Category: Analysis

D.C. Culbertson over the years Final photo by Mark Longaker, others unknown

By D.C. Culbertson
© 2001 NewMusicBox

“Act your age!”
“Age is nothing but a number.”
“With age comes wisdom.”
“He looks good for his age.”

People talk a lot about age. They speak of golden years, midlife crises, middle-age spread, callow youth, being young at heart, and nurturing the inner child. They debate the issue of physical vs. emotional vs. psychological age, speaking of “youthful” people in their 70s and “old” people in their 20s. A doctor writes a book on how to determine one’s “Real Age” based on one’s physical condition and lifestyle. And on and on… But is the issue of chronological age important when speaking about composers? Does a composer’s age influence the type of music he/she writes? At what point is one no longer considered a “young” composer, and can a composer who is chronologically “old” write in a young way?

For example, some believe that 40 is a pivotal age when a composer comes into his/her own stylistically, pointing out that Philip Glass and Steve Reich wrote their most significant works (Glass’ Einstein on the Beach and Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians) shortly before their 40th birthdays. But others are quick to point out that fellow minimalist Terry Riley wrote his most significant work, In C, before he even turned 30. Others point out composers like Pauline Oliveros, who is nearly 70 but still exploring new musical avenues, and 92-year-old Elliott Carter, who recently completed his first opera and is believed to be composing some of his best work at present.

Going further with this idea, can any generalization be made about composers from the same age group? If there is, how does their music compare or contrast with composers of another generation? Or is every composer so different that no real generalization of any kind can be made, regardless of age?

When exploring such a concept, there are a lot of different elements that need to be considered. Take musical form, for instance. Is opera popular among one age group and virtually ignored in another? Does one age group favor traditional forms like sonata-allegro or theme and variations, while another almost entirely disregards them? We hear from time to time about the impending demise of the traditional orchestra or the difficulty in getting new works for orchestra performed. Does this correspond with an increasing drop in the number of orchestral works composers have been producing over the past 50 years or is there no apparent basis in fact for it?

Is there a predominant musical style among any particular age group? For instance, is serialism more common among composers who were active during the height of the Darmstadt school–or later, or earlier? During minimalism’s heyday, the names of Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich were tossed around a lot, but were most of their contemporaries also using it? And what about aleatoric music or neo-romanticism?

What kind of musical influence is evident? While one generation draws heavily on European classical traditions exemplified by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, does another prefer to look back to an earlier time and draw on medieval and Renaissance traditions? What about music from non-Western cultures, particularly if it reflects the composer’s ethnic heritage? Or American folk music? Or jazz, or rock?

Do current events, cultural or social issues show up in any particular generation’s music? Can one see the effects of events such as the Korean War, the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic or the civil rights movements mostly in the age group who lived through them, or in later generations? What about influences from the composer’s own world–poetry they’ve read, movies or paintings they’ve seen, or even dreams they’ve had?

And what is the music scored for? Does one generation favor traditional ensembles such as the string quartet and piano trio? If they do use traditional instruments, are they used in non-traditional ways, whether it be bowing the interior strings of a piano, extended vocal technique, or playing only the head joint of a clarinet? Do others concentrate on electronic and computer music? Who primarily uses instruments not normally associated with “serious” or “classical” music, such as the banjo or toy piano? What about the use of ethnic instruments or ensembles such as the gamelan? How many composers choose to disregard any tradition and use instruments of their own invention, either exclusively or in combination with traditional instruments? And which go even further and make extensive use of things not normally considered instruments at all, such as plants, turntables and auto parts?

Armed with a copious list of American composers, I explored these factors and more among the age groups under under 40, 40-60, 60-80 and over 80, to see if any generalizations could be made along these lines. (Just for the record, I decided to limit my research to living American composers who write music that can be labeled “serious” or “contemporary.”) I read books, checked numerous websites, watched videos, combed through LP and CD liner notes, and sent numerous e-mails. What follows are a series of purely unscientific–but, hopefully, well researched–findings.

It can be a tricky matter to track down young composers, because most are not widely recorded or performed. But if the recent spate of awards given out by ASCAP and BMI are any indication, there are an enormous amount of composers under 30 writing an equally enormous amount of music. In addition to the 19 main winners of ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Awards this year, four others received honorable mentions, and seven special ASCAP Foundation Awards intended for composers under 18 where given, as well as five Honorable Mentions. Nine others were honored at the 48th BMI Student Composer Awards last June. Take into consideration all the schools and conservatories in the U.S. that offer degrees or private study in composition, not to mention young composers who are writing on their own, and the logical conclusion is that these winners must represent only the tip of the iceberg, numerically.

Despite their youth, some of these composers already appear to be well on their way to having distinguished careers. For example, 15-year-old Julia Scott Carey, who has been composing since age 5, received her first commission (from the Wellesley Symphony Orchestra) at 11, and over a dozen orchestras have performed her works to date, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

However, although it may be fairly easy to get an idea about how many young composers are out there, it’s anything but easy to make generalizations about the forms they prefer or the styles they write in. There are exceptions, such as Carey, who speaking by phone from her home in Massachusetts, describes her style as “lyrical” and “tonal–with a lower-case T.”

Some composers who are getting closer to 40 have established a trademark sound such as neo-romantics Lowell Liebermann and Daron Hagen, both of whom turn 40 later this year, neo-modernists Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964) and Anthony Cornicello (b. 1964), or post-minimalist Michael Torke (b. 1961), whose distinct style involves frenetic rhythmic patterns, and whose pieces are often based on his musical interpretation of colors. But far more often the writing of composers under 40 shows a wide mix of styles and influences, sometimes from piece to piece and sometimes even within the piece. For example, the three movements of Voices, a clarinet concerto by Derek Bermel (b. 1967), are based, successively, on speech sounds, an Irish folk song, and Jamaican rap.

The instrumentation of these young composers’ pieces is often as eclectic and varied as their musical style. For example, the compositions of Annie Gosfield (b. 1960) include works for detuned piano, the ensemble Newband (which is primarily made up of instruments built by Harry Partch), and a work for solo piano and baseballs created for the 100th anniversary of the unification of New York’s boroughs called “Brooklyn, October 5, 1941,” after game 4 of the 1941 World Series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees.

It seemed, in this regard, that it might be a good idea to ask one of these composers, particularly a well-connected one, why they think so much variance among this generation. One likely candidate was Adam Silverman, 27, a Yale graduate and co-founder of the New York-based Minimum Security Composers Collective, which has presented works by over 20 composers in three years and who says, when asked how many composers he knows personally, “I can’t even imagine…I could rattle off 50 names easily.”

Silverman believes that one reason composers of his generation lack any kind of common language is because they’ve grown up with easy access to many different types of music through media like recordings, radio and Internet sources like Napster and mp3.com. (His influences, for example, include Ligeti, Stravinsky, Schubert, the Beatles and Torke.) They’re also the first generation to have grown up with easy access to computers, which they can use as a tool for composing, either through software manuscript programs like Finale or through music editors and sequencers. Another reason may be “possibly a negative reaction to the example set for us by the oldest living generation, who harshly divided modern classical music into uptown and downtown camps, West Coast, and East Coast, American and European… In the last 35 years, however, there has been a slow rebuilding of musical openness, starting with that of the minimalists. Today, with no chips on our shoulders, young composers stand on their legacy; not having strongly experienced this musical chauvinism from our musical peers, we are free to concentrate on the important task of developing our own styles and personal modes of expression form whatever sources we see fit.”

Many of these young composers also differ from their older colleagues in a way that reflects a pre-20th century tradition: actively pursuing careers in performing as well as composing. Bermel, for example, was the soloist when the American Composers Orchestra premiered Voices. Gosfield, in addition to frequently collaborating with artists such as John Zorn, also directs her own ensemble. And New York-based Dave Douglas plays trumpet in no less than six ensembles, from a jazz quartet to Sanctuary, which he describes as an “electric octet.”

However, most of the music of the under 40 crowd does not seem to draw on political or social issues. Two exceptions to this are jazz composer Don Byron (b. 1962), whose outspoken political views inform virtually every composition he writes, and Robert Maggio (b. 1964), who said in his notes to the CRI disc Gay American Composers, “I write music that matters to me–music that explores my internal emotional life and the relationships between individuals. As with all important facets of my identity, my homosexuality has an influence on my music, at times directly affecting the pieces I write.”

Composers born during the 1940s and ’50s came of age in an era where the barriers between “serious” and “popular” music, as well as jazz and avant-garde music, started to break down drastically and there was a noticeable increase in the use of experimental techniques. Not every composer born during this period chose to follow these trends, naturally. Some even reverted to more conservative idioms. For instance, while the early works of John Adams (b. 1947) like Shaker Loops (1978) are minimalist, his more recent ones, like the 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer, are more through-composed and in a more conservative, post-modernist style.

But many composers in this age group have found a signature sound world and have pretty much remained identified with it. Glenn Branca (b. 1949) writes for “orchestras” of up to 100 guitars, many of them altered or specially built in different keys. Stephen Scott (b. 1944) started composing for “bowed” piano, where a group of pe
rformers use fishing line or horsehair to bow the piano’s inner strings, in 1976. Ellen Fullman (b. 1957) has been primarily associated with The Long String Instrument, a wooden box with 85-feet wires that creates tones with deep frequencies. Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) frequently incorporates non-traditional percussion instruments into his music, from kitchen utensils to pieces of scrap metal to tree branches hung with glass wind chimes. Since 1990 much of Phil Kline‘s music has been composed largely for “boom box orchestra,” a group of portable tape players. Meredith Monk (b. 1943), who has been associated with extended vocal techniques since the 1960s and has created a significant body of works exploring this terrain for her own ensemble, has only recently explored the possibility of writing works for other ensembles including the orchestra.

Electro-acoustic, electronic or computer music are the preferred mediums for many of composers in this age group such as Daria Semegen (b. 1946) and Pril Smiley (b. 1943), both of whom were associated with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Although composer and electric guitarist Paul Dresher (b. 1951) has created works for conventional instruments, some of his most important scores, which he performs with his own ensemble, combine electric and acoustic instruments to create a new type of chamber music. Another electric guitar playing composer Steve Mackey has also developed a unique style through combining the electric guitar’s sonorities with those of acoustic instruments. Scott Johnson (b. 1952), since his John Somebody (1980-82) in which an electric guitar imitates repeated fragments of voice recordings, has continued to explore and refine the technique of turning pre-recorded conversation into recognizable melodies through repetition and imitation for the past two decades. Charles Dodge (b. 1942), since his landmark Earth’s Magnetic Field (1970) in which the musical material from computations involving changes in the earth’s magnetic field, has been creating provocative music with computers incorporating such diverse ideas as synthetic speech-song to altering historic recordings of Enrico Caruso. Another computer composer who has been obsessed with the fine line between verbal communication and music-making for many years is Princeton-based Paul Lansky (b. 1944). Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945), who began her career performing folk and bluegrass music on the banjo, and began exploring the possibilities of computers in works such as Appalachian Grove (1974), has rarely gone back to acoustic instruments since then.

Other composers who initially concentrated on electronic and electro-acoustic music have modified or grown away from their original approach. For instance, Ingram Marshall (b. 1942), whose earliest compositions involved tape experiments, now frequently mixes live acoustic instruments with electronic processing. And Elodie Lauten (b. 1950), who originally worked exclusively with the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument (CMI), now composes for a lot of music for solo acoustic piano and has even created a work for Baroque period instruments.

Rock and popular music is also a strong influence in much of the music written by this age group. Glenn Branca (b. 1949) and Rhys Chatham (b. 1942), who were both originally performers in rock bands, have been created large-scale compositions using rock aesthetics and rock instrumentation for decades. Bonham for eight percussionists, by Christopher Rouse (b. 1949), was inspired by the late Led Zeppelin drummer. Julia Wolfe (b. 1958) described her Lick as being directly inspired by the Motown and funk music she grew up with. (Wolfe, along with fellow Druckman students Michael Gordon and David Lang, also founded the Bang On A Can Festival, with the aim of trying to break down the Uptown-Downtown polarity, in 1987.) Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), who like Philip Glass has enjoyed great commercial success, frequently works with rock musicians such as Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed and Adrian Belew. However, as she said in John Schaefer‘s book New Sounds, “I don’t think of [my music] as rock in any way, but it’s sitting in the rock bins in record stores, and there are people on it who do rock.”

It’s also not uncommon to see works inspired by current events and popular culture, both serious and frivolous, among composers of this age group. Michael Daugherty (b. 1954) is a particularly good example of the latter, with extroverted works like Desi (inspired by Desi Arnaz) (1990) or Elvis Everywhere, whose scoring includes four Elvis impersonators. Many of Laurie Anderson’s pieces include satiric or humorous social commentary, often with a feminist slant, such as Beautiful Red Dress. A number of African-American composers have written pieces inspired by important figures in black history; including Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941) and Anthony Davis (b. 1951), whose opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, was composed in 1985. And it was primarily composers of this age group who contributed to The AIDS Quilt Songbook, a cycle of 15 songs commissioned by the late baritone William Parker in 1992.

Many of the prominent American composers between the ages of 60 and 80 continue to pursue the trademark styles and techniques for which they initially became known. These styles and techniques, however, are as varied as the entire field of American music.

For a significant number of composers in this age group, serialism remains a vital compositional frame of reference. Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt were extremely influential teachers for a whole generation of composers and their compositional legacy continues in the music of Charles Wuorinen (b. 1938), whose music is as structurally complex and demanding as that of his teacher Babbitt while as classically balanced as that of Sessions. Donald Martino (b. 1931), Benjamin Boretz (b. 1934), Henry Weinberg (b. 1931) and Peter Westergaard (b. 1931), all also former Babbitt students, have each remained strict serialists throughout their careers. Although in recent years, even composers as uncompromising as Mario Davidovsky (b. 1934) seem to have softened a bit. Curiously, Babbitt’s most famous pupil Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) never composed serial music but has continued to cultivate a unique personal language for the Broadway musical for over 40 years.

During the formative years of the composers born in this generation, the most viable avant-garde compositional alternative to serialism was the music and philosophy of the late John Cage whose advocacy of indeterminate musical processes still informs the works of his disciples Christian Wolff (b. 1936) and Earle Brown (b. 1924). The Fluxus movement of the early 1960s, which took Cage’s compositional methods to an even more extreme realization, led to confrontational works by Yoko Ono (b. 1933) and George Brecht (b. 1925), but nowadays there are few strict adherents of the Fluxus aesthetic these days, although the singular career path followed to this day by La Monte Young (b. 1935), often cited as the founder of minimalism, can be traced to his earliest conceptual pieces during his involvement with Fluxus. Cage’s experimentation and the Fluxus movement both played key roles in the development of the so-called “Downtown” music scene in New York during this time as opposed to the more established, academically-oriented “uptown” one. And while the uptown-downtown divide is no longer a geographical reality, the aesthetic divide still informs a great deal of the music of composers of this generation.

Arguably the most important new style that emerged and has continued to flourish from composers of this generation is minimalism. La Monte Young and the three other composers primarily associated with the minimalist movement in music–Terry Riley (b. 1935) a classmate of Young’s at UC Berkeley, and two Juilliard trained composers: Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Philip Glass (b. 1937)–were all born within a couple of years of one another. All four were strongly influenced by non-western music: Young, Riley and Glass by the music of India and Reich by African drumming and Hebrew chant. And while the austerity of each of their early styles has blossomed into musical languages that are far more malleable, each composer retains an instantly identifiable signature sound.

Of course, a great many composers of this generation neither adopted minimalism nor followed the avant-garde paths of serialism and indeterminacy, but either remained adherents of or defiantly returned to the American tonal tradition of composers like Samuel Barber and Howard Hanson. Dominick Argento (b. 1927), Ned Rorem (b. 1923) and Lee Hoiby (b. 1926), all of whom are primarily known for their operas and songs, have consistently created music throughout long careers in a neo-romantic, conservative style. Although David Del Tredici (b. 1937) began his career writing atonal music, his style also switched to neo-romanticism after he began an 18-year series of pieces based on Lewis Carroll‘s Alice books, beginning with Pop-pourri (1968).

