Part 2
Tell me a bit about the way the new material developed and gradually took its final form, please.
As I said, the first pieces, “The Rose Dialogues” and “Interludes,” were developed throughout 2024 as part of a residency at EMPAC. Working at EMPAC was a real luxury because I was able to work with a local string trio from the point of early compositional sketches.
Often times commissioned ensemble work is necessarily through-composed and traditionally scored, and you don’t really get a sense of what the piece will actually sound like until the final rehearsals take place right before the live concert premiere. It can be really frustrating to work that way for certain kinds of music because you’re not afforded the opportunity to make changes based on how things actually sound. So any opportunity to have a sense of what things are actually sounding like in acoustic space early on and to develop the piece in response to that are really special to me.
So I came into that residency with sketches for these two pieces and I spent a few days working through them with the trio, and the technical crew at EMPAC set it up so we could do elaborate recordings of everything as well. And then for the next year after that I was able to fine tune things in my home studio based on those recordings.
And then in the summer of 2025 I did another part of the residency there to record “The Rose Dialogues” and a string version of “Interludes.” We were able to bring in my first choice of players for that, so we got Lucy Railton on cello, and Eyvind Kang and Whitney Johnson on viola, and we rented a tuned continuo organ for “The Rose Dialogues.”
[Read our Eyvind Kang interview]
[Read our Whitney Johnson interview]
The brass and woodwind versions of “Interludes” were recorded later in the year; the brass version with Diapason, who are good friends based in Los Angeles, and the woodwind version with Phaedrus, who are a Renaissance traverso consort based in Switzerland.
“Songs of the Smile’s Fig” was developed through a commission by Louth Contemporary Music Society, for a new choral piece written for Chamber Choir Ireland. That piece was composed throughout 2024 and early 2025, and then was premiered as part of LCMS’s Echoes Festival in Dundalk, Ireland in June 2025, which is also when we did the recording.
And then the organ pieces were composed throughout 2024 and 2025 initially in my home studio, and then fleshed out into full pieces and recordings throughout the second half of 2025. The organ work that I write is often so closely linked to the specific instrument, and then adapted more generally later so that it can be widely performable. But the organs that I recorded with are very intimately linked to the compositional process for me.
And, as with all of my albums, once I have the recordings then I go into a deep process of mixing, which is a compositional act from my perspective.
In as far as it is applicable, were there tuning-specific challenges for your new release or recent performances? In how far has working with alternative tuning systems changed your collaborative practise in general?
In terms of recording the album, no, there were no major issues in relation to tuning.
With performance, it can be a little tricky because, as I mentioned, each of the organ pieces is written to the tuning system of the instrument that I composed and recorded with. So when I perform those pieces, I just have to go with whatever the tuning of the organ in front of me is, and usually it’s not the same system as the one that I composed the piece for. But I’m not sure that I would refer to it as a challenge; on the contrary, actually, it’s something that I enjoy working with because it changes the music in a way that reflects the particularities of the sounding body.
Again, similar to the way that orchestration changes things: you can have the same written music, but it’s going to be a completely different sounding experience depending on the instrument that articulates those notes in space and time. Tuning is the same for me, so it’s been really meaningful to arrange my organ work for so many different instruments through performance. It gives you the opportunity to hear different relationships in the music, and to experience it in a new way.
The “Interludes” series, and some other pieces of mine that are written in a similar way where there is some openness and variability built into the structure and timbre, like “Long Gradus,” offer a parallel opportunity to iterate deliberately and by extension to then explore different aspects of the music under some fixed constraints.
To me it feels like a collaboration with the acoustic realities of the sound, it’s a real-time negotiation where everyone is listening and responding while creating the sound.
I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about your music written for different tuning systems. Were there surprising responses, did you perhaps gain new “insights?”
I think people for the most part have been receiving it well. I know that there are definitely people who think this kind of music is pretentious or that tuning is a gimmick or something, but most of the people I speak to or hear from directly are genuinely interested in this idea of approaching tuning as a timbral concept.
It’s a difficult thing to make music like this that is also accessible and approachable to people who don’t know or care about the technicalities of tuning, and that’s a balance that I strive for in most of my music. Some of the stuff I do with tuning and microtonality is definitely not accessible and it’s not really meant to be, but I think that most of the music on this album definitely is, at least to my ears.
The response to this kind of music that I simultaneously both love and hate is one that I get fairly often, and it’s usually something to the effect of “oh, I actually liked that!” For me, the minimalist approach to composition is so intricately entwined with giving centre stage to the tuning, and often times audience members (or even the people playing my music!) will look at my scores and express that they’re surprised that the music was enjoyable or interesting.
I think people are so conditioned to connect the score and notation in close relation to what will actually be heard, and the idea that the notes on the page might just be the framework for something more important that happens off the page (like the perception of overtones or psychoacoustic effects, which occur as a result of the tuning system being allowed to resonate in the acoustic space), is not one that many people have trained their ears to appreciate or even accept as part of the music.
