Kyle Gann will be familiar to some readers of Fanfare, because he was a critic here 1985-92. He remains one of the most wide-ranging and imaginative writers on American 20th-century music, having written definitive biographies of Conlon Nancarrow and Robert Ashley, critical studies of Cage's 4'33" and the Ives "Concord" Sonata, as well as his collected writings from his years as new music critic for the Village Voice. What may be less known is just how exceptional a composer he is. I've reviewed his works over the years, and (as he suggests in this interview) he has a special affinity for the piano, which he has treated masterfully throughout his career. His work has reached an apex of sorts with the release of Hyperchromatica, a set of 17 pieces in a personal form of just intonation tuning for three computer-driven pianos.
Kyle and I met one another in the early 1980s, when we were both graduate students in Chicago. He was far north and I far south, so in that immense city we were aware of one another but didn't meet much. But we both recognized one another as "fellow travelers," even at a distance. We stayed in touch, and as we both later found ourselves in New York's orbit, began to meet more frequently and compare notes on everything, as well as our own music. Now there's at least one leisurely evening a year (or more) at our homes in either Hartford or the Hudson River Valley, sharing single malt and cigars. I think I'm too close a friend to write a truly objective review, but my feelings for the quality and importance of this work should be obvious from what follows.
Robert Carl: We've known each other for decades, and even though we've both written on music a lot (though you far more than me!), we were first and always composers. That's how we knew each other in Chicago when we were both graduate students. This new work Hyperchromatica is a sort of "summa" for you, something that combines a web of interests and obsessions that have motivated your music throughout your career. Can you start to untangle those influences/obsessions, and maybe give us a sense of their respective origins?
Kyle Gann: Well that's a question whose answer could fill an entire interview, but I'll start by trying to be precise and succinct. When I was 14 or 15 I got the score to Charles Ives's Three Places in New England. When I saw and heard the passage in the middle movement where one half of the orchestra is going 4/3 as fast as the other half, I said, "I want to spend my entire life doing that." And I have. Much later I got into Conlon Nancarrow's player piano pieces and Schillinger technique, and learned more about the natural beauty of different pulses running out of phase with each other. Less than half of my music is microtonal, and I always cared more about rhythmic innovation than pitch innovation. My earliest recorded piece, Long Night (1981), is for three pianists playing at 90, 100, and 110 beats per minute respectively (and unsynchronized).
Microtones, as you know, came later, when I started studying with Ben Johnston after I finished my doctorate. I had been impressed with Harry Partch without really understanding his tuning system, but one day Ben looked at a chord I'd written and mentioned how beautiful it would sound if tuned properly - and he rattled off the tuning ratios. (That is, the simplest ratios of each pitch frequency in the chord to the bottom pitch frequency.) With a shock I realized I understood just what he was saying, and I realized there was no turning back. I had been the algebra and geometry whiz of my high school, and I knew I had exactly the math abilities for tuning.
And so I developed an idea that the way forward into the future, for music, was to learn to perceive a more nuanced array of pitch and rhythmic relationships. I've heard a few demonstrations of Indian classical music, over the years, that convinced me that we Westerners are far below the possible human maximum in that respect. Also, the arithmetic for the tempo ratios was the same as that for the pitch ratios, as Henry Cowell pointed out in his amazing book New Musical Resources. It seems to me that modern music has been trapped in a kind of frenzied and unsatisfying search for new textures and instrumental techniques because the door to new pitch and rhythm relationships seemed to be locked. I got the idea (and I certainly wasn't the only one who got it, you could name others yourself) that we could create a new musical language out of an expanded subtlety of pitch and rhythm relationships.
