Innovative Additions to the Piano Repertoire

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

Beyond 12 is a project that seems to have been launched by pianist Aron Kallay about a decade ago. The objective was to break free of the constraints afforded by the piano keyboard based on dividing the octave into twelve chromatic pitches. This led to the release of the CD Beyond 12: Reinventing the Piano, Volume 1 in September of 2013. It consisted of eight pieces, each by a different composer: Kyle Gann, Isaac Schankler, Aaron K. Johnson, John Schneider, Tom Flaherty, Vera Ivanova, Jason Heath, and Brian Shepard. The MP3 download was subsequently released on Amazon.com on October 30, 2015. Sadly, the accompanying booklet was not part of the download; but Microfest Records created a Web page of the content of that booklet.

At the middle of last month, Microfest Records released the second volume in this series. As of this writing, the album is only available for MP3 download from Amazon.com; but this time the booklet is part of the download. The composers contributing to this second volume are Jeffrey Harrington, Monroe Golden, Robert Carl, Veronika Krausas, Nick Norton, Alexander Elliott Miller, Bill Alves, and Eric Moe. The fact that none of these names overlap with those of the contributors to the first volume should indicate the breadth of interest in the motivation behind Kallay’s project.

The approaches to “reinvention” by these composers are similarly diverse. Those familiar with my writing probably know by now of my interest in tuning systems based on integer ratios that involve less familiar intervals arising from upper harmonics, such as the eleventh and the thirteenth (the latter being a personal favorite for its use by Benjamin Britten). Different aspects of this technique appear in several of the compositions on this new album, but there are also ventures into dividing the octave into some number of intervals of the same size other than twelve. The opening selection, Harrington’s “Sidereal Delay,” for example, divides the octave into 19 equal intervals. (The title refers to the two different ways to calculate the duration of a year based on different astronomical points of reference.)

For all of that diversity, the content of this new album is probably too rich in subtle differences to allow for start-to-finish listening. Each of the nine compositions (two by Krausas) has its own auditory frame of reference. While, with sufficient exposure, the ear can adjust to any one of those frames, abrupt adjustment from one frame to another as the recording moves on to another track is likely to be too demanding for most attentive listeners. Thus, while Amazon may have decided to limit its offering to the digital release because of potential delays in delivering a physical version, having those compositions separated for listening through a digital device will probably be more conducive to appreciating the merits of each individual selection.