Program

1 Tritriadic Chimes Bells in Just Intonation (2001)
by Terumi Narushima

2 Half Empty/Half Full (2002)
for 3 percussionists playing 60 wine-glasses
by Amanda Cole;
Performers: Kim Moyes, Jarred Underwood, John Dewhurst

3 Tempered Dekanies (2001)
for 2-channel playback
by Greg Schiemer

4 Music for Pure Waves Bass Drum and Acoustic Pendulums
For one player with electronics and percussion (1980)
by Alvin Lucier
performer: Matthew Bieniek

5 Tear (1999) for 4-channel tape
by Shahrokh Yadegari

6 Improvisation on a 53-note scale (2002) for Diamond Metallophone
by Christiaan van der Vyver
performers: Christiaan van der Vyver, Dale Gorfinkel

7 Plus Minus (2002)
by Jon Drummond
performer: Jon Drummond

8 "On the Carpet of Leaves illuminated by the moon" (2000)
for koto and pure wave oscillator
by Alvin Lucier
Terumi Narushima (koto)

9 TampaTablaTarangalila (2002)
for Tabla, MIDI Tool Box and Bol Pads
by Greg Schiemer & Girish Makwana Girish Makwana (tabla & electronics)

This program of microtonal works features conventional instruments exploring minute fragments of the pitch continuum or played in extended tuning systems both equal as well as just, together with experimental instruments like diamond metallophone, tuned wine-glasses, virtual carillon and other electronic systems built to explore harmonic terrain rediscovered by Partch, a musical legacy as old as Ptolemy yet still used in many parts of the globe.

The last half of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented transformation in the way musicians create, produce and distribute their work. Much of this change can be attributed to the revolution in electronics. The transformation has also helped to reinstate tuning diversity as it once existed in music, a diversity that gradually became lost in the process of technological development over many centuries.

Just intonation (or JI) tuning is an attribute of diverse tuning systems that developed in early civilisations and which still survive in various contemporary musical cultures and folk traditions throughout the world. Just intonation tunings are characterised by a vast palette of musical intervals (or separation between two audible pitches) where the intervals are non-uniform and where the natural harmonic series can be used to describe the size of each interval. The development of western harmonic music over the past three centuries coincided with the gradual disappearance of just intonation tuning and the eventual dominance of a single tuning system based on twelve equal divisions of the octave, known as 12-tone equal temperament (or 12-tET). Because their difference tones are in phase, just intervals sound purer and stronger than their closest 12-tone equal tempered approximations.

In the 20th century, composer and instrument-builder Harry Partch (1900-1974) revived interest in just intonation. Through his reading of the theoretician Helmholtz, Partch gained a new understanding of early Pythagorean theorists and formulated a new theoretical basis for western harmony based on just intonation ⁱ. In addition many other composers have also been attracted by qualities of tunings found in a broad range of traditions including Pythagorean, Indian, Celtic, Persian, Arabic, North African, Indonesian and Chinese. Many of these composers found it necessary to develop new software ⁱⁱ or build new purpose-built musical instruments, both electronic ⁱⁱⁱ and non-electronic ^iv in order to create music using their own particular variety of just tuning.

On-going development of tuning theories by other theorists such as Wilson ^v, Chalmers ^vi and Sethares ^vii has established new connections between diverse music traditions and current musical experimentation. Wilson's theories and instrument designs, which embrace historical tunings used in various epochs and in many parts of the world ^viii, have already had an impact on a number of areas of contemporary composition as exemplified in the work of experimental electronic composer and instrument-maker Burt ^ix, rock guitarist Catler ^x, composer-performer-and-instrument-maker Grady ^xi, and film music composer Taylor ^xii.

In this program, Jon Drummond's Plus Minus is an example of music written in non-12-tET. It is in 19-tET, a tuning system advocated by theorist Joseph Yasser in the 1920s. Like 3rds and 6ths produced in 31-tET, another system advocated by theorists like Vicentino as early as the 16th century and Helmholtz and Fokker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth, 19-tET 3rds and 6ths are close approximations to just intervals closer even than than 12-tET 3rds. Other composers working in 19-tET include Joel Mandelbaum and Graham Hair. Bill Wesley's Array Orchestra is also built around this system.