Others, whose style has been labeled “post-modernist,” including six prominent composers born within a year of each other–William Bolcom (b. 1938), Barbara Kolb (b. 1939), John Harbison (b. 1938), John Corigliano (b. 1938), Joan Tower (b. 1938) and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939)–write music which reference a wide variety of style
s incorporating such diverse idioms as romantic orchestral music, dissonant modernism and jazz, into an predominantly tonal idiom. One of the most difficult to categorize composers, George Crumb (b. 1929), whose music is equally related to neo-romanticism and post-modernism as well as to the legacy of John Cage and experimental music, has throughout his career pursued a unique musical vocabulary with incorporates unconventional musical notation, unusual instrumentation–for classical music, at least–such as the banjo or the toy piano, or unorthodox methods of playing.

Finally, many of these composers, have pursued lifetime careers in electronic music, a field of music that was essentially born as many composers of this generation reached adulthood. Morton Subotnick (b. 1933), who in 1967 created the first piece of electronic music commissioned for commercial recording, Silver Apples of the Moon, on the Buchla synthesizer, has built his entire compositional career on exploring the possibilities of electronically-generated sounds. Experimentation with electronically generated or manipulated sound has also been the major lifetime focus of Gordon Mumma (b. 1935) and Alvin Lucier (b. 1931). Most compositions by Jean Eichelberger Ivey (b. 1923), founder of Peabody Conservatory‘s Electronic Music Studio and one of the first women active in this field, are scored for one or more instruments with tape. The works of several other women who use tape as a primary medium reflect an interest in the concept of music as a meditative or healing medium, such as New Zealand-born Annea Lockwood (b. 1939), whose sound sources are often drawn from nature, her life partner, Ruth Anderson (b. 1928), and Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932). Robert Ashley (b. 1930), who has been at the forefront of electronic music for the past half century, has over the past two decades, refined his electronic sonic vocabulary to create a unique new form of opera in which he performs with a regular ensemble.

Social awareness has played a key role in the works of a great many of these composers, stretching across all of their stylistic differences. Ashley’s recent opera Dust takes on the issue of homelessness in America, while Joan Tower’s series of Fanfares for the Common Woman celebrates womanhood. African-American Valerie Capers (b. 1935) based her dramatic work Sojourner (1981), which she described as an “operatorio,” on the life of ex-slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Reich drew on both his childhood memories of bicoastal train trips between his divorced parents’ homes during World War II and the trains that transported Jews to death camps for his Different Trains (1986). And gay composer Corigliano was one of the first composers in this age group to write a work dealing with the AIDS epidemic, his Symphony No.1 (1990).

Perhaps the real secret to a long life is not vitamins or exercise, but composing. After all, there are at least a dozen composers over 80 in the U.S. at present who continue to be active while many of their contemporaries in other fields have long since retired. (Leo Ornstein [b. 1892], the eldest of these “elder statesmen,” stopped composing in his 80s, but continues to thrive in other ways at the ripe old age of 108.)

All these composers except Ornstein came of age during the late 1920s and early 1930s, when a number of significant groups and publications devoted to new music, such as the International League of Composers and Henry Cowell‘s journal New Music, were appearing. Radio and recordings were making all types of music more accessible to the public for the first time. And during the 1930s a number of significant European composers including Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Krenek and Bartók settled in the U.S.

One thing all these men have in common is that each has mapped out an individual path and established a distinct style of his own. (Sadly, Vivian Fine, the only composer qualified to be an elder stateswoman, died in a car accident last March at the age of 86.) Sometimes these paths have resulted in a respected career in academia, and sometimes a style that adheres strictly to an established tradition. Other times it’s resulted in a maverick.

Leon Kirchner (b. 1919) is one composer that fits the first category. Although his style has never adhered to one particular musical fashion, he has always placed great importance on basing a piece on a sound musical idea and adhering to equally sound principles of structural development. David Diamond (b. 1915), who taught at Juilliard for over 25 years, also stressed the importance of a solid theoretical background, both in his and his students’ music. Ironically, although Elliott Carter (b. 1908) also enjoyed a long career at Juilliard and has won two Pulitzer Prizes to date, his teachers during his undergraduate years at Harvard were less than enthusiastic about his radical, uncompromising music–possibly influenced by his friendship with Charles Ives, who he met at age 16–eventually sending him to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. The trip resulted in a brief fling with neoclassicism, but soon Carter returned to his old style, characterized by metric modulation, pitch organization, partitioning of various musical aspects and the concept of mathematical vs. psychological time, feeling that it provided a more appropriate way to depict the atmosphere of post-World War II America.

A number of these elder statesmen are primarily associated with the use and development of serialism. The 3 Compositions for Piano (1947) of Milton Babbitt (b. 1916) was one of the earliest examples of total serialism with regard to pitches, durations and dynamics, and the work which immediately followed it, Composition for 12 Instruments, serialized timbre as well. Despite the fact that he has also written electronic music and influences from other music, such as jazz, are evident in pieces like All Set, Babbitt continues to espouse the importance of serialism. George Perle (b. 1915) also continues to write in the 12-tone style, although he describes his music as “twelve-tone tonality” rather than serialism per se.

George Rochberg (b. 1918), on the other hand, switched from strict serialism to a neo-romantic style after his son’s death in the 1960s, a move which generated a great deal of hostility from some of his colleagues and was welcomed by others. In fact, although Rochberg himself discounts it, he is often considered the founder of the post-modernist movement. However, although he may be modest about his influence on younger composers, he is far from hesitant about criticizing them. For instance, in his 1972 essay “Reflections on the Renewal of Music,” he put down what he described as “the gross, generalized, nonspecific principles of today’s avant-gardists,” adding “There can be no justification for music, ultimately, if it does not convey eloquently and elegantly the passions of the human heart.”

In contrast to these, Henry Brant (b. 1913), while he did teach briefly at such August institutions as Columbia and Juilliard, has been a radical since he began writing music for pots and pans as a child. Most of his music is scored for huge, unusual ensembles–one example is Orbits, for 80 trombones and organ–in equally huge and unusual spatial arrangements. At age 80, he went even further afield and invented a Tenor Cello and Mezzo-Violin, for which he has written several ensemble pieces. The highly eclectic style of Portland-born Lou Harrison (b. 1917), who early on abandoned the New York scene for California and was especially influenced by a 1962 trip to the Far East on a Rockefeller grant, has included everything from music for gamelan to a symphony featuring vocals by pop singer Al Jarreau and texts in the universal language Esperanto. Harrison is also highly unusual for this generation regarding his personal life; not only did he come out openly as a gay man but, starting in the 1970s, began to publicly support the gay rights movement.

Even more interesting is the case of Gian-Carlo Menotti (b. 1911), who has been criticized in some circles for music that is too accessible and tonal. His output, which consists almost entirely of operas–for which he writes the librettos, another factor that has earned him criticism–was disparaged in conservatory circles for years. Recently, however, although his production of new works has slowed down considerably, a number of his earlier operas have been revived successfully and have been taken more seriously. The Consul, for example, in which a woman in a nameless Communist-like country repeatedly tries and fails to get her husband released from prison, seems far more relevant to recent political events than it may have been when it premiered in 1950. And it’s a rare city where at least one performance of his 1951 Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, isn’t held every year.

Iris Brooks Photo by Kevin Misevis, courtesy Iris Brooks

As both a musician and writer I have been drawn to Asia like a magnet for many years. It is not merely the exotic sounds of the hypnotic instruments that lure me in, but a more all-pervasive aesthetic, incorporating space and grace in the sounds and intent as well as in movement, calligraphy, flower arrangements, tea ceremonies, and landscape scrolls. I am one of many Americans who has been sucked into an East-West vortex where the music (both traditional and new) of many Asian countries, acts as sustenance as well as a resource for creating something new.

Composer/performer Skip La Plante, who is also the co-founder of Music for Homemade Instruments says: “For some of us, Asian music is about as fundamental to our lives as arithmetic. As a composer I function much as a librarian. I have a large collection of instruments and knowledge of a variety of musical traditions—specifically how these traditions organize sonic events. I can take whatever I feel like off the shelf and apply it to whatever the situation is.” And yet La Plante is rarely playing traditional music verbatim; he is more interested in creating his own pieces and instruments. While he has studied Indonesian gong-making technique, he prefers suspended refrigerator vegetable bins, which sound surprisingly gong-like.

Similarly, composer Barbara Benary—who is the artistic director of the Gamelan Son of Lion ensemble, playing new American pieces on her own homemade Indonesian gamelan instruments—speaks of becoming “bimusical” (or “multimusical”) a term she borrows from ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood. This is evidenced as she casually picks up a Chinese bowed erhu to blend in a new American work for Indonesian gamelan (percussion orchestra). Composer R.I.P. Hayman who has traveled to most Asian countries and amassed an impressive collection of recordings and instruments adds that he is still digesting musical material which “arises in surprise” in his work.

In interviewing a sampling of two dozen American musicians heavily influenced by Asian musics, similarities began to emerge. I was interested in their motivation, not just what musicians are doing, but why. Regardless of the musical traditions they have pursued, most mentioned the early recordings and concerts of classical Indian music by Ravi Shankar and/or Ali Akbar Khan as their first window into Asian music. Jai Uttal was so mesmerized by an Ali Akbar Khan concert that he immediately dropped out of college to study with the master. Several musicians mentioned the impact of Asian films, such as Pather Panchali, by Indian director Satyajit Ray (with whom Ravi Shankar often collaborated) or the work of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and one spoke of an abundance of National Geographic magazines as an early inspiration.

Not all Americans intrigued by Asia want to play traditional music(s) or use traditional techniques. Raphael Mostel does not believe music is a universal language. “Traditional musics are many languages and many dialects. What led me to create the Tibetan Singing Bowl Ensemble: New Music for Old Instruments, was the desire to compose a new kind of music, taking basic elements which all people have in common so that the music would be equally understood (or misunderstood) everywhere in the world. Truly universal.”

References to an older generation of American composers with one foot in Asia include Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. Their influence was particularly felt regarding stylistic as well as philosophical ideas with new attitudes about space and time. Percussionist Glen Velez-for whom Cage wrote a 1989 composition for tambourine – recalls a visit at Cage’s house. “He told me if you look at the sky, it is a blank canvas and he asked, looking at the pinpoints of the stars, ‘why are they there?'” But the minimalist connection was also cited with LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Phil Corner, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Richard Teitelbaum—who has written music mixing Tibetan Buddhist chant with breath, brainwaves and synthesizer and another piece for Japanese Noh flute, saxophones and sampler – teaches a course at Bard College about the relationship of these composers to the Asian musics that influenced them. While George Harrison may be Ravi Shankar’s most famous student, other rockers also listened to and studied Indian music including Jimi Hendrix, Mickey Hart, and the Grateful Dead. In the jazz world John Coltrane, Don Ellis, Yusef Lateef, Miles Davis, and Charles Lloyd are important regarding a modal presentation and improvisation, a deconstruction of Indian music, and the role of meditation.

For some, the role of spirituality is expressed through music á la Asia. This may be manifest by adherence to a strict tradition—kirtan, devotional Hindu singing from North India and Japanese Buddhist shakuhachi flute repertoire in the Meian style, thought to represent the simplest form of blowing shakuhachi as a spiritual practice. American Krishna Das speaks of music as a doorway and sings as a devotional practice. “Chanting is a part of every spiritual path. It’s about adoration of the beloved; it’s all about love,” he explains. Others create an original hybrid form as Jai Uttal has done with his Pagan Love Orchestra, mixing a Western pop sensibility and colorful orchestration with devotional songs.

Some Americans master an Asian instrument such as Steve Gorn playing the Indian bansuri flute. Although he plays with Indian musicians where he is accepted on the concert stage in India, he also takes the instrument into new settings. He plays bansuri in a pop context with Paul Simon, in jazz with Jack DeJohnette, in world music with Simon Shaheen, and in new American music with Glen Velez. “My personal feeling is I am a Westerner and bring that background to my work. I want the Indian stuff to flourish in other contexts,” says Gorn.

Composer Lois V Vierk was drawn into the world of the Japanese court gagaku (literally elegant music) through an initial study of Japanese dance. The way the body moves and breathes was the initial pull for her, followed by the combination of strength and elegance in the music. “The hichiriki is so powerful – it’s the loudest instrument in the world per cubic centimeter,” volunteers Vierk, who was commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival to write “Silversword” (1996), for gagaku orchestra. She is most interested and influenced by the slow unfolding of Japanese court music. “The nuances are not just decorative; they have meaning and that taught me a lot about phrasing,” she adds.

American instrumentalists also look to incorporate techniques from Asia. American players of gamelan music such as composer/clarinetist Daniel Goode incorporate repetitive elements, circular breathing, and drones into their own work. Vocalist Lisa Karrer says: “While rehearsing for The Pink, composer Tan Dun taught me the rudiments of Peking Opera style. As a result I sometimes employ those attack, sustain, and decay methods in my own vocal compositions. Likewise in my work with Javanese composer Tony Prabowa, my singing has been informed by his filigree-like vocal lines, which emerge from the traditional Javanese style.” For Karrer the impact is larger than technique. “By learning and playing this music my sense of psychological and physical time has changed and shifted.”

For percussionist Glen Velez performance practice is also about more than learning specific techniques. With Azerbajani music he heard what was appropriate with density and space—how
much to play and when not to play in an ensemble situation. “It let me see what was successful in a traditional setting and taught me about the sound values of a culture.” Composer/performer David Simons incorporates a variety of traditional techniques such as a Balinese kotekan (interlocking melodies) and gong cycles along with North Indian concepts of tala (rhythmic cycles) and tihai (rhythmic ostinati repeated three times to end on the first beat of the cycle) in his compositions. “For at least 25 years I’ve considered the combining of music cultures (East-East, East-West, and other unholy marriages) to be a frontier worth exploring, with endless possibilities. Just one example: using Indian santur technique with chopsticks on a Chinese zither tuned to an Indonesian scale playing rhythms of the Ewe tribe from Ghana West Africa.” Simons also notes that nothing takes place in a vacuum, pointing out that Asians have been migrating to the New World for centuries and culturally intermingling.

Sub-genres of pop music are a fertile place for influences going East to West and West to East such as Bangra/hip-hop Tuvan/blues and Qawwali crossover. Nowadays Americans don’t have to study Asian instruments in order to have their sounds available. Modern-day samplers and synthesizers contain patches with sounds of biwa, koto, sitar and gamelan. And while some Americans have made journeys East to soak in the culture on a visceral level accompanied by years of disciplined practice, others are instantly accessing Asia via the Internet, CD ROM, recordings, films, and MIDI patches.

As a nation of immigrants, Americans celebrate multi-culturalism. It has become as natural to play a raga on a sitar (or guitar) as a Mozart string quartet. And why not? With an ear towards Asia, musicians and composers are blending new sounds, styles, and structures in an ever-broadening and changing American sound palette. It’s part of the process of keeping American music and culture vital.

Howard Mandel Photo by Melissa Richard

Improvisation and composition are two sides of one coin alloyed in the medium of form. At least it’s how it is in jazz — though maybe a coin is too static an image for anything so dynamic as music or so fluid as the relationship of improvisation and composition. Not to mention there’s typically more music than coin to go around.

The correspondence of composition and improvisation though are arguably the same way in every performing art form. It’s hard to conceive any creative construction that doesn’t involve some degree of improvisation once substance has been chosen and intent begins to manifest. To start you scratch around, try one idea, tinker with it, put it off, dream up another, scrap the second, try a third, pick one thing out you’d tried before to mix or match with the first part, come up finally with something unexpected: a poem with a twist, a dance to challenge the body, a puzzle with a key, music that retains an ability to fascinate. That’s composition. Then in the performing arts the thing is to make it come alive in the moment. Which likely means adjusting, adapting, changing what you started with — expanding on it, cutting it short, recasting what you had, understanding and trying to put across even more than that, enlivening if not remaking in the process everything surrounding what you do — resulting in a composition transformed through individual and/or individuals’ efforts.

