Composition, Violin and Voice by Marc Sabat / Voice and Prepared Piano by Julia Holter

Based on a concept and text by Bruce Nauman (You May Not Want To Be Here)

Recorded by Adam Asnan (Roter Salon, Berlin) / Mixing by Dario Lozano-Thornton / Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi / Photo by Seth Lower / Design by Seth Weiner

Maybe Here

Marc Sabat - Maybe Here (feat Julia Holter)

live performance by the Sonar-Quartett Berlin 11.April 2010 Köln
Susanne Zapf & Kirsten Harms (violins)
Nikolaus Schlierf (viola)
Cosima Gerhardt (cello)

Beautiful city (1994)
for string quartet in a scordatura tuning
 
This piece was written and premiered in Toronto for a workshop and performance of experimental music by the ensemble “Critical Band” with guest composer/violinist Malcolm Goldstein. The texture of the slowly-evolving sound was inspired (in part) by working with Malcolm and by his style of improvisation. I had also been thinking about a 1960s article by Steve Reich, “Slow-Motion Sound”, in which he envisions the utopian possibility of microscopically examining every possible detail of a sound expanded in time.
 
At the time, I had recently encountered the theoretical ideas of Harry Partch, expressed in his book “Genesis of a Music” (1949). Partch recasts the conventional understanding of “harmony” and “tonality” in terms of Just Intonation, proposing an expanded understanding of musical intervals, tone systems, consonance and dissonance. His system is based on ratios of natural numbers, primarily ratios built from the first 5 prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. I was already then convinced that Partch’s conceptualization was sound, radical and of crucial importance to any future evolution of musical harmony.
 
The piece “Beautiful city” is a slowly moving chorale which explores harmonies based on the “neutral” third produced between the 9th and 11th partials of a harmonic series.

Beautiful City (1994)

live performance by Plainsound Orchestra 15 August 2003
in Reihe 0, Schwarzenberg, Bregenzerwald Austria
Stephen Clarke, Ekkehard Windrich, James Bush

This piece is part of a series of compositions that are based on a systematic documentation 
or cataloguing of a set of possible acoustic circumstances.  The process used in this case is 
based on one possible realization of an instruction from Christian Wolff’s “Burdocks”, in which a performer is invited to make about 511 sounds, each different from the others.  

This number happens to enumerate the set of all possible non-silent combinations of nine 
sounds: (29 - 1).The idea of presenting all combinations from a fixed set of sounds has been translated into a list of chords tuned in Just Intonation. Each chord is made up of pitches from 
the first eight odd partials of the harmonic series over A (1-3-5-7-9-11-13-15). 

These tones are transposed into various octaves within a fixed range of the piano, following a simple cyclic pattern. The 12 pitch-classes available on a piano are retuned in all octaves to a subset of the overtones of 13.78125 Hz (5 octaves below A-441 Hz and 1 octave below the 
lowest key of a standard modern piano), which produce sympathetic resonances depending on 
the type of pedalling used. 

The violin and cello, muted with apartment mutes throughout, sustain various tones from the chords, producing melodic lines. At the same time, the pitches played in the music, the resonances controlled by the pianist, as well as the nonlinear distortion produced in the air and in our ears, are all tuned components of a sustained sub-audio tone which remains constant throughout the duration of the composition.

The music is dedicated to Christina Sabat (1942-1998).

Trio for piano violin cello (1998)

Daan Vandewalle, piano
IGNM Basel Portrait Marc Sabat piano music 2011

2 piano studies (1995)

Stefan Pohlit: 'RAIN' ('Guardians of Magnesia')
2016-17, for string quartet

performed by the JACK Quartet @ NUNC!3, Chicago, 2018

Stefan POHLIT: 'RAIN' - JACK Quartet @ NUNC!3, Chicago, 2018

DRIFT - descant on Benedetti's two examples of syntonic comma drift (2018)

A new version for acoustic guitar and viola with a stronger focus on 11-limit tuneable sonorities.
Plainsound Music Edition 2019

ATLAS, 2012 (Version B, 2019)

(Speculative) 5-limit just intonation of Palestrina's Sicut cervus desiderat (1587)

Sicut cervus desiderat (Palestrina intonation, 2020)

(Speculative) 19-limit just intonation of Gesualdo's Tenebrae factae sunt (1611)

Tenebrae factae sunt (Gesualdo intonation, 2020)

Electronic Music in 37-limit Just Intonation (3.5.7.11.13.23.37)

created in SuperCollider 3.9.3
April-December, 2020

dedicated to Marcus Pal

large scale modulation down a fourth ("I-V")
3:4  -->  6:8:9  -->  8:11:12

PORT (Rondo for Marcus Pal)(2020)

Physically modelled performance (NotePerformer) 
Orchestral music in 13-limit just intonation
(3.3.3.3/4.3.3.1/bd.timp.harp/strings)

N.B. The very last chord is to be played "as long and accurate as possible", with multiple asynchronous reattacks in the brass and strings (in this version, there is a simple fade out due to the limitations of physical modelling etc.)

PER (2018-20)

Canadian composer Marc Sabat (*1965) is based in Berlin since 1999. He has made pieces for concert and installation settings, drawing inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of Just Intonation and of various music traditions — folk, experimental and classical. His pieces are presented and broadcast internationally at festivals of new music including the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Klangspuren Schwaz, MaerzMusik, Huddersfield, Darmstadt, Musica Viva and Carnegie Hall. Scores and artist editions are available from Plainsound Music Edition. Recent recordings include the LP “Les Duresses”, released by care of editions (Berlin) as well as discs on the labels Populist Records (Los Angeles) and World Edition (Köln).

Sabat studied composition, violin and mathematics at the University of Toronto, at the Juilliard School in New York, and at McGill University, as well as working privately with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney and Walter Zimmermann. Together with Wolfgang von Schweinitz he has developed the Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation and is a pioneer of music written and performed in extended Just Intonation. He teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin, and as a guest at the California Institute of the Arts, the Escola Superior in Barcelona, the Janacek Academy in Brno and the Paris Conservatoire. In 2010, he was an artist-in-residence of the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, followed in 2011 by a one year residency at the German Academy in Rome, Villa Massimo.


Sabat studied composition, violin and mathematics at the University of Toronto, at the Juilliard School in New York, and at McGill University, as well as working privately with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney and Walter Zimmermann, among many other close colleagues. He teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin, and has been a guest artist at the California Institute of the Arts, at the Escola Superior in Barcelona and the Paris Conservatoire. In 2010, he was an artist-in-residence of the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, followed in 2011 by a one year residency at the German Academy in Rome, Villa Massimo.


Trio for piano violin cello (1998)

Plainsound Music Edition

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