The ubiquity of microtones in new music

I was in the northern German town of Kiel last week for a small festival
celebrating the tenth and final year of the "Gesellschaft f�r akustische
Lebenshilfe". While the focus of the concerts over the past decade has never
been explicitly microtonal music, but rather a wide variety of what might be
termed "post-minimal" approaches to tonality, the alternatives to 12tet
presented were striking in their normalcy within the new music scene. Indeed,
even most of those composers with 12tet works on the program (myself included
in this case, but also Hauke Harder, Maria de Alvear, Markus Trunk,
Ernstalbrecht Stiebler) are also actively making pieces outside of 12tet.

Three composers programmed last week should be mentioned in particular, in
that they come from rather distant corners of the avant garde community:
Wolfgang von Schweinitz's works of the last few years have featured an
intensive engagement with a JI lattice derived from Helmholtz. His new work,
for solo trombone, used (sung and played) multiphonics to create 'natural'
ring modulation. Peter Ablinger's piece for solo flute(s) and electronics
used several equal divisions of a perfect fourth, the smallest with intervals
of 20 cents. Alvin Lucier's _Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave
Oscillators_, a work typical of Lucier's music in the last 15 years, was
entirely composed of beats between the fixed pitches of the piano and two
sweeping sine waves, making microtonal music on the piano without use of a
tuning hammer.

A glance at the two most recent issues of MusikTexte also show evidence of
the ubiquity of alternative intonation: Manfred Stanke, a former student of
Ligeti and Johnston, uses a huge variety of tunings within single works;
Carola Bauckholt and Maria De Alvear, both from the school of Kagel, use
microtones as a matter of course; add in a "new complexity" composer here or
one of the "musique spectrale" composers there and "alternative intonation"
starts to sound like a non-issue.

> [Daniel Wolf, TD 309.12]
>
> A glance at the two most recent issues of MusikTexte also
> show evidence of the ubiquity of alternative intonation:
> Manfred Stanke, a former student of Ligeti and Johnston,
> uses a huge variety of tunings within single works;

On a visit to Johnny Reinhard last year, Johnny played Stanke's
_Trace_ for me and I found it to be a magnificent and highly
complex work. Definitely a composer to pay attention to.

It's nice to know that microtones are playing such a large
role in modern music in Germany.

-monz

Joseph L. Monzo Philadelphia monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
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