Composition was partner to improvisation at the beginning of jazz if we can believe Jazzmen published in 1939. Buddy Bolden’s band and other New Orleans ensembles are reported to have played ragtime compositions — pieces that were published and distributed broadly as sheet music — though in performance they “jazzed ’em up” meaning the rhythms were loosened and the themes liberated from any necessity of strict adherence. Bolden’s posse was also reported to have expanded at length on slow blues. True the ability to read music wasn’t universal among jazz musicians at the turn of the last century though some leading players were indeed legitimately trained. Early jazz bands like many jazz, pop, rock and traditional bands today worked by ear rather by eye. But musical literacy seems beside the point; being unable to read a score doesn’t mean that a musician cannot craft, remember and perform his or her part of a composition communicated orally. Consequently non-readers can’t always be assumed to be “improvising.” They may be playing what’s been composed prior to performance committed to memory and repeated with such verve as to make it breathe like new.

Jazz from its New Orleans’ conception through its world-wide dissemination — by virtue of its distinct character co-mingling sources like ragtime minstrelsy, spirituals, marching bands, vaudeville, opera and concert music, Caribbean and Creole culture, all in the context of fast-changing social circumstances — surely has raised improvisation to a high art but not really at composition’s expense however the spotlight has fallen. Jazz has justly celebrated the great spontaneously inspired soloists: Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and many others. But it’s also hailed the writers of striking themes and dazzling passages, the arrangers of small and large instrumental forces into previously unimagined sounds, those orchestrators and producers whose art is in the creation of context. Jelly Roll Morton, George Gershwin, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, George Russell, Charles Mingus, and so on to Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and the later electric Miles demand attention as composers — again with stress that, in practice, jazz composition and improvisation are seldom mutually exclusive.

We need the word “composition” to refer to the ordering of things the placing of disparate parts together whether those “things” are specific notes to be sounded as they’re represented on a grid or opportunities that are carefully set up for the launch of such superb spontaneous creators as Lester Young. And we need “improvisation” to mean more than “Ready set blow!”

There’s no good or bad about one or the other and perhaps the two forms of musical generation are in their purest forms just opposite ends of a time-related continuum. Improvisation is more-or-less spontaneous creation while composition is assumed to be accomplished any time prior to performance: thought through, crafted, reflected upon and revised, the result brought to musicians and listeners at a decent remove from the circumstances of its birth.

In jazz there are many secret exceptions to this rule: Louis Armstrong had already worked out several of the motifs that jell in the brilliant opening cadenza of “West End Blues” for instance, and what are we to make of Charles Mingus grabbing scores from his copyists and thrusting them upon the musicians enlisted to play his Town Hall concert of October 1962? Does Pop’s classic represent the spur-of-the-moment flash of light that signals “genius at work!” or a pre-planned nailing of ideas sweated over and practiced? Does the recording of Mingus’s over-ambitious effort capture a big band in disarray or improvising?

If jazz is a players’ music and so has characteristically been more improvised than the music we sloppily call classical might that change as today’s conservatory-trained instrumentalists and highly schooled composers raised in a pop/rock/jazz/rap milieu are asked to grab the moment, expand on their instructions, stretch interpretation all the way into making something new?

The real question isn’t if music is improvised or composed, etched with a quill pen or Pentium processor, written for or recorded by someone playing viola da gamba or alto sax. Players and listeners judge if music’s inspired or complacent, innovative or conventional, iconoclastic or conservative. Turn it over: is what you hear committed or indifferent? Communicative or irrelevant? What we want is a coin that rings true, that we can use — a sound we want to hear again.

“In jazz the dividing line between composer and performer is a fine one subject to considerable overlapping in the sense that all jazz players can be considered composers since they are in effect composing extempore.”

– Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz

Louis Armstrong has long been hailed as the George Washington of jazz, the first giant to emerge from the coterie of jazz’s founders to give focus to the new world of improvisation and swing. This image of Armstrong, a.k.a. Satchmo and Pops, has been polished anew by Ken Burns‘ video-documentary Jazz, which kicks off its second episode and ends, as a benediction with the trumpeter-vocalist’s indelible performances of “Tiger Rag” and “Dinah” — numbers he calls “good ol’ good ones” in dazzling appearance in an early talky, circa 1930. Standing before the game but over
shadowed Mills Blue Rhythm Band, Armstrong sings two brilliant choruses, finishing with a completely self-assured scat phrase, elaborating on the simple, catchy melody with rhythmically-charged syllables that seem to beam from his bright eyes, knowing smile, and glowing being without mindful mediation. Then he plays a scorching out-chorus on his horn. The performance is so brimming with immediacy that audiences are easily persuaded it just happened.

The Roaring ’20s, the Jazz Age, was evidently an era in revolt against civilization’s old order, overwhelmed with its own spontaneous high spirits and in denial that an organized criminal enterprise was supplying the life of the party. It’s little wonder that a figure of fun representing the new style was elevated to a godlike level. But that’s not to deny Armstrong’s real powers.

He was said to be the loudest trumpeter of the time, required to play from the recording studio’s hall so as to let those musicians grouped around the microphone to be heard in the mono balance. His great chops, resulting from many hours since childhood of practice, enabled him to play higher and longer than other trumpeters of the time — indeed Pops made it his habit to conclude every song by reaching for an almost unattainable note and some of his most memorable solos climax with artfully paced repetitions of one blasted upper register tone.

Also, Armstrong absolutely did re-invent upon the melodies of many of the popular songs he embraced in the ’30s particularly using subtle pitch substitutions unprecedented accents and rhythmic displacements, startling hip details that refreshed stale conventions. He also kidded the simple tunes then expanded on them, identifying their most distinctive elements and reshaping them to new conclusions prompted by his own lyrical imagination.

It’s tempting to attribute his abilities to sheer force of personality as the young Armstrong was irresistibly charming and his musicality was evident in his speech, his lifestyle and his fashion sense. He was a denizen of the street, not a scholar or businessman; his message was enjoy the moment because the blues may be just around the corner. That he’d known hard times was evident in the moan and cry in his voice and his horn; that he’d triumphed over them, and could teach listeners to do the same, was clear from the adaptations, inventions and revelations he delivered that seemed to spring from him alone though they might be echoed or emulated in the music others made in his wake.

The actual process of his creativity being undocumented, it’s hard to say exactly how he turned other peoples’ tunes into his own, raising the matter of interpretation to auteur-ship, but it’s clear he did it again and again, even late in his career remaking Porgy and Bess with Ella Fitzgerald, assuming ownership of Cole Porter songs, in company with Oscar Peterson‘s trio, as well as themes from Walt Disney movies. On all these recordings, Pops’ gravelly vocal timbre stamps the song as his immediately as does the recognizable bite, heft and phrasing of his trumpet. Although many jazz experts insist Armstrong’s creative innovations were finished by the ’40s, that his repertoire, arrangements and style remained the same over the last three decades of his life, we continue to believe in Armstrong as a beacon of improvisation and spontaneity by virtue of the icons he broke in the ’20s and his desire to please the listeners before him always in the here and now.

Long before Armstrong’s routines became fixed, he modeled for jazz soloists ways they could distinguish their own improvisations. Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, even Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor — all the great improvisers — learned Pops’ lessons.

A) Be virtuosic; do all you can with your instrument.

B) Develop your own sound based on your tastes and apply it whatever you play.

C) Know what’s going on and use it for your own purposes.

With those skills presupposed, the challenge of what to play is conquerable by the musician who tries. Armed with self-knowledge and technical mastery, an individual can address improvisation on songs, chord progressions, modes, attitudes or specifics of time and place. Assuming one is never “free” of one’s own character the musician who’s open to immediate experience can yet be liberated by what they already know to arrive where they’ve never been before.

Take Charlie Parker as one archtypal example, an improviser who etched most remarkable spontaneous composition with his almost every musical breath. Mythologized as an achingly brilliant, life-long impoverished and culturally oppressed romantic hero — with an overlay of black American urban junkie genius stereotype — Parker’s flights of expression are much more ambitious, far-reaching and sustained than those of the mere Yardbird for which he’d been nicknamed as a hungry teen in Kansas City. When we listen, we are over and over lifted on Bird’s wings through his unanticipated course — dazzling trajectories of pure melody, seldom more than two choruses long, spilling at a flight-like speed out of the swing era’s rhythms and harmonies into the more intricate and intoxicating ether of bebop.

Parker was a virtuosic instrumentalist by any account, easily comparable to Paganini, in mastery of his medium. His attainment of his remarkable breath and finger coordination is legendary. Story has it that after being humiliatingly “gonged” for the amateurism of his alto playing by ramrod drummer Jo Jones of the Basie band during an audition jam, Parker retreated to an available mountain cabin, where he spent weeks obsessively running scales and intervals on his horn, compounding his own understanding of chords’ implications and conne
ctions, and perfecting his physical technique. It was about this time, too, that he committed himself to heroin dependency.

Parker was not just a heroin addict — he was a devout poly-hedonist, enjoying wine and women as well as smack and song. If we accuse (or simply depict) this self-realized musician of indulging certain compulsions, though, well, that backs us into a corner. Just what is it that drives an artist’s unprecedented accomplishment? Same demons that drive one to less flattering brinks? Bird indulged depths of personal behavior that were ultimately self-destructive, but he was not reputedly evil. We hear the world of an overwhelmingly gifted soul in his saxophone — including easily assumed strength, streaming lyricism, leaps of faith. Critical wit is another element of Bird’s story-telling, evident especially in the one existing film clip of him playing live, with Dizzy Gillespie and a rhythm trio after accepting Down Beat magazine awards on Broadway columnist Earl Wilson’s early ’50s television show.

Wilson is not the most elegant host of this rare event, bebop broadcast live — but jazz critic Leonard Feather convinces him to present the Down Beat plaques honoring Bird and Diz as players of the year. Wilson is mildly, thoughtlessly offensive, bungling the sense of the honors and referring to the musicians as “you boys” — at which Parker blinks. Asked if he has anything to say, Bird answers, “Well, Earl, they say music speaks louder than words.”

He and Gillespie, with pianist Dick Hyman (who’s face is not shown, only his hands) and an obscure bassist and left-handed drummer then kick off “Hot House,” a bebop anthem credited to Tadd Dameron, related to chord changes Cole Porter used on “What Is This Thing Called Love?” Effortlessly commanding the screen, the saxist and trumpeter bite directly into the finger-busting variation of the three-phrase from which their improvisations will follow. Bird’s eyes are intense, and his hand jumps briefly from the sax’s keys to tweak the octave ring on his horn’s neck — it seems to have stuck.

Nevertheless, he takes the first improvised break — firmly setting four quarter notes right on top of the rhythm, inarguably announcing his name: “CHAR-LIE-PAR-KER!” There’s a grace note pause, then Bird unfurls one of those breath-taking, faster-than-light-or-sound trajectories of melodic rapture and grace-of-God rhythmic articulation that characterize this man’s music. I sometimes ask students to count the number of notes in this second phrase of his chorus, and no one can. After that marvel’s untraceable ups-downs-in-outs, Parker lays forth another, more relaxed distillation of the motif at hand, playing with it happily through the song’s second eight-measure section, resolving its particular puzzle before a final comment: an improbably faster repeat of the unrepeatably fast and complicated phrase he’d earlier blown, and a braying haw-he-haw (earl-wil-son) Bronx cheer, which dribbles off as Gillespie launches from Bird’s conclusion.

Very few artists in any discipline have proved able to throw together such riotiously rich, whether acidic or lush always beautiful statements as Charlie Parker could in an eyeblink, with spontaneous impulses triggering subtle, practiced movements of his fingers, mouth and lungs at the whim of his devastingly quick mind. Yet his efforts, and those of his acolytes, will likely inspire generations to come of musicians, dancers, visual artists — anyone wringing raw materials for the enduring truth of their moment, maybe even writer — to try.

From:
More Than a Coin Toss: Facing the Flip Sides – Improvisation/Composition – of Jazz
By Howard Mandel
© 2001 NewMusicBox

There’s a tendency to ignore “composition” as much of a jazz matter after solemnly acknowledging the career of Duke Ellington who has been widely hailed, especially during the centenary of his birth in 1999, as “the greatest American composer.” Problematic though that title is, Ellington’s musical accomplishments are many, and outlive the 20th Century. His dozens of memorable songs — “C-Jam Blues,” “Mood Indigo,” “Satin Doll” just to name three off the top — remain essentials of American culture. His suites, starting with Black, Brown and Beige in 1942, are among the most serious accomplishments in the quest that Paul Whiteman announced in 1924 to lift jazz from its funkier surroundings to the concert stage and hence “make jazz a lady.”

Ellington himself would never have been so dismissive of his music’s context. His big break was in the Cotton Club, a gangster-run Harlem nightspot patronized by slumming white swells. Ellington was also a practical improvisatory bandleader who from 1928 until his death in 1972 maintained a touring ensemble of notable soloists. He and his co-composer Billy Strayhorn often created compositions from the warm-up exercises, personal vocabulary or fragmentary ideas of his band’s members. Hence “Come Sunday,” “Cotton Tail,” “Caravan,” and “Portrait of Cootie.” Like a tailor, Ellington could take materials his men brought him — Bubber Miley‘s way with a cup mute for instance — and compose a classic like “Creole Love Call” that allowed the player to show off a solo routine by playing to strengths and avoiding weaknesses. Ellington also wrote out some pieces for his Orchestra or small groups drawn from it completely — for instance Reminiscin’ in Tempo or his charts for the ballet The River or his Per Gynt Suite. But what we most cherish are Duke’s songs as if made to order for his men and occasional women to strut their stuff. The personal sounds and characteristic improvisations of Johnny Hodges, Juan Tizol, Ben Webster, Jimmy Blanton, Cat Anderson, Paul Gonsalves, Joya Sherrill, Adelaide Hall, and many others gleamed in the context of Duke’s settings.

Ken Burns in his recent PBS video-documentary series Jazz succumbs to the aforementioned temptation: after singli
ng out Ellington as the greatest, he cites few other jazzmen composers. In this his attitude lags behind that of his senior consultant Wynton Marsalis, who was himself awarded a Pulitzer Prize in composition, copped for his 1995 oratorio Blood On The Fields.

Granted Burns was challenged by the necessity of selection in his 10 part, 19-hour series, and the notion of a dramatic long jazz instrumentalist ready at the drop of a downbeat to create a perfectly balanced complex statement is catnip to filmmakers compared to the sedate shot of a composer laboring over blank score paper at a desk. But to fail to cite the compositional efforts even of such an evident minimalist as Count Basie, obvious maximalist as Sun Ra, or collectively composing-and-improvising troupe such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago is to lapse into cliché regarding what composition is all about.

And even Ellington is foreshadowed by Ferdinand Joseph “Jelly Roll Morton” Lemott (accurately acknowleged). With considerably more finesse, complexity and accomplishment than Armstrong, Bechet, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or whoever, Morton enacted highly specific dramas for particular instrumentation with his Red Hot Peppers, a septet or octet of musicians familiar with the New Orleans idiom and Jelly Roll’s ways in particular.

Morton first convened the Peppers to cut studio recordings in 1926 and three quarters of a century later, the results remain a shining bright entanglement of composition and improvisation.

The core instrumentation of Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers was piano, a brass cohort, two or three reeds, banjo or guitar, and percussion. Morton depended on his own and his players’ improvisations to flesh out his piano introductions and interludes, cornet breaks and reed obbligatos, but these spontaneous inventions were set amid multiple themes, rhythmic stop times, specific timbral effects and individually contrived parts deployed within the compositional format that was his New Orleans hallmark — fearless polyphony.

