Conference Agenda

Microtonality is easy to ignore. Its daunting notational systems and complexities of performance practice have led to its general exclusion from the canons of performance, making it all too rare to experience in a live setting. Likewise, microtonality is difficult to fit into scholarly norms–existing methodologies, which most often center score-based approaches to twelve-tone equal temperament, often become tedious or even unrewarding when adapted microtonally. And for those interested in learning about microtonal musics, methodologies built upon comparisons to the 100-cent benchmarks of twelve-tone equal temperament fall flat. Such methods fail to capture the very aspects of microtonal music that motivate people to study it. By focusing instead on microtonalities’ sounds and the experience of listening, this joint study takes a different epistemological approach.

We present six papers on musics before 1730 and since 1980 that attest to the primacy of listening in engaging with a wide range of microtonalities. Bringing our perspectives as composers, performers, musicologists, and theorists to our listenings, we center sounds and their means of transmission—be they electronic, instrumental, vocal, or otherwise—as inroads towards understanding the workings of the musics in question. We embrace the affective implications of microtonal listenings and recognize the importance of both the objective and the subjective in our methodologies, which range from acoustical analysis to autoethnography and from sound resynthesis to archival study. Our session will conclude with responses from the composer-pedagogue Julia Werntz and the ethnomusicologist Kate Galloway, followed by an open conversation to consider how a listening-centered approach can inform the future of microtonal composition, performance, and scholarship alike.

Nicola Vicentino’s explorations of the affective power of minute musical intervals were remarkable even by the standards of the Italian Mannerist avant-garde. Yet despite his pleas for his successors to “greatly exalt” his reworking of the three musical genera of antiquity through contrapuntal composition, his four extant enharmonic madrigals have all too often been seen rather than heard. On the one hand, this is unsurprising: the dot notation used to present this music in L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (1555) is difficult to understand, and his technical descriptions of interval sizes are convoluted and inconsistent. He seemed, however, to anticipate these difficulties, declaring that “the practitioner who wishes to learn to sing these [enharmonic intervals] should avail [themself] of instruments” to let the ear be their guide (trans. Maniates 1996). Vicentino even designed bespoke keyboard instruments for this very purpose. But in the absence of a reconstructed archicembalo or archiorgano, what would it take to learn and perform his unaccompanied vocal works by ear today?

In this paper I explore the possibility of coaching musicians without microtonal singing experience through recording and performance of Vicentino’s enharmonic madrigals by listening to two MIDI archicembali as well as synthesizer tracks to facilitate the learning process. I begin by discussing the production of a performing edition of these compositions which replaces Vicentino’s original dot notation with double flats that are friendlier to the modern eye and more meaningfully represent the extended meantone interpretation of his second tuning system. I then unpack my experiences listening to and singing along with these digital instruments and their wide range of timbral possibilities. I survey Vicentino’s affective descriptions of the intervals his vocal works require (from the “sweet and very suave” minor enharmonic diesis to the “lively and tense” proximate perfect octave) and offer an appraisal of their utility in singing his music. I conclude by considering the implications of this project for microtonal historical performance practice writ large—namely that by making full use of available technological tools, it can be easier today to learn such music by ear than its creators would have ever imagined.

9:25 AM

Performances of Easley Blackwood’s Twelve Microtonal Etudes (1980) are notably difficult to organize; the pieces are written using twelve different equal-tempered tuning systems and an extensive set of instrumental timbres that achieve a “captivating” but “outrageously sensible” musical outcome for listeners (Rapaport 1980). Blackwood encouraged others to take on the performance of these etudes (Blackwood 1994) but also warned organizers that “execution by conventional acoustic instruments is not advised” since their access to microtonal tunings is generally less precise (Blackwood 1982). While attempts have been made to recreate the methods of Blackwood’s original recordings for performance on software synthesizers (Leinecker and Ayers 2022), the allure of a performance that employs the authentic sonic effect of traditional instruments has led some musicians to arrange these pieces for twelve-tone equal temperament. Matthew Sheeran’s recent efforts to record Blackwood’s etudes on conventional instruments aligns with this sentiment to a certain degree; Sheeran has orchestrated each of the pieces for a different instrumental ensemble, translating the microtonal tunings to twelve-tone equal tuning for the purposes of recording. However, Sheeran goes beyond a simple twelve-tone rendition of the etudes; by recording each instrument in isolation, he is able to retune their output back to the original microtonal tunings using pitch-correction software while still accessing the timbral qualities of acoustic instruments.

