Microtonal Business
Kyle Gann has been on a microtonal kick lately. Today he posted a MIDI rendering of a microtonal quartet of his teacher, Ben Johnston. It makes for some very interesting listening.
What strikes me about this piece is that even though there are three or four times as many possible pitches per octave than we’re accustomed to, the harmonies are still very quartal and quintal. It still has a very American harmonic language, despite being out in sonic free space.
Which begs the question: what’s the point? Am I just not getting something? Gann says it took a really long time to put together this rendering (i.e., hundreds and hundreds of hours), but to me it sounds like someone sliding around the pitch bend on their keyboard. Not to say it doesn’t sound cool — cool doesn’t cut it, actually; gorgeous and serene is more like it — but it does sound like an awful lot of time and effort to create a 150 second rendering of someone else’s work. To me, MIDI was always just a tool — how do my harmonies sound? what might that rhythm feel like? Human performance was always the goal. But in this world of microtonality, MIDI is often the next best thing.
Maybe we’re back at that familiar pendulum: no one can really tell the difference between Boulez or chance music.