Among the Red Hot Peppers’ masterpieces are “Black Bottom Stomp,” “Milenburg Joys” and “The Pearls.” Another, “King Porter Stomp,” was re-arranged for

12-piece jazz band by Fletcher Henderson in the early ’30s, recorded and performed widely as a mid Swing Era hit by clarinetist Benny Goodman with his big band, and reconfigured in 1987 by Gil Evans for a jazz orchestra featuring electric bass, piano and guitars, conga drums, synthesizers and an alto sax solo by David Sanborn. (An orchestrator in the ’40s for Bob Hope‘s radio show, later for Claude Thornhill‘s classical-jazz orchestra, the host of the informal “birth of the cool” composers’ colloquoy and Miles Davis‘s closest collaborator, Gil Evans was never put off by polyphony.)

Morton was not an utter iconoclast; he embraced many of his era’s compositional conventions as far more than empty or sketchy shells rather givens to be tampered with — just as did his most successful homeboy-predecessor New Orleans-born European-educated Creole composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Gottschalk’s career may be thought of as derived from the examples of European composer-piano virtuosi as Chopin and Liszt; Morton was well aware of European composers especially those of the operas performed in New Orleans as well as ragtime composers such as Scott Joplin whose scores were published for parlor pianists starting in 1895.

As a composer of the highest order, Morton bent whatever he borrowed to his own vision and purposes as did Duke Ellington. Jelly Roll Morton’s composed polyphony, which seemed radical if not anarchic to many listeners in the ’20s, led to prop up the myth of New Orleans’ jazz as anchored in “collective improvisation.” Don’t be deceived. Even works as rhetorically “improvised” as Ornette Coleman‘s epochal Free Jazz or John Coltrane‘s Ascension follow compositional plans, sketchy though they may be and however much they gave their improvising participants lattitude to develop their own statements. The same method is employed by improvising saxophonist/ composer John Zorn in his game pieces such as Cobra.

Burns’ Jazz also neglects to consider one of the most successful American composers of the Jazz Age perhaps because of his theatrical context. But New York City-born George Gershwin was certainly a jazz baby — renowned for his piano improvisations at house parties who also composed immortal songs. Gershwin’s music has frequently been interpreted by jazz musicians and is favorite repertory of jazz vocalists. Gershwin’s ambitions as a composer went beyond songs of course — however much Paul Whiteman’s arranger Ferde Grofé contributed to the orchestration of Rhapsody in Blue. The chord progression of “I’ve Got Rhythm” has proved infinitely inspiring of artful improvisatory variation and was the basis for roughly half the songs “composed” by bebop saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” Parker. Gershwin incidentally anticipated Ellington’s compositional technique of writing out of the strengths of certain of his players. According to The Gershwin Years, “Ross Gorman Whiteman’s clarinetist was famous for being able to play a glissando upon an instrument supposedly capable of producing only individual tones. George decided that this tricky effect would be a good way to open the Rhapsody; the desired jazzy whoop immediately sets the mood of the piece.”

All this said, it’s worthwhile to understand how Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and George Russell–to name three “jazz composers”– fulfilled that role in their own rights. Mingus was an avowed Ellingtonian taking many of jazz-related generic or folk forms as raw material from which to sculpt personal monuments, often on the bulwarks of his players’ abilities. However rangy his writing, the finest realizations of Mingus’ music depends on the personal contributions of winds and reeds improvisers Eric Dolphy, Roland Kirk and John Handy, the inspirations of trumpeter Ted Curson, encyclopedic pianists Jaki Byard and Don Pullen, and the propulsion of his hand-in-glove drum partner Dannie Richmond. Monk on the other hand never departed from America’s most standard song form — head, solo, solo, head — but the unique idiosyncracy of his melodies variously based on large odd intervals or ingenious simplifications earns him a proud enduring place among 20th century composers. George Russell is an extraordinary composer by virtue of his discovery, exploration, comprehension and application of a set of previously undeveloped modal principles. Several of Russell’s better known works including “Cubana-Be/Cubana Bop” and “All About Rosie” are demonstrations of those principles played out on appropriated themes.

An adequate working definition for the activity of “composition” would nicely cover John Cage‘s innovations, Yoko Ono‘s conceptualizations, Anthony Braxton‘s composition-generating systems and even the improvised conductions or “comprovisations” being advanced by Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris. Cecil Taylor‘s superstructures on such inadequately analyzed albums as Unit Structures and Conquistador, Don Cherry‘s suites Complete Communion and Symphony For Improvisers, Ornette Coleman’s realizations of harmolodic principles through his electrically-amplified ensemble Prime Time, all deserve a glance at least as works weaving improvisation around and through stable compositional elements, an activity that is essential in “improvisation,” too.

From:
More Than a Coin Toss: Facing the Flip Sides – Improvisation/Composition – of Jazz
By Howard Mandel
© 2001 NewMusicBox

Frederick Kaimann Photo by Melissa Richard

Entering history on the ground floor is an exciting thing, but over time new floors get added beneath as you’re jacked high above the street where you entered. Eventually the hot dog vendors and beggars forget what you look like even if you’re, say, ridiculously fat.

So it goes with new music, an enterprise that is ever consuming, cannibalizing and discarding its past. Even most string quartet listeners don’t know Ignaz Schuppanzigh, the obese violinist. They’re still trying to figure out who’s playing cello for the Kronos Quartet. Which is only right, one supposes, since Schuppanzigh’s true legacy is the music he premiered – which you’ve heard – and not his playing – which you haven’t. But back somewhere deep in their conscious or unconscious memories, most string quartet players of new music have a place in their hearts for Ignaz Schuppanzigh because they’re living with his music. More than 200 years ago it was Schuppanzigh and his quartet that premiered almost all of the string quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven. Quite a legacy indeed!

Schuppanzigh neatly fits into one of the two categories of new music performers, according to Norman Fischer, the cellist with the Concord String Quartet, a resident ensemble at Dartmouth for decades but long since disbanded. Fischer says musicians play new music because either 1) grudgingly, they think they ought to, or 2) because they have no choice, it’s just part of who they are. For those latter, there’s no way around it. Their minds are reaching out for the new, never satisfied with what they’ve got. In that way, they embrace Schuppanzigh and what he did, but like Bill Clinton working a crowd, they constantly move on, shaking more hands, exchanging more greetings. (And like Clinton and most every other politician these days, the musicians constantly return to their big donors – Beethoven, Bartók, Haydn and Mozart – who always provide them with the sustenance they need to survive.)

Here’s Jessica Thompson, violist of the Chester String Quartet, fitting that mould: “It’s crucial to take part in brining new works into the repertoire, to make chamber music a living, breathing thing. And it’s always exciting to do something new that no one’s heard before. They can’t say, “Oh, when so-and-so played it, it was…” To present something totally fresh to an audience is liberating.”

String quartets can form long-term relationships with composers. The Cassatt String Quartet, for example, has worked with the same composers over two decades, watching and even helping their writing evolve. Others, like the Colorado String Quartet, have long-term relationships with presenters, agreeing to play a new piece on a series every two years or so.

What the composers get back, simply, is the immediacy, intimacy and expressive possibilities of the string quartet. The variability and depth of this canvas have never failed the imagination. Just the same way, painting will never die either.

Contemporary observers are only recently remembering this. Aaron Jay Kernis’s String Quartet No. 2, commissioned by the Lark Quartet, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. It had been twenty-five years since a string quartet had won the prize, Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 3, in 1973.

Some composers don’t get the benefit of recognition in their lifetimes, requiring the advocacy of quartets like the Marian Anderson String Quartet to make their names known.

How does a string quartet know what new music to play? Here’s one answer. When the venerable Guarneri Quartet was forming at the Marlboro Festival in 1964, pianist Rudolf Serkin told them, “Follow the love,” according to first violinist Arnold Steinhardt in his book on the Guarneri, Indivisible By Four. If somebody really loves a piece, it will be stronger than someone who rejects it, Serkin said. Find out what’s behind that passion.

Following Serkin’s advice, the brand new Elements Quartet based in Hoboken, New Jersey, is going through the initial phases of defining what it is they love. Three of the four members love Webern, but not violinist Evan Mirapaul. “It doesn’t do it for me, but I keep trying because greater musical minds than mine think it’s the greatest music to develop,” he says. “But as a visceral response, it’s not music I want to hear.” Then cellist Peter Seidenberg comes back with another of his favorites, John Cage’s first string quartet. So Mirapaul listened to a recording and turned to Seidenberg and said, “Um, when does it start? I’m open to it, but there’s not a think that hits me back.”

It’s not always like that for this eighteen-month-old quartet. They often agree.

Take John Zorn’s Dead Man, a collection of 13 short “specimens” (Zorn’s word) that lasts just under 15 minutes. “I love haiku kind of music, things that are super-condensed, neutron stars of music, and this was that,” says Mirapaul. “Zorn packed a lot of information into a tight space. There’s an incredible tonal range that’s interesting to my ears, that goes from slapstick to very, very serious.”

The Elements has also agreed on music by Peter Schickele, is commissioning David Sampson to write “The Elements” for them and is working with David Del Tredici on a new piece. Mirapaul is an optimist about new music, giving credit to the generation of minimalists who have brought audiences back. “While I’m not particularly a fan of a lot of the minimalists, I think they have done the job of reopening people’s willingness to listen,” he says. “Right now is kind of a cool time for new music because you can program it and have people willing to give it a fair hearing.”

And that’s as true in the shadow of New York skyscrapers as it is on the edge of the middle of nowhere, as the Harrington String Quartet is finding in Amarillo, Texas.

With an audience willing to listen, argues Mirapaul, the players of a string quartet have a heavy burden to shoulder. “Can we be effective advocates for it in the same way we are effective advocates for Beethoven?” he asks. “That is, can we evoke the thoughts and emotions that make audiences want to hear more music? We don’t have the evangelical mission that people needed to have until recently. There were some tough days. But right now, at least as a string quartet, if you play music from Monteverdi to something written yesterday as something worth being heard, audiences will listen to it fairly, and not as “new music” that they have to be defensive about. And I think that’s great.”

Inside Pages:

• Marian Anderson String Quartet
• Cassatt String Quartet
• Colorado String Quartet
• Harrington String Quartet

Bradley Bambarger Photo by Melissa Richard

There is no doubt that American composers have come a long way since Dvorák admonished them to stop mimicking Europe and come up with a distinctly native form of expression. Yet determining just who are the most popularly successful (i.e., the most frequently performed) American composers on their home soil these days is an elusive proposition past a certain point.

Certainly, the usual suspects have been more in evidence than ever over the past few years. The recent centenaries for George Gershwin (1998) and Aaron Copland (2000) boosted their profiles on the concert stage and on the airwaves to an even greater standing, while it doesn’t seem that Samuel Barber needs any sort of anniversary to spur presenters and programmers to put on his evergreens. Yet latter days have seen some other composers making headway.

Although his concert works are performed far more often than some critics would lead us to believe, the dual celebrations for Leonard Bernstein (what would have been his 80th birthday, in 1998, and the 10th anniversary of his death, in 2000) definitely heightened the presence for more of his compositions worldwide, both live and on record. Jazzing things up to a healthy degree, the pieces of Duke Ellington also gained at least some fleeting visibility in the concert hall as symphony orchestras joined in marking the 1999 centenary of this great American composer’s birth.

Beyond the birthday boys past, three current Johns seem to set the pace in the number of performances for their orchestral works — John Adams, John Corigliano, and John Williams (the latter particularly in pops and children’s concerts). In the operatic realm, Carlisle Floyd seems to be riding higher than ever. Bubbling under in various areas are such names as Christopher Rouse, Philip Glass, and that Yankee pioneer Charles Ives. Fully realizing the inexactitude of the process, I’ve collated some research data and anecdotal indications of the most frequently performed American composers in the orchestral and operatic arenas, as well as in chamber/solo recitals, pops/school band/children’s concerts, radio broadcasts, and recordings.

Inside Pages:

• chamber/solo recitals
• operatic arena
• orchestral arena
• pops/school band/children’s concerts
• radio broadcasts
• recordings

Joseph Lanza

Whatever happened to supermarket music? There was a time – not very long ago – when one could stroll through the aisles of an A&P or a Safeway while violins, pianos, guitars, harps and trumpets played soft instrumental versions of old standards and current hits. These ceiling serenades offered the musical equivalent to a parallel world, a temporary reprieve from the ordinary fare that people tend to enjoy at home or in their cars.

Unfortunately, most supermarkets and other venues have replaced the ghostly orchestras with an original artists goulash — usually apportioned at a higher volume, in a haphazard sequence, and with little to no regard for the logic of the landscape. Shopping at an A&P in Hoboken, New Jersey, I was amazed to hear Bobby Vinton‘s unabashedly sentimental “Take Good Care Of My Baby” immediately followed by the gritty hard rock of “Dirty Water” by The Standells. A restaurant like Denny’s, which caters to a very heterogeneous clientele ranging from ages 8 to 80, is now likely to emit oldies by Stevie Wonder and The Eagles, a regimen that threatens to alienate both seniors and youngsters not hep to baby-boomer nostalgia.

This “foreground music” trend could very well be more about economics than changing musical aesthetics. Since the mid-1980s, Muzak™, once the giant of background tunes, has increasingly distanced itself from its elevator music history. The company once hired full orchestras to reinterpret favorite songs, but with mounting musicians’ union levies, the process has proven too expensive. As a result, Muzak and other background music providers have opted for private record label agreements, enticing clients with foreground choices that supposedly reinforce a chosen business image and consequently have a more aggressive environmental impact.

This a la carte approach, which Muzak publicists like to refer to as “audio architecture,” may not be quite what Erik Satie had in mind when he set the groundwork for Muzak in 1920 with his intentionally nondescript “Furniture Music.” He threw a notorious fit when he played it for gallery patrons who responded with undivided attention. He jumped into the throng and pleaded with them to continue carousing and NOT listen! Echoing Satie’s concerns, the Muzak Corporation once summarized the effect its product was supposed to have on its target public by touting the slogan: “Music to be heard but not listened to.” This was probably a terrible miscalculation since it validated the assumption that such background music is somehow inferior. It also fed into the misguided notion that there are “tasteful” alternatives to the standard supermarket brand.

Anti-Muzak naysayers used to complain about background music being too “manipulative,” but with foreground music, the manipulation seems much more insidious. Walking into a Rite Aid and pelted by variations on hip-hop, I feel subjected not only to the whims of the store manager but also to a clutching fashion apparatus that never lets go. Whereas the older “elevator music” functioned as sonic air-conditioning, the newfangled alternative can be likened to designer scents pushed through a ventilation system. Unlike Starbucks, which sells CDs of the same “smooth jazz” it pumps through overhead speakers, supermarkets never showcased the anonymous Muzak ensembles that orchestrated the journey from the corridors of consumption to the cashier. The tunes were there just to aid a buying mood and not sell themselves.

This effort to add “prestige” and “personality” to the shopping routine proves that elevator music’s detractors do not object to the idea of manipulating people through music – just so long as it is their kind of music and not what they might uncharitably designate as “schmaltz“. Brian Eno, among the more prominent of these “alternative” soundscapers, has been quick to claim that his “ambient” approach is a vast improvement over the old Muzak. Still, there is that hilarious anecdote from the early eighties about patrons at the Greater Pittsburgh International Airport who got so creeped-out over Eno’s Music For Airports that the regular background music had to be restored.

While doing research for my book Elevator Music, I was inspired by the wise words of a (now former) Muzak programmer. According to him: “When musicians are left to themselves to make art for the sake of art, not considering public taste, demographics or psychology, they will put together something that won’t please everyone… My task is to amalgamate tastes. Imagine trying to please 80 or 90 million different viewpoints of the way things should be.”

There is something civically – even aesthetically – right about generic music complementing generic environments. This is among few examples when a one-size-fits-all policy makes sense. When entering a public sphere like a supermarket or a mall, shoppers are entitled to an aural escape, a sound mark to delineate the safe shopping environment from the more cacophonous and unwieldy world outside. If air-conditioning is therapeutic air for soot-infested cities, then supermarket music is therapeutic music for a world of conflicting musical attitudes and noises.