Sheeran’s process plays out a type of recursive translation (also called reverse translation, bi-directional translation, or round-trip translation) that mimics efforts in other fields (e.g. attempts to assess the efficacy of machine translation systems, discussed in Zaanen and Zwarts 2006, among many others). The resulting recording provides a unique experience for listeners; the combination of timbral authenticity (gained by recording on conventional instruments) and engineered microtonal tuning specificity (achieved through pitch-correction software) recalls Blackwood’s preference for music that is both familiar and “alien” (Blackwood 1985; Hook 2007). This presentation examines how these performances (and the audible artifacts of Sheeran’s recording process they contain) can capture Blackwood’s microtonal intent while providing listeners a novel mode of engagement that differs from the original 1980 recordings of the etudes.

This paper argues that Johann Jakob Froberger’s (1616–67) keyboard music exploits the out-of-tune sonic effects of meantone temperaments for expressive ends. Froberger employs progressions that may appear anodyne when considering pitches only in equal temperament. In actuality, these progressions involve increasingly out-of-tune keys under meantone. For example, in “Méditation faite sur ma mort future,” Froberger ruminates on his future death (Cypess 2012). This meditation’s seemingly conventional materials belie the existential angst of its program. However, a rapid tumbling through the sharp side of the circle of fifths in the meditation alerts the temperamental ear. The final cadence at the double bar in F♯ major is resolved in terms of harmonic dissonance, but hardly gives the impression of closure, agonizing audibly in its meantone-induced, discordant delivery.

Froberger emerges at the juncture between meantone and well-temperament at the turn of the eighteenth century (Jorgensen 1977; but see Wang 2012). Meantone temperaments are well-known in historically-informed performance circles for the “absolute beauty” of its close-to-pure thirds (Beebe 2020). However, this beauty is only made possible on a twelve-note keyboard by enfolding a “wolf fifth,” an extremely narrow, detuned fifth. Consequently, keys further down the circle contain out-of-tune intervals, leading some to label these areas “unusable” (Rampe 2003; Lindley 2006). Froberger’s characteristic enharmonicism and use of the wolf fifth present problems to a tuner, leading some to propose equal temperament or split-key manuals as solutions (Stembridge 1992; Yamamoto 2015). I advance the opposite claim: Froberger’s music indicates an awareness of these “unusable” keys and employs discordance for expressive effect.

To this end, I develop a method of graphing discordance that charts and listens to changes in out-of-tuneness over time. First, I reduce the meditation into a series of triadic events according to historical and modern treatises (Zarlino 1558; Bernhard 1657; Blackwood 1985). Then, I quantify each event’s out-of-tuneness by the total deviation from pure by cents of each constituent third and fifth. A plot of these coordinates charts a contour of out-of-tuneness across the duration of a piece of music that implicates a structure of discordance that is partially independent from harmonic dissonance.

10:00 AM

When considering Bach’s music, many analytical methods assume both 12-tone equal temperament (12TET) and a single functional pitch standard. Though 12TET was a valid option for keyboard instruments (Rasch 2002), meantone- and well-temperaments were still in use (Barbour 1947). This latter set of temperaments produced a variety of intervals with a range of sonic effects and varying degrees of stylistic acceptability (Gann 2019). The situation is complicated in mixed ensemble music for two reasons: first, non-keyboard instruments had different methods for tuning and tempering (Haynes 1991); second, different instruments were designed with different pitch standards, potentially displacing any tuning or temperament by up to a minor third across the ensemble (Haynes 1995). Furthermore, these standards were applied differently for different locations and instruments, allowing for a wide variety of realizations for any given composition.

This paper synthesizes historical temperament, tuning, and timbre research to describe three hypothetical performances of BWV 21/3, “Seufzer, Tränen, Kummer, Not”: a modern performance, a performance circa 1710 Weimar, and a performance circa 1720 Leipzig. BWV 21/3 only uses continuo (for our purposes, the organ), a vocal solo, and oboe obbligato. Organs played at the pitch standard Chorton, whereas oboes played at Cammerton, which sounded a whole step lower. For the two to play together, either the oboe part had to be transposed a whole step up or the organ part a whole step down. Both the Weimar and Leipzig editions place the vocalist in C minor, but the instruments are shifted: Weimar used C minor Chorton/D minor Cammerton, whereas Leipzig used B-flat minor Chorton/C minor Cammerton. After considering the technical requirements for these instruments to perform in these keys and the consequent sounds they produce (for the organ, via temperament; the oboe, via fingerings), this paper zooms in on the Neapolitan sixth-chord in the first measure and discuss how these differences in pitch, tuning, temperament, and timbre affects the listening experience of different performances.