I love that my music might have provided someone an opportunity to discover something new and something that they liked, but of course those kinds of responses also betray a condescension towards minimalist music that I find pretty tired and boring.
How would you describe the shift of moving from one tuning system to another?
Again, I would compare it to the way that one might approach different instruments.
There are definitely similarities in their construction and structure, like there is a certain way of thinking that you need to inhabit when you’re working in just intonation and it’s different than how you might understand a well temperament, but each tuning system is its own thing, and each one speaks in a specific way.
So when I approach a new instrument, I might start with the basic things that I know about it – that it’s a breathing instrument, or that it’s something that consumes the hands in a specific way, etc. – but once you start to explore the details you discover nuances and subtleties that are specific to it. And just as I do with instruments, I’ll often bring my own ideas into how I want to work with the tuning system, but I’ll also leave room for the system to show me what it’s capable of and to point my ears in different directions. And then it becomes a negotiation, a type of collaboration, where I’m exploring and listening and then directing things based on that.
Precision tuning is something that is typically considered a hallmark of just intonation, but I think my approach to tuning and my comfort level with discrepancies is a bit broader given that I work in equal measure with historical temperaments and with keyboard instruments that are always drifting slightly. So that’s something that is perhaps a throughline for me. But otherwise it’s really just about slightly reorienting yourself for the tuning system, just like you would for a different instrument.
Meantone temperament was designed to highlight its use of the 5/4 major third, so when I’m composing for that system, I might lean more into that. I don’t usually prefer major (or major-sounding) keys, but it’s fun to sometimes bring in this interval to create an effect that can be kind of jarring.
I did this in “Possente Spirto,” a work of mine from 2023-2024: the piece is primarily in a natural minor key, but I ended it with a Tierce de Picardie (Picardy third), a cadence that is typical of Baroque music and entails placing a major chord at the end of an otherwise minor passage.
I think that it really shines in this moment, not just because of the unexpected shift in character but because of the harmonic resonance of the meantone major third.
When working in just intonation, I tend to give favour to intervals like the fifth, fourth, seventh, and second, partly because I like to play with their symmetry.
Terms like consonant and dissonant are used in school, but mostly with very limited understanding of what they mean. How has your own idea of these terms changed over time and how do you see them today?
Yeah, ‘consonant’ and ‘dissonant’ are certainly terms that I have a completely different relationship to than I did when I first started composing maybe around twenty years ago.
I was taught that ‘consonant’ effectively meant ‘in tune’ and harmonious, and that ‘dissonant’ referred to things that weren’t pitched or in tune. I think the first realization that I came to when I began learning about tuning is that most modern music (i.e. any music written in equal temperament) is actually out of tune and exceedingly inharmonic. So most of the things that we’re taught to hear as ‘consonant’ according to that definition should really be categorized as properly ‘dissonant’.
And, ironically, we’re usually taught that music tuned according to the tenets of just intonation is ‘dissonant’ even though it’s “correctly” in tune, which also has political implications in that it automatically others and exoticizes musical traditions that are predicated on rational tuning rather than equal temperament.
When you start to learn about tuning, another way of thinking about consonance and dissonance sometimes arises in relation to the harmonic series, wherein the harmonics that are closer to the fundamental (the octave, the 3/2 fifth, the 4/3 fourth, etc.) are considered more consonant, and those that are more distant from the fundamental (like from the seventh harmonic upwards) are considered dissonant. To me, this kind of definition has never really made sense and just feels like an extension of the first concept given that equal temperament more or less overlaps with the first four harmonics and then starts to diverge drastically as the series moves upwards.
These days, I tend to think of consonance in terms of harmonic or acoustic stillness and dissonance in terms of harmonic or acoustic friction, which is independent of any essentializing of the intervals themselves and then becomes more a product of what happens when different intervals, whatever they may be and however “familiar” they may sound on their own, interact with one another. In psychoacoustic terms, I typically separate this between the perception of overtones, which implies a kind of harmonic alignment and stillness to me, and the perception of beating patterns, which suggests a kind of harmonic tension at work.
Of course, I don’t subscribe to any of the value judgements that we tend to place on consonance and dissonance; it’s completely unfair to put any kind of pejorative on dissonance. Often, I’ll go specifically towards that kind of sound actually, for instance in the context of meantone temperament where you find the incredibly dissonant wolf fifth between the A-flat and E-flat. Because of the way that the tuning system is built, the A-flat doesn’t technically exist – it’s properly a functional G-sharp – which is what accounts for the dissonance where you’d expect a fifth.
When working within the closed-system enharmonic limitations of the keyboard, I love to lean into structures that are built on that false fifth, which is what you hear in the organ piece Canto Duo from the new album, for instance.
