I have a real treat for today's podcast. I'm going to play four different microtonal pieces by four different composers, all for solo piano. Each was done using a different set of techniques to retune the piano, with different intonation systems, and all showcase the world between the 1:1 and the 2:1.

The first is by Aaron Krister Johnson, with a piece called Study for Kyle Gann. Here's what Aaron wrote about the piece:

In honor of his wonderful neo-Nancarrow work on the 'Studies for Disklavier' disk, I make this humble offering and dedicated it to Kyle Gann, the spirit of Conlon Nancarrow, and the inspiring 'impossible keyboard technique' made possible by the same.

There's a real nice 5 against 3 at the one minute and 45 seconds point, which really gets me up and going. Listen now to Study for Kyle Gann by Aaron Krister Johnson. Play song Nice ending there, with an acknowledgement to Conlon Nancarrow, Kyle Gann, and Bud Powell, all wraped up in a bow. Next up is a piece by Kyle Gann, the same Kyle Gann as was the target of Aaron's piece. Kyle is the music critic for the Village Voice and an associate professor of music at Bard College. This work is described by Kyle as follows:

Hello, gang, I've got a new piece, my first ever in 13-limit tuning. The tuning is simply all the ratios of whole numbers from 1 to 13, and the title is brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr) Triskaidekaphonia (rim shot) Dedicated to Aaron Krister Johnson for inspiring me to get to work on it.

• Tuning details here.
• Keyboard score as PDF here.
• Blog entry here.

A simple piece, over a drone, but it's taken a long time to get those 13-based intervals in my head. Enjoy!

Listen now to Triskaidekaphonia by Kyle Gann Play song.

Next up is my piece called Resolution in Blue for Microtonal Slide Piano. This piece explores what would happen if a piano had a wammy bar, a few dozen notes per octave, and a swell pedal. It's in just intonation, based on the tonality diamond to the 11 limit. The title, Resolution in Blue, is the diplomatic language at the UN for a permanent resolution. The security council uses this when it has a resolution read for a vote, when they are ready to remain siezed of the matter.

Play song.

The final piece is by Jeff Harrington for 19 tone piano, called Prelude #2. It is part of a series of four preludes Jeff wrote to be played together. I've played all four previously on a podcast. Today I'm just going to play the second one, since it has a lot in common with the other pieces I played today.

Play song.

Thanks for listening, Podcatchers!

An excerpt from a work in progress, from the baritone aria in the Opera: The War on Terror.

Today's podcast is a performance of my latest piece, called Balloon Drum Music. It is scored for Balloon Drums, Oboe, Flutes, Guitar, and Finger Piano. The piece starts out with a simple chord progession for the winds, with finger piano bass, that sounds sort of like this:

• Bb major
• Eb major
• G minor
• and so on.

When it is played, it sounds like a conventional progression. But in actuality, the chords are from the Partch Tonality Diamond, and their names in Sagittal notation are shown on the blog post at podcast1024.libsyn.com. There are notes in each key that are in common with the next key, and some that are slightly different. Some are off by very small ratios, and at later points in the piece when the flutes and oboe slides from one to another, the slide is unsettling to the non-microtonal ear.

For example, in the movement of chords from the B 16/9 major to the D 8/7 major, the B 16/9 goes down by 27:28 to fifth of the D 8/7 chord, which is A 12/7. There's another movement of a 35:36 and a 15:14. Each of these movements are decidedly different from conventional 12 tone equal temperment, whose minor second pitches approximate a 15:16. But even with these movements, the chords sound rather conventional at the start of this piece. When the slides come in, things get more microtonal.

The oboe has the ability to be in more than one place at the same time in this piece, or think of it as two oboists. The timbre of the oboe is subject to some alteration by choosing samples that are higher or lower than originally recorded. The result is kind of an English Horn sound, or sometimes like an angry cat.

As with most of my pieces, this one has a lot of indeterminacy. Each instrument can choose what to play next, by selecting from many alternative pitch and rhythm sequences. There are programmatic controls that drive the choice of sequences either towards or away from repetition.

The basic structure of the piece is a chord progression as a bridge between the longer sections of B 16/9 major. There are lots of triads based on 4:5:6 overtones, or 7:9:11, or slides between the two. These triads alternate in the chords and arpegiations. Other chords take advantage of wider intervals, like the 5:7:11:16, 6:9:13:20, 8:11:18:24, and other quasi fourth-based intervals.

The balloon drums are made from a four foot long sewer pipe with a balloon membrane over one end. I recorded one and use Csound to bring it up in pitch. Each note played on the balloon drum is actually 5-10 strikes of the drum separated by a few milliseconds. It gives it a sense of many drummers playing at once.

Listen now to a version of Balloon Drum Music by Prent Rodgers.

