Name: Mathew Muntz
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer, bassist, multi-instrumentalist, instrument-desinger and -builder
Current Release: The self-titled album by The Vex Collection, Mat Muntz's duo with Vicente Hansen Atria, is out via Carrier.
Recommendations on the topic of alternative tuning systems: I highly recommend Kyle Gann’s online articles and excellent book The Arithmetic of Listening as an introduction to those interested in the history and theory of alternative tunings. From there, Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music is like the Bible of just intonation, and super inspiring in how simultaneously personally creative and rigorously systematic his approach is. There’s also a lot of information to be gained from online tuning communities like The Xenharmonic Alliance. Stephen Weigel’s podcast Now and Xen is great - the way he interviews currently active microtonal composers gives an excellent view into how advanced tuning theory interacts with more abstract elements of the creative process.

[Read our Vicente Hansen Atria interview]

If you enjoyed this interview with Mat Muntz and would like to know more, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, and Facebook.

For an interview with one of his collaborators, read our Jessica Ackerley interview.



When did you first start getting interested in the world of alternative tuning systems?  

My first exposure to non-Western tuning systems was in my undergrad at Manhattan School of Music, where I kind of stumbled into the Indian music ensemble led by tabla player Samir Chatterjee.

We didn’t focus on tuning in a specific way in that ensemble, but Samir would occasionally say things like ‘the minor third in this raga needs to be tuned more sharp’.The mere knowledge that there was this entire alternative system out there made me open my ears to new possibilities, and the vague, non-systematic way it was presented encouraged me to explore it experimentally and intuitively.

Around the same time, I was playing bass in a trio called Brickwork with Xavier Del Castillo and Vicente Hansen Atria, and we were messing around with 24-tone equal temperament - arranging pieces by the great Russian microtonal composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky and writing our own pieces. My first truly microtonal composition was for that group.

All this made me realize that the distinction between so-called ‘alternative’ tunings and the supposed standard of 12-tone equal temperament was an artificial one. As a student, I had been taught to tune my upright bass using natural harmonics, which meant I was really tuning to 3-limit just intonation or Pythagorean tuning rather than equal temperament. I didn’t know it, but I had already been playing in an ‘alternative’ tuning system for years.

Similarly, listening back to favorite recordings of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman made me aware of how much of their signature sounds were linked to personal approaches to intonation - further proving that tuning was not a static condition of musical reality, but part of a constant negotiation at the core of musical expression.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances using alternative tuning systems captured your imagination in the beginning?

As part of my interest in Indian classical music I started listening to a lot of vocalists in the Hindustani tradition. My favorites quickly became Ustad Amir Khan and Pandit Kumar Gandharva, as well as the sitarist Pandit Nikhil Banerjee.

From there my ears were opened to other alternately tuned traditions outside of the European art music canon, including non-tempered singing from the Croatian region of Istria (which has become hugely influential on my current work), Central Asian folk traditions, and Korean music.

Eventually I worked my way to the big American just intonation composers - Harry Partch, Ben Johnston, Kyle Gann, etc.

Working with a different tuning system can be a very incisive transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?

One of the most compelling things about tuning is that contained within each tuning system is a whole host of cultural values, aesthetic goals, and trade-offs of possibility.

For example, the evolution of temperament in Europe is due to that region’s (highly unusual) prioritization of certain kinds of harmonization and modulation which eventually required a closed system of fixed pitches to function. When I limit myself to composing in a particular tuning system, a huge amount of the compositional decision-making is made for me before I write or play a single note. So on a basic level I want to be able to manipulate tuning as I would any other compositional parameter. For this reason, I’m especially attracted to just intonation systems, which have a high degree of modularity compared to most equal temperaments.

On a more abstract level, I feel that thinking in terms of another tuning system allows me to access different conditions of success and failure within a composition - new problems, solutions, strengths and weaknesses are presented which can make me write in radically different ways.

An example of this is my piece CEMBALO BRUTTO for two guitars displaced 1/6 tone from each other.



It’s the only piece I’ve written in that kind of tuning system (basically a very unequally distributed subset of 72EDO), and as a result feels extremely different from everything else I’ve written.

How would you describe the shift of moving from one tuning system to another?

I often think of different tunings as having different ‘flavors’, and enjoy finding ways to move between them as a way to generate contrast in a piece.

Depending on the instruments I’m working with, this can also feel like an orchestrational decision - changing from one tuning to another often means finding a different balance of ease and difficulty between the instruments depending on their respective tendencies. This way of thinking is another reason why I really like just intonation systems, in which all the intervals are based on whole-number rational relationships rather than the equal division of the octave.

Different types of relationships (particularly when dealing with different prime factors) have their own flavors, and a robust just tuning will have contrasting regions that serve as ‘sub-tunings’ and allow for the appearance of moving between tunings.

