Microtonal music is music using microtones — intervals of less than an equally spaced semitone, or as Charles Ives put it, the "notes between the cracks" of the piano. A looser definition includes anything not in 12-tone equal temperament, while a stricter definition distinguishes between microtonal music (which can take 12-tone equal temperament as an audible basis), and xenharmonic music (which does not).

Terminology

The term microtonal music may refer only to music which sounds audibly different from conventional Western music. According to this definition, five-limit diatonic just intonation and meantone temperament may not qualify as microtonal, while Indonesian music does, but not Indian classical music.
By another definition, microtonal music may refer to all music which contains intervals smaller than the conventional semitone. The idea here is that the music contains microtones, i.e., very small intervals. By this definition, the following systems are not microtonal: a diatonic scale in any meantone tuning; much Indonesian gamelan music; and Thai, Burmese, and African music which use 7 approximately equally spaced tones in each (approximate) octave.
An alternative term is xenharmonic music, saying that microtonal music should refer only to music which departs in any way from the conventional 12 exactly equal pitches of current theoretical Western usage. Xenharmonic music would tend to include essentially all of the world's non-western music. From the point of this view the term microtonal music may exclude quarter-tone and sixth- and eighth-tone music from consideration as microtonal, since it is based wholly on the 12 equal pitches of contemporary Western tuning. However, this definition is seldom used, and several very active schools of "microtonal music", such as those in Boston, Den Haag, Salzburg, and the spectral school in France are based on exactly such subdivisions of the conventional semitone.

Usage

One reason microtonalists explore alternate tunings is that each unique even or uneven division of the octave or non-octave or octave+fifth etc. gives a new world of intervallic connections and herewith musical content. Just intonation scales like Partch's 43 tone unequal scale start with the diatonic Western scale, and many of them extend it, in Partch's case up to the 11th partial. Some like the 19 tone or 31 tone equal scales may be used close to diatonic scales, but extend them considerably. Other divisions of the octave do not support the diatonic basis for Western musical notation and tonal theory, but have other equally viable intervallic relationships.

