Frank J. Oteri: (not) knowing the answer

FRANK J. OTERI

(not) knowing the answer

six sijos by james r. murphy for six unaccompanied voices in just intonation

Transformal Music (ASCAP)

not knowing the answer

6 sijos by james r. murphy for 6 unaccompanied voices in just intonation (c) 2015 Transformal Music (ASCAP), represented by Black Tea Music

2 (choose) 8 (shout) 10 (breathe) 17

(move) 28 (sit) 32

about (not)knowingtheanswer

For some unconscious reason I frequently enjoyed playing out-of-tune pianos and guitars as I was growing up, but I did not become aware that intervals other than those of 12-tone equal temperament were actually considered to be “in tune” by some people until my senior year of high school which was 35 years ago. This information at first came to me through meeting Johnny Reinhard, who was about to form the American Festival of Microtonal Music, and though him being introduced to a group of composers including:

Tui St. George Tucker, who kept two upright pianos tuned a quartertone apart at a 90-degree angle from each other in her Greenwich Village apartment; Jon Catler, who played on guitars refretted into 19-tone and 31-tone equal temperaments in his rock band J.C. and the Microtones; and others who eschewed equal temperament altogether and explored scales based on everything from the pure numerical relationships between the naturally occurring intervals in the overtone series (so-called just intonation) to pure intuition.

While the broad stylistic range of the music these people were creating was a stark contrast to the aesthetically narrow fiefdoms I had observed elsewhere in the contemporary music community of the late 1970s and early 1980s, at first it felt like I had somehow been allowed to participate in some kind of clandestine society like the Freemasons or the Illuminati, becoming one of the chosen few who was privy to the secret that there were an infinite number of pitches beyond the ones on the 7-white/5-black keyboard. But once I discovered that almost all non-Western music traditions used scales other than 12tET, and so had Western music until fairly recently, I came to realize that the fringe musicians were not the ones exploring microtonality, but the ones who weren’t! Suddenly everything I had learned about music felt like a lie, and all the music I had composed up until that point seemed two-dimensional and black-andwhite. I had to find a way to compose music that was 3D and in color.

To the chagrin of my then music teachers at the High School of Music and Art (now incorporated into the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts), I began proclaiming that the music they were exposing us to was just a pale simulacrum of what music could and should be. But one of my teachers paid careful attention to my ranting and raving, my math teacher Jim Murphy, a ¾ Cherokee Indian who grew up in Texas and was someone who knew a lot about marginalization. (One of the most important life lessons I learned from Murphy was that most events are either smoothed over or completely glossed over by the master narrative of history.) I still remember him giving me free reign of his calculus class one day to explain how to derive a diatonic scale exclusively from using simple whole number ratios and how various logarithmic permutations eventually led to the seemingly ubiquitous 12-tone equal tempered tuning.

Around that time, Murphy showed me a cycle of 14 sonnets he had written for his then wife Maxine Deseta and asked if I’d want to set them to music. I was struck by the elaborate formal structure of these poems not only were they all proper sonnets consisting of 14 lines of iambic pentameter, each one employed the same dedicatory acrostic. Any music I might write would have to be constructed similarly, and in a way that could be audibly apparent to an attentive listener. So I came up with a scheme in which each of the 14 songs would be a variation on the same melody (a musical parallel to the acrostic) but the harmonies for each would be restricted exclusively to different specific intervals (seconds, thirds, etc.). Since I was so fascinated by the new possibilities unleashed by venturing beyond 12tET, I initially contemplated devising some unusual new scale for this project. Ultimately I decided not to since I had yet to compose a microtonal piece and I had also never before embarked on such a large-scale musical structure. It took me over a year to complete that song cycle, the nurturing river, at which point I was a freshman at Columbia University. To this day, I still set poetry to music in much the same way, obsessively adhering to the precise metrical flow of the texts as if they were spoken and attempting to heighten the meanings of the words through specific phrase shapes and harmonic progressions. Murphy’s sometimes erudite wordplay, however, led me down a path I’ve seldom trod since then e.g. extended techniques, indeterminate rhythms yet I stuck to 12tET, although, in a sense, I was using 12tET as a microtonalist exploring music that was specific to, and largely only possible, using that tuning.

