The Voice/AFMM 5/23/1999: Micro Breweries

Micro Breweries
by Kyle Gann

June 2-8, 1999 Village Voice

American Festival of Microtonal Music
May 23
NYU Physics Auditorium

Everything that can be done in music has
already been done." The next time you hear
some tunesmith fob off an interviewer with that
tired postmodern mantra, remember that the
human ear can meaningfully distinguish about
250 different pitches, of which our music
generally uses only 12. We smugly
overpopulate our little musical archipelago
while entire continents lie uninhabited. The
Columbuses and Magellans of those
continents gather annually at Johnny
Reinhard's American Festival of Microtonal
Music. This year, perhaps competing with the
Bang on a Can festival, his "Microthon"� a
term which ought to connote a teensy tiny
marathon, but in this case meant a long
stretch of microtonal music� crammed
souvenirs from a world of unknown musics into
a single day.

Despite rampant underground interest on the
Internet, microtonality remains for most people
an enigma mired in obscure numerical
theories. Microtonal composers could lose
that enigmatic status overnight if they banded
together and reached some unanimity on what
kind of microtones to use. Thankfully, they
never have. One wants perfect consonances;
another extreme chromaticism; another exotic
melodic nuances; another wants to hear beats
between sliding tones; yet another thinks he'll
stumble across the promised magical effects
of the ancient "harmony of the spheres."

Take Adam Silverman, whose beautifully
restful Durham for strings was played
energetically yet perfectly in tune by the Flux
Quartet (Tom Chiu, first violinist). Silverman
opted for harmonic variety with everything
perfectly in tune, which required mercurially
shifting intonations as the chords changed.
Skip LaPlante, by contrast, went for maximum
weirdness in a Theme and Variations in
13-Tone Equal Temperament for his Music for
Homemade Instruments Ensemble. On stove
pans, plumbing pipes, and graded
two-by-fours, the group plunked and then sang
a tune in an ear-bending 13-step scale, with
tones eerily closer together than we're used
to. Despite its difficulty the feat was a pinnacle
of laid-backness, the vocal section including
lyrics such as "blah blah blah blah."

Influenced by Indonesian gamelan, Patrick
Grant aimed for melodic exoticism. His
ensemble combined drums, gongs, and
retuned electric pianos in Everything Distinct:
Everything the Same: clearly a difficult work
and a little too carefully played, but graced by
melodies that drove home the 11th and 13th
harmonics with ear-tickling regularity. Elodie
Lauten in her XX took a more atmospheric
approach. Her keyboard was tuned to a
Pythagorean scale� not much different from
our usual piano tuning� but each note
brought forth a wavering cloud of sound, while
she, singing, and Andrew Bolotowsky, on
flute, intoned pitches a quarter-tone away from
those emitted by the keyboard. Flamboyantly
uninhibited Sasha Bogdanowitsch sang
melodies with prerecorded overdubs of himself,
capturing the rich vocal resonances of
barbershop quartet (America's last bastion of
vernacular pure tuning) in an equally mystical
idiom.

The guiding spirit behind such microtonal
events is always, and may always be, Harry
Partch. These days every performance of his
music becomes a political statement, for there
is a war on between the Partch purists who
feel only the instruments he invented should
be used and those who will make
arrangements for any adaptable substitutes. I
distrust purism in all forms, yet even my
standards of Partch performance were
stretched by Reinhard's extremely loose
rendition of Barstow, a classic bit of
Americana based on hitchhiker inscriptions.
Garnet Willis played a makeshift
Chromelodeon (Partch's 43-tone harmonium)
jerry-rigged from two accordions, and I
anticipate heated arguments pro and con
among Internet tuning circles in coming
weeks.

For some reason� probably because the
guitar is the most frustratingly difficult
instrument to tune well� the microtonal world
is inundated with guitarists. Here we heard
John Growski with his 19-tone guitar, Paul
Erlich with his 22-tone guitar, and Wim
Hoogewerf with a 24-tone instrument. And it
was a coup on Reinhard's part to end with an
electronic work by Joe Monzo, who is more
theorist than composer, but who has been
doing some of the most important theoretical
work in tuning. For example, he's developing
software that will allow live microtonal
computer performance based on movement
through multidimensional pitch lattices. Based
on the Whitman poem, his piece A Noiseless
Patient Spider wasn't ambitious, but it did
capture with startling clarity the feel of a spider
moving through a geometric web of pitches.

Not all the music was so whacked out. Erlich,
on guitar and synth both tuned to 22 tones,
played a waltz, a rock solo, a modal improv,
that sounded almost normal. With only a
melodic nuance sounding odd here and there,
it was marginally pop, harmonically
conventional, even naive. And yet, what better
music for demonstrating that we don't need to
abandon the harmonies we're used to when we
redivide the octave? Erlich wrung feelings we're
used to from a scale we've hardly explored,
and provided a reminder that musical
revolutions always come from below: not from
the experts who invariably have a status quo
to defend, but from the amateurs who hear all
the beautiful details the experts miss. With
music like his, Grant's, Silverman's, and
Monzo's etching new pitches in our memory,
the 21st can hardly become just another
12-pitch century.

[photo of composer here]
Joe Monzo's a noiseless
patient spider captured with
startling clarity the feel of a
spider moving through a
geometric web of pitches.
(photo: Michael Schmelling)

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