Category: Commentary

Johnny Reinhard in Kazan, Russia Photo by Svetlana Sokolova

Here in the new millennium composers look about and wonder what connects them together. The answer appears to be the musical intelligence that they possess. Ever since Howard Gardner designated “musical intelligence” as the one of the legitimate human intelligences in his book Frames of Mind, I have been wrestling with its implications.

A quick Internet search reveals a pioneering, though shortsighted meaning for musical intelligence. It presently extends only to the “appreciation of musical patterns” like melodies and rhythms. Perhaps evidencing non-musical roots, it seems to me that talents in music may be only the tip of the iceberg, if not actually confused with actual musical intelligence. Those with musical intelligence use their talents to understand the world in a very special way.

For example, an astute camp music counselor can discern in the voice of a high school-age auditioner all sorts of things in only a few short moments. It is not so much that a musician can tell when the rhythm is faulty, or the pitch is off. Rather, more psychological concerns are identified and addressed. From the music alone, music intelligence can discern whether someone is a secure individual. Examination reveals whether the child has a sense of nuance, and to what degree. Even deception can be discovered in the music, possibly leading in unfortunate directions.

How many out there have scared the wits out of a dear one as a result of innocently overhearing something, accused however unjustly of involuntary judging? We seem to know what’s what with an almost telepathic certainty, admonished by the many that can’t read our frequency.

Theoretical understanding, instrumental virtuosity, compositional distinctiveness; these are the shop issues. Visiting music interstylistically, the foreign stuff, is still a rare pursuit, but I suspect it is gaining currency.

Musical intelligence takes the curious further than the modern piano. Charles Ives best epitomizes the curious musician, intelligent to what nature has to offer in direct proportion with humans history. Why not a preference for pianos that have “drifted pitch” for a composer who cried “are my ears on wrong?” Modest Mussorgsky was a fan of the out of tune piano, according to Shostakovich in Testimony. And Berg wrote for it in the last act of Wozzeck. But no, I’m not trying to encourage out of tune piano music.

With Ives’s “Universe Symphony” we have genuine polymicrotonality, which accounts for the possible inclusion of any, and every conceivable interval. Intervals hold true meaning for us musicians. I believe that following the technology avalanche of the past century it is incumbent upon us to taste some of the other flavors of the tuning rainbow, besides plain old twelve-tone equal-tempered vanilla. And there are many fine flavors besides the pedestrian quartertones. Just Intonation is arguably definitive consonance, or the key to the relationship between numbers and pitch, or the natural universal that jump starts the diversity of music around the world. And yet its melodies lose their angularity in the harmonic blend that produced them.

It would really jump-start our collective musical intelligence, as a nation, if the overtone series were taught as part of music school education. As Lou Harrison once suggested to me in an aside, wouldn’t it be wonderful if elementary schools taught fractions in the 3rd grade by singing ratios, rather than by just cutting up pizza pies? Then we musicians would have an audience in our future.

Why not a true tabula rasa to compose upon? What is the virtue of sticking to any single system of tuning? Why a system, and not an approach, or multi-systems? Why couldn’t one use–at any moment–a favorite interval? I have in mind a number of personal favorites, which constantly revolve according to the piece I am working on. Be not afraid, for there are no microtonal police to arrest lawbreakers. Any notation can be used with legitimacy. Microtones are eminently discoverable, with many published fingering charts available, and they are free on most every musical instrument, a few with specific modifications.

With the shrinking of the world, with the Basques on the same headline page as the Tamils of Sri Lanka, with Chechens and Kosovars more immediate than Indians or Iranians, we really need to integrate all possible tunings into one unified theory of intonation. To that end I present, and encourage a policy of polymicrotonality, utterly American in its freedom and in its possibilities. Rather than 12 notes in the octave, there are in this theory 1200 tones. These 1200 “cents” are at the very threshold of pitch differentiation in even the finest of the golden ears.

Musical intelligence demands a musical expression for newer meanings as a result of enlightened perspectives, virtually flooding our senses as the result of the shrinking world. Since the ineffable is still important in this increasingly complex world, it demands the necessary techniques to make sensible new musical meanings through new intervals.

Joe Monzo Photo courtesy Joe Monzo

Ever since encountering Harry Partch‘s Genesis of a Music in the early 1980s, I’ve been most interested in just-intonation (JI) tuning systems. The initial reason for my interest was that I realized there were far more pitches available to composers than the usual 12, and that their relationships could be far more subtle, intricate, and complex than the limited set of 12 different intervals available in 12-tone equal-temperament (12-tET).

The desire to simplify Partch’s numerical (ratio-based) notation led to me create harmonic lattice-diagrams to represent the pitches in ‘ratio-space’. I have since discovered that many others before me (Tanaka, Fokker, Wilson, Johnston) have had the same idea.

