Wall Street Journal review

The Full Spectrum of Musical Color

Pasadena, Calif.
Imagine lifting the lid over your piano keyboard and discovering,
along with the ebonies and ivories, another set of keys-red or green,
say-that play different pitches than the standard 12 per octave. In
effect, that's what the devotees of microtonal music have been doing
since the California maverick composer Harry Partch began building his
unique 43-tones-per-octave instruments during the Depression. At the
seventh annual MicroFest, continuing throughout May in various venues
in the Los Angeles area, some contemporary composers are taking full
advantage of the many tones "between the keys" to paint new and
colorful soundscapes.

"The best microtonal music uses new sounds to create new musical
emotions that never existed before," explains guitarist, music
professor, and radio show host John Schneider, who for the past two
decades has been a principal microtonalist maven. "In the world of
art, it would be as if someone sent us a paint box from Mars, with all
these colors we've never seen before. All these composers who are
exploring this world have found a new vocabulary of meaning and
feeling-in spite of the fact that microtonality has been around forever."

Much of the music made in human history was actually written for the
"pure" intervals that exist in the natural overtones of instruments-a
tuning system known as "just intonation," in which sounds are produced
by dividing the length of a vibrating string or column of air into
halves, thirds, fifths, and other rational ratios.

Different keys really had different sounds, affording composers
infinite nuances of expression, but, because some keys became too
dissonant, limiting available harmonies and key changes. And just
intonation's many possible forms made it hard to combine in the same
orchestra instruments that might have been built in different tunings.

As instruments began to be mass produced in the 19th century, a
standardized tuning system called "equal temperament" emerged, in
which the distance between any given pair of notes was roughly the
same no matter what octave they were played in. For all its practical
convenience, however, equal temperament was, to the sensitive ears of
microtonalists, an imperfect compromise: It destroyed the natural
beauty produced by pure intervals, made some intervals quite
dissonant, and deprived composers of far too many options beyond its
major and minor modes. As Partch said, an artist has five shades of
red, so why should composers have only one C sharp?

Recovering the lost tunings that Bach and earlier composers used was
one of the prime motivations of the 1960s early-music revival, and
those medieval, Renaissance and Baroque tunings drew Mr. Schneider and
many others into the microtonalist camp. "It wasn't curiosity" that
attracted him to just intonation, Mr. Schneider says, "it was lust! I
loved it so much from the moment I heard it, but I didn't know why it
sounded so good."

Mr. Schneider and other guitarists opened this year's MicroFest with a
concert of microtonal guitar music, including "Scenes From Nek Chand,"
one of the last compositions by that other great pioneer of
microtonality, Lou Harrison, who, days after reading Partch's book on
the subject in 1949, bought a tuning hammer for his piano and "never
looked back," producing characteristically melodic microtonal music
for keyboards, harp, gamelan and instruments he built himself.
Stringed instruments such as guitars are more readily retunable than
wind instruments, and "Nek Chand," written for a specially built
National Steel guitar, recalled the languorous "slack-key" Hawaiian
guitar music popular in Harrison's youth in the 1920s.

The May 9 concert was a tribute to Harrison, who died in February,
featuring music he wrote for the gamelan orchestras of Indonesia. Any
worries that microtonal music must sound weird or out of tune were
immediately alleviated by his ravishing "In Honor of Aphrodite" for
gamelan and chorus, and other lyrical works on the program, performed
by the Donald Brinegar Singers and the Harvey Mudd College American
Gamelan.

The recent surge in so-called world music has introduced microtonal
music to an increasing number of Westerners-the sounds are found in
the scales used in much vocal music from Arabia and Africa and the
sitars of India, and in other cultures that didn't adopt equal
temperament. The May 16 concert featured a tribute to composer Terry
Riley, one of the inventors of musical minimalism, who began writing
microtonal music in the 1960s after falling under the spell of
traditional Indian music. He's since written dozens of works in just
intonation, including the topical "Baghdad Highway," premiered here
along with a new documentary about his life by filmmaker Cecilia
Miniucchi.

The May 11 concert showed another reason for microtonality's growing
popularity: technology. Synthesizers and computers have made it
possible for composers to write in any tuning they wish without having
to construct or retune a whole set of instruments. Bill Alves's "Mass
Destruction" (which might well have been titled "George W. Meets Jimi
H.") combined blazing electric viola and computer samples of some of
the less felicitous words of the leader of the free world. Mr. Alves,
a composer at Harvey Mudd College who helped organize the festival,
also contributed an effective digital realization of Harrison's
landmark 1955 "Simfony in Free Style," the computer approximating the
timbres of recorders and viols for which Harrison composed the work.
Due to the difficulty of obtaining retuned instruments and sympathetic
musicians, it has never been performed by real instruments.

That points up the difficulty of performing microtonal music in the
Western classical/art-music establishment: Musicians who've devoted
years to internalizing the equal temperament that's so dominated
Western music for a century have to retune their instruments-and
ears-to embrace this wider spectrum of sounds. But more and more
composers are listening. And this MicroFest showed that more and more
audiences are too; MicroFest attendance has risen steadily.

Just as different artists can use the same color quite differently,
composers-including rock and electronica bands like Sonic Youth and
Radiohead-are using microtones to paint diverse sonic canvases in so
many styles that listeners can easily find some they enjoy. After
prolonged exposure to the rich, kaleidoscopic world of microtones,
returning to equal-tempered music was for me like going back to black
and white after spending a weekend immersed in color.

Mr. Campbell last wrote for the Journal on the late composer Lou Harrison.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "bill_alves" <ALVES@O...> wrote:

> Much of the music made in human history was actually written for the
> "pure" intervals that exist in the natural overtones of
instruments-a
> tuning system known as "just intonation," in which sounds are
produced
> by dividing the length of a vibrating string or column of air into
> halves, thirds, fifths, and other rational ratios.
>
> Different keys really had different sounds,

the misconceptions and confusions are repeated yet again.

> For all its
practical
> convenience, however, equal temperament was, to the sensitive ears
of
> microtonalists, an imperfect compromise: It destroyed the natural
> beauty produced by pure intervals, made some intervals quite
> dissonant,

microtonalists like julia are bristling right now if they're reading
this.