“Machine Sound” and Microtonal Music

In the essay devoted to the invention of “machine” (or electromechanical) sound, one tries to rethink the familiar word combination “machine and artificial”. The latter one is not a word game. By the user-friendly separation of an octave into 12 uniform tone steps, the modern tonal system of the western hemisphere is therefore artificial by definition. In contrast to that, the vocal polyphony of the Renaissance is based on an increased usage of acoustically pure or natural intervals. Early attempts to extend instrumental compositions with the benefits of just intonation failed. An unexpected support for microtonal structures within instrumental music came from machines. Primarily by the dynamophone, one of the first electromechanical instruments, developed close to the beginning of the 20th century. Beside its primary task — the additive synthesis — its inventor Thaddeus Cahill aimed for a union of sound art and the laws of acoustics. Therefore, this instrument had the sheer amount of 36 keys per octave. From the point of view of representatives of the musical avant-garde, the control over pitch that came with the mastery of sound synthesis allowed the use of new tonal systems.

Bruce Mather and His Memories of Wyschnegradsky

В статье содержится характеристика содержания текста «Моих воспоминаний об Иване Вышнеградском» Брюса Матера (р. 1939). Подчеркивается, что появление этих воспоминаний на русском языке — крупное событие в истории возвращения наследия Ивана Вышнеградского на родину. Одновременно автор статьи анализирует творческий путь известного канадского музыканта в свете его отношений с Вышнеградским, который оказал огромное влияние на становление его личности и стиля. Матер — едва ли не единственный ныне живущий ученик и последователь Вышнеградского, заложивший основу школы микротоновой музыки в Канаде. Содержащаяся в статье информация о творческих связях Матера и Вышнеградского, а также подробности биографии самого Матера представляются в отечественном музыкознании впервые. The article contains a description of the content of the text of “My memories of Ivan Wyschnegradsky” by Bruce Mather (b. 1939). It is emphasized that the appearance of these memories in Russian is a major event in the history of the return of Wyschnegradsky’s legacy to his homeland. At the same time, the author analyzes the creative path of the famous Canadian musician in the light of his relationship with Ivan Wyschnegradsky, who had a huge impact on the formation of his personality and style. Mather is almost the only living student and follower of Wyschnegradsky, who laid the Foundation for the school of microtonal music in Canada. The information contained in the article about the creative ties between the Mather and Wyschnegradsky, as well as the details of the Mather’s biography, are presented in the Russian press for the first time.

My Memories of Ivan Wyschnegradsky

Воспоминания канадского композитора Брюса Матера представляют собой уникальное свидетельство о последних годах жизни и творчества выдающегося русского композитора Ивана Вышнеградского (1893–1979), одного из основоположников европейской микротоновой музыки. Под пером Матера личность Вышнеградского предстает во всей своей полноте: как композитора, теоретика, педагога, подвижника. Особую ценность тексту воспоминаний придают письма Вышнеградского, в которых запечатлен стиль речи и мышления композитора. Одно[1]временно Матер короткими, но точными штрихами передает дух эпохи и нюансы художественной жизни Франции и Канады 1970-х годов. На русском языке «Воспоминания» Брюса Матера публикуются впервые. “My memories of Ivan Wyschnegradsky” by Canadian composer Bruce Mather is one of the unique testimonies about the last years of life and work (1974–1978) of the outstanding Russian composer, one of the founders of European microtonal music. Under the pen of Mather, Wyschnegradsky’s personality appears in its entirety: as a composer, theorist, teacher, and ascetic. Wyschnegradsky’s letters, which capture the composer’s style of speech and thinking, add special value to the text of his memoirs. At the same time, Mather conveys the spirit of the time and the nuances of the artistic life of France and Canada in the 1970s in short but precise strokes. In Russian, “Memoirs” by Bruce Mather is published for the first time.

