Public Rituals

Here’s a brand new piece of microtonal music — “The Triumphal Procession of Nebuchadnezzar“:

I may make a few dozen more tiny edits — I usually do — but basically it’s ready for public consumption. The tuning is 26-note equal temperament (26EDO for you tuning geeks). I didn’t know much about Nebuchadnezzar when I thought of the title, I just knew I wanted a reference to a Babylonian king. Various things happen during the course of the procession, none of them reassuringly familiar. If you imagine teams of slaves carrying an enormous golden idol past the cheering crowds, you won’t be far wrong.

Bent or Broken

Tonight, at a party, I found myself commenting to a friend that most of the people who are making microtonal music just aren’t very good. In many cases, they seem to have latched onto microtonal composing as a handy cover for the fact that they have only very marginal ideas about what musical expression and creativity are, or can be.

Am I being too brutal? Maybe. But again and again, as I listen to the hideous thrashing noises that have been uploaded by this or that microtonalist, I find myself imagining, with something akin to embarrassment, the scene in which the guy is hunched over his equipment recording this stuff while his girlfriend, standing behind him, rolls her eyes in pained and stricken disbelief, clearly wondering, “What am I doing hooked up with this loser?”

There are happy exceptions. One is Prent Rodgers. He’s doing provocative and spicy things with alternate tunings, and he’s using the tunings to enhance compositions that would stand up and be listenable (though in some cases quite different and less effective) if they were in standard tuning.

In what follows, perhaps it would be well to bear in mind that my taste in music is far more conservative than my taste in politics. I love Bach, Haydn, Beethoven (well, some of Beethoven), Schubert, and Brahms. I find Shostakovich and Prokofiev challenging but rewarding. I have no use whatever for Babbitt, Cage, or Stockhausen. The entire school of 20th century composition that attempted to demolish the ideas of melody, harmony, and regular rhythmic pulse I regard as a swarm of arrogant poseurs and con men, not as artists.

Having said that….

The website of the American Festival of Microtonal Music is a complete failure. Not because the site design is graphically awful — that would be easy to forgive if the music were good. Some of the videos of performances require a special plug-in, but I didn’t bother to download it, because after I went to the page of YouTube videos on their site, I could see no reason to burden my hard drive or browser with another plug-in. The audio in the YouTube video of a trio (flute, oboe, bassoon) was badly recorded, the piece was in a harsh and uninteresting modern idiom, and the use of microtonality was … well, it just sounded like occasional intonation problems. Other YouTube videos on the same page didn’t play at all.

The winners of the 2010 UnTwelve Competition are well worth listening to, though I can’t help feeling that somebody ought to have taken the time to explain to these composers

Is That a Piano?

I’m pretty sure you won’t know quite what to make of this. (I’m not sure I know what to make of it.) But I think a good way to approach it may be to listen first and then read about it after you’ve heard it. So here’s the track:

To answer your first question, no, that’s not a real piano. Building a real piano that would play those notes would cost, I’m sure, a quarter of a million bucks, if not more. Nor is it sampled. It’s ModArtt PianoTeq 4, a software-based physical modeling instrument. (And scary good, I might add.)

If it were a real piano with enough keys, you might be able to play the whole piece. I’m not sure. There are a couple of three-handed moments. But I did try to make it sound quasi-playable.

You want to know about the tuning, though, don’t you? It’s 19-tone equal temperament. You’d need a piano with a gray key between each pair of white keys, which would mean learning, oh, a few new fingerings. The fifths in 19 are not quite as good as those in our standard 12-note tuning, which is why the opening sounds faintly honky-tonk. But once you’ve listened to this tuning for a minute or two, you hardly notice.

I sort of know what some of the chords are — the obvious ones, anyhow. Other places I just trusted my ear. Chopin? Debussy? Or just a train wreck, you be the judge. If you want a title, I think I’ll call it “Koi Pond.”

Season’s Greetings

One of my Facebook friends posted a beautiful rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” for harp and oboe (probably sampled, but done with great care). My beady little brain said, “Heck, why not?” So here’s my take on the same tune. It’s … a little different, and certainly not as professionally produced as my friend’s, but I only spent three hours on it, so I don’t think I have anything to apologize for.

This happens to be in 31-note equal temperament, but nobody would be likely to notice the fact, as there are no outside notes at all. The only perceptible result of using that tuning — if it’s perceptible at all — is that the thirds and sixths sound a little more pure than we’re used to.