My thinking on this is influenced by Kyle Gann’s writings on historical tunings. In short, he describes the Renaissance / Baroque meantone and well-tempered tunings as allowing for vastly different intonational flavors between keys, meaning that a modulation in a Bach fugue could have the effect of a shift between tuning systems. This totally changed the way I think about tonal music.

In how far has working with alternative tuning systems led to creating different music for you personally? Are there creative ideas / pieces which you could not realise in equal temperament?

For me, the most significant effect of working in alternative tuning systems has been a general opening-up of the space of creative possibility rather than a specific compositional technique. It’s like seeing the code of the Matrix - something I previously understood to be fixed and immovable has turned out to be an object of endless manipulation and creative play.

I believe that my work with The Vex Collection was greatly enriched by my informal experience with alternative tunings. Of the pieces I contributed, only one was really ‘microtonal’ on a self-conscious, theoretical basis.

Far more significant and challenging were the tasks of coherently combining instruments from distant traditions and idioms (Korea, Scotland, Croatia) and of designing new experimental instruments to complement them. Messing around with tunings gave me the necessary confidence in manipulating seemingly fundamental parameters of the music to even attempt something like The Vex Collection, as well as the necessary flexibility to actually realize it.

So while compositions like ‘Fugue’ and ‘The Bagslingers’ are not strictly microtonal or alternatively tuned, I feel they are deeply informed by my tuning practice.



What were some of the most interesting tuning systems you tried out and what are their respective qualities?

A major discovery was the unique tuning system of the primorski meh, a traditional bagpipe from the northern coast of Croatia which I play.



It sounds very strange to Western ears, playing something resembling a non-tempered diminished scale in parallel narrow minor thirds. Since it is a traditional and non-standardized instrument, by coincidence I found that my bagpipe’s tuning can be mapped onto a subset of the harmonic series of C, allowing me to build a justly tuned system that overlaps with and extends the bagpipe’s range. Music in this tuning system is featured on my upcoming sextet release Phantom Islands on Orenda Records.

Recently, I’ve started expanding this system further, drawing inspiration from music elsewhere in the Balkans which utilize simultaneous conflicting tuning systems - often combining Turkish-derived makam melodies with local folk microtonality and Western equal-tempered harmonies.

My ultimate goal is to have a band with as many tuning systems as there are instruments, with overlapping zones of shared pitches where unisons and consonant harmony are possible while allowing for the possibility of radical departures into new harmonic worlds.

In how far has working with alternative tuning systems changed your collaborative practise?

I’ve found that when working in non-standard tunings, you quickly end up with a self-selected group of collaborators who are willing and able to do lots of weird stuff. This is great for me since, coming out of jazz and improvised music, my practice has always been very collaborative. Many of the people who are able to play in alternative tunings are also interested in microtonal theory/composition, so we end up bouncing ideas off of each other and arriving at new approaches we may not have found working alone.

I’m just starting to get a glimpse of this, but I imagine that when you’ve built up a big enough community of performers comfortable in alternative tunings, you can associate certain players’ sensibilities with certain approaches to tuning, allowing for a radical extension of the person-specific arranging techniques common to the music of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and other composers.

So far, the focus with regards to alternative tuning systems has mainly been on harmony. But melody is affected, too. How do you personally understand melody and what changes when it becomes part of a new pitch environment?

Maybe it’s because I was first introduced to alternate tuning systems through Indian classical music, but I have always prioritized melody and counterpoint over vertical harmony in my tuning-focused music. I think there’s something uniquely evocative about a weird or unexpected interval being revealed over time, rather than as part of a simultaneous chord or harmony.

Microtonal harmony is great and I still use it, but to me it has more of a physical / visceral effect whereas microtonal melodicism has a lot of underexplored emotional potential.

My piece "Prelude" for The Vex Collection demonstrates this tendency of mine.



It was composed for Micro-Aulos, a newly invented wind instrument I designed and built in collaboration with Vicente Hansen Atria for the project. The instrument is actually a set of 10 modular double-pipes, each tuned in a small subset of 31EDO, a tuning great for richly tuned chords and tonal music.

My approach to "Prelude" was essentially the opposite of that suggested by the tuning, focusing on exploring the limited pitch space of a few of these pipes in a highly ornamental, melodic way while treating the vertical harmonic interactions between them as incidental.

Some artists approach tuning systems from a strongly scientific angle. In case you're interested in this, what do you feel 'research' could potentially uncover and provide in terms of tuning systems? Where do you see the biggest potential for exploration at the moment?

I believe there is potential for historical and (ethno)musicological research to generate radical new approaches to contemporary composition in general and to tuning in particular.

Even at its cutting edge, academic art music is still very inward looking, applying itself primarily to continuing the philosophical and aesthetic trends of Western Europe. By engaging in serious research of traditions outside this narrow scene and integrating that research with active compositional / performance practice, we can not only be exposed to different tunings (developed and honed over generations to fulfill specific musical goals - socially rather than experimentally crafted), but to ways of making art arising from entirely different intellectual / creative lineages.