By complementing an original version of a song, the supermarket version provides an audio depth of field, an appropriately vague contour for the transient surroundings. The originals are too specific, carry too much baggage, and make for a much more flattened audio perspective. One could argue that the current use of original artist songs in supermarkets has the same distracting and demystifying effect that the compilation soundtrack has on many of the newer movies. What better way to ruin a story than to slobber a bunch of pop tracks over a film’s narrative and closing credits! And all to justify a CD release that can be called a “soundtrack” in only the loosest sense.

Oddly enough, the only respite from this chronic waking life is in the recent spate of retro commercials that resurrect supermarket music as a popular mythology. There is the mild cha-cha that plays w
hile shoppers browse for “Pork: The Other White Meat,” or the sweet elevator strains soon drowned out when two slackers engage in a Doritos crunching contest. And all those naysayers who once complained about supermarkets full of “syrupy” strings can only declare a Pyrrhic victory. They must now contend with a soundscape that is much louder and much more cloying. When the elevator music gets turned off, the hype really begins.

Heidi Waleson Photo by Melissa Richard

Intellectual property has been a locus of debate for centuries. The difficulties of establishing standards for its ownership and exploitation stem from the fact that such property is not tangible, but rather the expression of the human mind and spirit. What is more, most creations of this kind can only be shared if they are given physical form by some means, and if that physical form is duplicated in some way. Music is even more problematic than other art forms in that anyone’s experience of music is ultimately an experience of a duplication of a musical work, whether via an actual live performance or some form of transmission of a performance. So who reaps the financial benefit of that duplication?

The development of copyright law (and its related areas of trademark and patent law), reflects attitudes toward such property that vary from culture to culture, but is concerned with balancing the rights of creators with the utilitarian needs of consumers. In some minds, copyright exists to compensate and protect the artist; in others, to stimulate the artist to produce more art, but not at the expense of the marketplace. Rapid technological advances have made the marketplace a more and more open area.

The current battles over music and the Internet are the most recent step in the struggle of copyright law to keep up with technology, a race that has been particularly intense during the 20^th century, with its constant advances. Think about sound recordings, radio, movies, television, the photocopier, the DAT player. Rights that come into question with each new development tend to be fought out in the courts — and often decided in favor of the consumer, rather than the copyright holder. This leaves the US Congress to devise revision of copyright legislation to take new issues into account, and the Congress has tended to be a decade or two behind each of these developments. The following is a brief timeline of the development of copyright in the US, particularly as it applies to composers, offering a bit of historical perspective on an issue that never seems to be entirely resolved.

Copyright provides protection for original creative works. Its basic provisions are set out in the Copyright Act of 1976. It is actually a “bundle” of rights. Copyright owners, or those they designate, are the only ones who may exercise these rights which are: the right to reproduce the work in either copies or phonorecords, the right to prepare derivative works (new arrangements, for example), the right to distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public, the right to display the work, and the right to publicly perform the work.

These rights are secured automatically upon the creation of the work in a fixed form. Publication is not required, nor is registration with the Copyright Office, though such registration makes fighting infringement easier.

These rights may be assigned to others; composers, for example, often give publishers the right to publish their works and administer their copyrights. Copyright law also provides for the recovery of copyrights that are assigned to others after a certain amount of time has elapsed. The copyright owners, or those they designate, may extend various licenses to users. These include mechanical (recording), non-dramatic performance (also known as small rights), grand rights (for use in dramatic performance; opera and ballet are included here), synchronization (use in a soundtrack), print (sheet music), and commercial licenses (use in advertisements).

There are various limitations to the copyright owner’s exclusive control over the work. Most important is the concept of “fair use,” which provides for use of the copyrighted work in such activities as criticism, commentary, parody, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. The limitations of fair use have been developed through court cases. The factors used to determine if a fair use defense applies are: the purpose and character of the use (is it commercial or non-profit?), the nature of the work, how much of the work is used in relation to the whole, and the effect of the use on the potential market for, or value of, the original.

Intellectual Property: Whose Song is it Anyway?
by Heidi Waleson
©2000 NewMusicBox

The printing press was the first technological advance that forced recognition of the question of who would benefit from the mass distribution of an artistic product. The first law that addressed this, the Statute of Anne, was passed in England in 1709, enabling the Stationers Company, until then a publishing monopoly, to protect their rights in the works they purchased from authors against other printers. The term of the protection was 28 years; the author could get back the rights after 14.

The first US copyright law was passed by Congress in 1790 as “an act for the encouragement of learning”; it extended a 14-year copyright to books, maps and charts. In 1831, music in notated form was specifically protected; until that time, it was often copyrighted as a book or engraving. The term of copyright protection has changed over the years. The 1976 Copyright Act protected new works for the life of the author plus 50 years; the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension extended the term for works still covered by copyright by 20 years, making the term life of the author plus 70 years.

In the 19th century, problems raised by new uses and technologies required new ideas about the extent of copyright. In 1853, for example, when Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was translated into German without authorization, the court allowed it. But in 1870, a comprehensive revision of copyright by Congress prohibited unauthorized new uses of literary works, such as translations or dramatization. In 1865, photographs were protected for the first time. At the turn of the century, when Thomas Edison sued over the unauthorized duplication of a motion picture, the trial court ruled against him, because movies were not specifically protected. In 1903, that decision was reversed on appeal, and in 1912, movies were added to the copyright domain.

Intellectual Property: Whose Song is it Anyway?
by Heidi Waleson
©2000 NewMusicBox

At first, music copyright holders derived most of their income from print rights. The 19th century saw a huge market for sheet music — ten thousand songs were published during the five years of the Civil War alone — and by the end of the century, cheaper production and transportation made it even greater. However, there was nothing in the copyright law about recorded music, and new inventions like piano rolls and phonographs were starting to erode the publishers’ income — you could buy the record instead of the sheet music in order to play it yourself.

As usual, a court case came first, with a music publisher [White-Smith Music Publishing Co.] suing the Apollo Company, which manufactured player pianos and piano rolls. In 1908, the court decided for Apollo, but the revised copyright law of 1909 recognized the need for some regulation in this new area, and prohibited unauthorized “mechanical” reproduction of musical compositions, which included phonograph recordings and piano rolls.

In order to prevent monopolies on the part of single manufacturers, however, Congress also created a compulsory license. Once the copyright owner had authorized one company to make a recording of a song, any other company could make its own recording of the song, on payment to the copyright owner of two cents per record.

The provision remains, though the amount has changed over the years. Most mechanical licenses are issued on behalf of publishers through the Harry Fox Agency, which was founded in 1927 and is part of the National Music Publishers Association. The agency also collects and distributes royalties. In 1972, a copyright in sound recordings, one that protects the performance rather than the work, was added.

Intellectual Property: Whose Song is it Anyway?
by Heidi Waleson
©2000 NewMusicBox

In 1897, Congress gave composers a public performance right — that is, the right of the copyright owner to collect a fee for public performance. This right was difficult to enforce, because hundreds of dance halls and restaurants all over the country had musicians giving unauthorized performances of music, and it was impractical for the copyright holders to collect fees for so many performances. What is more, the 1909 copyright law specified that such performances had to be “for profit” if royalties were to be collected for them. In 1913, nine composers and music publishers formed ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, to come up with a way to protect the performing right. Once again, a court case led the way: in 1914, ASCAP filed two suits, against a hotel and a restaurant, for performing music by John Philip Sousa and Victor Herbert. The defendants contended that because the patrons had not paid for the music, the performance was not for profit, and the lower courts agreed. But an appeal to the Supreme Court overturned those decisions in 1917. The Court argued that the performances were part of the experience in the restaurants, for which the patrons were paying. “If music did not pay it would be given up,” the decision said. The copyright owners were thus entitled to their share.

This point having been established, ASCAP organized a royalty collection and distribution system. Composers, authors and publishers became members of ASCAP, and gave the society the right to license non-dramatic performances of their works. (This excluded “grand rights,” or the use of the work in a theatrical performance, a right that was retained by the composer, author and/or publisher.) ASCAP issued a blanket license to dance halls, hotels, restaurants, and other entities that performed live music, giving them the right to play anything in its catalogue. ASCAP distributed royalties to its members based on a formula of the relative popularity of their works that was derived from sampling the licensees.

Nowadays, the three performing rights societies (ASCAP, BMI and SESAC) issue various types of licenses. Other entities (such as radio) have been added to those who must license the music they use, and the new ones just like the old ones continue to resist it. Most music consumers would really rather not pay for music — consider how fans justify the circulation of pirated recordings — and don’t see why they should have to. The intermediaries, from taverns to TV stations, still try to avoid it.

Intellectual Property: Whose Song is it Anyway?
by Heidi Waleson
©2000 NewMusicBox

With the invention of radio, a new method of distributing music began to supplement and eventually replace the prevalence of live performance. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) got busy licensing radio stations as well, winning several legal battles to establish its right to do so.

In the 1920s and 1930s radio burgeoned enormously, as did ASCAP’s expectations for license fees, and since it had a monopoly, it could name its price. Radio broadcasters decided to take matters into their own hands, and set up their own licensing operation. BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.) was established in 1939, and signed up its own composers. ASCAP’s license agreements were due to expire at the end of 1940, and the big radio networks refused their steep new terms.

On January 1, 1941, ASCAP music went off the air, except on a few independent radio stations that had signed new agreements with ASCAP. By the end of the year, ASCAP had come to an agreement with the networks, and ASCAP music was back on. Composers now sign with ASCAP or BMI. Publishers have differently named entities so that their composers can sign with either of the two licensing societies. A third society, SESAC, fo
unded in 1930, also licenses music and collects and distributes royalties.

Intellectual Property: Whose Song is it Anyway?
by Heidi Waleson
©2000 NewMusicBox

The next new technology to threaten copyright owners was the photocopy machine. With this invention, every user became a potential copyright infringer, and the question of fair use got a workout. The first significant legal battle pitted a publisher of medical journals against US government libraries, and after a protracted battle up to the Supreme Court, which gave its decision in 1975, the libraries successfully defended their right to make copies of journal articles. If libraries could do it on a large scale, then what about individuals? The 1976 revision of the copyright act gave copyright owners the exclusive right to control reproduction of their work (with a specific exception for libraries), but the prospect of policing individuals raised both practical and privacy concerns. It was even difficult to police the sort of large-scale copying that was clearly illegal: Music publishers, for example, had to contend with the copying of music by choirs.

Easy private copies were soon to have counterparts in the audio and video areas. The next fight centered on the videocassette recorder. In 1976, a movie studio, Universal, sued Sony over its Betamax machine, claiming that home taping would cut into its profits. After seven years in the courts, the Supreme Court finally held for Sony in 1983. It would take almost another decade before creators got any kind of relief from consumers making private copies. That was kicked off by the introduction of digital audio taping technology in 1986, which raised the threat of machines that could make copies of copies with no deterioration in the sound. Another long wrangle finally produced the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. This law required that Serial Copy Management System (SCMS) controls be incorporated in digital audio equipment sold in the United States, so that the machines could make a copy of a prerecorded tape, but not a copy of a copy. What is more, manufacturers of blank digital audiotapes and digital audiotape equipment paid a statutory levy, which was to be distributed to the creators, artists, and record companies who made the recordings. Several funds were created for this purpose.

Intellectual Property: Whose Song is it Anyway?
by Heidi Waleson
©2000 NewMusicBox

The last decade has seen new legislation in the copyright area, once again in response to a new technology — the Internet. The Digital Performance Right in Sound Recording (DPR) of 1995 gave copyright owners of sound recordings (that is, the record companies) the right to authorize public performances, such as certain digital transmissions, including interactive audio transmission, of their work. Traditional radio and television were exempt. Next, the ‘No Electronic Theft’ Act criminalized sound recording copyright infringement occuring on the Internet regardless of whether there was financial gain.

The Digital Millennium Act (DMA) of 1998 implemented the international treaties signed in December 1996 at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) conference in Geneva. These treaties raised minimum standards for international copyright protection. The DMA amended the 1995 DPR to cover cable and satellite digital audio services and web casts. It also made it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures in software, outlawed code-cracking devices, and limited the liability of Internet service providers for copyright infringement in the information transmitted on their networks.

As the DMA requires webcasters to pay licensing fees to record companies for use of their sound recordings, another licensing system was required. The Recording Institute of America (RIAA) represents sound recording copyright owners in these negotiations. In September 2000, the RIAA and Yahoo agreed to parameters and conditions for music broadcast via Yahoo. In October 2000, the National Music Publishers Association and the RIAA agreed on procedures to facilitate licensing of musical compositions in recordings for Internet distribution. Like other “mechanical” licensing, this would be done through the Harry Fox Agency.

In the freewheeling world of the Web, the old arguments about who owns what are being played out once again. Technology innovates, and consumers take free access to the intellectual property made newly available for granted, until someone puts up a fight. The Napster controversy has echoes of much older ones. And while Internet technology has the real potential to actually charge consumers for the intellectual property they acquire through cyberspace — think of the ultimate pay-per-view — the legal history of this area indicates that getting there will not be easy.

Intellectual Property: Whose Song is it Anyway?
by Heidi Waleson
©2000 NewMusicBox

Photo of Ken Smith in front of “Smoke Free” (1999) {cigarette butts and wood, 45″x67″} by John Salvest (courtesy Rudolph Projects) Photo by Melissa Richard

A former political journalist turned music critic offers up a HyperHistory uncovering “smoke and mirrors” politics in the American classical music business.

My name is Ken. I’m a recovering addict. I can trace my awareness to the 1988 Convention floors in Atlanta and New Orleans where as a working journalist I first saw thousands like me, high on an adrenaline rush from an endless stream of platform items and camera-ready politicians. You couldn’t even call it substance abuse. There was no substance.

Moving to New York from Washington gave me a new lease on life. Over the past decade music has replaced politics as my chief obsession, and though I will admit to a twinge of nostalgia during the Lewinsky days, my life for the most part has been cheerfully apolitical. My New Republic subscription eventually lapsed and my political news increasingly comes from late-night monologues. And I know I’m not alone.

The thing is, looking around at the music world, I think that’s part of the problem. Musicians are as much a subculture of our society as political junkies, and if locked in a room together they could certainly find common ground. But most of them will never find the same room. Ask a musician to name his state senator and you’ll most likely get the same silence as asking a U.S. Congressman to name his favorite American composer.

Public indifference to concert music is understandable, since non-commercial music has rarely been on the popular agenda. Unlike the Old World, where composers and musicians were for centuries cheerleaders for the state (take a look at the obsequious texts to any Purcell court masque and you’ll see exactly what I mean), American musicians have rarely filled a national function. Concert music, along with opera, has kept itself out of the mainstream, treating itself at various times as (a) an ethnic identification with the old country, (b) a tool for social advancement, and (c) a publicly funded entity like any other deserving minority. American composers, particularly those fringe figures who challenge European cultural heritage, have it even worse–shunned by America’s Euro-centric cultural institutions as well as “democratic” taste. It’s little wonder that Charles Ives remained in the business world, where unlike the music world his innovative mind was treated with the respect it deserved.

But I digress. Music often suffers next to theater, dance and the visual arts on the public agenda because it’s not “about” anything — and when it does become “about” something, it’s usually because musicians have let the agenda be wrested from them. Think of Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait being dropped from the 1953 Eisenhower inaugural concert because of connections to the Communist party. Or to recall a case of musical flag-burning, when a organ student was arrested at my alma mater during the McCarthy Era for playing Ives’ “unamerican” Variations on “America”.

How does music rate on the public agenda in Washington? How political are American musical figures, and do their different roles dictate different agendas? Do conductors vote like corporate presidents and orchestra players like union members, as their roles might suggest? Are neo-romantics composers neo-conservative and serialists communists, making all pitches equally bankrupt, to paraphrase a recent argument in The New York Times? Are music critics and radio programmers filled with liberal bias, or part of the “right-wing media conspiracy”? Do the various music industry handlers — managers, publicists, presenters, etc.– have their own political agendas, or are they just as pragmatic as image consultants on the political stage?