A Speech-Musical Modernism: Harry Partch's Lyric Media

Recent work at the intersection of literary history and sound studies has taught us to regard lyric poetry as a sonic medium in its own right, but what sort of medium is it? This article unfolds lyric's intrinsic intermediality by way of the American composer Harry Partch and his brief collaboration with William Butler Yeats. Rekindling Yeats's turn-of-the-century dream of a new art uniting word and music, Partch's experiments setting poetry to microtonal music involved notating the subtle melodies of speech with new scales and instruments–homemade lyres, in fact. Built to compete with the phonograph, these new-old media pressed lyric to its absolute limit as a symbolic medium, clarifying both lyric's intermediality and its sensitivity to technological change. When Partch, who spent several years as an itinerant “hobo” in the 1930s, transplanted his Yeatsian speech-music to the transient shelters of the Depression-era West and began notating migrant voices, this compositional practice heralded unprecedented possibilities for the literary inscription of speech.

Microtonal Restraint

This article proposes that the beginnings of twentieth-century microtonal music and thinking were shaped more by restraint in composers’ thinking than by a full embrace of the principle of ‘progress for progress’s sake’. Pioneering microtonal composers such as Ferruccio Busoni, Julián Carrillo, John Foulds, Alois Hába, Charles Ives and Richard Stein constitute an international group of breakaway modernists, whose music and writings suggest four tropes characterizing this first-generation microtonal music: the rediscovery of a microtonal past, the preservation of tonality, the refinement of tonality and the exercise of restraint. The article traces these tropes of early twentieth-century microtonal experiment in works by Carrillo, Foulds, Hába, Ives and Stein with reference to writings and music by Busoni, Nikolay Kul′bin, Harry Partch, Karol Szymanowski and Ivan Vyschnegradsky. It adds to the growing scholarship about early twentieth-century tonally based aesthetics and techniques, and broadens perspectives on the history of twentieth-century microtonal music.

19-Tone Theory and Applications

Microtonal music is one of those subjects that has always been around, but few people have ever had the will to investigate it thoroughly. The main reason why more people have not dealt with microtonal music is that there are almost no instruments that allow composers to experiment with it. In spite of all this, the music of many cultures even at the present time employs non-equaltempered scales, and even Western music did until the eighteenth century, when mathematicians worked out the logarithmic basis of equal temperament. In this article, the author explains how he became interested in 19-tone equal temperament and how he explored the possible resources available in such a system. This involves creating a chord grammar based on similarity relationships, similar to what he has used in his music written in 12-tone equal temperament. Through these considerations he discovered a particular set of chords that have special properties in terms of their interval content, number of transpositions, and relationships to other chords. Finally, the author explains how he used these properties in the music he composed in this temperament.

Lecture about Electronic Microtonal Music at the Theremin Center Electronic Studio of the Moscow Conservatory in March 2004

Joseph Pehrson is a well-known New York-based composer. He studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Michigan. He has been active in promoting contemporary music in New York, having been a co-director of the “Composers’ Concordance” concert organization from 1984 to 2011. Pehrson has written music in various styles, including neoclassical and avant-garde, microtonal music. The latter includes electronic compositions with and without solo instruments, which he wrote in the decade of the 2000s. He has delved very deeply into microtonal theory and has written compositions for various unusual and non-standard microtonal scales, such as the 21-note to the octave scale. The following is a transcript of Joseph Pehrson’s presentation at the Theremin Center, which was the Moscow Conservatory’s electronic studio in the 1990s and 2000s.

Mendes, Gilberto (1922–2016)

Gilberto Ambrósio Garcia Mendes was born in Santos (São Paulo state), on 13 October 1922. Despite his unorthodox musical career — he did not start to study music until the age of nineteen, and, in addition, worked in a bank until his retirement in 1975 — he has achieved wide recognition as one of the leading Brazilian composers of the present. He is a local pioneer in the fields of chance, concrète, and microtonal music, mixed media, and musical action.