History

The earliest music of which a written record exists anywhere on earth appears to be the Hurrian Hymn. This music was probably microtonal, though interpretation of the Hurrian records has been disputed.
The Hellenic civilizations of ancient Greece also left fragmentary records of their music—c.f., the Delphic Hymns. Of the tuning of ancient Greek music we have a comprehensive record, courtesy of Aristoxenos' surviving text on music. The ancient Greeks divided the octave into two sets of tetrachords—that is to say, four-note scales placed one above the other. The placement of individual pitches within these two stacked tetrachords determined the seven notes of the Greek tuning within the octave. Greeks recognized three genera of tetrachords: the enharmonic, the chromatic, and the diatonic. According to Archytas, all employed unequal pitches to the octave. Each of these 3 genera used what we today would call just intonation, i.e., they are defined by ratios of integers. On the other hand, Aristoxenos asserted a primacy of the ear's perception over intervals resulting from abstract calculation. Aristoxenos abandoned the description of intervals as the ratios of integers, describing the division of the tetrachord in terms of unit divisions, which some scholars have identified as a protype for an equal temperament, but were more likely not to have been understood by Aristoxenos as units with precise values but rather as units describing a small but audibly perceptable distance in pitch space as realized on a monochord. While the chromatic and the diatonic genera sound very similar to the contemporary Western tuning used today, the Greek enharmonic genus made prominent use of an approximate quartertone. Thus the Greek enharmonic genus qualifies as a distinctively microtonal tuning whichever way we define microtonality.
As Joel Mandelbaum has pointed out in his PhD thesis "Multiple Division Of the Octave and the Tonal Resources of the 19 Tone Temperament" (1960), scholarship done on the Montpellier Codex suggests that it records microtonal tunings, probably the Greek enharmonic. Thus the evidence appears to show that microtonal tunings survived and were commonly used late into the medieval period.
Meantone tunings date from the early 1490s, as scholars such as Richard Taruskin and Patrizio Barbieri have pointed out. Since Pietro Aron meantone tuning became extremely common and was considered to represent "correct" tuning throughout Europe until 1750 and in England and Spain until 1850. Such meantone tunings sound similar to, but more harmonious than, conventional Western tunings of 12 equal pitches per octave, when performed on an instrument limited to 12 pitches per octave, as long as the composer restricts his/herself to a narrow compass of musical keys close to the root note of the tuning (i.e., if the meantone tuning is tuned starting with C, the keys close to C major will sound like a more harmonious take on conventional Western music; distant keys, however, like Eb minor, will contain highly audibly exotic and sometimes discordant musical intervals.) Some early composers, however, deliberately wandered far afield from the root note of meantone tunings, producing highly microtonal effects in typical renditions of their music. One prominent example is "Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La" by the British virginal composer John Bull (composed sometime between the 1580s and 1610, and included in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book). Such extensive modulation in meantone tuning on a 12-note-per octave instrument sounds "wolf" fifths and other exotic musical intervals not found in contemporary Western music using 12 equal pitches per octave, and probably qualifies as "microtonal" music (depending on the specific definition of microtonality).
However, if more than 12 pitches per octave are allowed, meantone tuning can be extended to sound harmonious (and possibly not microtonal) in more and more keys, eventually distinguishing keys that sound identical in 12-equal (like F# major and Gb major). It was quite common in the heyday of meantone tuning to find keyboards with "split" keys or special organ stops, often allowing 13-16 pitches per octave of meantone tuning. In this way music by Handel and many other composers could be played in meantone tuning, maintaining smooth harmony and conventional-sounding melody even as the music modulated to distant keys. Teachers of string instruments, including Leopold Mozart, and of wind instruments, including Quantz, expected their students to distinguish all enharmonic pairs of pitches (like F# and Gb) in their playing, with the sharpened version of one diatonic tone being played lower than the flattened version of the next diatonic tone up. So composers in the meantone era who restricted their harmonic compass were doing so largely because they were writing for keyboard or an ensemble that included a keyboard.
Many tunings of meantone temperament can be made to close in a manageable number of notes per octave (12-tone equal temperament is one example). The 1/3-comma and 1/4-comma meantones close very nearly in 19 and 31 tones per octave, respectively, with better approximations to the 5-limit thirds and sixths of the diatonic scale than can be found on modern 12-tone instruments. Several French composers of the 17th century made use of this fact by designing keyboards for 19 equal intervals to the octave, which could be played in all keys with no "wolf" intervals. 17th-century scientist and musician Christiaan Huygens promoted the use of 31-equal, which also allows meantone in all keys without "wolves", but with better approximations of 7-limit intervals than in 19-equal. Huygens advocated the use of the just seventh, with pitch ratio 7/4. This interval is very well approximated in 31-equal. In the 20th century, a Dutch school of microtonalists arose around Adriaan Fokker, which sought to use the novel resources of Huygens' 31-tone system as fundamental features of new musical forms, and not merely according to their established functions in common-practice tonality. Many Dutch composers were associated with this school, including Fokker himself under a pseudonym; the best-known was probably Henk Badings.
Guillaume Costeley's "Chromatic Chanson", "Seigneur Dieu ta pitié" of 1558 used 1/3 comma meantone and explored the full compass of 19 equal pitches in the octave, making use of audibly microtonal intervals like the 63-cent interval of 1/19 of an octave.
