Classical Musical Exploration: The Alternative Tuning and Just Intonation of Ben Johnston

Have you ever wondered why there are 12 tones in the musical scale? What if there were other ways of dividing the octave? What would the resulting music sound like?

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As usual, the musical abundance of the internet has been my blessing and my curse. Over the past few days I stumbled upon the string quartets of Ben Johnston - and they hit me with such a strange, fascinating sound that I've since spent dozens of hours listening to his work and learning as much as I can about it.

There's a lot to dig into here, and I'm just starting to understand it. I'm thinking a series of posts on Just Intonation and Alternative Tuning might be helpful, as I've been struggling to find a good step-by-step source to educate myself on the subject. For now, though, I'll just ask you to click on the video so you can listen to a performance of Amazing Grace that's unlike anything you've ever heard.

This presses all of my musical joy buttons. Readers of my previous music posts will know that I love music that can be considered "challenging," but it still has to evoke a strong emotional response - none of that avante garde banging around for the sake of attention. I love stuff that sounds richer and more rewarding the more times you listen to it. And I appreciate artists who use traditional instruments in innovative ways.

So what's going on with this performance? It's a sort of Theme and Variations on the melody of Amazing Grace. And the variations take us into some pretty far-out, spine tingling territory.

And it sounds this way because Ben Johnston has thrown out the traditional "tempered tuning" system we (and our ears) are used to.

Here's a one minute, layman's explanation:

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There's no getting around the fact that an octave change in tone represents a doubling, or a 2:1 ratio, of the frequency. 440 Hz is the A of your standard tuning fork. You can go up an octave or two to hear 880 Hz and 1760 Hz., or down to hear 220 and 110.

Mathematically, all the other intervals we're used to hearing in music follow basic ratios. A major fifth is a 3:2 ratio (A to E would be 440 and 660 Hz, for example) and a major third produces a frequency ratio of 5:4. The more complicated the ratios, the less harmonious they sound to the human ear.

But here's where it gets interesting: the tones you hear from your piano keyboard are only approximations of those ratios - even if your piano is in perfect tune! For all kinds of complicated reasons, singers and instrument makers all started compromising somewhere around the Renaissance, and ever since, this tempered tuning is what we've come to hear and accept as "normal music."

Johnston has done a tremendous amount of work to compose music based on the purer ratios of just intonation tuning - and it's hard to imagine how difficult this is to notate and play. It's no surprise that it took the Kepler Quartet fourteen years (!!!) to record his ten string quartets. These musicians are hitting notes that deviate from their regular training by semitones that lie on the verge of human perception. (You can see them celebrating the end of this arduous project here.)

At first, when I heard his music, I thought Johnston was just playing with these micro-tones for the sake of being "edgy" or "experimental," but it turns out that every note has been precisely selected to adhere to his complex mathematical calculations.

Source

This is why the music doesn't sound discordant, per se, especially after you listen for several minutes. It makes the music sound grander and richer - thicker, somehow, as if there's a small orchestra playing rather than just a quartet. And I think it's why the harmonies give me such hair-raising, spine tingling chills.

Have you gotten to the last few minutes of that performance yet? Seriously, don't cheat yourself. I know you've got lots of other stuff to read and vote on. Just click to the 8 minute mark if you're in a hurry and hear it through to the end.

Possibilities for Electronic Musicians?

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Ben Johnston had to do all his composition and mathematical manipulation with pencil and paper.

Surely electronic musicians could be able to produce some wildly original stuff in a fraction of the time? I would love to see some of these just intonation principles explored in techno, house, dubstep, whatever, but I can't seem to find anything like that online.

If I'm missing something, please enlighten me.

In the mean-time, I'm so excited about the harmonious possibilities of these tunings that I'm thinking of digging into Sonic Pi a bit. It's an open-source, "live coding music synth," and it seems like it should be perfect for this kind of experimentation. Of course, I've got a bit of math to learn before I'll know what I'm doing. And I didn't exactly start out this week thinking this was the sort of project I'd be putting time into. (But I suppose it could be more rewarding than playing more Minecraft...)

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I've got this video on virtuousity from Adam Neely to thank for my discovery of Ben Johnston. If you're a fan of classical (or any) music, and like to learn a bit about what makes it tick, you owe it to yourself to clear out an afternoon and dig into Adam's Youtube channel.