10:25 AM

Sound art is often taken as a negation of music, relying on its scale and sense of place to encourage an immersive listening experience opposed to musical norms (Demers 2010; Kim-Cohen 2016; Novak 2013). Ryoji Ikeda’s matrix (part 1) at first seems to fit such a description—it consists entirely of sine tones, saturating frequency bandwidths too narrow for any pitches to be stably recognizable. But the sine tones’ density creates audible pulses, which listeners can organize into meters and polyrhythms. Because the sine waves are spatialized, they quiver as listeners move their heads. Consequently, the pulses are unstable—while this makes them difficult to entrain to, compared to metric theories’ usual repertoires (London 2012; Jakubowski 2018), it also encourages listeners to conjure new meters, thus “metering” acoustical beating (Butler 2006), as they move through the installation’s spatial layout (Saccomano 2020) or apply selective attention (Fujioka et al 2014; Kondoh et al 2021).

I claim that in matrix, the apparent thick microtonal surface in fact affords listeners the opportunity for metric entrainment. Contrary to accounts that take Ikeda at his word when interpreting his supposed reliance on acoustics and mathematics (Cecchetto 2021; Hui et al 2020), my reading demonstrates that Ikeda’s installations are in fact rooted in conventions around musical meter. As a case study, this paper presents an analysis of the installation’s sixth large section. All tones sound at integer frequencies (in hertz) between A440 and A451. At any given time, there are 2 to 4 sine tones sounding, creating acoustical beating at 1 to 6 frequencies. I focus on a passage a third of the way through, in which we can hear crossfading from a steady pulse to a 3:2 polyrhythm, whose traces we can project onto emerging septuplets. My analysis demonstrates both that listeners can take agency in constructing meters, and that Ikeda’s microtonal sine waves afford more than a pure experience of tone. No pulse dominates in matrix; rather, the speakers’ conflicting streams allow listeners to construct a metric hierarchy by moving their heads, focusing on certain subdivisions, and applying their enculturation into metric convention.

10:45 AM

Moments of disorientation are vital. —Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

How often does the excitement of applying an analytical schemata to a piece of music unintentionally mask our perception? Musical analysis may certainly assist us in better understanding structures within any given piece. There is an endless arsenal of theoretical frameworks one may choose to distill the intricacies of a musical experience into basic elements from which the piece is claimed to arise. Yet, such a logical conclusion may secretly contain within it certain biases with the very instruments of measurement—e.g. the ear of a seasoned listener, the habits of expectation, and relativistic juxtaposition of various musical/sonic continua—we so heavily rely upon in formulating our conclusions. To call into question the vary basis upon which we collect our phenomenological perceptions begins the process of queering, or skewing, the normative telos we often project onto our experience. Ideally, by releasing the strong grip upon a singular narrative framework, we allow the peripheral information to seep into the experience and no longer exclude the ‘noise’ from the signal, instead realizing that there is truly no ‘noise’ at all.

Sara Ahmed describes a ‘shift in dimension’ that facilities the discontinuity of the presence of self. This ‘shift’ arises from the intuitive acquisition of pre-cognitive experience, a noumenon, where perception does not fall under any familiar linguistic categorization. This noumenology, of chaotic or disoriented systems, may provide a better understanding of the musical affect. The volatile sub-genre of music known as ‘hyper-pop’ produced by artists such as Sophie, Arca, and Metaroom purposefully use various musical production techniques to exacerbate acoustic disorientation employing micro- timings and tunings. This music is highly sample-based, extreme, effected, distorted, obscured, and skewed—always seeming to fall between the cracks of expectation. To erect a scaffolding of ‘microtonality’ around such music misses the point. To truly approach these artists' nearly-imperceptible nuances, poetics, and hyperbolic abstractions, we must descend to the level of nano-tonality, a substratum beneath the phraseology of analysis, as well as a generalization of ‘tonality’ itself to its most literal etymological meaning: ‘stretch’.