Michael Harrison
Tone Cloud II [from Revelation: Music in Pure Intonation]
The Revelation tuning presents sonic opportunities that have opened new vistas for me as a composer and performer. In composing Revelation, I wanted to explore the piano’s extensive capacity for resonance, as well as open the listener’s hearing for an infinite matrix of tones available in Just Intonation and the pulsating, shimmering sounds of the “commas” (two slightly different versions of the same note derived at from different harmonic or mathematical means). My aim is to expand the harmonic, textural, and acoustical palette of the piano as well as enlarge the scope of pianistic techniques. Both the music and tuning for Revelation were directly inspired by La Monte Young’s magnum opus The Well-Tuned Piano (1964–73–81–present). During the 1980sI worked extensively with Young as his apprentice, tuning and learning to play his work. I am extremely grateful to have had such an extended immersion in Young’s visionary work, which has opened a way of composing and listening to intervals that has guided me to find my own path and voice within this new cosmology of sound. I hope that Revelation can also be a springboard for other composers and performers to continue exploring “Just” tunings and return to the ancient roots of music as an expression of perfect harmonic and mathematical proportions. A CD of my rendition of the complete 72-minute version of Revelation is available on Cantaloupe Music (2007). (For extensive program notes by Michael Harrison and Stuart Isacoff visit www.michaelharrison.com.)
While performing at the 4 Pianos festival along with Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Charlemagne Palestine in Rome in 1999, I found myself contemplating the sonic effects that result from working with commas. I woke up on the morning following the last concert with a radical new tuning in my mind. Upon returning to New York City, I applied this new tuning to my customized “harmonic piano” and began composing a new work based on the tuning's unusual qualities. I have titled both this new composition and the tuning Revelation.
As I experimented with the Revelation tuning, I discovered that it possessed unique capabilities that I had rarely heard or encountered before. By combining carefully selected pitch relationships with various performance techniques, this tuning creates undulating waves of shimmering and pulsating sounds, with what sound like “phase shifting” and “note bending” effects and other acoustical phenomena. In some of the tone clouds, the overtones are so audible that many listeners have described the experience of hearing the sounds of many different instruments resonating from the piano. The tuning has so many beautiful and exotic sounds latent within it that at first I felt like an explorer discovering new harmonic regions in unknown and distant realms.
The Revelation tuning divides the octave into twelve “unequally” spaced notes, all of which are tuned to harmonics of a fundamental low F, and which are derived from the primes 2, 3, and 7. The work combines relatively simple Pythagorean intervals with more complex intervals derived from the seventh harmonic, such as the extremely minute interval of 64:63, or approximately an “eighth” tone, which I call the “celestial comma,” and which forms the nucleus of the work. Revelation continues the innovations first introduced in Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, with the extensive use of these simultaneously sounding commas that exist only outside the confines of equal temperament. In fact, tempered tunings were developed over the past four hundred years precisely to avoid hearing the sound of commas. I have discovered that incorporating commas into the harmonic fabric of my music frees it from the need for tempered tunings and opens up a new approach to tonality and modulation.
Throughout the history of Western classical music there has been a gradual evolution from the use of relatively wide and consonant intervals to increasingly narrow and more dissonant sounding intervals. In the 20th century, Schoenberg’s doctrine of “emancipation of dissonance” led to the free use of any interval combination in equal temperament. I propose that this evolution is still in progress, and that its next stage is the “emancipation of the comma.” Throughout the keyboard, Revelation incorporates three sets of adjacently tuned celestial commas into the harmonic fabric of the tuning. The comma is thus freed from its restricted status as an “out-of-tune” dissonance that, until recently, was obliterated by tempered tunings and instrument designs. The piano is one of the most resonant instruments in the world, but the equal tempered tuning system now in use impedes this natural resonance in favor of a convenient, democratization of the twelve tones and key relationships. Just Intonation tuning frees the piano from these restraints, further revealing and maximizing its natural resonances. When the commas are allowed to sing out, they create a new and beautiful complex acoustic universe.
Special thanks to La Monte Young and Marina Zazeela.
©2008 Michael Harrison, New York City