A few years ago I started work on my first proper string quartet – an expansion and fuller exploration of one of the sections of Alicia. The piece was written originally in equal temperament, as the thought of doing a full length work in Just Intonation had simply not crossed my mind.
I “finished” this new version of the piece back in 2005, and really hadn’t looked at it again until earlier this year when we decided to go ahead and produce it in our next season with a video component by Patrick Davison. In revisiting this piece, which I am really excited to have premiered, I realized that I have no desire to continue to use equal temperament, and that now was the time to find a new tuning.
I spent my summer in Darmstadt, and heard a lot of microtonal music, some of it very interesting, a lot of it sort of careless. Much of the music I heard just sounded out of tune to me. I had to confirm with my perfect-pitch-having friend that certain things were intended.
A lot of my down-time there was spent going through this old version of the quartet and cleaning it up, cutting things, perfecting things. I cut nearly 8 minutes off the duration and that, for me, is quite a feat. Most of the time when I start nitpicking the work gets longer.
But there was still this issue of tuning.
The piece makes great use of some of the properties of equal temperament. There are key changes, and melodic “rows” – but when I listen to it now, it just sounds completely out of tune. I didn’t want to create Just tunings for each section, and so I started thinking about some of those earlier compromises with pure intervals.
My first experiments with tuning this piece were mostly theoretical – going back and analyzing my chords (I use a lot of sevenths), trying them on my piano (tuned to a circle of pure fifths i’m using for a different piece), looking at how the piece was organized harmonically etc. I started looking at Werckmeister as a strong possibility. I got a copy of Kontakt, and have finally figured out how their scripts work and I’m able to relatively accurately try new tunings through there. I’ve now somewhat landed on a version of Werckmeister III that I’ve recentered on D.
I’m not sure if this is going to be where the piece ends up – I need to live with this tuning for a while, and find out which parts work for me, and which parts don’t. Generally I find the piece sounds much better, and far more interesting. These things take time, and i’m sure there will be some tweaking of this tuning to make certain sections sound better to my somewhat warped ear, but for now, I think I’ve found a tuning.
Tags: 2008, Art, Changes, Collaborators, Darmstadt, Experiments, Just Intonation, Music, New Work, Patrick Davison, Piano, Randy Gibson, Sounds, String Quartet, Tuning, Video
