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Xenharmonic triad, part 3

Alois Hába: Suite for Quarter-Tone Guitar No. 2 (1947). Fifth movement, “Allegro energico”

Downloaded from the Huygens-Fokker Foundation

Rounding out our brief tour of microtonal and xenharmonic music is this movement for quarter-tone guitar by Czech composer Alois Hába. The most prolific microtonal composer of the 20th century, Hába announced his mission in a 1927 book entitled New Theory of Harmony, which was one of the earliest systematic treatments of the harmonic foundations of microtonal composition. The book fused Schoenberg’s principle of the “emancipation of the dissonance” with the microtonal impetus of Ferruccio Busoni’s 1907 pamphlet Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music.

Taking advantage of his position as leader of the Department of Microtonal Music at the Prague Conservatory (the first such institution in the world), Hába spearheaded the development of a number of new instruments specially built for microtonal performance, including quarter-tone pianos (1924-1931), a sixth-tone harmonium (1936), a quarter-tone clarinet (1924) and trumpet (1931), and a quarter-tone guitar in 1943. Hába was especially fond of this last instrument, for which he composed the accompaniment of a number of song cycles, as well as two suites.

The Suite No. 2 is, in the context of Hába’s compositional idiom, a strongly tonal piece, gravitating toward the pitch center of E, with varying major/minor inflections. Still, the music is athematic and freely circulates all 24 pitches of the quarter-tone scale, creating a decidedly strange duality of modernist chromaticism and historical reference. (The fifth and final movement, heard here, opens with a flamenco-esque flourish and ends with a wonderfully out-of-place blues chord of the dominant seventh.) A performance of first movement of this suite by guitarist Tolgahan Çoğulu is available on YouTube, in case you were wondering what a quarter-tone guitar looks like.

Hába’s resplendent Suite for Four Trombones in the Quarter-tone System, composed in 1950, makes for an interesting point of comparison with the Suite No. 2, composed three years earlier. Together, the two pieces give a very good impression of Hába’s mature, mid-century compositional voice.

August 21, 2011, 11:27am

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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. 

August 17, 2011, 10:45am

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Xenharmonic triad, part 1

F. F. F. Fiale: “Quattro supernovate in faccia”

From the album Possible Worlds (2011)

One of the phenomena of 20th and 21st-century music I find most consistently fascinating is the constellation of investigation and experiment around the idea of challenging the hegemony of 12-tone equal temperament (12-tet), the tuning system that has prevailed in European-influenced music since the late 1800s.

These efforts are known by different names: one term, “microtonality,” was popularized in the early 20th century and is still used today. It is used to describe tuning systems based on an interval smaller than the tempered semitone (minor second), which is the intervallic atom of 12-tet. Under the auspices of microtonality, composers such as Julian Carrillo, Alois Hába, and Ivan Wyschnegradsky delved into the possibility of scales with 24, 31, 48, 72, or more tones within the octave.

But microtonality proved to be an insufficient concept to explain every alternative to 12-tet. What about systems based on the division of the octave into fewer than 12 equal parts? Or systems that rejected the very notion of a single repeated modulus, building instead a network of relations of varying and incommensurable intervallic distances? Or the various forms of just intonation?

To encompass these possibilities, the American composer Ivor Darreg coined the term “xenharmonic,” which describes all music that works outside the system of 12-tet, whether strictly microtonal or not. (The concept of microtonality, for better or worse, has survived and is occasionally used in a broad sense as a synonym for “xenharmonic.”)

In the next three posts, I will feature three examples of xenharmonic music, a kind of mini-tour of the genre. (Those interested may also want to revisit xenharmonic compositions I’ve explored in previous posts.) We’ll begin from the present and work backward through time. 

The first example comes from the compilation album Possible Worlds, released by Spectropol Records in July of this year, which provides an excellent survey of the stylistic diversity of contemporary xenharmonic music. The album can be downloaded free from the label’s Bandcamp page.

I chose this track to demonstrate an approach to xenharmonic music from outside the classical tradition with which alternate systems of tuning are generally associated. ”Quattro supernovate in faccia” (“Four Supernovas in Your Face”), by Fabrizio Fulvio Fausto Fiale, an Italian musician and a self-described “classical pianist, choir singer, and death metal drummer,” is a “crazy virtual jam session,” based on two kinds of esadecaphonic (16-tone) scales.

August 14, 2011, 12:36pm

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Nicola Vicentino: “Musica prisca caput”

From the album Nicola Vicentinos Enharmonik: Musik mit 31 Tönen

Patron saint of musical eccentrics, the composer and theorist Nicola Vicentino (1511-c. 1576) is one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian renaissance. Though he authored two books of madrigals and a handful of other compositions, Vicentino was best known for the unorthodox ideas about musical scales expressed in his 1555 treatise L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice). 

Like many musicians of the time, Vicentino was obsessed with the idea of rediscovering the fabled magical power of the art that had been possessed by the ancient Greeks. Following Greek practice, Vicentino constructed scales on the basis of tetrachords, or series of intervals within the span of a perfect 4th. The Greeks recognized three types or genera of tetrachord: the diatonic, consisting of two whole tones and a semitone, the chromatic, with a major third and two semitones, and the enharmonic, made of intervals close to what we now call a major third and two quarter-tones (intervals half the size of a semitone). When all the tetrachords were put together, the result was a system of 31-tone equal temperament that could be used to approximate a form of just intonation. 

Not content to rest on his theoretical laurels, in 1561 Vicentino built a novel instrument to realize his idiosyncratic musical ideals: the arcicembalo, a harpsichord constructed to produce no fewer than 31 tones in the octave. The keyboard was specially designed with three terraced levels of keys on each manual. The same year he also invented the arciorgano, a portative organconstructed along similar lines.

A modern reconstruction of Vicentino’s arcicembalo by M. Tiella

While Vicentino’s intentions were not particularly radical—he was more interested in perfecting meantone temperament than in the exploitation of microtonal intervals—his instruments nonetheless became legendary symbols of techno-musical experimentation. His ideas helped inspire not only the chromaticism of late Renaissance composers such as Gesualdo, Luzzaschi, and Monteverdi, but also the resurgent activity in microtonal music and instrument building in the 20th century.

The four-part Latin ode, “Musica prisca caput,” written in honor of Vicentino’s patron Ippolito d’Este, demonstrates neatly the three tetrachordal genera as Vicentino understood them. The three sections of this short composition are composed strictly in each of the three genera: diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic, respectively. The text reads:

Musica prisca caput tenebris modo sustulit altis, / Dulcibus ut numeris priscis certantia factis, / Facta tua, Hyppolite, excelsum super aethera mittat.

(Ancient music has now borne its source from the nourishing shades, so that, Ippolito, it may send with sweet numbers your great deeds, in contest with ancient deeds, to a new height above the ether.)

The Latin reads “You have revealed to me the obscure and secret things of your science.”

May 02, 2011, 8:23pm

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William Sethares: “Ten Fingers”

From the album Xentonality (1998)

William Sethares is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His musical research centers on the possibilities and problems offered by microtonality or xenharmony, that is, partitions of the pitch continuum other than the conventional 12-tone equal temperament that has dominated Western music for over a century.

In particular, Sethares has investigated the relationship between timbre and tuning system.  He argues (and demonstrates with audio examples) that our conventional sense of consonance and dissonance of musical intervals is based on our hearing them played by instruments with harmonic spectra, that is, instruments whose overtones are related to the fundamental as whole number multiples (2f, 3f, 4f, etc.).  12-tone equal temperament (or 12-tet, to use the lingo) is a system of tuning that approximates the intervals inherent in sounds with harmonic spectra, such as those created by most string instruments and open pipes.  But the harmonic spectrum is not as universal as we are typically taught: sound sources such as bells and metal bars, while possessing determinate pitch, have overtones in nonharmonic proportion to the fundamental (for example, 1.6f, 2.9f, etc.).  

Sethares shows that one can construct custom scales based on the timbral properties of any given sound, such that the dissonance (measured in terms of beating between frequencies in close proximity) is minimized or controlled.  One can also reverse the process, starting with a tuning system (for example, one of Sethares’ favorites, 10-tet), and determining the overtone structure needed for instruments to play within this tuning with the minimum of dissonance.  Thus unusual tunings that might sound grating with harmonic timbres are made strangely consonant—but still distinct and different from 12-tet with harmonic timbres.

This example, whose full title is “If God Had Intended Us to Play in Ten Tones Per Octave, Then He Would Have Given Us Ten Fingers,” is composed for an artificial guitar-like timbre specially constructed to play in 10-tone equal temperament.  It is from his 1998 album Xentonality, and also found on the CD included with his book Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale.  His 2002 release, Exomusicology, uses his ideas on the relationship between timbre and tuning to explore “the music and culture of fictitious creatures and nonexistent alien species.”

One of Sethares’ imaginary musical instruments: the “Trident,” a marimba that plays in 7-tone equal temperament 

February 15, 2011, 1:07pm

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Syzygys: “Rimsky Train”

From the album The Complete Studio Recordings (2003)

“A female duo who plays microtonal pop music,” the Japanese band Syzygys is the project of Hitomi Shimizu (keyboards) and Hiromi Nishida (violin).  (The band’s name, presumably an alternative plural of the polysemic word “syzygy,” comes from a Greek root meaning “conjunction.”)

Like all good music, that of Syzygys defies description: it is at once familiar and strange. Many of the gestures are redolent of that ubiquitous but unnameable modern idiom of composition heard in incidental music for popular media, but a subversive and experimental element is also always present— and in this way the music of Syzygys is comparable to the otherwise very different work of, say, Raymond Scott.

The delightful weirdness of this music derives in part from the completely ingenuous fusion of catchy pop song elements with the hauntingly unfamiliar sonorities of a 43-note just intonation scale invented by Harry Partch.  Shizimu plays a modified electric reed organ tuned this scale.  (Across the top of the band’s homepage there is a “playable” 43-note keyboard.  A classy touch.)

If this music sounds like the somewhat deranged soundtrack of a forgotten Nintendo game, it’s not coincidental: Shimizu has done the music for several titles for the Sony PlayStation.  She’s also a prolific composer for film and TV.

August 19, 2010, 12:01am

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Alois Hába: Suite for Four Trombones in Quarter-tone System, Op. 72 (1950)

From the album Centenary: Alois Hába

Alois Hába is one of the most important composers associated with microtonal music in the 20th century.  Born in 1893 in Vizovice (present-day Czech Republic), Hába moved between Prague, Vienna, and Berlin from 1914 to 1923, when he permanently settled in Prague.  Beginning in 1924, Hába offered courses in quarter-tone music at the Prague Conservatory; these developed into a full-fledged department of microtonal music, which lasted from 1934 to 1949, although its operation was interrupted by the war.

Jiří Vysloužil’s claim in Grove Music Online that Hába “may justly be regarded as the originator of the use of quarter- and sixth-tones in Western art music” is dubious in the extreme, considering the contemporaneous endeavors of composers such as Ivan Vyschnegradsky, Willi Moellendorff, and Richard Stein, not to mention the considerably earlier experiments of Jörg Mager and Julián Carrillo. But Hába’s success in propagating microtonal music within the mainstream of European “classical” music is likely unsurpassed.  Beyond his work as a composer, Hába oversaw the construction of new instruments for the performance of microtonal music, including three types of quarter-tone piano (1924–31), a quarter-tone (1928) and a sixth-tone (1936) harmonium, and a quarter-tone clarinet (1924), trumpet (1931) and guitar (1943).

This lovely mid-century suite for trombone quartet comprises five short movements, marked Maestoso, Andante cantabile, Allegretto scherzando, Moderato cantabile, and Allegro risoluto.  Hába’s music, by turns magisterial, elegiac, and playful, demonstrates irrefutably the expressive viability of quarter-tone composition.

February 25, 2010, 1:14pm

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Julián Carrillo: Preludio a Colón (1924)

From the album Julian Carrillo (date unknown)

Born in Mexico City in 1875, Julián Carrillo is a fascinating and little-known composer of the 20th century.  Around 1895, Carrillo began using his violin to experiment with microtonal intervals— distances between notes smaller than the semitone or minor second which is the smallest difference between two pitches in the conventional Western system of tuning.  The realization that a virtually infinite world of tones lay dormant between the notes of the equal-tempered scale took on revelatory significance for Carrillo, who christened his discovery “el sonido trece” (“the thirteenth sound”).  Carrillo’s experiments in microtonality were among the first efforts in what would become a major strain of new musical investigations in the 20th century— perhaps first brought to public awareness by Ferruccio Busoni in his Outline of a New Aesthetics of Music, written in 1907.  (N.B.: The link is to the 1911 translation of the text, which is faulty, but alas, the only English version available.)

Carrillo’s music met with great public success during his lifetime.  Championed by Leopold Stokowski from the 1920s on, his works were premiered in several cities in the United States.  In 1930, Carrillo returned to Mexico from abroad and formed the “Orquesta Sonido 13,” a group dedicated to his microtonal compositions.

He had a set of 15 microtonal pianos built for him and exhibited at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels— the same event which saw the famous Poème électronique of Varese, Xenakis, and Corbusier.  Carrillo’s “metamorphic pianos” were admired by other microtonal composers such as Alois Hába and Ivan Wyschnegradsky.

Carrillo also developed a new system of notation meant to rationalize musical production and make it easier to write microtonal intervals.  Like the many other efforts in this vein undertaken in the 20th century, Carrillo’s innovations did not catch on.

The title of this piece translates as “Prelude to Columbus.”  It is written for soprano, flute, guitar, violin, octavina, and harp.

December 09, 2009, 5:31pm