But following that, I finally took the plunge into microtonal composition. I learned that composer Joel Mandelbaum, then the head of the music department at Queens College, kept in his office a pair of two analog electric organs with 24 and 31 keys to the octave respectively. (These were the two models of the Motorola scalatron, a brief foray into manufacturing musical instruments by a company now more known for its telecommunications products.) So, never the most practical person, I spent the summer trekking out to Queens College once a week to work on an opera in 31-tone equal temperament. (It has yet to be performed.) Then I went on to perform several improvisatory works in which intervals on various keyboard synthesizers were retuned using pitch bends and other makeshift workarounds.

By the end of the 1980s, I acquired a Yamaha TX81Z which allowed me to trigger a variety of preset tunings via a MIDI cable from any standard digital keyboard. Those presets included a variety of historic tunings (e.g. Just, Pythagorean, ¼-comma Meantone, and Werckmeister III what some musicologists posit J.S. Bach used for his Well-Tempered Clavier) as well as quartertones and eighthtones, but the scales with more than 12-notes were awkward to finger and counterintuitive. Yamaha’s just intonation preset was limited only to 5-limit intervals but I found a bunch of fascinating harmonic relationships between the pitches when I strayed from the intended tonal center of the scale. So in 1989, I composed Oasis: Four Steps Toward an Untempered Clavier, a series of short movements in some of these “off” keys, a kind of anti-WTC. But it proved unwieldy as a solo piece in live performance. (I finally reworked it for four-hand performance in 2014 and it is currently in the repertoire of the Ray-Kallay Duo who gave the work its first definitive performance at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh on March 1, 2015 as part of the Beyond Microtonal Festival.) I played around with the TX81Z for a couple of years after Oasis, finally figuring out a way to transcend the presets and tune my own scales, but the last time I used the TX81Z in my own performance was back in 1991 for the one and, to date, only performance of

my Just Salsa, an 11-limit just intonation salsa band piece for two keyboardists in combination with flute, trombone, fretless bass, and a massive rhythm section. It worked, but the set-up required to pull it off was too cumbersome and not sustainable. I stopped composing microtonal music for over a decade though I never stopped thinking about it.

Throughout the 1990s I devoted myself to setting poetry to music in good old 12tET E. E. Cummings, Margaret Atwood, William Butler Yeats, Kenneth Patchen. Then in the beginning of the 21st century, I started using Sibelius music notation software which, by that point, had incorporated quartertone notation and playback capabilities. I soon figured out how the plug-in was coded and came up with ways to accurately play back sixth-tones and even smaller gradations. Suddenly I was able to test out a wide range of intervals in an intuitive and consistent way and also create audio simulacra of pieces that musicians could listen to which greatly helped the rehearsal process. It led to a flowering of instrumental music. Pieces such as circles mostly in wood for wind quintet in quartertones (2002), Fair and Balanced for saxophone quartet in quartertones (2004),Imagined Overtures for rock band in sixth-tones (2005), and Spurl for solo clarinet in 13-limit just intonation (2009) would not have been possible otherwise.

I used only eight pitches in Spurl which are derived from the eighth through fifteenth overtones (intervals which are all derived from the first six prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13). It is the only scale that pre-valve brass players in the Baroque era would have been able to play, “correcting” the “wrong”-sounding notes by adjusting their embouchure to approximate a diatonic scale. But what would a piece of music sound like if, instead of trying to “fix” those “mistakes,” such a scale could be given free reign? Spurl, being monophonic, was only able to explore the melodic implications of such a scale and it is ferociously difficult. While fingerings exist that enable wind players to play all of the pitches of this scale in tune, not every player can master them especially in material that is, ideally, fiendishly fast. The idea was for the melodies to move so quickly that harmonies, though never present, were not only implied but were somehow audible, as they are in the Solo Flute Partita of J.S. Bach, another nod to the Baroque. (Spurl has finally been mastered by Michiyo Suzuki.) But still, implied harmonies are not the same as actual harmonies. So it begged the question, how would actual harmony function in music derived from such a scale and what kind of ensemble could effectively convey it? Since the idea for the scale originated in my thinking about valve-less brass instruments, I contemplated a brass quintet playing such music. I completed the first movement of this piece and sent it around to brass groups. But it has remained a stillborn project. Despite this scale being a natural occurrence on their instruments, brass musicians instinctively avoid and/or adjust the intervals that don’t conform to the diatonic scale and replicating such a scale across a wider range than the one octave in which they naturally occur is a tremendous challenge.