Music Theory Meets Geometry

The theory of harmony that serves to organize most of the music of Europe and America (and increasingly of the rest of the world) is built on a couple of basic assumptions — axioms, if you will. First, there are exactly 12 pitch classes (A, B-flat, B, C, C-sharp, and so on). Second, the pitches relate to one another within a one-dimensional space. That is, they’re laid out in a line, which conventionally runs from side to side with lower pitches to the left and higher pitches to the right.

The relations among pitch classes, which are what harmony theory is about, all take place within this one-dimensional matrix. Octave equivalence (transposition) and the Circle of Fifths introduce wrinkles, but the wrinkles can easily be mapped onto the one-dimensional layout.

To be sure, the frequency spectrum, in which pitches are defined by their number of vibrations per second, is one-dimensional. The fact that harmony theory defines relations in one dimension is not wrong. But it’s a limitation conceptually.

Guitarists play in two dimensions. Because of the layout of the fretboard, they sometimes discover scale and chord relationships that keyboard players fail to notice. They do it by moving geometrical patterns across from one string to another, as well as up or down the neck of the guitar.

Harmony theory in two dimensions turns out to be quite interesting. When we add the possibility that there may be more than 12 pitch classes within the octave, matters become very interesting indeed.

The ancestor of my new Z-Board is the Z-tar, a MIDI interface designed for guitarists by Harvey Starr. The Z-Board goes a bit further

Fun with Isomorphism

Every musical instrument has limitations, not only in terms of its range and timbre but in terms of the mechanical possibilities it provides. If you want to be able to play chords, a clarinet would be a poor choice — as would any wind instrument with the possible exception of the bagpipes or the harmonica. Conversely, if you want to hear tones that will sustain indefinitely, don’t write for piano.

If you want to be able to play more than 12 notes per octave, your options will be even more limited. A number of software-based synthesizers will make wonderful sounds while producing whatever tuning you can devise, but playing any of them from a MIDI keyboard will present some unusual challenges. Figuring out how to finger scales and chord voicings for a tuning with 31 notes per octave while playing a standard 12-note-per-octave black-and-white keyboard … well, it’s possible. I’ve done it a lot. But it’s a brain-twister.

Having done a bit of research over the years on alternative MIDI controllers, this fall I ordered a Z-Board from Starr Labs. I was aware that it wouldn’t have or be absolutely everything I could ever desire, but I was also pretty sure it was the best instrument I was going to find. It arrived yesterday.

The Z-Board has quite a lot of software smarts packed inside, but that’s not why I wanted it. The keyboard is a 12-by-24 array of velocity-sensitive buttons, and this array has the enormous advantage that it’s isomorphic. That is, a given chord or scale has exactly the same shape, no matter what key you start on. (The array of black and white key tops is arbitrary, and in fact the pattern shown in the photo is not the final arrangement that I settled on — it’s based on an earlier diagram I had sent them. Oops. We’ll get that sorted out in a couple of months. No hurry.)

Any key on the Z-Board can be programmed to send any MIDI note number you want. In fact, the features are more comprehensive than that: You can

Keys Without Locks

Today’s software instruments can quite easily play notes in any arbitrary tuning system that you might devise. But those of us who go in for this sort of thing soon confront a serious problem: The standard pattern of white and black keys found on just about all commercially available MIDI master keyboards is utterly inadequate for playing most alternate tunings.

As long as you’re content to limit yourself to 12 notes per octave, you can get along nicely with a standard MIDI keyboard. The moment you stray beyond the boundaries of this rather narrow conception of a scale, you’re in trouble. Fingering becomes a nightmare.

One of the better resources I’ve found is Starr Labs. I’ve ordered their Z-Board keyboard, and it should arrive next week. I was tempted to buy their U-648, but it’s more expensive. The Z-Board seems an effective compromise.

Coincidentally, this morning I got an email from a fellow named Bogdan Constantinescu, who is trying to round up 20 buyers to underwrite the cost of producing 20 keyboards of a new model called the Terpstra 280. If you’re considering acquiring this type of gear, you may want to check it out. I don’t know Bogdan personally, and I can’t vouch for the stability of this business enterprise, but the design looks good.

