Charles Curtis
Stanzas Set Before a Blank Surface
Moving outward from the “one-sound,” the unison, to the multiplicity of thoughts surrounding a decision to treat the unison as an interval: first, that what we call unison is a misnomer, that one sound alone is not a unison, only when another matches up to it, the second seeking to double the first as one to one (1:1), but still the unison is the second sound, so two, and should be called a doubling.
Then, that any unison, granting it for the moment that status, is at best an approach to same, no circumstance that I can recall yielding more than the brief semblance of oneness before going back to showing its two-ness again (the insurmountable difficulty of playing in Just Intonation, and this is not meant as complaint, but notification).
Further, that the experience of unison or doubling is in fact of a massing of spectra, timbre, and interference, to a richness plainly numerous in every conceivable sense, all the more so when nearest to so-called unison.
Again, a confusion entirely my own as to whether by interval we should refer to the space between the physical sounding sources themselves (voices or instruments), even when they are attempting to play the same sound, or between the values of the fundamentals that they are sounding (or something else again).
But despite these reservations, the careful attention to the unison as an interval, as a space between subtly discrepant points in a pitch continuum, I note being paid it by for instance Feldman in his enharmonic re-spellings of the “same” notes; or by Lucier with his interest in what is triggered (in acoustical beat patterns) by extreme nearness in frequency (gauged by rate of beating, not by fundamental); or my own obsessive joy at listening to stable frequencies that beat once every twenty minutes, tracking the motion of one acoustical beat in motionless listening over twenty minutes. Here I find myself investigating the unison as interval, dyad or duad, investigating what may appear to be a tiny space, but which upon entering it proves teeming with energy.
Having made recordings of all of the natural harmonics on the four violoncello strings up to the 17th, and observed them in selected combinations, I find myself drawn to the would-be unisons and the near-unisons, as mapped on the four neighboring harmonic series (lined up from the C to the A strings as 8:12:18:27). The inharmonicity is one thing; so, even simple correspondences such as the 15th harmonic on the G string matched with the 10th on the D string ([2x15]:[3x10] or 1:1) show pronounced roughness and phase irregularity. And then adding to this the explicit deviation of C17 with G11 ([2x17]:[3x11] or 34:33), D5 with C11 ([9x5]:[4x11] or 45:44), G16 with A7 ([4x16]:[9x7] or 64:63), or A3 with C10 ([27x3]:[8x10] or 81:80), we definitely have intervals, though given the inharmonicity I hesitate to say that they are exactly these intervals.
But Just Intonation, in its human form, played on acoustic instruments or sung, is necessarily an aspiration and not a certainty. We are not plugging in numbers; and the practice is accompanied (in fact characterized) by the irregularities of material (inharmonicity of strings, the phase changes and uneven friction of the bow) and the natural weakness of the performer. And in fact I am not so interested in the numbers themselves. Everything else that is going on seems so much more interesting. To me, words are no more communicative than the trembling statements of the harmonics calling out softly from the strings.
We stand so that we can hear more alertly, move more readily to catch the slight shifts in terrain amongst the standing waves. The pleasure of Just Intonation, and its natural correlate, sustaining sound, is in the space articulated, that we can step into and stand in, finding just that stance that admits us to the narrow spaces that these intervals point to (inter-val: something like a “valley between” ridges). Estancia, a dwelling; stanza, standing, a stance. The dyad in prosody is a two-liner of differing rhythm, here too an interference. The comma, a short clause, a minute interval, a break or difference, the comma of Didymus (81:80). Each of these words, stanza, interval, dyad, comma, contains an interval to stand in and to move in.
Moving outward, then, from the unison to everything around it, and from the listener to what is around the listener. The lyre-ic (the struck string) striking the quick of sound, that attribute of sound which gives a trace of something otherwise traceless, seemingly vacant, patiently waiting to be invoked: environing space, and our standing in it. Not standing for something, but standing here, and bearing witness to our standing here, wherever here is.