Partch's tonality diamond is the spring board for two works in the program. One is Christiaan van der Vyver's Improvisation on a 53-note scale for the diamond metallophone; the other is Amanda Cole's Half Empty/Half Full written for wine-glasses tuned with water, a method of tuning derived from a south Indian musical genre known as jalatharangam. Following Partch's practice, both works represent pitchs and intervals using fractions where each pitch is defined as an interval above the tonic of a scale; the pitch is represented by the number above (numerator), while the tonic is represented by the number below (denominator). The colour scheme used in both instrument designs is used to represent tuning limits, a scheme based theoretically on odd-numbered prime harmonics. Partch devised this to classify pitches and intervallic relationships in terms of their distance from the fundamental of the natural harmonic series. Traditional Pythagorean intervals are 3-limit; i.e. the highest prime present in the just ratio is 3.

Terumi Narushima's Tritriadic Chimes: bells in just intonation takes it starting point from contemporary tuning theorist John Chalmers. Tritriadic scales are 7 note scales generated using 3 harmonic seeds. One example is the western diatonic scale generated using the 4th 5th and 6th harmonics as the generators. The seeds form three major triads based on the tonic, dominant and subdominant. Chalmers' tritriadic algorithm introduces the possibility of new just intonation scales using other harmonics as seeds. Tritriadic Chimes uses tunings a variety of tuning limits based on 5th 7th 11th and even the 13th harmonic and combines these with impossible bell timbres created using the same harmonics.

Greg Schiemer's Tempered Dekanies takes it tuning from the combination product set method devised by contemporary tuning theorist and instrument designer Erv Wilson. This method forms scales by multiplying combinations of a set of harmonics; the size of the scale is determined by the number of harmonics. A 6-note scale (called a hexany) is formed using a set of 4 harmonics; for example, using the 1st 3rd 5th and 7th harmonics as generators, the combination product of every pair forms a scale consisting of the harmonics 3 (1x3) 5 (1x5) 7 (etc) 15 21 and 35. A dekany is a 10-note scale formed using a set of 5 harmonic generators. The property of these scales is that they have no tonic, unlike the Partch tonality diamond, yet groups of pitches in the scale still contain complementary major and minor relationships.

Shahrokh Yadegari's Tear emphasises links that exist between new music and traditional tuning; Yadegari, a former student of Tod Machover at MIT, recently ported Richard Moore's C-Music to Linux; he is also founder of the Persian music society in the US and is a traditional santur player. Tear plays with musical contrast between the sound produced by traditional vocal techniques and sound produced by algorithms of his own invention. The work has been performed at several International Computer Music Festivals.

The wild card in the program pack is the work of Alvin Lucier one of the leading figures in experimental music in the 60s and 70s and not a person one normally associates with contemporary tuning theory. There are in fact two of his works in the program: Music for Pure Waves Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums and On a Carpet of Leaves. These are both very much about new alternatives approach to tuning even though there is no strict adherence to the principles of JI or non-12-ET. These works serve to remind us that tuning is not simply a question of pitch relationships, with a severe case of numerology gone mad, but very much about other musical and psychoacoustic phenomena such as resonance and beating.

Tritriadic Chimes Bells in Just Intonation (2001)
by Terumi Narushima
First presented at Microfest 2001 at Pomona College, Claremont California, Tritriadic Chimes is a sound installation consisting of a series of short pieces to be played from a bell tower. Excerpts of the work will be heard as musical interludes throughout this concert. Bell sounds have been synthesized using harmonics found in the sound spectrum of a tuned carillon bell, an East Asian barrel profile bell as well as other actual bells. Virtual bells without cultural antecedents have also been designed. The work is a functional statement about the imposition of mechanical time. In the piece, time that is defined by clockwork is replaced by a more fluid notion of temporality that is associated with the dream state.


Half Empty/Half Full (2002)
for 3 percussionists playing 60 wine-glasses
by Amanda Cole
Half Empty Half Full is a percussion trio for sixty glasses tuned in Just Intonation. Each percussionist plays a set up of 20 glasses. Each glass is tuned with water in a scale with 29 notes per octave spread over two octaves. Notes are grouped according to their tuning limits - i.e the odd-numbered prime harmonic to which the pitch is related - using a different colour to represent each limit.