I think this one is just about ready. Here's a section from version 2 at 3:40 in. Note the flutes. Nice octave shift. Everything is moving either geographically or glissandiacally

This is some more bumper music. Today's entry includes slides from one key to the next in the bridge. It takes what used to sound rather conventional, and makes it into a catfight in Arabia. Or something like that.

Today's podcast is bumper music. Just something to cleanse your audio pallette. There are some balloon drums in this work-in-progress.

Today's podcast will be a bit longer than usual, since I'm going to play the works of several composers - music by Joe Pehrson, Aaron Krister Johnson, and Christopher Bailey.

But first, some words of advice from Eve Beglarian, who was profiled on a podcast put together by the talented composer Corey Dargel. His podcast, called Composers and the People Who Love Them, is a terrific collection of viewpoints on one composer by a variety of personalities. And they are quite the personalities. I'm going to play a clip of Eve being interviewed by Professor Heebie McJeebie:

Play clip.

I agree with Eve.

On to the musical numbers. First up is Joe Pehrson. He writes about Inner Voices:

Inner Voices is my first electronic piece which uses software, rather than hardware, synthesizers. I'm using the z3ta+ softsynth which reads "Scala" tuning files. Therefore, virtually any intonation can be realized. In this piece, I use the Blackjack scale, a 21 note scale which very closely emulates just intonation (non-beating intervals) within a margin of 2 or 3 cents. The z3ta+ is a very flexible softsynth and I use no presets: all the sounds are especially created. Sonar is my sequencer host and a second software synth, the TTS-1 creates percussion effects. I use quite a few of these, since they are handled so nicely by this second synth. I'm currently completing a version for electronic playback and 2 live percussionists.

Listen to Inner Voices by Joe Pehrson.

Next piece is by Aaron Krister Johnson, and is a suite of Four Pieces for Harpsichord:

• Praeludium distretto
• Contrapunctus null
• Eat My Two-Against-Three
• ADD Crisis Center

Here's how he described them:

3rd of August, 2005- four new works for 2/5-comma meantone tuned harpsichord. A note about the improvisations: I often do them in real-time at about half tempo, then, for a Nancarrow-like effect, they are sped up in tempo. But, yes; they are improvised real-time. And occasionally I'll fix a sloppy flam or something like a note not being held long enough which sounded choppy, etc.

Listen now to Four Pieces for Harpsichord by Aaron Krister Johnson.

The final piece of the podcast is a fun romp by Christopher Bailey called "Post-industrial Nuclear Thrash Mutated Smurfette JumpFest" by Christopher Bailey. He describes it as follows:

I did it in ProTools, with a few basic plug-ins, samples, and an XV-3080 Synth. It's not systematically microtonal, just lots of random pitch-bends added to juice up the pitches. Plus a lot of the samples are kind of weirdly colored sonorities. Beyond that, I suppose the title speaks for itself.

Listen now to music by Christopher Bailey, "Post-industrial Nuclear Thrash Mutated Smurfette JumpFest". Great stuff.

Today's episode is a work in progress by Bill Sethares. From his description:

I've been working on mapping procedures to take the partials (overtones) from a sound (the source) and move them somewhere else (the destination). The application is to create sounds (currently planning on using Kontakt [from Native Instruments]) that have spectra specially designed for particular tunings. As I've been playing with the algorithms, I have been "trying them out" on complete mixes and have some interesting sounding results... for these two pieces, the destination was set as all integer multiples of 65 Hz. So all of the "notes" are squished down to one big harmonic sound.

The source in this piece is Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. See if you can hear it through the rush of harmonic partials. Neat stuff.

Today's podcast is a very short but delightful piece by Kraig Grady. He calls it an experiment, but I think it's so great, I'm going to play it twice today. He writes:

I had meant to go into Logic Vocoder and see whatIi could do with noise to illustrate to Bill [Sethares] what it might do. But it didn't work at all. While I was there I somehow ended up doing this. -- Kraig Grady North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/> The Wandering Medicine Show KXLU <http://www.kxlu.com/main.html> 88.9 FM Wed 8-9 pm Los Angeles

It's called Crickets, and here it is. Twice since it's so short.

Today's podcast is a piece by Jonathan Szanto, written for a dance performance. He writes:

Tidal Falls - I got called very late (4 weeks before performance) to create a score for a dance piece that already existed. The piece was metered, and has both metric and tempo changes in sections; therefore, the bulk of the piece already had an existing tempo/meter format. Flowing/falling water is the theme of the piece, including an actual working 'fountain' on stage that dancers go into. Water sounds were one of the requests. I looked at this piece as a good place to try getting better at some of my toolset, especially in seeing what happened when I started working with a lot of multiple instances of soft instruments - how far could I task my poor little DAW? The main compositional/recording/mixing application is Sonar 4.

It's about ten minutes long. Listen and enjoy the wet goodness!