Related to my lattice-diagrams is a method of notating rational (i.e., JI) pitches which utilizes prime-factorization. To me, this was a much simpler notation than using integer ratios. I came up with a name for this: JustMusic.

My original paper on this is at http://tonalsoft.com/monzo/article/article.htm

Stimulated by Partch’s short sketch of a ‘history of intonation’, I began constructing lattice-diagrams for many different historical tuning systems, which were gradually added to my paper until it became a book, JustMusic: A New Harmony.

At the same time (around 1984), I realized that the key to my being able to compose in the kind of complex JI tunings I wanted to use, would be to make use of computer software to handle the math calculations and produce aural output. My JustMusic software has been under development ever since, and hopefully will be ready for release within the next couple of years.

Along the way, I’ve become fascinated with the role that prime numbers seem to play in our perception of music. My most important contribution to theory so far seems to be my formulation of the concept of ‘finity‘, which is a generalization of Fokker’s ‘periodicity-block‘ concept.

I’m interested in studying the historical conceptions of various shapes and sizes of periodicity blocks in music all over the world. I believe that this ‘history of finity in tuning’ (which, I now realize, is what my book attempts to be) can enrich our knowledge of many other aspects of our lives and histories, especially ancient religious beliefs, possibly even extending to modern scientific theories about the universe.

Thanks to my interaction with other microtonal theorists on the internet Tuning List, I have become much more catholic in my tuning interests, so that even though I still prefer to use JI in my own compositions, I now also do a lot of research into other types of tuning systems, such as meantones, well-temperaments, and non-just non-equal tunings.

The content on my website leans pretty heavily toward tuning theory, and I’m most well know these days for my hyperlinked Encyclopaedia of Tuning.

Joe Maneri Photo courtesy of Joe Maneri

I was always interested in microtonal music. Over 40 years ago I started playing Turkish and Albanian music which includes quartertones and other intervals as many folk musics do. And then, in 1972, I was moved to write a microtonal piece. I had a cousin who was unable to speak all he could do was make different sounds. I had to be dutiful to God because I didn’t believe in God, so I made a piece that was microtonal. I had some India Pale Ale. I saw it broke down my defenses. I bought a six-pack and had three of them, and I wrote the piece!

I started to make my own system because I had no choice. I lived on Speen Street which was named after an American Indian so I was inspired to use a variety of arrows to show the different intervals. A man came to visit me one day named Ezra Sims. I didn’t understand anything he said, so I said, “Can you talk to me on my level?” But when I finally learned from him, I immediately wrote a book on microtones.

I’m sorry for all you just people, but I’m un-just. I use equal-tempered intervals. My mind doesn’t understand all that mathematical stuff. And I don’t use specific scales.

When my son Matt was 9, he was on the computer and showed me all these buttons and said, “They could be used for microtones. We oughta make an instrument.” I was playing at a wedding and I had to get an accordion because the piano didn’t work. (All these churches have pianos that don’t work!) One side of an accordion has a keyboard, but the other side has all these buttons. So I thought if we put a lot of buttons on here, we can reach all the notes. So we made a plan. We called Wang and Schmang and all these other companies and they said, send us what you want and send us the money and we’ll make it. But, fortunately, in good old Brooklyn (I live near Boston but I’m from Brooklyn), we walked by a brownstone and found a guy who said “Sure I can make that!” It plays 72 notes to the scale, five octaves of it.

But five years ago I gave it up. I wanted to sing.

I went to Salzburg and saw all these things that people were doing, but I didn’t hear any melodies that knocked me off my feet! I had no papers to give out. I improvised with my saxophone and I sang. With all your machines, you forgot mankind. It’s not a human thing from the heart, from the brain, from the blood and from the spit! I have it in my voice and my heart. I just wrote a new piece that’s an hour long called Holy Land, Part 1, it’s a double saxophone concerto about Cain and Abel and it’s all microtonal. Everybody sings. Even the orchestra’s going to be singing while they’re playing…

Microtones can give us melodies, new melodies. Microtones are going to take over. We’re all going to be singing again. I believe that we are in a new Renaissance and the Renaissance is here in America.

Lois V Vierk Photo by Kurt Ritta

Many of my pieces use glissandi, but only a few of my works are actually microtonal. Of these, my favorite tuning is in “Go Guitars” for 5 electric guitars. Each guitar is tuned as follows: lowest string is low E, next string is middle E quarter tone down, next is middle E normal, next is middle E quarter tone up, next is high E quarter tone down, highest string is high E normal. I love the richness of the sound and how powerful it is, especially when all six strings are strummed together. A lot of the piece uses slide, glissing between different “chords“, sometimes with strums (16th or 32nd notes) and sometimes without.