Is it time for “politics” to enter American musical life, or vice versa? And if the word “politics” is too distasteful, lest it evoke either echoes of right-wing filibusters or shadows of cold-war dissidents, let’s call it “public awareness.”

We hear plenty these days about “The Politics of Hollywood,” as a recent panel at New York’s 92nd Street Y was entitled, but what about the politics of Carnegie Hall? Last month, the institution celebrated the 80th birthday of Isaac Stern, who 40 years ago led the rally to save the building from destruction. Even more significantly, the violinist played a major role in the formation of the National Endowment for the Arts, the center of a decade-long Congressional debate in which the musical voice was conspicuously silent. Granted, musicians of Stern’s stature are few and far between, but how hard is it to command a few line items on the national agenda?

Inside Pages:

• Conductors in American Politics
• Politics and American Classical Musicians
• American Composers and Politics
• The Pulse of the Nation
• Spin Control

There is nothing that musicians take more for granted than the fact that there are twelve pitches to an octave, and that these pitches divide the octave into twelve equal steps. Apparently few musicians question this arrangement, and only a tiny minority can explain whence it arose, why, and from what principles its authority derives. This 12-pitch assumption, however, is far from innocent. Twelve-tone equal temperament, as this common tuning is called, is a 20th-century phenomenon, a blandly homogenous tuning increasingly imposed on all the world’s musics in the name of scientific progress. In short, twelve-tone equal temperament is to tuning what the McDonald’s hamburger is to food.

How can this be so? What is so unnatural about twelve-tone equal temperament?

The basis of any natural system of tuning is that two pitches sound consonant (that is to say, sweet, or intelligible to the ear) when their sound waves vibrate at ratios of relatively small whole numbers. In an octave, for example, two pitches vibrate at a ratio of 2 to 1, one pitch vibrating twice as fast as the other. In a perfect fifth, such as C up to G, the ratio is 3 to 2. In a major third C to E, the ratio is 5 to 4.

The great problem that nature bequeaths to us in the mathematics of tuning – not an obstacle, but a wonderful challenge when viewed the right way – is that these simple intervals aren’t divisible by each other. To illustrate, we need a perceptual measure of interval size. The one invented by the great acoustician Alexander Ellis in the late 19th century is called a cent, and is equal, by definition to one 1200th of an octave, or 1/100th of a half-step.

An octave: (ratio 2:1) = 1200 cents
A perfect fifth: (ratio 3:2) = 701.955 cents
A major third: (ratio 5:4) = 386.3 cents

In the equal temperament we’re used to, three major thirds – C to E, E to G#, G# to C – equal one octave. But as you can see, three pure major thirds of 386.3 cents do not equal one octave, because 3 x 386.3 does not equal 1200. So equal temperament, our McDonald’s hamburger tuning, stretches every major third out to an arbitrarily out-of-tune 400 cents, somewhat the way McDonalds standardizes every patty to a flat quarter-pound of dubious relation to beef. These means that every major third on the piano is out of tune by 13.7 cents, creating busy little beat patterns between the overtones of every major third we hear. Unless you’ve had some exposure to Indian or Indonesian or some other non-Western musical tradition (or authentic barbershop quartet music, the last pure-tuned tradition in America), it’s quite likely that you’ve never heard a true major third in your life, nor a true major or minor triad.

Music schools teach that this Big Mac tuning has been around for centuries and represents an immutable endpoint of progress. It’s a lie. History, even in Europe, has provided many alternatives, Arabic and Asian cultures have provided rich tuning resources unknown to us, and many recent American composers have explored alternative tuning possibilities.

There are many reasons to write in other tunings, seemingly as many as there are composers who do it. La Monte Young seeks absolute purity of pitch so he can explore complex combinations of distant overtones never heard before. Harry Partch wanted to imitate in melody the subtle contours of the human voice, without compromise. Lou Harrison wants to recapture the sensuous presence that true intervals had before the 20th century. Ben Johnston wants his music perfectly in tune so it will have a healthful psychological effect on the listener. Myself, I enjoy the expanded composing resources of 30 or so pitches to the octave, and the option of creating amazing chromatic effects through minimal voice-leading. Some composers are seeking a magical harmonic alchemy written about in ancient treatises. Others just enjoy exotic out-of-tuneness. One of the exciting things about the microtonal field is that, despite its grounding in natural laws of acoustics, its diverse practitioners hardly agree on anything.

For those intrigued but unfamiliar with the wide range of microtonal strategies, this quick survey in four sections will explore several options for escaping equal temperament. We’ll look at forms of historical tunings, take a regrettably brief glimpse at other tunings of the world, and examine tunings devised by several American composers, both in the areas of just intonation and of equal temperaments based on divisions other than 12.
And for those who want more information, there are a lot of Web sites. Book publishers and academic musicians are absolutely convinced that alternate tuning is a strange, esoteric subject that no one except a few weirdos is interested in. If they’d look on the Web, they’d find thousands of tuning aficionados. You can learn everything you wanted to know about meantone at meantone.com, and Terry Blackburn, Zeke Hoscan, and Stephen Malinowski have excellent pages on the mathematics of different European tunings. There’s a Pythagorean Web page. And one of the most forward-looking theoretical thinkers, with a lot of new tuning conceptions for new composition, is Joe Monzo. The tuning of our music evolves historically more rapidly than people realize, and it’s on the move again.

Just intonation isn’t for everyone. Its plethora of fractions can be daunting, and a lot of composers dissatisfied with 12-tone equal temperament simply can’t think creatively in a free field of fractions. Many of these composers have divided the octave, equally, into more than twelve pitches per octave. The great attraction of any kind of equal temperament is that it allows free transposition to any step of the scale. During the 19th century, transposition became so central to compositional thinking that many classically-oriented composers can’t imagine doing without it. Just intonation doesn’t make transposition impossible by any means, but a just-intonation scale limited in its number of pitches will make certain transpositions available, and others difficult.

It must be said, though, from my experience, that working with an unequal just-intonation scale is like carving in wood – the material has a grain to it that gives the artist something to work against. Working in equal temperament is like carving in plastic: every scale step is the same, and the scale doesn’t suggest very much about how to compose in it. Transposition in an unequal scale can lead to very interesting results, with old musical content expressed in new interval patterns. Many classically trained musicians, however, aren’t willing or ready to think in such terms.

That said, various equal temperaments were the usual deviation from 12-pitch tuning from the 1920s until at least the 1970s. Division into 24 pitches per octave used to be considered, in the first half of the 20th century, the most convenient alternative; this is known as quartertone tuning. Other composers have divided the whole-tone into 5, 6, 8, or 12 equal parts, for 30-tone, 36-tone, 48-tone, or 72-tone scales, each of which offers certain advantages. Other, seemingly more eccentric equal divisionsare actually quite natural, such as 19, 31, and 53 tones per octave.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

Back in the ultramodern 1920s, quartertones seemed like the next logical step for deeper exploration of pitch language. The theory of acoustical tuning wasn’t taught in those days; thinkers as brilliant as Schoenberg and Cowell went around insisting that the 11th harmonic of C was F# (it’s 551 cents, halfway between F and F#, not 600 cents), and no one really believed that you could hear such tiny pitch differences. In addition, the nature of musical instruments, especially that behemoth the piano, was not going to change any time soon, but if you put two pianos together, you could tune one down 50 cents, and between them you’d have a quarter-tone scale, 24 equal steps to the octave. It was an interval not of acoustic necessity, but of convenience. Thinkers like Ferruccio Busoni theorized about splitting the half-step into three and four equal parts as well. In those days of talk about splitting the atom, it must have been in the air.

And so a number of composers wrote music in quartertones. Chief among these were (for quality) the American Charles Ives and (for quantity) the Czech Alois Hába. Ives’s main contribution was Three Pieces for Quarter-Tone Pianos, completed in 1926, one of his last works. His article “Some Quarter-Tone Impressions” (published by Norton with his Essays Before a Sonata) theorizes about what kind of harmonies quartertones would support. He postulates a triad in-between major and minor, say, C and G with a pitch between Eb and E; the chord sounds more stable, he claims, if you add a seventh halfway between Bb and B. The Quarter-Tone Pieces carry out these theories beautifully. The only recording I’ve ever found, however (and there are several), that really has the pianos exactly a quarter-tone apart is the old vinyl recording on Odyssey. All the others miss slightly.

Alois Hába (1893-1973) wrote a considerable amount of quartertone music. He also wrote string quartets that divided the whole step in to five equal parts (fifth-tone, or 30 equal steps to the octave) and six equal parts (or 36 steps to the octave). Haba’s opera The Mother is in quartertones, and is recorded on Supraphon. Another composer of divided half-steps is the Russian Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979), who had a vision in the street one day that he was supposed to write microtonal music. Musicians at McGill University, including the Mather-LePage Duo, put out two recordings of Wyschnegradsky’s multiple piano works, one for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, another for three pianos tuned a sixth-tone apart. It’s visionary music, like Scriabin but creepily in-between-the-keys. The Arditti Quartet has supposedly made a recording of Wyschnegradsky’s string quartets that was released in Europe, but I’ve never found it.

Mexico’s Julian Carrillo also made a career out of what he portentously called “the Thirteenth Tone,” although what he actually did was to divide the half-step into four parts for 48 equal steps per octave. His Preludio a Cristobal Colon, published in Henry Cowell’s New Music Edition, is written for an ensemble in his special notation.

Ezra Sims of Boston has gone even further, writing in a special notation for 72 pitches per octave. Sweet, haunting, sometimes folk-music-based, Sims’s music sounds natural but is very careful about its intonation, not compromising on commas and raised and lower leading tones.

Each of these divisions has certain acoustical features in its favor; the more divisions, the more acoustical accuracy and the less convenience of notation and performance. Quartertone tuning captures several 11-based intervals, intervals based on the 11th harmonic:

11/8 = 551 cents
11/9 = 347 cents
11/6 = 1049 cents
12/11 = 151 cents

All are very close to quartertones. However, seven-based intervals are just as out of tune in quartertone music as they are in 12-tone equal temperament.
The 36-tone equal temperament, or dividing the half-step in three, is better for capturing intervals based on the 7th harmonic, or 7-based intervals.

7/4 = 969 cents
7/6 = 267 cents
8/7 = 231 cents
9/7 = 435 cents

Each of these is approximately 33 cents above or below an equal-tempered pitch. Sims’s 72-pitch tuning combines these possibilities, allowing pitches both 33 and 50 cents away from the 12 standard ones, and also allows much closer approximations of standard major and minor thirds. The use of 72-tone equal temperament allows perfect transposibility in eleven-limit tuning, but at the price of tremendous inefficiency. Partch, after all, gets perfect eleven-limit tuning with only 43 pitches, and I’ve never succeeding in needing more than 31.

Other intervals are possible with equal temperaments not derived from the whole- or half-step, but from circles of fifths.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

Certain divisions of the octave are natural because they represent the points at which multiples of the perfect fifth coincide with multiples of the octave. For example, 12.

12 perfect fifths = 12 x 701.955 cents = 8423.46 cents

7 octaves = 7 x 1200 cents = 8400 cents

8400 and 8423 are pretty close, so if you fudge the fifths a little, you can divide the octave into 12 steps and get both fifths and octaves.

Like wise, 19:

19 perfect fifths = 19 x 701.955 cents = 13337 cents
11 octaves = 11 x 1200 cents = 13200

13337 and 13200 are, proportionately pretty close, so 19 ends up being one of the natural divisions of the octave if you want perfect fifths. So do 31, 34, and, more spectacularly, 53.

The Colorado-based guitarist Neil Haverstick plays, and has recorded with, a 19-tone guitar, on his impressive discs, The Gate and Acoustic Stick. The influence of tuning on Haverstick’s blues playing is fun to listen to; he sometimes has to extend the rhythm of blues phrases to fit in all his chromatic pitches. He also plays a 34-tone-to-the-octave guitar. Fretted instruments such as guitars and lutes have the oldest history of playing equal temperaments, since you have to have equal temperament if the frets are going to go straight across the fretboard. Just intonation on guitar (or any other unequal temperament) requires jagged frets that shift up and down for each string. Since at least the 16th century it’s been considered easier just to tune guitars in equal.

The 16th-century theorist Nicola Vicentino invented a 31-tone-to-the-octave harpsichord, the keys divided between two manuals and with some of the black keys split. He claimed that with his 31-tone scale one could play melodies from the Hebrew and Arabic worlds and the Slavic and Germanic countries without distorting them into the Italian scale. He understood that tuning is ultimately a multicultural issue, and that standardized, invariant tuning was a means of oppression used against foreign musicians from allegedly inferior cultures. Incidentally, in 31-tone equal temperament the perfect fifth is a slightly flat 696.77 cents, almost exactly the same size as the meantone fifth Vincentino was used to. [Ed. Note: The 31-tone system has inspired a great many new music composers both in the Netherlands and the United States — American tricesimoprimalists include Joel Mandelbaum, and Jon Catler who in the 1980s led a rock band called J. C. and the Microtones.]

A 53-tone equal temperament has sometimes been held up as a dream tuning. In 53-tone, each pair of adjacent pitches is separated by 22.64 cents. The major third in this scale is playable as 384.9 cents (instead of an optimum 386.3); the minor third is 316.98 cents (instead of 315.6); and the perfect fifth is 701.886 cents (instead of 701.955). All of the (five-limit) intervals of European music can be played within a half of a percent accuracy in 53-tone equal temperament. Inspired by such realizations, an Englishman named T. Perronet Thompson built a 53-pitch organ in the 1850s, its keyboard a Dr. Seussian fantasy of split keys, curved keys, different colored-keys, and knobs sticking up through other keys. Estimated arrival time moving from a C major chord to a G major chord is probably four minutes, as the organist cogitates on where the right keys are, but it was a wonderful idea.

A couple of other modern experiments with equal temperaments should be mentioned. One is Easley Blackwood‘s remarkable series of 12 Microtonal Etudes, each written in a different equal temperament from 13 to 24 pitches to the octave. Blackwood invented his own different notation for each division of the octave; the score is published, and the CD is available on Cedille. The electronic sounds are a little cheesy, and it’s a little disappointing that, instead of treating you to the most unusual intervals, he concentrates wherever possible on intervals found in 12-pitch tuning; for instance, 15-pitch equal contains the same major thirds as 12-pitch. But the tunings themselves are all the weirder for not being grounded in any natural acoustic basis, and they’ll stretch your ears.

Wendy Carlos has also worked with equal-tempered scales not based on the octave, so that you get different pitches from octave to octave. For example, if you have a scale of 35-cent increments, you’ll have a pitch at 1190 cents and 1225, but not at 1200. I haven’t had an opportunity to hear her results, but her Web page – which seems to say virtually nothing about her tunings — has some brief samples of her music. Recently, at the last Festival of Microtonal Music that Johnny Reinhard organizes, I heard Skip LaPlante’s Music for Homemade Instruments group-sing a happy little tune in 13-tone equal temperament. And they really did it. There may be no natural acoustical basis for a 13- division of the octave, but it can be sung, and it blows your mind to hear it.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

If 12-tone equal temperament is the Big Mac of tunings, then just intonation is the health food. Just intonation means that the pitches have been defined in terms of whole-number ratios between frequencies. For example, if we’re in the key of C and I refer to a 6/5 E flat, that means an E flat that vibrates at a frequency 6/5 as fast as C; in other words, if C above middle C vibrates at 500 cycles per second (cps), 6/5 E flat will vibrate at 600 cps. The number of potential pitches in a just intonation system is equal to the number of possible fractions: namely, infinite. Naturally, composers cannot deal creatively with a disordered infinity of pitches. We need schemes to limit and justify and order the world of potential pitches. In fact, I believe that good music can only issue from an elegant tuning, and the more elegant the tuning, the more fertile it will be as a generator of musics.

