We examine the subtleties of music and art in media, their influence on the mind, and their power to evoke emotions. We are committed to understanding the role of the artist in society and the nature of creativity.
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In 1872, Fredrick
Douglass gave a speech entitled “Self-Made Men.” Although I do not subscribe to
most of his philosophical premises in regard to the nature of the world we live
in and how we come to understand the things in nature, I do agree with some of
his ethical conclusions and psychological assessments of what he describes as
Self-Made Men. For that alone I am willing to share this document with you.
For example, I
do not agree with him when he says, “the best man finds in his breast the
evidence of kinship with the worst, and the worst with the best.” The reason
that I do not subscribe to this idea is because it grants to the worst of us,
the virtues of the best. It also implies that a good or great man (i.e. the Self-Made
Man) is to be measured by the worst within him instead of by his best
qualities.
Aside from
several other instances where he and I disagree as to the assessment of the
Self-Made Man in relation to other men, Mr. Douglass and I also differ about
the role of man in regard to his destiny, role, and results in life. Unfortunately
Douglass commits a further error in his philosophical outlook where ascribes to
the Self-Made Man full command over the direction of his course in life, but
then also contradicts himself when he considers that “Man was made a very
insignificant agent in his own affairs,” because, “it was all the Lord’s
doings.”
On the other
hand, I absolutely agree with him when, at his better moments, he says about
the Self-Made Men that “they are the men who are not brought up but who are
obliged to come up, not only without the voluntary assistance or friendly
co-operation of society, but often in open and derisive defiance of all the
efforts of society and the tendency of circumstances to repress, retard and
keep them down.” And that “they are the men who, in a world of schools,
academies, colleges and other institutions of learning, are often compelled by
unfriendly circumstances to acquire their education elsewhere and, amidst
unfavorable conditions, to hew out for themselves a way to success, and thus to
become the architect of their own good fortunes.” He ends with: “They are in a
peculiar sense, indebted to themselves for themselves.”
The reason I am
sharing his words with you is because I know that all of us to a greater or
lesser degree are Self-Made Men. And for all that Douglass says in his
conclusions which contain contradictions and errors, he does his best to reveal
the character and virtues as well as any insights about the Self-Made Man in
terms that he understood during his time.
So besides some
of the observations I’ve already shared with you about some of the statements
in this essay, “Self-Made Men” is a must-read and I highly recommend that you
get your copy of this document, print it out, and read it.
Because artists deal in beauty and form objects to be beautiful by using the imagination, it's important for the artist too to be beautiful. As a representative and high priest of the work of art that is Nature, the artist must work with as much commitment on himself as on his works of art. What greater work of art anyway is there than the physical form of the artist himself?
The first thing the artist must come to learn are the systems that make up the human body. When we exercise several systems are being conditioned simultaneously, so get familiar with what systems there are and how each one functions to keep us healthy and during exercise.
Working out is more than just building muscle, losing weight, or doing cardio. To exercise is a lifelong commitment to your body like being an artist is a lifelong commitment to acting in the capacity of a creative being. Just like the skills you learned to make music, create paintings, for acting, or choreographing, exercise requires that you learn not only the systems that make up the human body, but also how to use them for working out.
Working out means conditioning one or more of the systems of the human body. An individual can work out the cardiovascular system by doing breathing exercises or practicing breathing techniques while exercising the muscular system. Depending on the type of exercise you like to perform, you should commit to becoming expert in that form of working out.
Because some arts are physical in nature it may not be as necessary for those artists to worry about exercise as other artists who sit or stand for extended periods of time without moving very much. Artists who work in this way must make an effort to get exercise anywhere and anytime, especially without weights or too many props. The reason I recommend learning how to exercise without props is to eliminate excuses and barriers to actually working out. If you take the time to acquire the knowledge of working out anywhere, anytime, and in any weather, then staying physically fit will be easy and interesting.
For example, watch how these master Yoga students combine balance, strength, flexibility, and breathing as elements in their exercise practice.