My first big attempt to combine the microtonality with the tempo shifts and simultaneities was my theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull, sort of a one-man pocket opera that I wrote between 1995 and 1999. (That's finally coming out this summer on a New World CD, by the way.) After that, I developed the tempo ideas in a bunch of pieces for Disklavier [computer-controlled player piano] and the microtonality in a lot of electric keyboard pieces for live performer. For some reason, I couldn't seem, any more, to develop both at the same time. Finally, in 2015 I was working with a subset of a single harmonic series, which had come to fascinate me. And that summer the close-up photos of Pluto came back, and I was reading and found out that Pluto and Neptune maintain a 3-to-2 ratio in their orbit cycles, and that there are other planets like that, and the whole damn solar system is a big multitempo complex based on whole-number ratios! And something went "Ping!!" in my head and I started the piece "Orbital Resonance" with the harmonic series going out of phase with itself at simple ratios, and from that point the other ideas for what became Hyperchromatica came thick and fast. I always knew I had to write some really big tempo-microtone exploration, and Hyperchromatica was the piece I'd been aiming for all through the 16 years since Custer.
I don't know that I've been very succinct.
RC: Considering how much you just covered, thorough but incredibly succinct! And it brings up a host of more questions for me to ask, but first I think we need a bit more of basic explanation. You talk about a "subset of a single harmonic series." Can you speak more precisely to that (it seems essential to the concept of Hyperchromatica), how it differs from other forms of intonation, and also give Fanfare readers who may not be familiar with it a very basic primer on just intonation? (And yes, I know I just bit off a huge chunk again.)
KG: No, no, excellent and entirely necessary. A harmonic series is a group of pitches all of which sound at frequencies which are multiples of a single frequency. For instance, every knows A 440, which is the A above middle C which, in our Euramerican world, is most often tuned to ring at 440 cycles per second. An octave is a ratio of two to one, and so if A is 440, the octave below is A at 220 cycles per second, and the octave below that A 110. So the harmonic series on A 110 includes A220, E 330, A 440, C# 550, E 660, G 770, A 880 B 990 and so on, each new pitch adding a smaller interval than the one before it. The troublesome thing is that C# 550 is a little flatter than the C# on the piano, G 770 is twice that flat, while D 1210 (11 times 110) is a quarter-tone between D and D#. Some of these are pitches we just never used in European music (although several smart people in the 17th century argued valiantly for their inclusion). So the harmonic series - which I often demonstrate by playing a low piano note while moving my finger lightly along the string, producing all those pitches - contains, above the number six, a lot of tones that we never used in our notated music until Partch brought them back to life around 1928. The harmonic series, for musicians, is nature, though European music got away from nature by jostling the pitches around so that they're all equal steps.
So the basic scale of Hyperchromatica is the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th harmonics of Eb, going right up the harmonic series. Then I build another such scale on the 9th harmonic (F), another on the 10th harmonic (G), another on the 11th (a quarter-tone sharp), and so on up to 15. Because some of those harmonic series overlap, there are 33 pitches in all. The largest gap in my scale is between the 91st harmonic (the 13th harmonic of the 7th harmonic, 91 being 7 times 13) and the third (equal to the 96th harmonic, since 96 is an octave of 3: 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96). That scale step is 93 cents wide, a cent being 1/100th of a piano half-step. The smallest gap is only eight cents, between the 7th (equaling the 224th harmonic) and the 225th, which is the 15th harmonic of the 15th. It's a very unequal scale, and I like that. It makes me feel like I'm out in nature, dealing with all its surprises and complexities, whereas arbitrarily dividing the octave into an equal number of steps feels like an urban park, set out in regular paved pathways.
The use of these pure number-related intervals is called just intonation. We assume that before the 16th century European music was all played in just intonation to sound maximally consonant and intelligible. In the 16th century (maybe a little earlier) they started fudging (or tempering) the tuning of the pitches a little, to use a wider variety of chords without adding more pitches. Still, a string quartet or a cappella vocal group can still play or sing in just intonation. I've met choral directors who instruct their singers to sing the third of a major triad (E in C-E-G, for example) a little flat, to be more in tune. Barbershop quartets usually sing entirely in just intonation, and they can't use a piano in rehearsal because the impure tuning throws them off. That's a fascinating body of musical practice to study for tuning, and I always play some barbershop in classes. It was the eventual dominance of the keyboard that made musicians give up on trying to get chords purely in tune. I hope this is clear enough; I have a page on just intonation on my website [kylegann.com/tuning.html] which I'm told is where many people send tuning novices for a totally beginning introduction to the topic.