The Italian Renaissance composer and theorist Nicola Vicentino (1511-1576) [1] experimented with microintervals and built for example a keyboard with 36 keys to the octave, known as the archicembalo. However Vicentino's experiments were primarily motivated by his research (as he saw it) on the ancient Greek genera, and by his desire to have beatless intervals (when played with near-harmonic-series timbres) available within chromatic compositions.
Johann Kuhnau's composition "Der Kampf zwischen David und Goliath," composed around 1700 in meantone, makes prominent and aggressive use of the exotic intervals available in meantone—specifically, the "wolf" fifth. Such a composition probably qualifies as microtonal, depending on the definition of microtonality.
Composers such as Beethoven and Schubert made extensive use of the enharmonic modulation cycles possible only in a closed tuning of 12 pitches per octave, and not open-ended tunings like meantone. This led to the demise of meantone thinking in most of Europe by the outset of the Romantic period. Microtonality was not completely lost, however, as some string teachers began to advocate "expressive intonation" in which the enharmonic distinctions of meantone were often reversed, i.e., the sharpened version of one diatonic tone often played higher than the flattened version of the next diatonic tone up.
Jacques Fromental Halévy composed a quarter-tone work for soli, choir and orchestra "Prométhée enchaîné" in 1849, and European composers produced an ever-increasing number of microtonal compositions as the 19th century waned and the 20th century began.
By the 1910s and 1920s, a fad emerged for quarter tones (24 equal pitches per octave), inspiring composers as Charles Ives, Julián Carrillo, Alois Hába, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and Mildred Couper. Such was the popularity of 24 equal during the late teens and 1920s, for example, that Erwin Schulhoff gave classes in quarter-tone composition at the Prague Conservatory. Béla Bartók came late, and only sporadic, to quartertones (e.g. in his Sonata for violin solo, which uses quarter tones in an essential manner).
Alexander John Ellis, who in the 1880s produced a translation with extensive footnotes and appendices to Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone, proposed an elaborate set of exotic just intonation tunings. Ellis also studied the tunings of non-Western cultures and, in a report to the Royal Society, determined that they did not use either equal divisions of the octave or just intonation intervals. Ellis inspired Harry Partch immensely.
During the Exposition Universelle of 1889, Claude Debussy heard a Balinese gamelan performance and was exposed to their non-Western tunings and rhythms. Some scholars have ascribed Debussy's subsequent innovative used of the whole-tone (6 equal pitches per octave) tuning in such compositions as "Voiles" and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune to his exposure to the Balinese gamelan at the Paris exposition.[citation needed][Gary Don's article in Music Theory Spectrum would do nicely.] Berliner's introduction of the phonograph in the 1890s allowed much non-Western music to be recorded and heard by Western composers, further spurring the use of non-12-equal tunings.
While experimenting with his violin in 1895, Julian Carrillo(1875-1965)[2] discovered the sixteenths of tone, i.e., sixteen clearly different sounds between the pitches of G and A emitted by the fourth violin string. He named his discovery Sonido 13 (the thirteenth sound). Julian Carrillo reformed theories of music and physics of music. He invented a simple numerical musical notation that can represent scales based on any division of the octave, like thirds, fourths, quarters, fifths, sixths, sevenths, and so on (even if Carrillo wrote, most of the time, for quarters, eights, and sixteenths combined, the notation is able to represent any imaginable subdivision). He invented new musical instruments, and adapted others to produce microintervals. He composed a large amount of microtonal music and recorded about 30 of his compositions.
Major microtonal composers of the 1920s and 1930s include Alois Hába (quarter tones, or 24 equal pitches per octave, and sixth tones), Julian Carillo (24 equal, 36, 48, 60, 72, and 96 equal pitches to the octave embodied in a series of specially custom-built pianos) and the early works of Harry Partch (just intonation using frequencies at ratios of prime integers 3, 5, 7, and 11, their powers, and products of those numbers, from a central frequency of G-196).
Prominent microtonal composers or researchers of the 1940s and 1950s include Adriaan Daniel Fokker (31 equal tones per octave), Partch again (continuing to build his handcrafted orchestra of microtonal just intonation instruments) and Ivor Darreg (who built the first fully retunable electronic synthesizer capable of any division of the octave, just or equal or non-just non-equal).
Prominent microtonal composers of the 1960s and 1970s include John Eaton (who created his own microtonal synthesizer, the Syn Ket, to produce microtonal intervals), Ivor Darreg again (who augmented his home-built orchestra of instruments to include guitars refretted in equal temperaments 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, and 31, as well as the magalyra series of sub-contrabass steel guitar instruments), Harry Partch, Easley Blackwood (who composed and performed the well-known Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media with compositions in every equal division of the octave from 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24 equal pitches per octave) and Augusto Novaro, the Mexican microtonal theorist who composed studies in 15 equal, among others. Barbara Benary also formed Gamelan Son of Lion around this period, and Lou Harrison was instrumental (all puns intended) in creating American gamelan orchestras at Mills College. In Europe, the "Spectralists" in Paris created their first works from 1973 on with an extensive use of microtonal harmony. The main composers were Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail and Michael Levinas; see also the parisian ensemble "L'itinéraire". György Ligeti in Hamburg strongly promoted microtonality and used it in several of his works.
Since the 1980s, microtonal composers have proliferated to such an extent that a list of composers who have produced at least one microtonal composition nearly subsumes the entire list of practicing composers. Digital synthesizers from the Yamaha TX81Z (1987) on and inexpensive software support this development.