Voices, however, can theoretically sing any interval. So it was time to finally return to composing microtonal vocal music. The best option for such an endeavor seemed unaccompanied choral music, though by that point I had not composed anything for chorus for more than twenty years and none of it had ever been performed. Since I first thought about composing such music involving poetry by Jim Murphy, it seemed appropriate to return to it. Around the same time Murphy was writing all these sonnets, he also wrote a bunch of sijos, another centuries-old poetical form. The sijo, which originated in Korea at roughly the same time that the sonnet originated in Italy, consists of three stanzas containing a total of six lines, each with a strict syllabic count. Like the 14 sonnets I set in the nurturing river, Murphy’s sijos seemed to beg for an equally meticulous formally abstract musical rendering. In December 2009, I completed a setting of one of Murphy’s sijos using this 6 primes-derived 8-note scale, but I was unsatisfied with the result and shelved it away.

Then in 2014, Francisco J. Núñez commissioned me to compose a choral piece for his Radio Radiance series with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City. At first I thought I’d return to the sijo settings but the music I wanted to write for them was not appropriate for YPC, so instead I set three poems by Lady Mary Wroth, the first published female sonneteer in the English language. Earlier this year, I was again commissioned for a choral work to celebrate the 35th anniversary season of Central City Chorus. However, they wanted a New York-themed piece. Murphy’s abstract Korean-formed poems again did not seem like the right fit so I turned to the witty and extremely urban poetry of my longest friend, Charles Passy, who writes about personal finance, food, and drinks for The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, Composers Concordance asked me if I’d be interested in participating in a 72-composer effort to create a sonic parallel scored for unaccompanied voices for a series of 72 paintings by Rainer Gross based on the 72 divine names enumerated in the Kaballah. Each piece would last only a minute. Intrigued by Gross’s painting Lamed Vav Vav and the accompanying legend behind it of there always being 36 just people in the world and if they ever were to die time would end, I agreed to be involved in the project only if I could write something in 36-tone equal temperament for the singers. They agreed, and so I did. But after completing that minute of music, my appetite was whetted for writing more microtonal choral music. I returned to that sijo from six years earlier and turned it into something I was finally proud of. Then I asked Murphy to send me every sijo he had written. I chose five others to set along with the one I already set, creating a 6x6 scheme that matches the 14x14 scheme of the nurturing river The resultant piece,(not) knowing the answer, is a journey into a strange new harmonic landscape though one that is implied in nature.

The vocal ensemble Ekmeles Charlotte Mundy, soprano; Elisa Sutherland, mezzo-soprano; Amber Evans, contralto (who was a last minute substitute for Timothy Parsons); Steven Bradshaw, tenor; and Jeffrey Gavett, baritone and artistic director gave the world premiere performance of (not) knowing the answer in The Crypt at the Church of the Intercession in Northern Manhattan, New York City, on October 28, 2022.

September 15, 2015 (updated November 7, 2022)

1 (wait)

wait in fear wait in silence empty self empty nothing

answer back reach conclusion reach to toes stretch in shouting

what one does nothing matters what one is is all that is

2. (choose)

choose each time to be a moment choose each place to be a where

choose a home to be yours only choose your heart to be the door

widely open to see sun's coming wisely shut this night so cold

3. (shout)

anger red start and startle peace is white not heard not heard

anger white shout and bluster blood is red not seen, not seen

when we war things are altered when we kill things are the same

(wait) (choose)

(shout) (breathe)

(move) (sit)

4. (breathe)

seven stars shine from nowhere seven seas wash the bottom

here we are breathe in fresh air grass is now flounce of green hair

the funny thing the funny laugh sense wells from nothing lives in nonsense

5. (move)

mist of morning hot, dark coffee feet on railing bare, and carefree

hair is blowing thoughts asunder slow sweet breathing air of wonder

constant foaming constant movement now is all things now is all ways

6. (sit)

sit and wait as a mountain stand and shout fast running gorge

scratch and till make a garden rain and sun til thoughts grow large

sense is feeling all is nature sense is form sense is sky

NOTE:ThefractionsaboveeachpitchindicatethejustintonationratiosinrelationtoatonalcenterofG(1/1)Thetonichasno accidentalnordotheintervalsbasedonperfectfifthsaboveit(DandA,3/2and9/8).Theaccidentalnotationshereinarea combinationofRichardStein/MildredCouperquartertonalnotation(fortheratioof11/8)andadaptationsfromtheSagittal systemdevelopedbyDaveKeenanandGeorgeSecorforthenotationofsmallermicrotonaldeviations:theintervalsbasedonpure thirds(5/4and15/8);thenaturalseventh(7/4)andthenaturalthirteenth(13/8)arenotatedusing&,J,andrsymbolsrespectively Singersshouldavoidusingvibratoexceptwhereindicatedinthescore