To further assist you in educating yourself about body mechanics and in the many ways the human body can taught to develop balance, strength, and flexibility, here are several books that I personally have used to exercise the body's systems in more intense ways. Each book has something to offer beginning and experienced practitioners of Yoga and Pilates and with regular practice all students will begin to see how both disciplines overlap on certain core principles.
Proficiency with the principles, techniques, and practices found in these and other books on Yoga and Pilates will bring you the following benefits:
You will feel more energized due to an increase in oxygen, blood, and nutrient circulation. This will also benefit sexual performance and increase stamina.
You will feel lighter and more cleansed because of your deep breathing during you workout. Because the organs of the body are gently squeezed during exercise, the activity of the organ will be stimulated to function and cause cleansing to occur. Any hardened residues in the intestines, liver, and circulatory system may loosened and be purged from the body.
You will achieve symmetry of the body, resolve stiff joints and alleviate physical deterioration related to the artist's work. Some poses and postures focus on side of the body at a time, while other allow to exercise both of sides of the body simultaneously. Performing a symmetrical workout can quickly resolve physical imbalances and compensatory movements such as limps and poor posture.
Unlike machine exercises, where you can mindlessly perform a physical motion, the flow of the poses in Yoga and Pilates requires you to perfect your technique by paying close attention to the parts of the body you are using to achieve better fitness results, thus you will achieve mental alertness.
You will learn coordination by the actions of stretching and toning body systems at the same time.
You will experience realizations as you learn to connect the poses seamlessly by transitioning between them.
You will become adaptive to keep things interesting and challenging by coming up with new arrangements and sequences for your workouts. Almost automatically you'll find yourself inventing your own workout routines.
You will become efficient by learning how to exercise the whole body with just a few poses and postures in short periods of time. You'll also realize how to exercise with focus by targeting segments of the body and specific systems for conditioning. You'll be able to be mobile. With learning about Yoga and Pilates exercise techniques you'll find that it's possible to workout indoors, outdoors, in parking lots, in the bedroom, in the backyard, and if you travel a lot, even in hotel rooms. You will save money. Because you can exercise anywhere, you don’t have to go to the gym and save your money from membership fees. You will develop function. As you learn to use your own body weight for the poses and exercises, you won't need weights. Besides, I've often found that the movements exercise machines force us to perform are not always the actual movements we make when we move around normally. Unlike Yoga and Pilates where we learn to exercise using techniques that strengthen our joints, muscles, and bones correctly, we achieve a more graceful sense of our motions. Yoga and Pilates exercises do not usually work out body systems in isolation. Instead several body systems are exercised together therefore these techniques are an effective means for attaining optimum physical conditioning especially in confined spaces and short spans of time.
And because some artists use their hands exclusively in their work a form of "Finger Yoga" can be developed by gently bending and shaping the fingers into simple poses. This is especially beneficial for the musician, painter, and author who use their hands a great deal.
This is why using Yoga and Pilates is an ideal work out program for artists. Thousands of years of practice, research, and technical perfection have gone into all of the movements found in both disciplines and have benefited millions of people. Count yourself among them and commit to perfecting the physical form of your body by shaping into form you can be proud of.
Overall, learning about these techniques will provide you with all of these benefits and many more. But the most important of these benefits I think are the means to retrain and condition your body to act under your control, to be balanced, toned, stronger, and more flexible. As a human being, exercise will condition the male or female artist into a biological and physical specimen of natural fitness - an embodiment of natural beauty. With Yoga and Pilates exercises, the beauty of the artist will complement the work he does and improve his performance.
The Guitar + Microtonal Tuning = Raga-Style Guitar
The interest I have as a guitarist and composer in microtonal music concepts is in experimenting with exotic, random, and unusual tunings and string tensions to discover new timbres in the strings themselves, the guitar’s physical shape and body. And during the recording process, the most fascinating of all techniques I like to use is where I compose in different and overlapping tuning systems from several sound sources.
For now though, I’d like to get into an approach to the acoustic and electric guitar that makes use of Classical Indian tuning techniques (a microtonal music tradition) and applies them to the guitar. This technique is called Raga-Style Guitar. First, let’s go over at least one definition and then deal with some key points about this approach which include, and are by no means limited to, the following:
Definition
A raga is a pattern of intervals where what’s important is the relationship between the notes, not absolute frequencies.
