Theresa Wong
Blue Tunnel Fields [w/ Ellen Fullman]
I have only recently begun to delve into the world of Just Intonation through my collaboration with Ellen Fullman. As a cellist, I moved from classical music to free improvisation (with a ten year gap in between), which left a very big hole in my understanding of harmonic theory. I was fascinated by the idea that so much of the music that I had been listening to had evolved out of a compromise of pitches and that culture had shaped my ears to hear something that was naturally occurring to sound ‘out of tune.’ Initially bogged down by the numbers and confusing terminology of Just Intonation texts, a friend and fellow composer Matthew Goodheart turned me on to William Allaudin Mathieu’s book, Harmonic Experience. Through Mathieu’s elegant explanations and through the practice of singing and playing over a drone, I have begun to reshape and retune my ears to the complex web of overtone relationships. For Blue Tunnel Fields, Ellen and I decided to stick to a fairly limited number of pitches for my equal-tempered ears to navigate. Ellen came upon a chord that she liked, and we began the piece by improvising around it. The strings of her instrument are tuned to the fundamental of A440. I tuned the cello to the 6/5 (C +15.7 cents), 9/5 (G +17.6), 27/20 (D +19.6), and 81/80 (A +21.5).