Adding pitches; some new thoughts, ten years after Perspectives of New Music's "Forum: Microtonality Today".

As we wonder what it is that grips us and fills us with foreboding and delight in Chopin's music, we are apt to find a solution that might appear to many as pure fantasy, namely that Chopin's intention was to release upon us a cloud of quarter-tones, which now appear as phantom doppelganger in the shadowy realm within the intervals produced by enharmonic change. Once the quarter-tones are emancipated, an entirely new world of tones will open to us. But since we have been accustomed to the long established divisions into semitones, these new sounds will seem weird, suggesting a splash of discordant waves. Yet the children of the next generation, or the one after next, will suck in these strange sounds with mother's milk, and may find in them a more stimulating and doubly rich art.

Johanna Kinkel

Acht Briefe an eine Freundin uber Clavier-Unterricht

IN 1991, Perspectives of New Music's "Forum: Microtonality Today" was groundbreaking in its clear presentation of the varied methods and accomplishments of several of the most important pioneers of microtonalism. Ten years later I am responding with some thoughts of my own, as one of a small minority of microtonalists referred to by Douglas Keislar in his introduction: composers who use microtones for no reason other than to obtain the stimulating sonorities that are available with the added pitches, and who employ distinct, functional, expanded forms of equal temperament to this end.

If such composers did not figure prominently in the Forum, this is understandable considering their extreme scarcity in recent decades. (1) Today microtones are considered most often as a means of attaining acoustically "correct," pure tunings in scalar, frequently triadic idioms. There also are many composers who, although they may be unconcerned with pure tuning, nonetheless use the added pitches in an incidental fashion, either as mere ornaments to the twelve traditional pitches, or in clusters designed actually to reduce the function of individual tones, in the manner of Iannis Xenakis or Krzysztof Penderecki.

Earlier in the twentieth century bold efforts were made to forge a discrete melodic and harmonic language out of expanded equal temperament, by Alois Haba, julian Carrillo and Ivan Wyshnegradsky. However this path fell into disuse, with very few composers following in their painstakingly-made footsteps. This is surely due largely to the bewildering challenge of making musical sense out of the added pitches, a challenge that largely was not met by these composers, who left no substantial repertoire of inspirational works to affirm the merits and artistic potential of this approach to future generations. (2) Nonetheless, it is my belief that even in this nearly embryonic state expanded equal temperament is actually the most valuable form of microtonalism, and that it carries the most potential for musical innovation.

In 1988 I began several years of private study with Joe Maneri, one of the few composers still developing and advancing expanded equal temperament. Despite near-obscurity and isolation even amid the already marginalized international community of microtonalists, Maneri has been writing with seventy-two-note equal temperament, and has been teaching it with unwavering commitment and passion to students in his microtonal course at the New England Conservatory of Music, since the late 1970s. Although his microtonal oeuvre to date remains small, totaling seven pieces, the beauty and innovation in these works is profound, and provides a rich subject for study.