At the beginning of last month, MicroFest Records released its latest album of music by composers interested in the use of just intonation. My own interest in this approach to tuning dates back to my time in graduate school, when I could spend hours pouring over a chart in the second edition of Willi Apel’s Harvard Dictionary of Music, which compared the frequency differences between equal-tempered tuning and earlier systems based on the integer ratios of the perfect fifth (3:2) and the major third (5:4). That interest was revived as a result of reading Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell, which so absorbed me that I found myself already writing before I had finished the book. That “intermediate” exercise was an article on this site entitled “On Listening to Integer Ratios,” which was when I documented my first thoughts about the Just National Steel Guitar designed for playing just intonation.
Less than two weeks after writing that piece, I found myself taking on an adventurous recording devoted to compositions written around the just intonation system. This was the MicroFest album playfully entitled Just Strings, whose title was also the name of the trio consisting of guitarist John Schneider (who produces the MicroFest recordings), harpist Alison Bjorkedal, and percussionist T.J. Troy. In that context the title of the new MicroFest album, Just National Guitar, suggests that it serves as a “sequel” to Just Strings, exploring the use of just intonation on a different instrument. Currently, this album is available from Amazon.com only for MP3 download; but the download includes a highly informative digital booklet.
Lou Harrison playing a Just National Steel Guitar (from the Just Strings booklet, courtesy of John Schneider)
The entire album consists of solo performances by Schneider on a Just National Steel Guitar. It is organized around the works of two strikingly different composers. It begins with Harrison’s three-movement suite, Scenes from Nek Chand, inspired by the work of an Indian artist of the same name. Harrison chose to compose the piece using a modal scale based on the sixth through twelfth overtones of the harmonic series. Since the “tonic pitches” of the series are those overtones that are powers of two, the result was a gamut that provided the tonic with its “dominant” partner from both below (sixth harmonic) and above (twelfth harmonic).
The Just National guitar was created to provide an instrument with both strong sonorities (metal strings naturally amplified by the body structure of a National Reso-Phonic Steel Tricone guitar) and a fret system that would accommodate the intervals of Harrison’s scale. Scenes from Nek Chand turned out to be Harrison’s final composition, and it was first recorded on a Mode album collecting Harrison’s five suites for guitar. Towards the end of the album, Schneider presents a “new” Harrison suite, this one consisting of six Harrison pieces that predate the Just National instrument arranged for Just National performance by Schneider.
Throughout the album, compositions by Schneider himself, Terry Riley, Tom Johnson, and Carter Scholz are interleaved with the five short movements of a suite by Peter Yates entitled Quips. True to the title, each movement presents a brief quip by a different source. In order of appearance, those sources are Oscar Levant, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, George Orwell, and Franz Kafka. This requires that Schneider sing in counterpoint with the melodic line he as playing. Schneider rose to this challenge admirably; but I have to confess that, for the most part, I was able to follow the words because I already knew what they were.
Two of the composers on the album, Johnson and Scholz, seemed to be as interested in the mathematical properties of sequences of “overtone integers” as they were in the music that resulted. Both Johnson’s “Rational Melodies” (Schneider performed only seven of the 21 melodies in the collection) and Scholz’ “Almost Square” reminded me of my own student days of playing with sequences of whole numbers that had interesting properties involving different forms of symmetry. (There was a side of me that wanted to do one better than the twelve-by-twelve “grid” representation of the valid forms of a single-twelve tone row.) Both Johnson and Scholz came up with material far more conducive to attentive listening than anything I had managed to conceive.
Riley’s contribution to the album consists of two pieces intended to be part of a longer suite for the Just National instrument. Both involved reflecting on a protest against the outbreak of the war with Iraq initiated by President George W. Bush on March 19, 2003. A protest march down Broad Street in Nevada City, California, prompted the composition of “National Broad Street March;” and that piece was subsequently complemented by “Quando Cosas Malas Caen del Cielo” (when bad things fall from heaven). It is worth noting that some of Riley’s earliest works were created at a time when there were frequent protests against United States involvement in the Vietnam War; but there is a sense in which these 2003 pieces are more explicit in their motives of protest.
Schneider’s own contribution to the album is his Tombo por Lou. This may be approached as a “response” to the “call” of Scenes from Nek Chand; but, as the title suggests, it also serves as a memorial for Harrison himself. That said, when one listens to the two pieces side-by-side (as they are arranged on the album), there is a sense that Schneider chose to pursue overtone-based intervals that were rather more adventurous than those that Harrison preferred. It would be fair to say that Schneider has nodded gracefully as several of the structural forms that one encounters in Harrison’s music. However, those forms are then populated with new approaches to the creation of melodic lines and their accompaniment.
Schneider has arranged the album in such a way that the attentive listener will be guided through a wide variety of different approaches to using a tuning system with origins in Harrison’s desire to work directly with natural overtones. There is so much individuality across the selections that are offered that one is unlikely to dismiss any of them as “more of the same.” More importantly, the album prepares its listeners for the prospect of encountering a Just National instrument played in recital. I have been fortunate to have that experience several times, and I am always looking forward to the next opportunity.
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