LA Times review

Hello tunees,

Again, I am "quoting" from this article in the LA Times for
"educational" purposes. I could not get Bill Alves' link to work...
(it was broken and I couldn't get it to copy right in THREE browsers).

So, I searched on the LA Times website. But for those who don't want
to take the time to do that, here it is. (Educational Tuning
List purposes only, NOT to be reproduced...)

________________

Attuning the Ears to Appreciate Microtonalism
The theories of Partch and Harrison speak volumes at MicroFest.

By MARK SWED, Times Music Critic

Microtonalists are the Green Party of classical music. They have
an ecological mission, believing that the tuning system of 12 equally
spaced pitches to the octave, common in Western music for the past
three centuries, is artificial. They want to get back to pure systems
found in nature that are based upon the harmonic overtone series.
They agree in their joint effort to fight the system, but they are
also mavericks, obsessive in their defenses of their individual arcane
methods of tuning.

Like so many environmentalists, microtonalists prize
self-sufficiency. They build their own instruments and make their
own CDs. Their patron saint, Harry Partch, whose 100th birthday is
being celebrated this year, created beautiful and unusual homemade
instruments. But he is also celebrated for his profoundly
anti-establishment streak, which included his becoming a hobo during
the Depression.

But incorrigible maverick though he was, Partch also found favor,
at least for brief stretches, at several academic institutions, as
many microtonalists do today. Thus MicroFest 2001, which was billed as
the first conference of microtonality, was hosted by the Claremont
Colleges Friday through Sunday, and its participants seemed equally
divided between those with academic affiliations and those proudly
without. All the participants in the three days' worth of concerts and
formal papers were, however, far from the musical mainstream. One
of the weekend's fashion statements was sandals with socks, rain
or shine.

Passion ran high. A physical fight reportedly broke out at one point
between two feuding participants. During his presentation, a
musicologist from Mexico City described the atmosphere surrounding
one Mexican microtonalist as being like a cult. "You have to go to a
dark house to hear his instruments," Alejandro L. Madrid said.
As its own religious gathering of sorts, this MicroFest was
oblivious to both the first night of Passover, Saturday (when an
important concert and a keynote address by Lou Harrison was
scheduled) and Palm Sunday (papers began at 9 a.m.)

For most of us, microtonal music sounds out of tune. But it is hard
to define in what way because just about every microtonal composer
seems to have a different tuning system. Partch invented one with 43
tones to the octave. Modern microtonalists become attached to their
own systems, be they 19 tones to the octave or 23 or some other
number, and they are ready to tell you that one system or another
has the purest intervals. Among the papers were "Common Tone
Adaptive Tuning Using Genetic Algorithms," "Transposed Hexanies"
and "The Euler Genera and an Hyperdimensional Tone-lattice."

My own selective attendance concentrated on more general and
historical approaches, and there were some fascinating points. In the
Renaissance, Guillaume Costeley wrote with microtones, and it
would be good to hear it sung, not presented via computer as it was
during a paper on Friday. Joe Monzo, of Sonic Arts in San Diego,
described Schoenberg and Webern's fascination with microtones in
the early 20th century. Had the Nazis not stepped in, something might
have come of that.

But fascination and obsession are two different things. Most at
the MicroFest are obsessed. One heard that obsession in boring
music that lingered on favored intervals but went nowhere.
Occasionally something strong emerged, such as when local
composer Kraig Grady hit combinations of pitches on his jiggered
vibraphone that seemed to turn a listener's head into a bell. And I
was sorry to miss, on Saturday night, East Coast critic and composer
Kyle Gann's "Custer and Sitting Bull," which I know from other
performances and a CD to be an engrossing work for synthesizer
and reciter, in which microtones are used for telling dramatic effect.

But it was mainly concerts devoted to Partch and Harrison, Friday
and Sunday nights, that demonstrated the lasting power of
microtones. Their music reveals a large and human view of the world
that encompasses many eras of history and many cultures.
Partch once dismissed his 43-pitch scale as one-quarter of
one-tenth the truth. Friday's concert of early Partch (works from
1929 to 1950) was all about truth--the truth of experience. His
musical subjects were the newsboys on the street corner, the hobos
he met riding the rails, ancient Chinese poetry and ancient Greek
scales.

His instruments are striking. The performers, Just Strings, a local
five-member ensemble headed by John Schneider, had one
instrument, a kithara built by Partch, a copy of one of his diamond
marimbas, and adapted cellos and guitars. Performances, lyrical and
theatrical, emphasized the musical side of a composer too often
known for his quirkiness.

The Harrison concert included the premiere of a work from 1935,
a movement from a work for nine strings in quarter tones
"Geography of Heaven," which Harrison wrote at age 17. It is a
young man's moody, mystical chromatic music, the movement aptly
titled "Soul Soaring Aflame."

Harrison uses many systems of tunings, some from early Western
music, some from his interests in the music of the East. In his long
life--he turns 84 next month--he has gleefully absorbed music from
everywhere. Only a drop in the bucket of a highly prolific composer,
the program ranged from stunning chromatic organ music to small
serenades for guitar, pieces for harp or a score for tack piano (like
those found in honky-tonk). It ended with a rush of glorious melody in
"Threnody for Carlos Chavez" for solo viola and gamelan.

The level of performance was impressive. Among the Pomona
college soloists were pianist Genevieve Feiwen Lee, violinist Rachel
Vetter Huang, organist Carey Roberson, violist Cynthia Fogg, and
percussionist Bill Alves, who organized the three-day event. In their
hands, Harrison's microtones sounded no more doctrinaire than the
music of Schubert, which makes Harrison the most natural
microtonalist of them all.

Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times