Key Points
The Major/Minor tonal system is not strictly used.
Most Indian classical music is improvisational.
Ragas are often associated with particular moods, specific times of the day and year.
Indian scales (or ragas) are not fixed in pitch.
Any raga may actually begin on any pitch.
Not all of the notes in a raga must be used.
Altered tunings can cause the strings to interact with each other in complex ways where a shimmering or buzzing effect occurs.
Any of the notes in a raga can be flattened or sharpened to better suit the mood and effect of that raga.
The number of possible ragas is practically limitless, with hundreds in common use today.
The timbre of a microtonal tuning can vary greatly ranging from bright, bold, deep, rich, heavy, light, dark, thin, smooth, murky, clear, reedy, brassy, piercing, mellow, hollow, transparent, breathy, or full.
Since microtonal tunings only alter the frequencies in a composition, all other musical elements such as arranging melodies, harmonies, and rhythms can still be used for writing music.
The rhythms of Indian music are organized in long rhythmic cycles called talas. There are more than 100 different talas.
Tunings that are slightly off from the pure interval result in a combined wave that has bumpiness to it. The bumpiness will be even and regular and be heard as a “beat.” This is known as ‘beat tuning.’
With wide tuning, the sound of many people playing near the same pitch is perceived as full, lively, and more interesting. Some music traditions have an aesthetic preference for the sound of instruments playing near, not on, the same pitch. Here the objective is to produce impressive feats of tuning.
Experiment with the 6 types of tonality: sounds and silences, atonal, chromatic, diatonic, polytonal, and any mixture of two or more of the above.
And lastly, experiment with new sounds, ideas, and even new or evolving instruments.
Technical Guitar Issues
When attempting to incorporate these ideas into your practice sessions, composition, and performance you will first need mastery over knowledge of all intervals on the fretboard, especially those which have an unstable sound or provide a quivering effect. A quivering effect can be achieved with heavy uses of the minor second, minor third, tri-tone, minor sixth and major seventh intervals. The reason you’ll need mastery over this knowledge is so when you’re working in a microtonal tuning, you’ll be able to ‘feel’ your way through the strings, find a raga, then shape a piece out of the sounds. To this you can add knowledge of how to construct chords using these intervals.
The next prerequisite you’ll need to conquer is knowledge of modes. Although there are many more modes that are available, the basic idea of a mode is that each mode begins on one of the seven notes in the Major scale. So if there are 12 Major Scales each with 7 notes (minus the octave note), this gives you a total of 84 scales. However, the reality is that in Equal-Temperament, this means you’ll only have access to just a few scale ‘flavors’ – minor, major, diminished, and augmented. Using the ideas in the Key Points I mentioned earlier, the microtonal tunings you come up with will greatly expand the quantity of sounds you have access to. To help you overcome any difficulties you’re having with mastering modes, here is one of the best practical books on the subject I’ve found so far…Tom Kolb’s Modes for Guitar.
Although, this next step isn’t really required, it’s certainly highly recommended for you to have a good understanding of the ethos of a Mode. One of the most interesting features about ancient Greek theories about modes or scales is the consideration that different scales had different effects, which affected a person’s mood, character, and morality. This idea is known as the “ethos” or mood associated with a Mode. For example, according to the ancient Greeks, the Dorian mode was viewed as virile and warlike; the Hypodorian, majestic and stable; the Mixolydian, pathetic and sad; the Phrygian, agitated and bacchical; the Hypophyrigian, active; the Lydian, funeral; the Hypolydian debauched and voluptuous. Among them, the Dorian mode—virile, grave, stately, warlike, instructive, severe, keeping the soul well-balanced—was considered the national mode; it was the mode which was suited for the perfect citizen.
