Part 3

What was your own learning curve / creative development like when it comes to alternative tuning systems - what were challenges and breakthroughs?

It was definitely a steep learning curve!

It took many years to even understand the basic concept, and then years beyond that to understand and work with tuning deeply, from a place of comfort rather than confusion. And of course I’m always still learning, there is so much to mine. And that was just to get a grasp on just intonation, never mind historical temperaments as well, which are in some ways perhaps even more complex. I think it’s like that for everyone though and when I teach tuning, I always try to emphasize that, hopefully to prevent people from giving up because they’re overwhelmed.

When I first started learning about tuning, my initial interest was actually from a mathematical perspective. I think that’s one thing, if not the main thing, that can be tricky for a lot of people. And, in some ways, it’s not unfounded; understanding tuning requires a level of comfort working with numbers and basic arithmetic and there’s kind of no way around that. Tuning is also quite a lot about structure and balance, so if you’re not used to thinking geometrically then it can be a challenge in that way as well. So even as someone who loves thinking about mathematics, I struggled early on to really absorb the concepts.

As with most things, it did get increasingly easier with more exposure; there are a lot of great texts out there from people like David Doty, Kyle Gann, and W.A. Mathieu, and there are ways to break it down so that it feels straight forward. Just intonation is called rational intonation for a reason, because it can be rationally derived, it just takes some mental dedication to get there.

I think one breakthrough that I had early on was what I mentioned previously in terms of connecting tuning to my interest in minimalist compositional approaches. Tuning is a deep rabbit hole and it’s easy to get swept away in the possibilities (just intonation, for instance, offers a theoretically infinite number of tuning systems), and so I think once I started working with tuning systems in a more focused and perhaps even conceptual way, like just examining a few isolated intervals and exploring how they relate, I realized that you could express quite a lot with a little.

So I guess deliberately giving myself the same kinds of limitations that I was placing on every other parameter of my compositional practice was really helpful early on, and remains so now.

Being a keyboard player helped too, I think, because you’re already predisposed in some way to question the rigid structure. If you came into music through a stringed instrument, for instance, microtonality might feel more accessible, which could result in less motivation to seek it out.

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?

Absolutely. I know I’m saying this a lot, but I really can’t overstate how much similarity I see between the way that musical instruments are approached and the way that tuning systems are approached.

I don’t think anyone would be surprised to learn that someone who played the guitar their whole life, who developed a certain compositional style as a result of their instrument, might make music that is appreciably quite different once they start composing for piano, or some other instrument. It makes sense because each instrument has certain structural, idiosyncratic, and timbral particularities about it that will speak differently in varying types of music. Tuning systems, to me, are exactly the same.

One tuning system can reveal things in the music that another simply can’t; each version of the music is equally valid, I think, so then it just comes down to a decision of which is better for the composer’s specific aims of for piece. Again, it’s similar to the art of orchestration: if a musical line is given to a flute instead of a violin, it’s going to result in a different sounding experience; neither better nor worse, just different.

I’m not sure how other composers who work with alternate tuning systems think about this, but because my music is specifically timbral, the overtones generated in acoustic space are just as important as the notes written into the score. So, in that way, there is a lot of my music that can’t be realized in equal temperament.

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

For this album I mostly used ones that I was already familiar with – meantone temperament, which has a unique quality on account of that wolf fifth and other intervals that derive from it, and then historical well temperaments like Kellner and Norden.

Well temperaments are interesting because they aren’t quite as strong in their character as meantone temperament is, but they have more subtle resonances that are quite special and hard to unhear once you start exploring them.

In terms of the “Interludes” series, which uses just intonation, I employed a few different structures. One of them, “Interlude I: Polyphonic, for Strings,” uses my signature septimal scale, which I created many years ago and have used a few times over the years. It’s my favourite iteration of the septimal sound.

The scale I built uses minor seventh and major second intervals that are true symmetrical mirrors of the fundamental, so while most septimal intervals tend to be around 30 cents flat from equal temperament, one of these intervals is around 30 cents sharp. The result is that there is one semitone where the upper pitch is around 30 cents flat, and the lower pitch is around 30 cents sharp, so the difference between them is only around 40 cents, whereas in equal temperament it would be 100 cents. That’s quite significant, and it creates a unique character when the two pitches interact.

“Interlude V: Harmonic, for Woodwinds” uses a scale that dips into the 11th and 13th primes, while “Interlude II: Unison, for Brass” is mostly built around upper natural harmonics as intervals themselves rather than intervals built from lower natural harmonics.



So each system, and by extension each iteration of the piece, has its own unique sonic quality partly by way of the tuning.

Do you still use equal temperament? What are some of the aspects and goals for which you find it suitable?

Of course! I love equal temperament!

I have no intrinsic problems with it, I think that it’s a very useful system and that it serves a specific function in all sorts of music that I adore. I don’t think anyone can claim to love popular music while also hating equal temperament; the two sentiments are just not compatible. And popular music is one arena where equal temperament really shines.