You and I have in common that we've gradually swerved toward the harmonic series late in our careers. For decades I just used whatever pitches I wanted, and gradually I started finding fascinating chord sequences within the harmonic series itself, in which one major or minor triad moves to another with only the slightest changes of pitch. (Partch called this "tonality flux," which I wrote a Wikipedia page for.) I gave a copy of Hyperchromatica to my acupuncturist, whose musician boyfriend wanted to know what kind of pedal I had on the piano that was bending the pitches (which of course aren't bending, they're just tiny intervals). And I do use a lot of simple major and minor triads, because I think most listeners have an instinctive resistance to alternate tunings unless you can also include all the common chords they're already used to. Just about all of my music, I think, uses something familiar on the surface to lure listeners into a weird world. It's my basic strategy. Hyperchromatica starts on a couple of common jazz chords, and then the melody takes twelve notes within a perfect fourth to descend from F to C.
RC: That I think was super clear, even if some folks reading may have to chew on it a bit. To those, I promise, it's worth it, and you'll never look at (listen to) standard rep the same again. (And on a personal note, the way you develop the scales is truly ingenious.) I should mention that in fact you have a book coming out soon from University of Illinois Press that covers this ground and a host of others concerning alternative tunings, that will I suspect be a definitive text on the subject. (And a great companion to this piece.)
When you mention jazz chords, that brings out another striking aspect of Hyperchromatica. The piece has two aesthetic "faces" - one is rooted in the earth of American vernacular music, even back to 18th/19th-century hymnody and popular song and dance. The other is much more "transcendentalist," i.e., abstract in its investigation of sonic and structural musical phenomena. Talk a little about this duality and range; I think it's not only admirable but exceptional nowadays.
KG: Well, thank you. First, if it's not too late, let me add about the tuning: You don't have to grasp the concept to enjoy or even understand the music. For most listeners, the effect of the tuning is that the glissandos will be preternaturally smooth, the notes will seem to bend a little going from chord to chord, and there will occasionally be odd sonorities you've never heard. The surface of the music is melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic, and the tuning just makes it sound like painted in blacklight paint or something. I think.
I fancy that I am an involuntary member of an American school that includes Ives, Cowell, Lou Harrison, Ben Johnston, and even John Cage and Harry Partch: We all like to push the boundaries and do weird, experimental stuff, but when we get a conventional inspiration, we're happy to write conventional music. Ives and Cowell have many very conventional songs and even Romantic symphonies, Harrison could write a catchy tune with the best of them, and even Cage wrote In a Landscape and Dream, pieces the most phobic anti-Modernist could hardly object to. I get a harmonic or rhythm (or both) concept, and then I usually feel around for some delightfully simple idea to focus it around. I took a jazz course from one of my colleagues in 2000, and studied further modal harmony with another, and when I'm not using microtones, I generally go to jazz harmony, because I think it's just more elegant and fertile than the pitch-set concepts that became the lingua franca of classical high Modernism. We're all competing with past composers who used harmony as one of their main tools, and I won't write a piece without harmony, which would feel like composing with one hand tied behind my back. Harmony, to me, means it makes a difference which pitch is in the bass, which didn't tend to be a 12-tone concern.
Otherwise, I'm not sure how vernacular my vernacular is. I like to write pieces I can hum. I think most composers find me naive for this, but non-musicians appreciate it. And I am always astonished at how much more insightful comments I get from non-musicians than musicians on my music. In Hyperchromatica there are a few movements in which I decided, calculatedly, not to write a tune or a catchy rhythm: "Orbital Resonance," "Liquid Mechanisms," and "Pulsars." In a way, I wanted to reassure composers that I know how to do abstraction. And sure enough, those first two in particular are the ones that composers tend to single out as the most interesting. They leave little for the listener to hold on to. I don't know whether that's Transcendentalist, at least in the way that I've had a lifelong fascination with the 19th-century American Transcendentalist movement - maybe you can elaborate. I like those movements, but they intentionally lack a focal point.
I've written a couple of pieces with country-and-western type bass lines (one was stolen), and I certainly don't shy away from the occasional pop rhythm. I think you can show off weirdness better with a little normalcy as a foil. I can't tell you how much this makes me feel alienated (well, you know) from the larger community of composers, who seem to look down their nose at my music as being, as the Viennese say, "too much written for the audience." But I'm also the audience for my own music, and I spend a lot of time listening to it. Do you listen to your own music a lot? I mean like, all the time? Some composers don't, I know. I do. And I want people to love it, not just be impressed with it.
