipe organ sound font. I made a lot of sketches, lists of available (near-) JI, 7-limit chords and intervals, etc. on paper, and chord progressions, melodic motifs etc. mostly directly to a notation program playing back on the softsynth in menatone. I'm not a fan of Finale but that's what I use, and one of its features was actually very handy here: the black keys of the pipe organ are C#, Eb, F#, G#, Bb. and in Finale you can specify that these are also the notated pitches for input midi notes. Maybe you can do that in Sibelius, too,
In the fall we had a couple of sessions with the organist to try out the music I'd written so far and edit it a little bit, changing some awkward figures etc. We also decided on the registration.
Hope this was the kind of of information you had in mind.

Best,

Juhani

>
> And while we are on the subject - microtonal ambient seems to, in general,
> do quite well with the normally 12 equal crowd as well and I recommend
> posting that genre there as well. On the other hand other microtonal work,
> especially rock music in non-12 gets handed back to me with a lot of
> rejection (be it mine or other microtonal rockers) - who'd thunk rock
> listeners would be so conservative... but it seems to be true....

Well, what you say is my experience, too, and does not surprise me. Ambient is kind of an experimental genre, anyway, whereas for microtonality to be accepted in rock I assume you have to work inside an experimental sub-genre. There's 'math rock' that deals with complex rhythms. Do math rockers like their ratios in pitches, too?

>
> Chris
>
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 3:18 PM, Juhani <jnylenius@...> wrote:
>
> > **
> >
> >
> > Here's my new piece for small renaissance organ in 1/4 comma meantone (12
> > notes). It explores, among other things, the septimal possibilities of the
> > tuning.
> >
> > http://soundcloud.com/juhani-nuorvala/pr-lude-non-retouche
> >
> > The organ is one of the three organs in the organ hall of the new Music
> > Centre, Helsinki. It has only one small keyboard plus one diatonic octave
> > of pedals doubling the keyboard bass notes.
> > This is a live recording from the premiere in 21, Oct. Susanne Kujala is
> > the wonderful organist.
> >
> > JN
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>