Kids today, with their 31 equal divisions of the octave. Yes, it’s the music of Nicolà Vicentino, a Renaissance theorist and composer who built his own microtonal harpsichord to accommodate his experimental tunings. But it’s not just a theoretical experiment: there is some connection to musical practice (even if Vicentino was basically making this up). Food for thought as we mess with digital tuning systems and microonality.”
Microtonality is having a moment, partly because of a need just to escape the sameness of our commodified world, and also because tech is making it easier to work with. But it’s not that this is something that exists only in math, or that it’s terribly new, or even that “microtonality” is always the most accurate word.
In fact, Vicenza-born Vicentino has this in common with modern Western musicians: he was messing around with some theory, abstracted from its context. (It was the 16th-century equivalent of loading up a Scala file for the first time, without knowing what it meant.) The Renaissance scene had grown interested in ancient Greek modes and genera. In fact, the descendants of those systems were likely plentiful in everything from Byzantine church music to Jewish cantillation, and Arabic maqams, for instance, already had theoretical treatises from the likes of al-Sheikh al-Safadi and Abdulqadir al-Maraghi, back a couple of centuries earlier.
But that’s not to be dismissive of Vicentino’s compositions, because they sound incredible. Presumably, the 31 divisions of the octave were never intended to be used all at once. But a bit like a computer music composer of his era, Vicentino fused them all anyway, fitting them into idiomatic polyphonic sounds. And the best way to hear that is to listen to a vocal group hold the intonation together, like this haunting, somewhat dizzying performance by Exaudi, filmed by Patrick Allen:
And another beautiful work. (Yeah, “musica kaputt” is probably what my magnum opus should be a called; there’s a P.D.Q. Bach work waiting to happen with that title, it seems.)
Here’s that wild instrument — made to the original instructions. (It’s described as “a reconstruction of the Archicembalo, made by Marco Tiella and the Formentelli workshop in 1974.” And actually, the singers are smoothing out some of the rough edges!)
Johannes Keller:
But I don’t want to get completely lost in the 1500s. One criticism of the Western approach to microtonality might well be that it gets the whole approach to tuning systems wrong by stripping them of their musical practice — and that’s more than a fair point. (I’d even argue that it strips us of understanding the diversity of tuning and melodic meaning in Western music, if we get hung up on 12-tone equal temperament, which is a fairly recent invention.)
But but but… that said, here’s a composer making a perfectly convincing composition more or less out of thin air. (The Renaissance Italians were pretty hopelessly limited in their understanding of Greek music history, just starting to work it out on paper.)
And this work and the invention of the instrument has attracted musicians who do understand equal divisions of the octave in the context of living musical practices. Take Tolgahan Çoğulu, for one, who has invented his own microtonal guitar. You’ll find him playing along with Johannes Keller — or rendering the piece on his own invention, a connection of inventors separated by more than four centuries.
Here he walks clearly through how the modes work. And I think there is a sense that Vicentino was working from his own musical idiom, just adding microtonality.
It’s well worth a dive into all the microtonal guitar work he’s doing. And this is a 21st-century acoustic invention, in effect — no reason we have to assume all current music technological inventions need to involve a computer. (In fact, despite its roots across the century, technically Tolgahan Çoğulu’s guitar is quite a lot younger than, say, a DX7!)
And then you can discover new possibilities, like realizing Balinese gamelan music on the instrument. That raises an important distinction between cultural appropriation, which flattens out the source material, extracts its value, and erases its meaning and context (as well as the people involved), with actual cultural exchange, which involves, you know, investing some actual time into learning the material and talking to people. It’s the difference between stealing someone’s recipe and screwing it up and spending some time in the kitchen cooking together. Oversimplifying. Sorry, this will be just a teaser, since otherwise I’ll truly get lost in the wrong century.
I’ll stop yammering, because this is just inarguably beautiful:
But I can’t get enough of this project. I love that it’s evolved over time. The same, you could say, has been true of Vicentino.
Check out that full history:
Or watch in LEGO:
More (this Patreon needs more members)!
https://www.patreon.com/Microtonalguitar
I’m equally excited that Tuning Systems in Ableton Live or the Scala support on a Sequential synthesizer can open up possibilities for players and finally make them make an instrument their own — including, especially, an Arabic or Persian player whose music was flattened and detuned by overly restrictive “standards.”
If you’re in Berlin next week, it happens we’ll be right inside Ableton’s offices talking about this again:
June Meetup: Exploring tuning systems
And for more, you can catch the panel I moderated in the fall, plus a great presentation on research on hegemonic tech culture by Laurel Pardue and S. M. Astrid Bin:
Have one last composition:
And Chick Corea; why not?