Like the streets of mid-town Manhattan, equal temperament was conceived as an idealized grid in which everything is evenly balanced and self-contained. But straight lines and equal increments are rare in nature. And the return of non-tempered tunings has opened exciting new possibilities for moving Western music off the grid and out of the box.
In equal temperament, all pitches are theoretically alike. So it’s easy to treat them as abstract entities (“notes” rather than tones) and to lose touch with their sounding reality. By contrast, in tunings based on the whole-number relationships of the harmonic series, each pitch and each interval has its own unique identity.
In his insightful Music Primer, Harrison observes that Schoenberg’s excellent ear lead him to understand that in equal-temperament all intervals of a given type (except the octave) are equally untrue, making all the pitches of the chromatic scale essentially equal. In this light, it’s not too hard to imagine Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique as the musical equivalent of grid-lock. Rather than sit stalled in a dodecaphonic traffic jam, American composers (many of whom have felt less of an investment in equal-temperament) have chosen to retune.
Do tunings grounded on the harmonic series represent open roads, leading music out into new country where it wants to go?

Johnny Reinhard
“What is the virtue of sticking to any single system of tuning? Why a system, and not an approach, or multi-systems?…”

	Joe Monzo “The desire to simplify Partch’s numerical (ratio-based) notation led to me create harmonic lattice-diagrams to represent the pitches in ‘ratio-space’…”
	Joe Manieri “I’m sorry for all you just people, but I’m un-just…”
	Lois V Vierk “Many of my pieces use glissandi, but only a few of my works are actually microtonal…”

Frank J. Oteri Photo by Melissa Richard

I’ll never forget the utter amazement I experienced the first time I was exposed to the notion of “microtonal music.” I was a high school student at the High School of Music and Art (now consolidated with the High School of Performing Arts into the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts) during the explosion of the “punk rock” movement and was eager to find something, anything, that was just as daring and rebellious in the world of so-called classical music, thinking at the time that anything that was rebellious in pop music couldn’t ultimately be all that rebellious if it was “popular.”

I sought out serial music before I realized that serialism was an established practice in musical academia. I enjoyed the indeterminate music of Cage and his disciples but I wasn’t really willing to go along with its abrogation of ego. (I was a teenager after all.) Then I heard the quartertone music of Alois Haba, Wyschnegradsky and Carrillo, a little later I was exposed to Harry Partch and Just Intonation. It was like a city boy seeing a forest for the first time.

Here was music that was instantly recognizable as different, yet was also mostly accessible despite being completely new. And the numerical theories behind it made concrete physical sense out of mathematical concepts that were previously abstract and arcane. To this day, I wonder why the derivation of equal temperament isn’t taught in math classes when logarithms are first taught or that the circle of fifths isn’t invoked when introducing the Fibonacci series. I still remember grabbing a cello belonging to one of my classmates to explain the harmonic series in my calculus class.

While back in the 1970s, microtonality seemed to be the rebellious road not taken that should have been taken, nowadays it seems that microtonality is everywhere. Most digital keyboards have altered tunings programmed in. Many period instrument groups incorporate an historic approach to temperament along with other aspects of performance. And the use of new intervals, ranging from mere ornamental coloring to a full systemic exploration, seems part of many new music composers’ approaches cutting across every stylistic divide. Microtonal music can be atonal, neo-romantic, minimalistic, indeterminate, jazz, and more. In some cases the use of microtonality has liberated composers from stylistic quagmires.

John Eaton has been exploring microtonality in a highly original yet completely non-dogmatic way for decades. In our lengthy conversation, he spoke about how expanding the range of available intervals offers many new expressive possibilities. Kyle Gann, a leading authority on microtonality as well as a microtonal composer, offers a very personal HyperHistory of tunings that have inspired other American composers. Johnny Reinhard, the founder of the American Festival of Microtonal Music who was responsible for many of my first encounters with microtonality, makes a strong argument for a “polymicrotonal” sensibility, along with comments on preferred tuning systems by Boston-area master improviser Joe Maneri, West Coast theorist Joe Monzo, and composer Lois V Vierk. We would like to know your thoughts on all this as well which we hope you will share in our interactive forum moderated by John Luther Adams, who has also used non-standard tunings in many of his compositions.

An acceptance of the infinite approaches to tuning ultimately leads to a greater understanding and appreciation for the music of all cultures and time periods. Ironically, by putting our accepted scale of 12-tone equal temperament in context, it also shows the riches of an approach to temperament that many of us still take for granted. Ultimately, it offers the opportunity to inspire that utter amazement which hasn’t left me since 11th grade and offers the potential for great discoveries that can only happen when you learn something new.

Gayle Morgan Photo courtesy of Gayle Morgan

“Is There Too Much New Music?”

Last year the Cary Trust offered its biennial program of grants to assist New York City music institutions in commissioning new music. We received 117 applications to the program and after an extensive review of the projects by independent consultants, we made 32 grants totaling more than $450,000.