Tempered Dekanies (2001)
for 2-channel playback
by Greg Schiemer
Tempered Dekanies is based on the dekany, a 10-note scale invented by Erv Wilson. A variant of a Risset software instrument is used in conjunction with a simple attack-sustain-decay pitch envelope to produce microtonal pitch shifts that gradually change the beat speed over the duration of each note. Above all I wanted to hear these unique scales speak the language of the person who invented them and adapt my musical thinking for this to happen.


Music for Pure Waves Bass Drum and Acoustic Pendulums
For one player with electronics and percussion (1980)
by Alvin Lucier
Electronically generated sound waves excite the heads of large bass drums, setting into motion ultra-light pendulums which are suspended in front of the drums. The rhythms created as the tips of the pendulums strike the head s of the drums are determined by the pitch and loudness of the waves, the lengths of the pendulums and the resonsant characteristics of the drums themselves


Tear (1999)
for 4-channel tape
by Shahrokh Yadegari
Tear is a study on the relationship between timbre and melody. It is based on a melodic improvisation by Mohammad Reza Shajarian, one of the greatest living vocalists of Iran, in the mode of "Bayat-e Tork" (simlar to the western scale with the 7th degree flattened a quartertone). The piece first establishes a mood in which the vocal melody would ambiguously enter, however, as the piece progresses, both opposing qualities - the traditional beauty of the melody and the mechanical precision of the accompanying timbres - keep their own character yet move in the same direction. The preservation of the original feeling of the vocalist and the content of the poem by Hafez (Persian poet of the 13th century) were the initial assumptions and difficulties of this study. All the sounds, except the voice of M.R. Shajarian, have been synthesised by the Recursive Granular Synthesis method based on fractals, devised by the author.


Improvisation on a 53-note scale (2002)
for Diamond Metallophone
by Christiaan van der Vyver
Improvisation on a 53-note scale was created to explore some of the melodic and harmonic possibilities of the diamond metallophone. The metallophone's design is an extension of Partch's tonality diamond and grew from a similar desire to realise compositions that cannot easily be reproduced on standard instruments. The alignment of keys on intersecting diagonals of the diamond represent complementary axes of pitches on the harmonic and subharmonic series. The diamond metallophone has more than one tonal axis unlike Partch's system, which is symmetrical about a single axis. In this improvisation the performers play with tonal ambiguities of the instrument in response to the beat tones produced.



Plus Minus (2002)
by Jon Drummond
This interactive work realised with Max MSP involves the generation of sinusoids in real time. It explores aspects of equal temperament based on 19 divisions of the octave.


"On the Carpet of Leaves illuminated by the moon" (2000)
for koto and pure wave oscillator
by Alvin Lucier
The title of the work is taken from the title of the chapter in Italo Calvino's novel If on a winter's night a traveler. On Page 199 one reads:

Tampa TablaTarangalila (2002)
for Tabla, MIDI Tool Box and Bol Pads
by Greg Schiemer & Girish Makwana
Off and on over the past two years, Girish and myself have been involved in developing an electronic implementation of traditional tabla tarang, the traditional art of tuned tabla represented by the mastery of Pandit Kamlesh Misra. This project drew as much on Girish's experience as a classical tabla player as it did on my own research interest in tuning systems and musical instrument design based on microcontroller technology. The research project in its final state would have involved an interface with many more than the 3 percussion pads used in this performance. It would also have involved the use of tuning limits beyond 5-limit tuning typical of Indian classical music.

In 1999 Girish, a Masters of Music from the Maharajah Sayajirao University of Baroda, became the first candidate from an Indian classical music background to enrol in the PhD in composition at Sydney Conservatorium. His accomplishments as a musician are all the more remarkable because of his caste status and also because he has a disability caused by poliomylitis contracted as an infant. When his scholarship support was revoked by an incoming state government in his home state of Gujurat, India, he was unable to remain enrolled. Yet despite his circumstances the Australian Department of Immigration cancelled his student visa on September 2nd 2002.

The title is a play on the words Tabla Tarang and the word Tarangalila which means illusion; Tampa needs no explanation. For the past decade the imaginable seems to have triumphed over imagination. So we bring forward a performance of this dream, albeit prematurely, in case it is the only chance we will ever have to realise it.