My objection is simply historical, on account of its standardization, and in relation to how it’s silenced the deep poetic potentials that are inherent in pretty much all other tuning systems. I often liken equal temperament to visual monochrome: there’s nothing wrong with monochrome, and in fact it can be endlessly interesting in and of itself, but it’s not sufficient as an ambassador of the entire colour field.

Or you could think of it instrumentally, as we’ve been speaking in that vernacular: can you imagine if the piano was for some random reason the only musical instrument that existed? There’s nothing inherently wrong with the piano and it can still do a lot, but it would be horrible if we were limited to only its particular way of speaking and sounding, if all timbre was simply that of the piano. That’s what equal temperament has done to tuning as a creative parameter, reduced it from infinite spectrum to an exceedingly finite singularity.

As I mentioned earlier, I also perform a lot in equal temperament because I can’t control the tuning of every organ that I play and a lot of them are set in equal temperament, so I need to be able to adapt. It’s not a bad thing, though, it just means something different for the music, as it should be.

Equal temperament was designed to be practical – other tuning systems have many discrepancies and imperfections that make them difficult to extrapolate universally. Equal temperament is useful because it is almost independent of context; every interval in every key is exactly the same size and therefore sounds exactly the same. The trade off, of course, is the loss of harmonic and intervallic variety, nuance, and colour. You can’t really have it both ways.

As I said, there are also ways around working in equal temperament in a way that still feels harmonically resonant: the first three overtones of the harmonic series are the octave, the fifth, and the fourth and the latter two are effectively the same as in equal temperament, just two cents difference, which I would say is negligible.

And there is an awful lot that you can do just with unisons, octaves, fourths, and fifths. In relation to this album, the “Songs of the Smile’s Fig” choral suite is in equal temperament.

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?

For me, tuning is about the relations between pitches, about the experience of an interval, not about the tuning of pitches in isolation. And insofar as tuning concerns one thing against another, I see harmony and melody simply as two sides of the same coin, one expressed vertically and the other expressed horizontally.

In fact the “Interludes” series explores this very idea, and in the score, I encourage the players to think of these sequential “melodies” simply as chords resting on their side. I think this is something that I’m constantly trying to navigate in my work, the balance between the vertical realm of acoustics and space, and the horizontal realm of time and pacing.

I think that my music often just moves too slowly for it to be perceived as properly melodic rather than harmonic, but it is there in some sense and the horizontal aspect is important for me also, which I explore through shifts in duration.

“The Rose Dialogues” also explores this overlap between melody and harmony, with a concept that I describe as a variable canon: all players are following a certain melodic structure, but they’re not properly aligned in doing so, constantly slipping in and out of phase with one another. In this way, the tuning is expressed in both dimensions.

With electronic tools, playing and composing in just intonation has become a whole lot easier. Do you find this interesting? What are some of the technologies, controllers and instruments you use for your own practise?

In terms of general compositional techniques, I think that there is no right or wrong answer, no way of working that is better or worse than any other approach.

I think it all comes down to the particularities of process as well as personal preference, so I encourage people to find what works well for them and to not feel technologically pressured to abandon those methods for newer ones if they’re still fruitful and meaningful. Anything that helps you is a good thing, regardless of what that technology looks like or how outdated it may be. So I guess in theory I don’t find technology for its own sake especially interesting in relation to tuning, no.

My practice is a hodgepodge of things. I am a pen-and-paper composer in the initial stages, and that includes the tuning side of the work; I like sketching out lattices and making sense of the geometry by my own hand. I also use an app that was designed by Caspar Johannes Walter, a contemporary German composer; it’s basically just a crude signal generator where you can specify tunings in either cents deviations or ratios, and get specific with the setting of your 1/1 frequency. I find it extremely useful. It allows me to construct my scales and get a sense of how harmonies work off paper, in the aural reality of the future music.

Sometimes with a composition and tuning system you can go somewhere conceptually but then once you hear it, you might discover that it doesn’t really work, so the sound itself pushes you into a different negotiation of the tuning system. I also have a few synthesizers that have precision tuning capabilities, so sometimes I’ll demo things with those, to again go one step further and actually have material to work with in the real space of the composition.

When I’m doing a demo of something, it models my electroacoustic practice, so I’ll usually just record held tones at the specific tuning I need them in and then edit that into independent segments of sound and start building in my DAW (Logic), which is where most of the composition happens. So in that way, really any instrument that can alter and control its tuning can work.

I do a lot of recordings with acoustic instruments and that’s easy as I have a good community of musicians around me who I like to work with. But if I don’t have access to the instrument or players, I’ll just use whatever is convenient.

I have a Nord keyboard in my studio that serves as my main compositional workhorse and it’s actually pretty useful because I can use the sampler to get a basic approximation of the instrument I need and then I use the master tuner to set the cents deviation and I can record held tones direct to Logic. It’s probably not the most efficient way to work but I don’t care much about that kind of thing.

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’m probably not the right person to answer this! I am interested in the scientific angle, but I’m not up on that kind of acoustic research. In my academic research I tend to gravitate more towards historical, cultural, and philosophical expressions of tuning and temperament.

I’m definitely not working in any opposition to scientific perspectives though, I just think that the philosophical side is less developed, and I would love to see more connections being made between the two aspects.