source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 10:28:00 -0700 Subject: From McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: Review of the Just Intonation Network's "Rational Music For An Irrational World" -- Several correspondents have asked me to review the 1989 cassette "Rational Music For An Irrational World." For a number of reasons, this makes sense--even though the cassette itself is now 7 years old. First, this tape is an extremely important aural document in the history of post-Partch just intonation. Prior to 1989 many individual tapes were available, but there was no convincing proof that a widespread movement toward JI existed in America. Individual composers' JI tapes could be dismissed by bigoted New York critics of the head-in-the-sand Paul Griffiths school--"this JI composer is a fringe lunatic," "that JI composer is a flake," and so on, and so forth. Partch himself was treated this way until the 80s. (After all, The New Yorker music critic described Ivan Vyshnegradsky as "almost insane" in a 1995 review.) But once the JIN issued its compilation cassette, it became impossible for the New York critical circle-jerk buddy system to deny the existence of a grass-roots just intonation movement of long standing on the West Coast. Second, the JIN cassette "Rational Music" is an important document tracing the early history of just intonation on pre- and post-MIDI digital synthesizers. Many of the compositions on "Rational Music" date from just before and just after the advent of MIDI, and they are therefore an invaluable historical record of how the first generation of mass-market digital JI'ers wrestled with the problems of MIDI, computer sequencers and keyboards designed for 12 equal tones but retuned to just intonation. (This problem is one with which many of us continue to wrestle today.) Third, "Rational Music" was the Just Intonation Network's announcement of its musical position. Inevitably, all movements stake out a place in the musical spectrum--IRCAM has consistently placed itself in the post-Webern serialist camp and has thus marginalized itself nearly out of existence; all the award-winning IRCAM composers use Forte/Rahn/Morrison pitch-class set theory in their compositions. CCRMA has consistently placed itself in the American neocalssical camp; Dartmouth in the Ussachevksy/Luening American electronic music camp, which lies midway between the extremes of the French ORTF musique concrete and the Germand Darmstadt lab-oscillator-and-filter school--and so on. With the selection of pieces on "Rational Music" the JIN placed itself squarely in the neoclassical algorithmic camp with this tape, reflecting by and large the interests of the JIN members in the San Francisco Bay area. This movement has since flowered, while the Eurocentric12-TET serialist acoustic movement has continued to flail and twitch like a chicken with its head cut off--albeit more feebly now than ever before. (Remember that New York is part of Europe, and the Bay area up through the Northwest is part of the Pacific Rim. Then you can understand why New York composers were so Eurocentric and why the American gamelan movement began in the Bay area.) -- The first piece on side 1 of "Rational Music For An Irrational World" is "Dance of the Testifiers" by Erling Wold. This appears to be a synthesizer-and- sampler arrangement of "incidental music for the theatre work `The Islamic Republic Of Las Vegas.'" The composition strongly resembles the work of Lou Harrison, and dates from 1985. As has been mentioned in prior posts, Erling Wold is a talented composer as well as a polymath, and this composition is as impressive and delightful as the rest of his oeuvre. Especially notable: Wold's success in teasing an expressive, human-sounding result from his MIDI sequences. "Prelude and Fugue for the Rest of Us" by Jules Siegel was performed "by the composer's original IBM PC software which models human performance." This composition won 3rd place in the Third Coast New Music Project Microtonal Music Festival in 1988. Despite a slightly mechanical-sounding performance, the composition comes across as a tuneful and impressive extension of Bachian contrapuntal techniques into the realm of extended JI. "Loved and Lost" by Eric S. Ridgway was composed, performed and recorded in January of 1986 using 4 multi-tracked acoustic JI guitar tape parts. This piece is fascinating because it is a species of composition which could not have existed prior to the advent of cheap multi-track tape machines. It works well, although the recording quality betrays the age of the composition. "Form For Just Intonation" by Norbert Oldani, is particularly interesting for 2 reasons: first, Oldani is a long-time JI and ET theorist whose theoretical work is undeservedly little-known and whose compositions are ( even more undeservedly) less widely known. And second, Oldani realizes his composition with a peculiar early digital synthesizer: Passport Design's Soundchaser System. This synth produced 8-bit digital sound with 256-point additive synthesis wavetables. On 2 cards plugged into an Apple II+ computer, the Soundchaser was much more programmable than most modern digital synths--moreover, due to the digital filters on the DACs, the sound output was reasonably hi-fi up to about 12 khz. Oldani's composition takes maximum advantage of the unique digital timbres of the Soundchaser system: basically, you could get dynamic additive digital synthesis by burning polyphony. In this regard the Soundchaser was infinitely more flexible than modern digital synths, and Oldani coaxes a remarkable variety of bell-like, string- like and analog-synth-type timbres from his system. The piece works well, and is one of the very few recordings now extant of a microtonal composition on an entirely microcomputer-based pre-MIDI digital synthesis system. "City of Trout" by Thomas J. Dougherty, sounds remarkably like much of the music being done today by the San Francisco Bay area Max algorithmic composers. By and large the American algorithmic composition movement came out of the Bay area, and this is an early and elegant example--one of the best pieces on the tape. "I am Curious (George)" by Carola Anderson is also noteworthy because it clearly represents the first MIDI efforts by a JI composer who had earlier worked exclusively with acoustic ensembles. (This is true of many of the Bay Area JI community: David Doty and many other influential SF JIN members initially started their xenharmonic explorations as American gamelan performers and builders, strongly influenced by Lou Harrison's justly tuned gamelans. Thus most of these early JIN members gained their first compositional experience with live acoustic ensembles, rather than with digital synths and computers.) This composition succeeds well, and doesn't