And finally, you’ll definitely need to open your mind to the possibilities alternate tunings (microtonal tuning) will force you to consider in regard to your string tuning and tensions. There are six categories to cover when dealing with microtonal and alternate tunings. They are: Drop tunings, Open tunings, Modal tunings, Unison tunings, Slack tunings, and Hybrid tunings.
Drop tunings entail lowering the pitch of one string, usually the sixth. The first string is another good option.
Open tunings consists of tuning all of the open strings to the notes of a major or minor chord.
Modal tunings are similar to open tunings except they replace the third of the major or minor chord tunings with the second or fourth scale degrees resulting in sustained chords. Modal tunings can be used for playing melodies and open chords in a variety of modes.
Unison tunings harmonize two or more strings to the same pitch. Such an example is the tuning EADAAE, which is one of my personal favorites.
Slack tunings lower the pitch of one or more of the strings with a resultant “slack” on the strings.
Hybrid tunings combine any of the fore mentioned tuning categories such as a slack/open tuning or a unison/modal tuning.
To help you with alternate tunings, here's a resource that I have found to be of immense usefulness...Alternate Tunings for Guitar
Influential Microtonal Musicians and Guitarists
Here is a short definitive list of musicians from around the world who greatly influenced the spread of these ideas as well as the guitarists who expanded that influence even further in recent years with experimentation of their own. This list is by no means exhaustive.
Ravi Shankar – sitar
Nikhil Banerjee – sitar
Hamza El Din – oud
Brij Bhushan Kabra – Indian slide guitar
Ali Akhbar Khan – Indian sarod
Robbie Basho – originally a blues player, later developed the “impressionistic guitar school” that evolved into the New Age guitar movement. Many consider his second album “The Grail and the Lotus” (1965) pure American raga. Influences: Matsuo Basho, Max Ochs, Bill Roberts, Ravi Shankar.
Steffen Basho-Junghans – further developed the achievements of Robbie Basho, raga-style guitar. Watch the video below for a short video introduction to the artist.
John Fahey – steel string guitar, founder of Takoma label.
Davy Graham – British/European acoustic guitar movement, experimented with fusing rock, folk, blues, jazz, and Indian music, later known for recording with the sarod, oud, and bouzouki.
John McLaughlin – from the band Shakti, added resonance strings to the acoustic and electric guitars to achieve a sound closer to the sitar (sitar-guitar), and the coral guitar.
Prasanna – Karnatic music and jazz fusion on electric guitar
Varanasai - Hawaïin guitar
Fareed Haque – Garage Mahal, sitar guitar.
G. Jaywant - Hawaïin guitar
Harry Manx – blues guitarist, slide guitar.
Barun Kumar Pal – Indian slide guitar.
Sanjay Kumar Verma - Hawaïin guitar
Debashish Bhattacharya – inventor of the Dev Veena (which is a synthesis of veena, sitar, sarod, and Kannur). It has 22 strings and is played flat on the lap.
By far however, of all the raga-style guitarists I’ve heard, I fell in love with the music of Sandy Bull and Peter Walker from the very first moment I heard them.
In the All Music Guide, Richie Unterberger wrote:
“Long before Ry Cooder, Leo Kottke, Richard Thompson, and others were impressing listeners with their ability to hop from genre to genre, Sandy Bull glided from classical and jazz to ethnic music and rock & roll with grace and verve on his first two albums. Accompanied on his first two albums by renowned jazz drummer Billy Higgins, Bull produced some of the first extended instrumental compositions for guitar that incorporated elements of folk, jazz, and Indian and Arabic-influenced dronish modes. Not "rock" by any stretch of the imagination, it's nevertheless easy to see that it could have had an influence on the rock musicians who began incorporating eclectic and Middle Eastern sensibilities into their music a few years later. After his debut, Bull expanded his arsenal from the acoustic guitar and banjo to include oud, bass, and electric guitar. After his second album, however, his recordings were less focused and less impressive.”