In just intonation, we use fractions to define pitches. To know what pitch a fraction represents, we need to know what key we’re in. If we’re in the key of C, then we define C as 1/1, and D is 9/8. That means that D is defined as the pitch that vibrates 9/8 as fast as C. 9/8 is also the name of an interval – in this case, a whole step. Normally, in talking about justly tuned pitches, we express fractions in terms within a single octave, or between 1 and 2. If 9/8 is D, then 9/2 and 9/16 are also D, but we tend to only use 9/8 because it’s in the octave between 1 and 2. We’re used to calling pitches in different octaves all Cs, or all B flats, but it can be difficult for people to get used to the notion that 7/8 = 7/4 = 7/2 = 14/1. The pitches denoted by those fractions are all octaves of each other, because multiplication or division by 2 only changes octaves.

One of the ways we differentiate between different just intonation systems is by what prime numbers are employed factors in the tuning’s fractions. For instance, five-limit tuning is tuning in which all fractions can be expressed as powers or multiples of the numbers 2, 3, and 5 (not 1 because 1 is merely identity, and not 4 because 4 is merely an octave of 2). In seven-limit tuning, the list is expanded to 2, 3, 5, and 7. Eleven-limit tuning goes up to 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11, and so on. Finally we’ll address the possibility of 13-limit and higher tunings.

If the arithmetic here confuses you, you’ll find a fuller, more gradual explanation on my tuning page. If this sparks your interest, you’ll find all sorts of just-intonation resources at the Just Intonation Network Web page, which will lead you to an encyclopedic array of tuning sites. Or if this just scares you, you can go back to the tuning page.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

You may have never been aware of it, but you’ve been listening to music in five-limit tuning all your life – or rather, an equal-tempered approximation of it. European music is based on the desire to get two intervals in tune: the perfect fifth (3/2) and the major third (5/4), as well as the minor third (6/5) between those two intervals. The basic problem of tuning is that any two prime-numbered intervals are incommensurate. That is, there is no number of major thirds that will equal any other number of perfect fifths. Major thirds are 386.3 cents wide, perfect fifths are 701.955 cents wide, and there just aren’t any reasonably small numbers those will both divide into evenly. [Another way to say it: Major thirds are based on 5, perfect fifths on 3, and no power of 5 (5, 25, 125, 625…) will ever equal a power of 3 (3, 9, 27, 81, 243…).] Therefore we have to make decisions about which pitches to have fifths on and which to have thirds on.

Let’s start by taking four pitches and tuning them to perfect fifths: F, C, G, and D, with C as our tonic, defined as 1/1.

F 4/3 = 498 cents
C 1/1 = 0 cents
G 3/2 = 702 cents
D 9/8 = 204 cents

If we continue tuning the circle of fifths to these perfect 3/2 fifths, we’ll end up with a 3-limit tuning known as Pythagorean, because it is limited to the intervals Pythagoras is alleged to have discovered. That gives us rather harsh major thirds of 81/64 (408 cents), though, and right now we’re looking for pure major thirds of 5/4 (386.3 cents). So let’s build a pure major third above and below each of our four established pitches. This gives us a pretty evenly-spaced 12-pitch scale:

C 1/1 = 0 cents
Db 16/15= 112 cents
D 9/8 = 204 cents
Eb 6/5= 316 cents
E 5/4 = 386 cents
F 4/3 = 498 cents
F# 45/32 = 590 cents
G 3/2 = 702 cents
Ab 8/5 = 814 cents
A 5/3 = 884 cents
Bb 9/5 = 1018 cents
B 15/8 = 1088 cents

This is a fine, perfectly in-tune scale with 12 pitches. Its only drawback is that it is only in tune for the key of C. For example, if you want to play a D chord, the interval between D 9/8 and A 5/3 isn’t 3/2, as a perfect fifth should be, but 40/27 (5/3 divided by 9/8 = 5/3 x 8/9 = 40/27). And at 680 cents instead of 702, that “wolf fifth” between D and A is going to howl. You can retune A to be in tune with D, but then your F chord is no longer in tune.

There is a fascinating recording of a piano work in five limit tuning: Terry Riley‘s The Harp of New Albion (Celestial Harmonies 14018). The work employs a piano tuned to the above scale on C#, except that the G is 64/45 instead of 45/32. And the movements of the piece run through several keys, including D and Bb, so that you get a powerful sense of what happens when you intentionally modulate within a limited five-limit system.

This is the basic problem with tuning Western music, with its need for fifths and thirds and its limitation of only 12 pitches. If we allowed ourselves more than 12 pitches per octave, the problem would have many easier solutions. In fact, there were experiments in 16th century Italy with constructing harpsichords with octaves of 19 and 31 pitches to the octave just to avoid this dilemma. The academics of their day, as academics always will, prevented such innovations from catching on. But all of our historical European tunings, from meantone to well temperament and even our present accursed equal temperament, are approximations of this five limit tuning. So you can explore those historical European solutions, or you can go on to the composers who, after being stalled for 330 years, finally plunged ahead into seven-limit tuning.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

Back in the 16th century, lots of forward-looking musicians wanted to expand the range of European tuning to include intervals based not only on 3 (perfect fifths) and 5 (major and minor thirds), but also 7. After all, Indian and Arabic musicians had gaily been using 7-based intervals for centuries. But they were infidels, and one way the Christians wanted to distance them from the heathens was by insisting that no one could really perceive such tiny pitch differences. So the Italian academics won just after 1600 (over the continuing objections of the seminal mathematician Marin Mersenne), and closed off the wonderful number 7 to the Western world for more than 300 years, until Harry Partch rediscovered it and began using it in the 1920s.

Adding the number 7 and its octaves (14, 28) to our original stable of numbers (2, 3, 5) gives us a very interesting array of new intervals:

15/14 = 119.443 cents
8/7 = 231.174 cents
7/6 = 266.871 cents
9/7 = 435.084 cents
7/5 = 582.512 cents
10/7 = 617.488 cents
14/9 = 764.916 cents
12/7 = 933.129 cents
7/4 = 968.826 cents
28/15 = 1080.557 cents

Now keep in mind that the equal-tempered intervals we’re used to are all sizes divisible by 100. An equal tempered whole step is 200 cents, a perfect fourth is 500 cents, and so on. Seven-limit intervals often create intervals a third of a half-step away from their equal temperament semi-equivalents. The 8/7 “major second” is 31 cents “sharp.” The 7/6 “minor third” is 23 cents “flat.” This specific difference creates a certain flavor for seven-limit tuning, oddly off from the tuning we’re used to and sometimes bitterly flat, yet strangely consonant. In addition, the 7/5 tritone offers a much more consonant tritone than anything we’re used to in European tuning.

Add these 10 simple seven-based intervals to the basic five-limit intervals, and you get a scale that some would consider unwieldy. The most perplexing compositional problem of working in just intonation is, once you open up the field to seven, how do you choose which pitches to use?

One of the most brilliant solutions is the one La Monte Young adopted in his six-hour piano masterpiece The Well-Tuned Piano. He eliminated all factors of the number 5, so that he was only working with multiples of 2, 3, and 7. And he arrived at the eccentric yet very beautiful 12-pitch scale, suitable for piano tuning:

Eb 1/1 = 0 cents
E 567/512 = 177 cents
F 9/8 = 204 cents
F# 147/128 = 240 cents
G 21/16 = 471 cents
G# 1323/1024 = 444 cents
A 189/128 = 675 cents
Bb 3/2 = 702 cents
B 49/32 = 738 cents
C 7/4 = 969 cents
C# 441/256 = 942 cents
D 63/32 = 1173 cents

Note that the scale doesn’t uniformly ascend: G# is lower than G, and C# is lower than C. The scale is basically a five-pitch pentatonic scale around 0, 200, 450, 700, and 950 cents, with slightly different versions available for each pitch. Young kept the tuning secret for 27 years until I tuned my synthesizer to it and published it in an article (with his permission) in Perspectives of New Music, Winter 1993, Volume 31 Number 1. There’s a lot more to say about this scale, and I say some of it on my La Monte Young web page. Unfortunately, the Gramavision recording of The Well- Tuned Piano is out of print and nearly impossible to obtain. Please don’t ask me how to get a copy, because I can’t tell you. You can find out more about La Monte, though, at the Mela Foundation Web Page.

Michael Harrison, Young’s protege and piano tuner, also writes piano music in seven-limit just intonation. He has a CD available on New Albion records.

Another important masterpiece in seven-limit tuning is Ben Johnston‘s String Quartet No. 4, “Amazing Grace.” This lushly emotive 1973 work, a series of variations on the old hymn “Amazing Grace,” begins in a simple pentatonic scale and keeps adding new pitches with each variation until it runs through a glorious 22-pitch, seven-limit scale in the final variation. It’s Ben Johnston’s most popular work, and an instant favorite for everyone who hears it. The best recording is an old one by the Fine Arts Quartet on Gasparo records – unfortunately still only on vinyl. The Kronos Quartet has made a perfectly acceptable recording on Nonesuch, but their attention to tuning isn’t as meticulous.

From seven-limit tuning, the next logical step is eleven-limit tuning.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

Eleven-limit tuning means that we define intervals and pitches by multiplying and dividing the numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11, with no prime numbers larger than 11 used as factors. Adding 11 into the mix gives us a very interesting range of new intervals:

12/11 = 150.637 cents

11/10 = 165.004 cents
11/9 = 347.408 cents
14/11 = 417.508 cents
15/11 = 536.951 cents
11/8 = 551.318 cents
16/11 = 648.682 cents
22/15= 663.049 cents
11/7 = 782.492 cents
18/11 = 852.592 cents
20/11 = 1034.996 cents
11/6 = 1049.363 cents

Note that of these intervals, nine are within 15 cents of a quartertone (50 cents between two equal-tempered steps in 12-tone equal temperament), and six of those – 12/11, 11/9, 11/8, 16/11, 18/11, 11/6 – are within three cents. Eleven-limit tuning produces many of the pitches that we think of as quartertones. The peculiar quality of eleven-limit tuning is to smooth out the scale by giving us mediating pitches half-way in-between the pitches we’re used to.

The great champion of eleven-limit tuning, of course, is Harry Partch. His 43-tone scale, 43 non-equal steps to the octave, uses no prime factors larger than 11. I won’t give his scale here, because you can easily find it in his book Genesis of a Music and other places. There is loads of Harry Partch information on the Internet, the best sites being Corporeal Meadows and a British Harry Partch web page. In addition, all of Harry Partch’s major and minor works are being released on the innova and CRI labels.

The other person I can mention as having written a significant-sized output in eleven-limit tuning is myself, Kyle Gann. Eleven-limit tuning appeals to me for all those in-between notes, those quarter-tones that slide so easily between the pitches we’re used to. My own attraction to microtonality is the potential for extreme chromaticism and a minimalist approach to voice-leading in which lines can remain almost motionless while the harmony changes key wildly. You can hear this effect in my 1997 piece How Miraculous Things Happen, of which you can find an audio excerpt here. The piece uses 24 pitches to the octave (but very unevenly distributed, not quartertone), and capitalizes on the interval of 11/9 (347 cents) to slide smoothly between the minor (316 cents) and major (386) thirds. My largest just-intonation work so far is a 35-minute, one-man opera, Custer and Sitting Bull. The four movements of this work expand from 20 to 31 pitches, each movement based on a different tuning principle. You can also find audio samples of this piece at the same place, and program notes and tuning charts at my Custer and Sitting Bull web page.

Partch charmingly expressed his reasons for not proceeding past 11 to the 13-limit: “When a hungry man has a large table of aromatic and unusual viands spread before him he is unlikely to go tramping along the seashore and in the woods for still other exotic fare. And however skeptical he is of the many warnings regarding the unwholesomeness of his fare – like the ‘poison’ of the ‘love-apple’ tomato of a comparatively few generations ago – he has no desire to provoke further alarums.” Personally, I’ve never been able to get comfortable enough with my perception of the 13th harmonic as a consonance to pass that limit myself. But if you’re hungrier than Partch, and more attuned than myself, you’ll want to go on to the thirteen-limit and beyond.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

There are an infinity of numbers, and an infinity of prime numbers. There are an infinity of fractions. There are, correspondingly, an infinity of pitches within any octave. Studies have suggested that, depending on circumstances of timbre, register, volume, and so on, the human ear and brain can distinguish about 250 pitches per octave. I myself have found, as a composer, that two pitches only 5 or 6 cents apart turn out to be impractically close, and I can’t meaningfully distinguish them within the context of a piece of music. Other composers, with other, more acoustically pure musical aims, may well find a vast gulf of difference between 200 and 205 cents. To be comfortable, I need at least 16 to 20 cents between the pitches in my scales, but Partch‘s scale contains pitches only 14.4 cents apart. There are, refreshingly, no rules here, and no limitations besides the composer’s own personal idiosyncrasies.

The number 13 opens up still further territories. The 13th harmonic is 840.53 cents above an octave of its fundamental, and some simple 13-based intervals include:

13/12 = 139 cents
13/11 = 289 cents
16/13 = 359 cents
13/10 = 454 cents
18/13 = 563 cents
13/9 = 637 cents
20/13 = 746 cents
13/8 = 841 cents
13/7 = 1072 cents

Note a preponderance of pitches about 40 cents away from our equal-tempered pitches.
The only composer I know of working consistently in 13-limit tuning is Mayumi Reinhard, and she swears that’s where the action is.

The 17th and 19th harmonics come too close to equal temperament to sound very exotic in most contexts; 17/16 is 105 cents, and 19/16 is 297.5 cents, both nearly divisible by 100. Ben Johnston‘s Suite for Microtonal Piano (1977), though, is a fine example of a piece in 19-limit tuning. The 12 pitches of the piano are tuned to the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd, 24th, 26th, 27th, 28th, and 30th harmonics of C. (This is still only 19-limit because all the other numbers factor down to prime numbers smaller than 19: 21 = 3 x 7, 22 = 2 x 11, and so on.) I don’t know of a better work for demonstrating the fascinating possibilities just intonation holds for modulation. The first and fifth movements are in the key of C, the second movement is in D, and the fourth is in E, meaning you get some pretty strange scales over D and E. The third movement is dodecaphonic. Johnston is possibly the only major composer who’s written dodecaphonic music in just tunings. The Suite for Microtonal Piano is recorded by Philip Bush on the Koch label, along with Johnston’s Sonata for Microtonal Piano (1964), a complexly prickly work in a highly extended five-limit tuning.

An equally fascinating work in 31-limit tuning is Johnston’s String Quartet No. 9, recorded by the Stanford Quartet (now renamed the Ives Quartet). Johnston has his intrepid string players play in a harmonic series scale from the 16th to the 32nd harmonic, including transpositions and inversions of the scale. The 31st harmonic is basically a quartertone between the 30th and 32nd, and when the strings cadence from dominant to tonic with that 31st harmonic, that cadence sounds nailed down for good. The work is mostly sweetly neoclassical, providing an unexpectedly normal context for odd harmonic events, and it’s very well performed. (The original 1964 tuning of La Monte Young‘s The Well-Tuned Piano was also in 31-limit tuning, not seven-limit as it eventually ended up.)

Johnston has more recently gone up to the 43rd harmonic (43-limit tuning) in recent works that aren’t recorded yet. The only person I know of to go higher than that in just intonation is La Monte Young in his sine-tone installations. For 20 years, Young has explored in his scintillating sound sculptures the harmonics between the higher octaves of the 7th and 9th harmonics. His current installation at the Mela Foundation is The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered Above and Below the Lowest Term Primes in the Range 288 to 224 with the Addition of 279 and 261…. The complete title is many times longer), which you can visit at 275 Church Street in New York City (call 212-925-5098 for times). It includes the 1072nd, 1096th, 2096th, and 2224th harmonics over its base drone, as well as other, lower tone complexes. All of these are octaves of prime-numbered harmonics: 1072 = 67 x 16, 1096 = 137 x 8, and so on. In more recent works Young has gone up above the 5000th harmonic. My sketchy introduction here can’t begin to do his sine-tone installations justice, but you can read more about them in my article “The Outer Edge of Consonance: The Development of La Monte Young’s Tuning Systems,” in Sound and Light: La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1996, pp. 152-190).

