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Xenharmonic triad, part 2
Ivan Wyschnegradsky: Étude ultrachromatique, for Fokker 31-tone organ, Op. 42 (1959)
From the album 50 Jaar Stichting Huygens-Fokker
In 1951, the Dutch physicist and musician Adriaan Fokker (1887-1972) oversaw the construction and installation of a unique, 31-tone keyboard instrument in Teyler’s Museum in Haarlem. This would became known as the Fokker Organ. Fokker’s tuning system was based on the theories of the 17th-century Dutch polymath Christian Huygens, whose notion of a 31-part equal division of the octave was in turn inspired by earlier instruments such as Vicentino’s arcicemablo. The instrument’s labyrinthine keyboard interface demanded a fundamentally new technique from those who would dare to play it.
The keyboard of the Fokker Organ
Huygens and Fokker both envisioned this configuration as a means of enabling the performance of music in various mean-tone tunings, rather than a path toward microtonality as it is generally understood. Other composers, however, viewed the refined division of the octave as the technological basis for a new chromatic overdrive: the principle of the equal importance of all notes that motivated atonality and Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique was now to be applied to a greater (and theoretically unlimited) number of tones.
This was the approach taken by the Russian-French composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who wrote this piece for the Fokker Organ in 1959. A champion of microtonal music since the early 20th century, Wyschnegradsky used various systems of tuning, all unified by his vision of “ultrachromaticism,” in which microtonal pitch organization was infused with a heavy dose of Scriabin-esque musical mysticism.
This portable version of the Fokker Organ, the Archiphone, was developed in the 1960s
This recording was released on a CD made for the 50th anniversary of the Huygens-Fokker Foundation Centre for Microtonal Music, in Amsterdam. The foundation’s website is one of the best resources on the history and theory of microtonal/xenharmonic music on the internet.
Played 220 time(s).
August 17, 2011, 10:45am