And in the same publication, Steve Leggett says the following about Peter Walker:
“Although he only released two albums in the mid-'60s, Peter Walker influenced a whole host of subsequent guitarists with his modal drone explorations of Eastern musical forms and his experiments with raga and flamenco. Walker took up the guitar early, although he didn't begin to play in public until around 1959. During a stint in San Francisco he heard the legendary Ravi Shankar perform and Walker's lifelong fascination with Eastern raga was formed. He studied with Shankar for a time in Los Angeles and also studied with Ali Akbar Khan in San Francisco. Returning to the Boston area, he became a regular on the 1960s Cambridge and Greenwich Village folk scenes, where he became close friends with guitarist Sandy Bull. Walker released the influential Rainy Day Raga LP on Vanguard Records in 1966, following it with a second Vanguard LP, Second Poem to Karmela or Gypsies Are Important, two years later in 1968, and then dropped away from the music scene, settling in upstate New York to raise his family. Rediscovered by Joshua Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records, Walker contributed four new guitar pieces to A Raga for Peter Walker, which was released in 2008 on Rosenthal's label and featured tribute tracks from the likes of Jack Rose, James Blackshaw, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Thurston Moore, and Greg Davis.”
Walker’s compositional approach took the Indian concept of starting with a drone, adding a scale based on the drone, then a melodic line based on the scale, then weaving, reweaving, and interweaving the melodic line so that a freely improvised piece is constructed. And when playing ragas on the guitar, he set up a drone pattern, and then worked a melody line in based on a popular American folk song or whatever other melody he found appealing.
Microtonal Music Concepts and Raga-Style Guitar in Popular Music
Here are a few more examples of artists who have experimented with microtonal music and raga-style guitar techniques:
The guitar introduction to the The Doors' song "The End."
Greg Ginn, guitarist of American hardcore punk band Black Flag, made use of microtonal intervals in songs such as "Damaged II," from 1981's Damaged LP and “Police Story.”
Elliott Sharp's groups Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplen make extensive use of just intonation microtonality to intensely dissonant and vibrant effect.
Los Angeles guitarist Rod Poole has produced a number of rock-oriented xenharmonic CDs.
And the band Crash Worship made use of Ivor Darreg's megalyra subcontrabass for both xenharmonic and industrial noise purposes.
Elaine Walker of Zia has released several albums making use of the Bohlen-Pierce scale and other equal temperaments such as the 19tet and 10tet. Zia performs on electronic instruments that specifically do not reference the standard 12 tone tuning.
Jonny Greenwood, of the alternative rock band Radiohead, has experimented with microtonal music in both his solo material and his work with the band; for instance, the song “Climbing Up The Walls,” from the band's 1997 album OK Computer, includes a recording of sixteen violins playing quarter tones apart from each other to create a droning, atonal 'white noise' effect.
Another prominent rock artist who uses microtonality in his work is Glenn Branca who has created a number of symphonic works for ensembles of microtonally tuned electric guitars. The two examples below illustrate the ensemble work (The Ascension) and the other is a rock example (Carbon Monoxide).
In a previous article called “The Essence of Music: Frequency, Timbre, and the Organization of Sound,” I talked about the infrasonic, ultrasonic, and acoustic ranges of frequency, discussing how they were different, while emphasizing that the human ear can perceive all sounds, leaving aside disabilities in hearing, within the range of 20 Hz and 20 kHz (20,000 Hz). I also discussed some of the essential differences between Noise and Tone.
But more importantly, I delve deeply into the concept of scales and examine the nature of frequencies in relationship to the formation of anything resembling music. As a way of understanding this I contrast the fact that Equal-Temperament is just one of the tuning systems which grew in prominence in the West with others, no longer in broad use, including Pythagorean Intonation, Mean-Tone, Just Intonation, and Well Temperament. Taking into account the information about the acoustic range of frequency and the fact that all frequencies within that range can be considered a tone, I go on to share with you my concept for a definition of scale as “any quantity of notes which have been designated or selected for use in a given musical context... whether it consists of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 12 notes.”
So since any frequency can be considered a note so long as it’s assigned a letter name or some other designation, and a scale is any set of allowable notes used in a composition, then any instrument, including the human voice, can be tuned or modulated to access the sonic material found only in microtonal music.