Until some madman surpasses Young, this takes us as far as we can go in discussion of new just-intonation dimensions.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

Many musicians think that to attack today’s equal-tempered tuning is to attack the European classical music tradition itself. Not at all true, in fact, quite the opposite. Through most of European history – all except the last 100 years, in fact – tuning was an art, not a science, and the differences between different keys in the old keyboard tunings had an enormous, if subtle, influence in the way the great composers wrote their music. Ever wonder why F major is considered a calm, pastoral key, or why there are no Vivaldi concerti in F# major? Tuning is the answer. And the old tunings need not be dead, for they still have much to offer the modern composer. I keep my own pianos tuned to 18th-century well temperament, and compose for the wonderful variety of intervals it provides.

For simplicity’s sake I’m going to present only two phases of European tuning, meantone and well temperament.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

Meantone is the name of one of the most elegant tunings in the history of European music, a beautiful tuning that provided near-perfect consonance in a variety of keys. The tuning was first explicitly defined in 1523 by an Italian theorist name Pietro Aaron, though it is suspected that some rough form of meantone had been in use through much of the 15th century. Meantone tuning dominated European music until the early 18th century, and continued being used in certain backwaters, especially England and especially among organ tuners, through the late 19th century. Having lasted some 250 to 400 years, depending on the area, meantone has been the most durable tuning in European history so far. [Ed. Note: It is also, most likely, the tuning that the European colonial settlers brought to America, and its compromises of good and bad triads undoubtedly informed the compositional choices of William Billings, Francis Hopkinson and other early American composers.]

Meantone is basically a 12-pitch keyboard tuning, a workable compromise that allows eight usable major triads and eight minor triads, the other four of each being real howlers. The premise of keyboard tuning in general is that you can have your major thirds in tune or your perfect fifths in tune, but both cannot be in tune, and some compromise is always necessary. Let’s look at why:

A well-tuned perfect fifth = 702 cents.
A well-tuned major third = 386.3 cents.
An octave = 1200 cents.

If we tune our perfect fifths in tune, we’ll have C to G, G to D, D to A, and A to E all 702 cents wide. 4 x 702 = 2808 cents. Therefore the two octaves and a major third from C to E (C G D A E) will be 2808 cents, and, subtracting two octaves or 2400 cents, the major third C to E will be 408 cents. 408 cents is an awfully wide and harsh major third, not really tunable by ear, bad for singing, and inharmonious.

Meantone’s solution is two squeeze down the perfect fifths until the major thirds are perfect. What we want is C to E at 386.3 cents. Therefore, two octaves and a major third will be 2786.3 cents, and each perfect fifth will be 1/4th of that amount, 696.575 cents. (The ratio between pitches of a meantone fifth is actually the fourth root of 5, since if you take the fourth root of 5 to the fourth power, you get 5, which is the ratio of two octaves and a pure major third.) (Don’t worry if you didn’t follow that. Not necessary.) The perfect fifth in meantone is just over 5 cents flat. But acoustically, the ear is less disturbed by out-of-tune fifths than by out-of-tune thirds, since with fifths the out-of-tune harmonics are higher up in register and further away and less obvious.

So meantone strives to give us as many perfect 5-to-4 major thirds as possible, which, when limited to 12 keys per octave on a keyboard, is 8. C, D, E, A, and G are tuned to slightly narrow fifths and slightly broad fourths, and then the rest of the pitches are tuned to pure major thirds: E-G#, F-A, A-C#, Eb-G, G-B, Bb-D, and D-F#. The result, notated in cents above C, is the following scale:

C 0
C# 76.0
D 193.2
Eb 310.3
E 386.3
F 503.4
F# 579.5
G 696.6
G# 772.6
A 889.7
Bb 1006.8
B 1082.9

And, if you’ve tuned your first five pitches right, C-E is a pure major third as well. The other four major thirds are 427 cents wide and sound terrible: G#-C, F#-Bb, C#-F, and B-Eb. In fact, as notated, those aren’t major thirds at all, but diminished fourths. In meantone, there is no such note as Db, but only C#. There is no D#, but only Eb. Unless, that is, you redo the tuning slightly to center it around some key other than C, as was sometimes done.

And so, in meantone, you simply can’t use triads with those unavailable major thirds. During the meantone period, you can’t really use keys with more than three sharps or flats in the key signature. Look through music of the 16th and 17th centuries, and you will find no pieces in Ab major, F# major, or Bb minor. Such keys need pitches that don’t exist in meantone tuning.

BUT – and this is the great advantage, the eight major and eight minor keys you can use sound so much sweeter than they do in our music. Those thirds sound so lovely, and thus all European music from the mid-15th to mid-18th centuries (and beyond) was based on the primacy of thirds. It became excusable to omit the fifth from a triad, but not the third, because the third was in tune and the fifth wasn’t. (I highly recommend Orlando Gibbons‘s Lord Salisbury Pavane and Galliard as a sterling example of exploration of meantone tuning. This late-16th-century work, a masterpiece of early keyboard music, meanders through every possible chord in meantone plus one dissonant B-major triad as a passing chord. Play through it in equal temperament and it sounds OK. Then play it in meantone, and its colors suddenly come alive, and you hear the work’s luscious beauty as Gibbons’s original audience did. Then play it in equal temperament again, and it collapses disappointingly back into black and white, just like Dorothy coming back to Kansas.)

Historically, there are different kinds of meantone, based on their division of the syntonic comma. The syntonic comma is the discrepancy between four perfect fifths and two octaves and a major third, about 21.5 cents. The classic Pietro Aaron meantone I’ve outlined above is called 1/4th-comma meantone, because 1/4 of the comma was subtracted from each perfect fifth. There are less extreme meantones such as 1/5th-comma, 1/6th-comma, even 5/18ths-comma. The less subtracted from each fifth, the more out-of-tune the thirds will be. 1/11th-comma meantone is actually identical to equal temperament. [The classic tuning book from which all this material is drawn is J. Murray Barbour’s Tuning and Temperament (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).]
I wish I could recommend specific recordings in meantone tuning. I suspect that many exist, but early music groups, even when they are attentive to authentic tunings, are not often in the habit of specifying what keyboard tunings they use. Anyone can contact me at [email protected] with information about specific meantone recordings, I will add them to my historical tuning web page.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

In 1893, the august Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians stated that Johann Sebastian Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier to demonstrate equal temperament. That was a misconception. And it has filtered down into hundred of music history texts, a lie so pervasively believed that it will take generations to correct.
Bach, after all, did not write The Equal-Tempered Clavier. But in his day, they did refer to a temperament in which all keys were usable as an “equal” temperament. But the truth was (and all this material comes from a wonderful book, Tuning: Containing the Perfection of Eighteenth-Century Temperament, the Lost Art of Nineteenth-Century Temperament, and the Science of Equal Temperament, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991, by piano technician Owen Jorgensen) that, back then, they had no way to truly divide the octave equally on a piano or harpsichord. They didn’t have oscillators or electronic tuners. And while, by Bach’s day, composers wanted to have all keys available, no one was interested in making them all the same. Each key had its own interval pattern and its own different color, so that one kind of music sounded better in E flat minor, while another came off much better in F major. There were reasons for choosing a specific key, and Bach wrote his preludes and fugues to illustrate those differences, not to suggest that they didn’t exist.

I do an experiment with my students: in a blindfold situation, I play the Bach preludes each in several different keys, and let them guess which key the prelude was written for. They usually get it right. The E flat minor Prelude, for example, sounds really flabby in E minor, and the C major prelude takes on a weird, too-bright quality in C#.

The tunings that dominated the 18th and most of the 19th centuries are now referred to as well temperaments. There were many different varieties. Tuning, for most of musical history, was an art, not a science, and each piano tuner has leeway to use his own taste. Some of these temperaments have reasonably familiar names: Werckmeister III, Kirnberger III, Vallotti-Young. (That’s Thomas Young, not La Monte – he wasn’t quite in the picture yet, or Beethoven’s sonatas might have sounded very different.) Some of these tunings you can find more information about on my Historical Tuning web page, but to save space I’ll only describe one here: Thomas Young’s well temperament of 1799.

The principle of well temperament is this: Imagine the circle of fifths. Now imagine that you squeeze the fifths nearest C slightly to make the thirds (C-E, G-B, F-A) a little flatter and more in tune. That means that you’ll have larger fifths and thirds on the opposite side of the circle of fifths, around F#. In most well temperament, and especially this one, the keys most closely related to C major/A minor have the flattest fifths and the most consonant thirds. Black-note keys like F# major and Eb minor have purely in-tune fifths, but their thirds are a little harsh and bitter. Therefore, when you want to write something like a Funeral March in an especially bitter, tragic key, you write it in B flat Minor – which is what Chopin did with his Funeral March Sonata. When you want a kind of majestic spookiness, as Beethoven did in the adagio of the Hammerklavier, you write it in F# minor, where the thirds aren’t bad and the fifths are especially stately and in tune.

A 0 cents
Bb 102 cents
B 196 cents
C 306 cents
C# 396 cents
D 502 cents
Eb 600 cents
E 698 cents
F 804 cents
F# 894 cents
G 1004 cents
G# 1098 cents

As you can see, no pitch here is more than 6 cents away from equal temperament, but the differences, if subtle, are still striking. The major third C-E is 392 cents, the major third F#-A# 408 cents, much harsher. All the black-key perfect fifths are perfectly 702 cents, while C-G is only 698 cents; the black-key fifths sound much purer. C# major and F# major are really active keys, bristling with overtones. C and F major are sweet, mild keys, and E flat minor is pungent. This is the tuning in which Beethoven heard his music (before he went deaf), and it clearly influenced his choices of keys, as it did for every other composer before the mid-19th century.

The first recording of Beethoven’s music in the original temperament appeared a couple of years ago: Beethoven in the Temperaments, with pianist Enid Katahn and piano tuner Edward Foote (Gasparo). The disc includes the Moonlight Sonata, the Waldstein, and the Pathetique in a late-18th-century well temperament that brings out subtle color differences among the keys.

Well temperament is hardly a dead issue even for composers today. The Californian composer Lou Harrison loves to use well temperament, and in fact wrote his entire Piano Concerto, recorded by New World Records, in Kirnberger III, which is fairly similar to Young’s tuning above. (Check out the Lou Harrison Web Page.) The mystic New York composer Elodie Lauten often writes music in well temperament, often combining it with equal temperament at the same time for a scintillating, slightly out-of-tune effect.

I have both my pianos tuned to Young’s 1799 temperament, my Steinway grand at home and the Disklavier in my Bard College office. I basically write for keyboard in well temperament, and I see no reason to go back to bland equal temperament. I know of no keyboard music that doesn’t sound better and more interesting in well temperament. The only music that equal temperament supports, as Lou has often put it, is 12-tone music; in 12-tone music, all the major thirds are theoretically equal, all the major 7ths, and so on, so I suppose one might want equal temperament to play 12-tone music authentically. But I see no other advantages. And how many of us play a repertoire dominated by 12-tone music?

Chronologically, this brings us back to 12-tone equal temperament – and if you can’t say anything good about a tuning, you shouldn’t say anything at all, I suppose, which is why I’ll direct you to the just intonation page or back to the tuning page.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists

A tremendous amount of work remains to be done in the realm of determining the tunings of non-Western musics. This is my academically acceptable way of professing ignorance. I have made some attempts on my own to match tunings of various non-European musics on my synthesizer, and to analyze pitch structures in terms of tuning. Not only is this sometimes difficult (especially when the music is fast or more than one pitch is sounded at a time), but the appropriate methodology varies from culture to culture. Many non-Western musics do not hold sustained pitches in place the way European music does, but slide and glissando and even yelp from one word to the next. An entire generation of musicologists could devote themselves to this problem without exhausting it. However – I’ll tell you what I know, and what I’ve found.

At Bard College we have a gamelan. Its official slendro scale is as follows:

Ab 16/15 = 112 cents
G 1/1 = 0 cents
Eb 8/5 = 814 cents
D 3/2 = 702 cents
C# 11/8 = 551 cents

These cent measurements arrived with the gamelan – the ratios I supplied myself. The gamelan instruments are in pairs, tuned about 30 cents apart to create the characteristic shimmering of gamelan music, but this tuning applies separately to each half of the pairs. I once wrote about gamelan music in terms of ratio tunings, and received an irate letter from some gamelan maven who informed me that gamelan musicians don’t tune in terms of ratios, and that I was imposing a foreign notion. And yet I’ve heard Lou Harrison talk about gamelans in terms of ratio tuning, and the cent-sequence 551, 702, 814, 0, 112 can only be interpreted as intending the ratios above. Not my field, but this particular bit of evidence leaves little room for interpretation.
Among Americans, Lou Harrison, Barbara Benary, Evan Ziporyn, and Jarad Powell, and many others, have written music for gamelan, and inspired by gamelan. With more than 200 Indonesian gamelans operating in the U.S., gamelan must really be considered a major current in American music.

Arabic music is well known for its use of 11-based intervals which sound, to our ears, like fairly exact quarter-tones. Treatises on Arabic music make reference within a scale on, say, G, to pitches halfway between Bb and B (11/9, or 347 cents) and halfway between F and F# (11/6, or 1049 cents). Modern transcriptions of Arabic songs and violin music sometimes use fairly standard quarter-tone notation for these pitches of the scale, and the quarter-tones are easily audible and very distinct on recordings.
That Indian ragas use a scale of 22 pitches is well known, but the exact tuning seems to be in doubt. The Hindu specialist Alain Danielou lists a tuning for the 22 pitches with some authority, but a student of mine (Jane Gilvin) researched Danielou and couldn’t locate any such tunings in the Sanskrit treatises he supposedly derived them from. Danielou, in his Music and the Power of Sound, interprets the Indian scale as pairs of notes, some five limit and others drawn from a cycle of 53 perfect fifths, and thus within three-limit tuning:

1/1 = 0 cents
256/243 = 90

16/15 = 112
10/9 = 182
9/8 = 204
32/27 = 294
6/5 = 316
5/4 = 386
81/64 = 408
4/3 = 498
27/20 = 520
45/32 = 590
64/45 = 610
3/2= 702
128/81 = 792
8/5 = 814
5/3 = 884
27/16 = 906
16/9 = 996
9/5 = 1018
15/8 = 1088
243/128 = 1110

Several of the paired notes are separated by the syntonic comma of 21.5 cents, or 81/80. It is unclear what authority Danielou asserts for these ratios, but he is a fascinating figure nonetheless.

Finally, many musicians believe that the “blue” notes that jazz singers and sax players play – bending the third, sixth, and seventh steps of the minor scale downward a touch – is a return to a seven-limit scale inherited from Africa. I have analyzed a few recordings by Billie Holiday with inconclusive results. There are certainly points at which she distinctly sings about a third of a half-step flat on those scale steps, with reference to the piano – and other places at which she sings in tune with the piano. My impression, drawn from the most modest evidence, is that sometimes she bends the third, sixth, and seventh scale steps downward for expressive purposes, and that she may find there “notches” representing the ratios 7/6 (267 cents), 14/9 (765 cents), and 7/4 (969 cents). Ben Johnston has written some jazz arrangements couched in such specific “mis-tunings.”

Through the spread of pop music, the Euramerican 12-pitch equal-tempered scale is in danger of wiping out indigenous tunings in much of the world, especially India and Southeast Asia, even in Arabic countries. At the same time, however, more and more American musicians are studying Eastern cultures, becoming experts in Indian or Indonesian performance, and absorbing new tunings. It is clear that if we want American music to join the rest of the world rather than squashing it, we need to get out of our 12-pitch equal-tempered RUT.

With that depressing thought you can go to the just intonation page, the historical European temperaments page, the equal temperaments page, or back to the tuning page.

From BETWEEN U S: A HyperHistory of American Microtonalists