sound "stiff" or overquantized. David Doty is to be congratulated for serving as "MIDI guru" to Carola Anderson on this composition. The results are musically impressive. "Two Fragments of Ancient Greek Music" are FB-01 HMSL-produced Greek melodic fragments. The timbres sound not so great and the performance is somewhat mechanical, but since the main interest here is historical and musciological, that doesn't matter at all. John Chalmers once again demonstrates his scholarship by resurrecting these 2500-year-old musical fragments from oblivion and letting us hear them. "Air for the Poet" by Lou Harrison is a fine acoustic recording of a typically Handelian neoclassical composition. As always, it's difficult to hear anything xenharmonic in the piece. "Time Auscultations" by William Alves is up to the usual high standard of this fine composer's oeuvre: in this case, samples of the internal motors of robots are ingeniously used to create a just intonation soundscape. Alves is one of the most adroit composers at the forefront of the movement to combine cutting-edge digital signal processing techniques with classical just intonation tunings. The result is a unique and splendidly musical blend of the modern & the classical. SIDE TWO: "Paradigms Lost" by David B. Doty is his "fantasy of what might have happened if psychedelic-era rock bands had pursued their interests in the exotic, free from the constraints imposed by the record industry." To thse old ears, this composition sounds like the best piece of music on the tape. It's a stunning demonstation of how vividly musical just intonation can be, while at the same time whipping the listener through some truly crunchy JI modulations & intervals. Doty's intent is also a worthy one: we in the Southern California Microtonal Group have also produced a a subset of compositions which in effect take up where the psychedelic rock bands of the late 60s left off. This is a musical direction utterly disdained by the so-called "serious contemporary music" theorists and critics (many of whom cannot be taken seriously), but it's a musical direction which promises endless musical rewards to the adventurous microtonal explorer...as Neil Haverstick has recently pointed out. I have in prior posts mentioned that David Doty is a superbly talented composer: this composition offers yet further proof of that fact. "Paradigms Lost" alone justifies spending the money on the JIN tape. "Analogs" by Glenn Frantz, uses a MIDIfied Commodore 64 computer with a Yamaha TX81Z. The composition is theoretically interesting since it uses not a fixed scale, but instead a fluid set of pitches separated by the 81/80. This kind of "floating just intonation" would be impossible with an impractically large acoustic ensemble, but with a computer it becomes easy. Musically, this piece is very effective, and works well. Another historically fascinating example of early JI composition: it's sobering to realize that with the advent of the Commodore 64 and the TX81Z and FB-01, for about 5 years in the mid-1980s even dirt-poor composers could get into digitally sequenced computer-controlled xenharmonic music for an investment of under 700 or 800 dollars U.S. This is no longer true: today, the minimum cost of a retunable digital synthesizer has climbed above $1500 and new computers aren't cheap, either. (Of course, used IBM XTs and TX81Zs can be bought second-hand for next to nothing, but my point is that there are no NEW synths or computers to fill the under-$1000- for-the-whole-schmeer niche.) In my judgment, this lack of dirt-cheap retunable synths is a big gap in the market, and some synthesizer company will make a bunch 'o bucks if they can fill it. (Computer sound cards don't count, since they're not portable stand-alone units.) "Threnody" by Dudley Duncan is a positively 19th-century-like essay in JI. Very nice piece, and an early 1988 example of a composition using Partch's 43-tone scale(!) "Guitar Suite" by David Canright demonstrates another talent of the multifacted math instructor. Canright is not only a fine JI theorist and a mathematically adept mind, but a skilled guitar player & composer. "Study #3" by Ralph David Hill is a virtuoso example of something from nothing. This piece was done on Hill's home-built Quadvox, a synthesizer built literally from the ground up out of raw chips and microcode in the early 1980s. Almost anyone else would be intimidated by the mere prospect of such a task: Dave Hill not only completed the project, but managed to make the results sound musical. (The liner notes are not accurate for this piece: I know Dave HIll's work intimately, and this composition was clearly not done with his Cro-Magnon resynthesis system.) "Temple of Eyes" is a very skillful new-agey JI composition using sampled and synthesized sounds. Robert Rich, the composer, is also an influential programmer: he wrote the JICalc software which is used by so many xenharmonists to retune their synths. An excellent piece of music. "Zenharmonics 2.1 (excerpt) by Gino Robair, proves less interesting. A bevy of guitars all played with e-bows comes off as too much guitar and too static a drone. Robair's percussion music is much more interesting; it's a pity none of it is included here. "Ulysses Departs From the Edge of the World" by Harry Partch is the only recording I know of this composition. Apparently it originally appeared on a long-departed LP or CD called "New Music For Trumpet" by Jack Logan. Kudos are due David Doty and company for rescuing this fine recording from oblivion. -- Overall, this cassette is highly recommended. It's available for ten dollars plus postage from the Just Intonation Network, 535 Stevenson Street, San Francisco CA 94103. WIth this tape, David Doty has some an excellent job of selecting, producing, and re-recording the music, and the cassette sounds remarkably hi-fi throughout (some of the tracks inevitably suffer from hiss due the antique multi-track cassette medium on which they were originally recorded). The only suggestion for improvement I can make is (perhaps) to issue a CD and run the more hissy tracks through the Mark Dolson DNoise noise- reduction shareware, or DigiDesign's vastly more expensive but essentially identical de-doising DSP software. Other than that, this cassette is exemplary, and a must-have for fans of microtonal music. --mclaren Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 6 Sep 1996 20:17 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA25765; Fri, 6 Sep 1996 20:18:41 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA25544 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id LAA24004; Fri, 6 Sep 1996 11:18:39 -0700 Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 11:18:39 -0700 Message-Id: <009A7FB1FCCEEF00.1C2C@vbv40.ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu