microtonality

It's possible to have an open, "free" microtonal palette and keep your
hand/ear on the rudder at the same time...

Back in the early '90s, I was lucky enough to have a nearly two year
weekly solo improvised guitar gig at the old Worcester Artists Group.
(The long since defunct WAG was a great big bustling
gallery/performance space located in an old screw factory in downtown
Worcester Massachusetts.)

This was a wonderful experience in many ways... as I was able to play
on the same bill with a lot of different improvising musicians with
whose work I was already familiar; Tim Berne and Bill Frisell, The
String Trio of NY (a personal fave), Hal Russell, Gregg Bendian and
many others... and I was able to grow by way of a steady gig (this
being a somewhat different animal than practicing, rehearsing, and the
related like).

I've never felt that I could better my improvised music through
composerly refinement. That "problem" was encoded into the music in as
much as I would play to the strengths of what I felt "worked"; it
would be difficult to understate the importance of context and
intent... of what it is that your trying to accomplish. I could never
compose a "better" solo guitar piece than I could improvise, but
there's also no way that I would expect any of my groups to improvise
one of my compositions -- if you want a three measure rhythmic unison
across seven instruments, free-improvisation might not be the best
tactical approach to solving this problem!

I cherish both through composition and total improvisation. But aside
from hopefully being good music <!>, I don't expect each to be able to
be the other.

I intentionally had my fretless Les Paul made without fret markers or
neck dots. I did this not so much because I wanted to "better" my
ear's ability to play "in tune"... but because I wanted all the
"forbidden" notes right there before me with as few inhibitors as
possible. I wanted to know what the hell was in there motifically...
emotionally... what strange and refracting lines and chords! It takes
a lot of doing and concentration to play the fretless to orthodox
expectations, i.e., conventionally. For a long time I wasn't the least
bit interested in meeting expectations and aural conventions or any of
it -- I wanted *new notes* and lots of 'em damn it!

My friend Bart Mallio studied with Anthony Braxton for a while; Bart
plays bass in the Anthony Rodrigues Trio in which I also play fretless
guitar. Should anyone be interested, here's a link to "Long Hard
Winter" by the AR trio:

<http://stations.mp3s.com/stations/55/117_west_great_western.html>

I think Braxton is a truly remarkable man. He has continually worked
his music towards an organic, unified amalgamation of improvised and
notated schemes. He's also the type that has no problem seeing the
iconoclastic and remarkable individual achievement across any of the
ideological battlelines that often churn around the
improviser/composer, in/out, old/new, etc., camps... witness his
heartfelt and keen appreciation of Paul Desmond and Derek Bailey...
Richard Teitelbaum and Sousa... Wagner and Warne Marsh...

It's also worth noting that Braxton's own music is an exceptionally
difficult collision of improvised and notated schemes... It not only
requires dynamic, intuitive players who can really think on their feet
and personally contribute with a capital C, but it also demands some
pretty fearsome sight-reading and the "schooled" like... In Braxton's
music these may not be two sides of the same coin, but he certainly
expects his players to be ready -- heads or tails!

There's so many ways to approach "microtonality" outside of those that
are most frequently discussed on this list -- tempering and some
stripe of just intonation. The "problem" is that most of them run out
of analytical steam pretty quickly... I can say that they work, this I
know, but I can't do much more than outline how and why in some pretty
quickly depleted terms.

One example of this is the set of pieces I wrote for turntable quartet
(two of these pieces, "Blue Carousel" and "The Way I See You Know",
are up at the aforementioned site should anyone be interested). I
wrote this set of pieces back in '87 as a way to better isolate and
really focus in on certain aspects of intonation and simultaneity that
I found, and still find, utterly fascinating. The method allowed for a
dynamic manual adaptive retuning on the fly in strict quodlibet! No
lattices or ratios or the like are gonna help much here and that's
OK... but there are many, many ways to get your microtonal fill, and
sometimes I feel a bit frustrated by my inability to give some of them
with which I am familiar more air time here in this most active of
microtonal forums...

Oh well, just some thoughts while they were fresh.

--d.stearns