Definition of Microtonal Music
According to some, microtonal music is music which uses intervals of less than an equally spaced semitone, or smaller than the white and black keys on a piano. Sometimes microtonal music also refers to music which uses intervals not found in the Western system of 12 equal intervals to the octave. The term implies music containing very small intervals but can include any tuning that differs from the western 12 tone equal temperament. By this definition then any scale in any mean-tone tuning; the traditional Carnatic system of 22 śruti; the Indonesian gamelan music; as well as music using just intonation, mean-tone temperament, or other alternative tunings; and Thai, Burmese, and African music which use 7 tones in each (approximate) octave can be considered microtonal music.
One reason microtonal composers explore alternate tunings is that each unique even or uneven division of the octave or non-octave or octave + fifth etc. gives a new world of intervallic connections, exotic timbres, and thereby new musical content. Another reason is that such extensive modulation in a variety of tuning systems, which differs from a 12-note-per octave instrument, sounds "wolf" fifths and other exotic musical intervals not found in traditional Western music.
As you’ve read about in past articles I’ve written and will read in this article I have a deep interest in experimenting with composing music in this manner. Yet I am not the only one. Many other artists, composers, and musicians have also taken an interest in microtonal music and have used the theories to bring microtonal elements into their work.
Pioneering Applications of Microtonal Music in the West
Julian Carrillo (1875-1965) who discovered the sixteenths of tone, while experimenting with his violin. In other words, sixteen clearly different sounds between the pitches of G and A emitted by the fourth violin string. He named his discovery Sonido 13 (the thirteenth sound) and wrote on music theory and the physics of music. He invented a simple numerical musical notation that can represent scales based on any division of the octave, like thirds, fourths, quarters, fifths, sixths, sevenths, and so on (even if Carrillo wrote, most of the time, for quarters, eights, and sixteenths combined, the notation is able to represent any imaginable subdivision). He invented new musical instruments, and adapted others to produce microintervals. He composed a large amount of microtonal music and recorded about 30 of his compositions.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky, used third tones, quarter tones, sixth tones and twelfth tones, non octaving scales, as well as the term ultra-chromatic, for micro-intervals, and infra-chromatic, for macro-intervals.
Ivor Darreg, who proposed the term xenharmonic (from the Greek xeno, foreign, and Greek harmonic, hospitable) for any scale other than 12-tone equal tempered scale. He also built the first fully retunable electronic synthesizer capable of any division of the octave, just or equal or non-just non-equal and built an orchestra of instruments all in his home to include guitars refretted in equal temperaments 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, and 31, as well as the magalyra series of sub-contrabass steel guitar instruments.
Claude Debussy, who heard a Balinese gamelan performance and was exposed to their non-Western tunings and rhythms. Some scholars have even ascribed Debussy's subsequent innovative use of the whole-tone (6 equal pitches per octave) tuning in such compositions as the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra and the Toccata from the suite Pour le piano to his exposure to the Balinese gamelan at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. Others believe that this exposure gave him the confidence to assert his rebellion "against the rule of equal temperament" marking his fully mature piano works, with their many bell- and gong-like sonorities, exploiting the piano’s natural resonance. Still others have argued that Debussy's works like L'Isle joyeuse, La Cathédrale engloutie, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, La Mer, Pagodes, Danseuses de Delphes, and Cloches à travers les feuilles are marked by a more basic interest in the microtonal intervals found between the higher members of the overtone series, under the influence of Hermann Helmholtz's writings.
Berliner's introduction of the phonograph in the 1890s allowed much non-Western music to be recorded and heard by Western composers, further spurring the use of non-12-equal tunings.
Major microtonal composers of the 1920s and 1930s also include Alois Hába (quarter tones, or 24 equal pitches per octave, and sixth tones), Julian Carillo (24 equal, 36, 48, 60, 72, and 96 equal pitches to the octave embodied in a series of specially custom-built pianos), and the early works of Harry Partch (just intonation using frequencies at ratios of prime integers 3, 5, 7, and 11, their powers, and products of those numbers, from a central frequency of G-196) (Partch 1979, chapt. 8, "Application of the 11 Limit", 119–37).
