Thursday, July 26, 2012

New Music in Quarter-Tones

This may not be the most popular album posted; I know people are not too thrilled with the modern classical chamber music that I passionately love -- especially when it gets a bit too recondite. At least I don't think I'll have too many requests for flacs, this time.
For those not familiar with it quarter tone music uses the tones between the half tones that are the established standard in the european classical scale. That 12-toned scale is itself created with the ratios of whole numbers to divide from tonic into dominant, subdominant, and so on. It's obvious to those who have studied basic harmony how you can start with one tonic (C) and with 4 and 5 progress to 12 notes (or even just by using 5ths). Because of these ratios it's debatable whether there is anything natural about quarter tones at all and for the most part they sound like instruments out of tune. Of course much is made of the fact quarter tones appear frequently in indian or any eastern music as well as in the blues scale (between 4 and 5) or as bends on the guitar. However, these are used very judiciously and not as the basis of an all-new scale.

How can you perform quarter tone music on a piano with set keys? Well, the answer is you can't -- you need 2 pianos which is why each track here features 2 pianos, one tuned a quarter tone off from the official EU standard tuning enshrined recently in the Bruxelles law of 2010 which mandated an exact tuning for A above middle C at 440 Hz on pain of death. (You will recall that Silvio Berlusconi's representative there, an ex-porn star, at that time argued for a different tuning of about 444.4 (repeating) for esthetic reasons and the germans argued this would lead to havoc in their bavarian motor industry, & she was finally voted down after a long drawn-out orgy in the general assembly.)

It must be difficult for a composer to create music like this since even their imaginations might find itself a little wanting to fill in the blanks.
You can judge for yourselves what is your opinion of this, for me the standout tracks are Charles Ives' piano composition, and the first track on side B which features the amazing ondes martenot I talked about in the past on the website. See here:
http://prognotfrog.blogspot.com/2010/04/de-londe-linfini-canada1974.html

14 comments:

Tristan Stefan said...

mp3
http://www.filejumbo.com/Download/79B279602790C389

mister jay said...

woah i have this album on vinyl i got it at a garage sale a few years back because of the cover

JD said...

Any chance for flac version of this record?

Tristan Stefan said...

yeah it's a cool cover isn't it?
Are you sure you want flac or are you pulling my leg on account of what I said

Tristan Stefan said...

http://www.filejumbo.com/Download/AE85EBEDC90C1901

DanP said...

Really interested Tristan, thanks!

DanP said...

Wave file, cool!

JD said...

Thanks for lossless version!

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Anonymous said...

Hi! I too have this LP but have not had a functional turntable for years. A room full of vinyl but no way to listen to any of it unless I come across one of them on a blog like yours. I am not a musician and have no musical education so your description of quarter tone music doesn't mean much to me other than it sounding 'out of tune'. That is exactly what attracted me to the album in the mid-70's after hearing one of the Ives pieces on a local university FM radio station. I have always thought it may have been little more than an accident that western music took the 'whole tone' path. We could just as easily have taken the 'quarter tone' direction and this record would sound perfectly normal. Many thanks for the opportunity to listen to this after so long.

-Brian

Anonymous said...

FYI: Strange error message from filejumbo:

Compiler Error Message: CS0042: Unexpected error creating debug information file 'c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\08d762c1\49b56ca5\App_Code.ejo4kbyp.PDB' -- 'c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\08d762c1\49b56ca5\App_Code.ejo4kbyp.pdb: There is not enough space on the disk.

CCW said...

Filejumbo links sadly don't seem to work anymore....

Tristan Stefan said...

http://www.sendspace.com/file/io2cn1
NEW REUP SEPT. 25, 2013

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for re-uploading this! Love the music on your blog, please keep it coming!

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