Each time we run this program I am amazed at the enormous number of new music projects and composers competing for the grants. In the nine years that we have offered the program, we have funded projects involving commissions for more than 100 composers. Nonetheless, there were many more composers included in proposals that were not funded, and I imagine that there are others who have stopped submitting projects based on disappointing responses in previous programs.

This situation would be more acceptable if there were several other sources of support for commissioning, but in fact the Trust’s program is nearly one of a kind, and at present it is considerably larger than other commissioning programs that are national in scope, such as those of Meet The Composer and Chamber Music America.

Recently, I scanned a New Music Calendar, noting those contemporary music ensembles and presenters that are supported by operating grants from the Cary Trust. I was surprised to observe that we were funding only 13 out of approximately 52 concerts that appeared in the April Calendar. This was shocking to me because, unlike many other funding agencies, we have an acknowledged and relatively substantial commitment to the development and performance of new music. Even with an average annual grant list of 25 new music ensembles and presenters, it seems that we are barely scratching the surface when it comes to supporting contemporary music activity in New York City.

Is there too much new music? Are too many people pursuing careers as composers? Are 52 contemporary music concerts in one month too many?

One might obviously reply that the problem is not with composers and musicians performing contemporary music; the problem is with the appalling lack of financial resources available to support their work. I would agree, but in light of the competing calls on philanthropic resources for the arts, it is probably unrealistic to expect a dramatic change for the better.

One measure that patrons and grant makers inevitably use in assessing the value of a new music ensemble or presenter is the size of the audience for the music being presented. At the Trust we try not to fall into that trap because we are committed to supporting the art form itself. We do not believe that a value can be placed on music merely by counting the number of individuals currently interested in hearing it.

Taken to an extreme, however, I would have to ask if the Trust would support an ensemble that has no audience at all, and the answer would be “no, we would not,” although I have attended a few concerts for which the audience was sparse to the point of nonexistence. In terms of our own grant program, we justify support for these new music events as “r&d“, but we would certainly have cause for concern if a substantial portion of the grants we make ended up assisting concert events that hardly anyone attends.

If there is too much new music chasing too few financial resources and too little audience interest, what is the cause and what is the solution? Since composers are self-appointed, who is to say who should pursue a career and who should turn to other interests? Perhaps in some cases teachers or performers discourage less promising composers by failing to promote them or their music. More questionable is the power of patrons and grant makers, even those who subject funding proposals to careful scrutiny by artistic peers, to determine the day-to-day success of creative artists if not their long-term standing and reputation in the community at large.

In the end, the challenge for musicians, concert presenters, arts funders, and individual music lovers is to provide as strong a support system as possible for a large, diverse body of composers and their music. Perhaps the burgeoning interest in music and arts education will eventually produce a larger, more diverse body of listeners. Still, it is entirely possible that the proliferation of music and art will always outstrip the financial resources available to subsidize them.

Thus, it is all the more important that both human as well as financial resources be used wisely. Concert producers at all levels of venues must be thoughtful and clear about the programming they choose to present; musicians must commit the time and energy needed to rehearse and give a new work the best possible airing; and arts funders must first trust the field and then take the risks involved in supporting new work.

Audiences also have a responsibility to get into the concert hall as often as possible and then relax, open their ears and minds, and enjoy the experience when a new work or a particular performance or an enjoyable program clicks. These challenges are being met in many instances. Attempting to keep up with the fast-paced new music performance field, especially in New York City, is a daunting but exhilarating experience. Composers, performers and producers of new music have not chosen an easy path, but it can be richly rewarding – artistically if not materially – for them as well as for their patrons and fans.

Catherine Wichterman Photo courtesy of Catherine Wichterman

“Support Nurturing and Nourishing Relationships”

During my time at Meet the Composer and now at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I have taken the view that the most effective funding of new music (or any other art form for that matter) addresses the connections between artists and the individuals and organizations that serve as advocates for their work. At Mellon, for example, all our programs look for imaginative ways to support the work of individual artists and to advance particular art forms, even though we do not support individual artists directly through fellowships, commissions, or other traditional funding mechanisms.

New pieces of music enter the repertoire first because they are good, and second because someone (performers, conductors, artistic administrators, and others) believe in them and are able to communicate their belief and passion to audiences–not once, but frequently over a long period of time. For this reason I have always believed that the most powerful support of new music will identify and support mutually nurturing and nourishing relationships between composers and performers and enable them to evolve and deepen over time, increasing opportunities for composers to write new pieces of music and for performers and performing organizations to develop their capacity to sustain a commitment to new music.

We are always looking for ways to build successful partnerships rather than to support isolated projects or individual commissions. This is an approach that we have used in our dance and theater programs with some success, and I think in the long run it will contribute to a healthier environment for new work because it is an organic, systemic approach to supporting the creative process while simultaneously building an infrastructure that advocates for artists and for new repertoire.