Prominent microtonal composers or researchers of the 1940s and 1950s include Adriaan Daniel Fokker (31 equal tones per octave), Partch again (continuing to build his handcrafted orchestra of microtonal just intonation instruments). In the 1960s and 1970s experimenters included John Eaton (who created his own microtonal synthesizer, the Syn Ket, to produce microtonal intervals), Harry Partch, Easley Blackwood (who composed and performed the well-known Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media with compositions in every equal division of the octave from 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24 equal pitches per octave); Augusto Novaro, the Mexican microtonal theorist who composed studies in 15 equal; Barbara Benary, who formed Gamelan Son of Lion around this period; and Lou Harrison, who created American gamelan orchestras at Mills College.
And in Europe, the "Spectralists" in Paris created their first works from 1973 on with an extensive use of microtonal harmony. The main composers from this period are Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Michael Levinas, and György Ligeti.
Microtonal Music by Inventors and Instrument Builders
Inventors and instrument builders are also becoming increasingly interested in creating new instruments and altering established instruments to gain access to even further subdivisions of the octave. A few pioneering musicians are also part of this movement.
Here are a few examples of those involved:
The Japanese multi-instrumentalist and experimental musical instrument builder Yuichi Onoue developed an 24-TET quarter tone tuning on his guitar as well as a deeply scalloped electric guitar for microtonal playing techniques (Landman). Here are a pair of videos with one showcasing his scalloped guitar and the other is a sampler of his other electronic instrument inventions.
Explicitly microtonal jazz has also made a niche for itself. Trumpeter Don Ellis uses a quartertone trumpet built to his specifications. There’s also woodwind player Joe Maneri, who has mapped what he calls the "virtual pitch continuum." Other examples of these tuning techniques can be heard in albums released by percussionist Emil Richards, Lothar and the Hand People, as well as the xenharmonic intonational inflexions of John Coltrane, and many others.
The Japanese band Syzygys (Hitomi Shimizu and Hiromi Nishida) have released two albums utilizing the 43-tone scale of Harry Partch, using a modified reed organ (Szygys 2007). To hear a selection of their work, click on...Complete Studio Recordings or use the image below.
And in the November 2004 WSES Official Newsletter for Acoustics, Science, and Technology of Music it’s mentioned that "bands from Sonic Youth to Art Rock Circus have written music with non-standard and microtonal guitar tunings." Sonic Youth uses alternate tuned guitars with several strings tuned slightly different from each other, creating a beating sound. In their early period the band played their guitars with screwdrivers, based on the techniques of Glenn Branca, who took this idea from Harry Partch's Kitharas and John Cage's prepared piano.
The third bridge technique led to the microtonal scale used on the Yuri Landman's Moodswinger and his clarification based on this scale about the physical consonant paradox present in experimental rock (Landman 2008).
These Are Powers modified their bass guitar into a microtonal adjusted instrument (Carr 2008). Because the fretboard isn't representing the 12TET anymore because of the preparation, the chord combinations and tone progressions form an altered microtonal spectrum. To sample some of their work, click on...Cracks In The Lifeline
Likewise Micachu, being heavily inspired by the works of Harry Partch, alters her instruments with shortening bridges to create a different, more random, microtonal tonal palette. For samples, click on...Jewellery
Microtonal Music Concepts by Pioneers of Electronic Music
Even hardware such as digital synthesizers and inexpensive software synthesizers has expanded the ease and popularity of exploring microtonal music. But before they existed experimenters did what they could with what was available. In 1954, Karlheinz Stockhausen built his electronic Studie II on an 81-step scale starting from 100 Hz with the interval of 51/25 between steps (1964). And in Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) he used various scales, ranging from seven up to sixty equal divisions of the octave.
Wendy Carlos, in her 1986's Beauty in the Beast we find her experimenting with many microtonal systems including just intonation and other alternate tuning scales she invented for the album: "This whole formal discovery came a few weeks after I had completed the album, Beauty in the Beast, which is wholly in new tunings and timbres" (Carlos 1989–96).
or use the image below.