RC: I frankly love the austere and visionary quality of "Pulsars," but then I also end up dancing to "Space Cat" and "Galactic Jamboree." I love the range and the diversity, and your willingness to refuse distinctions of "high" and "low."
And speaking of variety, perhaps it's time to talk tech a bit. You've already written a series of works for Disklavier (the Yamaha computer-driven grand piano), exploring non-equal tempered tunings. But this piece is the most ambitious essay yet in your explorations. And it seems it really could only occur as the technology has become so fluid, adaptable, and powerful. Can you talk about the setup of the three pianos?
KG: Sure. But the technology is really not so new. It's basically player pianos, so in a sense you could say that this music could have been done 100 years ago, except that there was no secure way to synchronize the pianos, as Antheil tried to do (and failed) in Ballet Mecanique. Now the player pianos are run via computer with MIDI, in my case with Digital Performer, which has been around for many years. The pianos need to be close together because each melody will ping from piano to piano, and I don't want an exaggerated stereo effect. I came up with the scale, and then the distribution of the pitches among the three pianos worked out nicely, with no strings raised in pitch and none lowered much more than a half-step. The harmonic series on 13 is all on piano 3, the one on 11 all on piano 2, those on 1 and 7 are mostly on piano 1, but those on 5, 9, and 15 jump all over the place. Still, the efficiency was serendipitous.
Working with microtones is what has become much easier since I started. Some of these pieces I started composing in Sibelius with a gray little pitch bend command on every note. Eventually I memorized where every pitch was on the three pianos, so I started composing directly into a three-piano score - which, if you notice how often there are seven tempos at once with each line bouncing among all three pianos, was still an absorbingly elaborate process. But it was a lot easier on my eyes than the gray pitch bend commands. I think I've ruined my eyesight for microtonality.
The problem is more perception than technology. Classical musicians hear that it's computerized pianos and say, "Oh, but that must sound very mechanical." Nancarrow fought against the same bias, which you never find non-musicians expressing. Someone could write a dissertation on the ways I keep the rhythm from sounding mechanical. I never use a string of 16th notes in a steady beat. Sometimes there are three to seven tempos going at once. They have to be mechanically accurate to get the patterns I want, and the brain can't process strict accuracy in that complex context. In other cases I delay or accelerate notes in a melody by a fraction of a 16th note, in order to make the timing more human. In the slower movements I change metronome marking quasi-randomly almost once a measure or more. But some of the movements need to sound in strict tempo for the delightful effects to come off. Classical musicians play Debussy and Chopin and internalize the principle that rhythm must always be fluid, with expressive rubato, and then they go home and listen to their favorite hip hop and electronic dance music without ever being able to consciously realize that metronomic rhythm can be a blast in the right context. So yeah, I consider that famous line between classical and pop one of the great red herrings of music history.
Somebody could have made this music a long time ago. I've been imagining it for decades. But the microtonality people weren't into multitempos, the rhythmic complexity people weren't into alternate tunings, and - most importantly, I think - neither crowd was into Minimalism, which I consider the basis of my music and the reason the structures are simple enough for the complexity to come across so clearly. It seems funny that I use seven tempos going at once and 33 pitches and call myself a Minimalist, but every time I sit down to write, I think like a Minimalist. That's why we came up with the term Totalism, to cover the discrepancy.
RC: The whole issue of blending two comprehensive practices - multitempo timespace and just intonation microtonality - takes me back to the concept of the "summa." I found myself through listening referencing two works, The WTC and the Nancarrow player piano Etudes. It seems to me this work has the potential to open up thinking in a similar manner about new creative avenues in composition. I know this is the sort of question that composers usually defer from out of modesty, but what sort of impact would you like Hyperchromatica to have on the field? If the right sorts of ears picked up on it, what would you hope to emerge? What would it enable that you could dream but not do yourself?
KG: Hah! Hoo-boy. Well what I would like to see emerge are some commissions for me, maybe a performance for my unperformed symphony (which you indirectly talked me into writing). I started the piece, after all, because I was getting about two small performances a year in my late 50s. And I decided, in resentment, to put out my most ambitious CD with no performers at all, since the performance world had abandoned me.
But to emerge from wallowing in self-pity for a moment, I have always felt that the 20th century unearthed a tremendous wealth of new musical ideas, and that those ideas needed to be built on, not just abandoned as the patented work of single composers. I've said many times that five late 20th-century composers gave us foundations for an entirely new musical practice: Nancarrow, for large-scale rhythmic structure; La Monte Young and Ben Johnston for a new (microtonal) pitch language; Morton Feldman, for a new kind of musical rhetoric and continuity; and Robert Ashley, for a new way of combining music with text. Not surprisingly, these are among the composers who have influenced me most, and I've stolen ideas from all five. I do see Hyperchromatica as a melding of Nancarrow and Johnston, and, less obviously, there's quite a bit of Feldman thrown in. I have to shy away from the Nancarrow connection, because since I wrote the book on him, people tended to assume my Nude Rolling Down an Escalator CD (for Disklavier, on New World) was more of the same. But Nancarrow's structures were much more large-scale and Modernist, where mine are more local, humorous, and improvisatory. I don't think stealing from these composers is unoriginal when one can combine their ideas into new hybrids, and I don't think those ideas were invented in order to be summarily dropped.
I'm not answering the question, because I can't. But I do think the piano is the clearest and most persuasive advocate for microtones. Johnston's amazing string quartets, Partch's operas for his own instruments, are wonderful, but they don't quite make the case to young musicians that microtones can be a perfectly logical language, because the timbres overpower the microtonal voice-leading somewhat. Ever play on a just-tuned acoustic piano? It's an astonishing experience because the pitches, once sounded, ring in perfect ratios. They "lock" in. Going back to a regular piano after that is an intense disappointment. In the liner notes to Hyperchromatica I say I'm trying to reinvent tonality, and I mean it. The chords in Hyperchromatica include a lot of common triads and seventh chords, linked not only by the third and fifth harmonics, as in conventional tonal music, but also by seventh, 11th, and 13th harmonics. It just extends tonal practice up the harmonic series, and is easy to understand by ear once you're used to it. Some of us just intonationists think we're simply picking up the development of music theory where theorists dropped the ball in the 17th century, by refusing to move past the fifth harmonic. The tonal system as they conceived it gave us a few good centuries, then stagnated and got stuck. I guess I would hope Hyperchromatica can get the ball rolling again. People who don't know think that microtonality is to atonality what atonality is to tonality, just another layer of complexity - and most microtonal music gives them good reasons to think that. But most of the movements in Hyperchromatica are profoundly tonal, and the others are polytonal.
RC: I have a sense we're nearing our limit, and the editor may pull the plug on us (and I don't want to lose any of this). For me, the questions I had are fully answered, and as always, I'm delighted and dazzled by the clarity of your thought and expression. I can only hope this interchange makes folks want to experience this work, and helps bring it into the widest possible view. But to you the last word; any final thoughts to sum up?
KG: After several listenings, what's your favorite movement?
RC: Yikes, you turned the tables on me! But sorry, I'm going hedge my bets, but just because I can't be absolute about anything. There are four, which exemplify such different personae. "Space Cat" for raucous bluesy fun. "Pavane for a Dead Planet" for unrestrained lyricism and a sense of the deep tonality behind the standard rep (not to mention a stunning climax). "Dark Forces Signify" for its gravity of tone and stately procession. And "Pulsars" for something I've never heard before!
OK, 4 out of 17. Not bad, still!
KG: Great, no one's mentioned the "Pavane" yet. I'm keeping track, and hoping that each movement will be at least one person's favorite. I think I'm most awed by "Futility Row," which seemed to write itself, but I have a soft spot for "Rings of Saturn," and I think of "Busted Grooves" as the movement no one can dislike. But it's "Spacecat" that's gotten over 35,000 hits on Spotify, for some reason. It may be the title.
Thanks for this; you know how much fun it is for me to talk about myself for awhile. Return the favor soon.
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