NY Times.AFMM: Voyage From Whole Notes to Whole New Systems

June 1, 1999
NY Times

MUSIC REVIEW

American Festival of Microtonal Music: Voyage
From Whole Notes to Whole New Systems

By PAUL GRIFFITHS

The world of microtonal music is rich and strange.
It includes music that makes finer divisions
within the traditional tuning system, usually
by dividing each semitone into two quarter-tones.
It also includes whole new systems. Instead of
having 12 steps to the octave, a composer might
want to have 31, or 10.

Several such possibilities were explored on
Thursday night at the closing concert of
this year's American Festival of Microtonal
Music, which was held, regrettably, in St.
Paul's Chapel on the Columbia University
campus -- a space whose long reverberation
fuzzed some of the subtlety of shape that made the music special.

Microtonal musicians exist partly in a
world of their own, for reasons both historical
and practical. To play unusual intervals
accurately requires new techniques or new
instruments, which are generally the province
of specialist performers. Also, the norm
for Western music has long been 12-step equal
temperament, with anything else
being regarded as irregular, eccentric or
plain wrong.

That norm is so fixed in our ears that
departures from it tend to sound malformed.
Many of the pieces in this concert gave the
impression of music squeezed, or melting,
or heard at the bottom of a swimming pool.
The feeling was slithery, weird or
melancholy. But maybe listeners used, say,
to Anton Rovner's quarter-tones would
find Mozart harsh and granitic.

The program polemically suggested a
millennium-long tradition of microtonal music
by following Rovner's opener -- "Appel � Deux"
for viola and horn -- with a short
history that went from an early medieval
organum through a piece of Portuguese
polyphony from around 1500 to short
mid-20th-century samples from Percy Grainger
and Ivan Wyschnegradsky.

Hearing Renaissance polyphony performed with
decisive microtonal dissonances was
distinctly odd, and none too credible: one
would need strong evidence that the music
could ever have sounded this way. But the
Grainger item, his very short "Free Music,"
was a spurt into an airy new world, suggesting
that the most convincing microtonal
music will be that which connects least with what we know.

In the rest of the program, Meredith Borden
gave a gripping account of a rare early
Harry Partch score, "Potion Scene," setting
the speech from "Romeo and Juliet" for
soprano and viola (Anastasia Solberg). Johnny
Reinhard, the festival's director, gave
a formidable performance on his bassoon of
Joseph Pehrson's "One Small Step for
Man," in eighth-notes, and Skip LaPlante, in
"Camping in the Backyard," offered an
appealing, funny, simple set of sound pictures
for flute, bassoon and string bass with
his own homemade metallophone.

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