Microtonalism in rock music

The American hardcore punk band Black Flag (1976-86) made vernacular use of microtonal intervals, via guitarist Greg Ginn, a free jazz aficionado also familiar with modern classical. (During their peak in the late '70s and early '80s, long before American punk was mainstream, the band was considered, not unwarrantedly, a thuggish and hostile street unit, although time has given their work a considerable measure of musical acclaim.) A worthwhile song is "Damaged II," from 1981's Damaged LP — a live-in-studio recording in which intentional (and surprisingly scale-aware) use of quarter- and eighth-steps suggests a guitar in danger of detonation. Another is "Police Story," most versions of which end in a cadence played a quarter-tone sharp, to similar effect.
Elliott Sharp's groups Carbon, Tectonics and Terraplen make extensive use of just intonation microtonality to intensely dissonant and vibrant effect. Los Angeles guitarist Rod Poole has produced a number of rock-oriented xenharmonic CDs.
The band Crash Worship made use of Ivor Darreg's megalyra subcontrabass microtonal instrument for both xenharmonic and industrial noise purposes.
The Japanese band [3] Syzygys (Hitomi Shimizu and Hiromi Nishida) have released two albums utilizing the 43-tone scale of Harry Partch, using a modified reed organ. Elaine Walker of Zia [4] has released several albums making use of the Bohlen-Pierce scale and other equal temperaments such as the 19tet and 10tet. Zia performs on electronic instruments that specifically do not reference the standard 12 tone tuning.
Jonny Greenwood, of the alternative rock band Radiohead, has experimented with microtonal music in both his solo material and his work with the band; for instance, the song Climbing Up the Walls, from the band's 1997 album OK Computer, includes a recording of sixteen violins playing quarter tones apart from each other to create a droning, atonal 'white noise' effect.
Other rock artists using microtonality in their work include Glenn Branca (who has created a number of symphonic works for ensembles of microtonally tuned electric guitars) and Jon and Brad Catler (who play microtonal electric guitar and electric bass guitar).
Experimental luthier Yuri Landman built a custom made string instrument called the Moodswinger for Aaron Hemphill of the Liars with a special microtonal overtone-scale for resonating stringpositions.
Microtonality often appears to occur in popular rock music in contexts where it is not notated or explicitly described as microtonal, but is nonetheless quite audible. Obvious examples include the guitar introduction to the The Doors' song "The End", the extremely and unmistakably microtonal vocal line in Sinead O'Connor's songs -- most notably on "Nothing Compares 2 U," -- and in the microtonal bass lines in songs like Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Israel." The November 2004 WSES Official Newsletter for Acoustics, Science, and Technology of Music mentions that "bands from Sonic Youth to Art Rock Circus have written music with non-standard and microtonal guitar tunings."
Explicitly microtonal jazz has also made a niche for itself as, for example, in the playing of trumpeter Don Ellis, who used a quartertone trumpet built to his specifications, woodwind player Joe Maneri, who has mapped what he calls the "virtual pitch continuum" onto the intervals of 72-tone equal temperament, and in albums released by percussionist Emil Richards, Lothar and the Hand People, the xenharmonic intonational inflexions of John Coltrane, and many others.

Microtonalism in Electronica

1986's Beauty In the Beast saw Wendy Carlos experimenting with many microtonal systems including just intonation, using alternate tuning scales she invented for the album.
Advances in software synthesis have facilitated alternate tunings. Software emulations of classic hardware synthesizers such as the Roland TB-303 and Yamaha DX7, as well as emulations of traditional instruments such as sitars and guitars can be heard tuned to several different types of scales designed by music theorist Erv Wilson on Marcus Satellite's 1998 album From On High.

Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/

Tags:

31 equal temperament, Microtonal music, Daniel James Wolf, Arab tone system, xenharmonic music, 3rd Bridge, Pascal Dusapin, La Monte Young, Bob Gilmore, 9 equal temperament, tone equal temperament

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