Hexagonal key layouts are employed in the Terpstra, the U-648, and the C-Thru Axis. The Z-Board, in contrast, uses a checkerboard grid. The jury is still out on which layout is better for a universal keyboard. Hexagons may be better if you want to be able to slide a fingertip from one key to the next, as there are more directly adjacent keys. But my suspicion is that the human brain has an easier time grasping chord and scale shapes on a square grid.

The Terpstra’s keys are in elevated tiers, so you would only be able to slide a finger down, not up. Nonetheless, I feel elevated tiers are a very desirable feature, because they provide better hand positioning and tactile feedback. I’m a bit skeptical of interfaces like the Madrona Labs Soundplane, which I haven’t played, and the Haken Continuum, which I have, because they provide less tactile feedback. The nerves of the fingertips are exquisitely sensitive, and for me, tactile feedback is more important than the ability to slide freely.

Shirin Dances

This summer I decided to write a few pieces of music inspired by fantasy novels. If nothing else, this project gives me an excuse to read fantasy novels. I had never encountered Guy Gavriel Kay before, but I was quite impressed by his two-volume The Sarantine Mosaic. It’s set in a city and culture that is unabashedly borrowed from Medieval Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire. Technically the story is fantasy, but there’s not really much magic in it. If you like novels that are heavily laden with palace intrigue, you’ll probably like it a lot.

One of the main characters is a dancer named Shirin. She’s a celebrity, the star dancer of one of the leading chariot-racing teams. We never actually get to see her dance in the course of the novel, but from the fact that the chariot racers are high-spirited and face death in the arena on a daily basis, we can imagine that her dances would not be sedate. She might start with something slow and sultry, but before very long the men would want to see some moves. There would be baubles, bangles, and beads of sweat. Veils would flutter and probably fall to the ground, revealing … well, intricate gymnastic gyrations, at the very least.

Greek and Turkish music is often in 7/4 time, so that was obviously the place to start. 31-note equal temperament gave me some suitably exotic harmonies and melodies. The result: “Shirin Dances.” Here it is:

I don’t usually do pieces with such sweeping tempo changes, and the list of tempo changes was the very first thing I devised, before starting to create the music. How to keep the piece from falling apart at the seams was a puzzle in itself. If I’ve succeeded, possibly you can get a taste of the effect Shirin’s dancing would have had on those chariot jockeys.

Concatenatin’ Keys

Thanks to software-based synthesis, composing and recording microtonal music is easier today than it has ever been. Ever. Like, in the history of the human race. Playing microtonal music remains a great deal more difficult.

The tricky bit is, you need a keyboard to send MIDI notes to the computer. I mean, unless you’re planning to type notes into a Csound score, which is even more laborious. The moment you stray outside of the standard 12-note-per-octave keyboard, your options become almost insanely restricted. A few tiny companies build alternative keyboards, but they’re both expensive and, in most cases, designed in odd ways, because they’re being built not by people who hope to make money but by people who have a Grand Vision of the Future of Music. And their grand vision is not, in general, widely shared.

Up to now, I’ve been struggling along with a standard keyboard (an M-Audio Axiom 61, not that that matters). I have pretty much taught my brain to find chord and scale shapes on this keyboard, in tunings with 17 or 19 or 22 or 31 equal-tempered notes per octave. It’s a brain-twister, but not impossible.

This week I hit the wall. I noticed that a piece I’m working on in 31ET had too many melodic phrases that meandered up and down in single scale steps. I more or less improvise these melodies while the sequencer plays, and I can glue my fingers to about six scale steps (three with each hand) and play a line that’s at least modestly interesting. Figuring out which key to play in order to do a larger melodic leap

Emotional Infrastructure

I have a wonderful idea. There’s a major creative project that I would love to undertake. It would be expensive (but I can afford it). It would be time-consuming (but I have plenty of time). It would require great technical skill (but I have the skill set). It would mean months — no, make that years — of hard work (but I enjoy hard work). This project would allow hundreds or thousands of people to experience music in a new way. Though it’s not for me to say, I would hope and expect that many of them would find the music stimulating and satisfying.

Sounds great, right? What could possibly get in the way?

The difficulty is this: In order to follow through on the huge amount of work that’s involved, I will need to have a fairly consistent, reliable source of emotional support and encouragement. Someone who listens to the music as I’m developing it and tells me it’s good, or notices things that aren’t quite working and suggests improvements. Someone to talk to when I get discouraged (which is often). Someone who