“I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendoes,   
The blackbird whistling   
Or just after.”

From  13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens

There is a duality to all beautiful things: beauty absolute and beauty as it is understood.  A fern grows, is governed by natural law in its growth, and is beautiful for its proportion and disproportion alike—but man brings a separate beauty, in examining and discovering  those natural laws.  Music creates itself out of the logic of acoustics and the geometry of self-reference, unaware as the fern, and it is beautiful—but man, an imperfect logical machine, materializes it, fetters the intrinsic beauty with extrinsic reality and creates something new.

Mathematics, perfectly elegant truths, are pressed against a noisy physical world, leaving behind impressions and forms which cannot be directly experienced, but can be understood.  The agreement between between the abstract and the firm is harmony, and both perfection and imperfection come together to create the full picture of beauty.  In music, the harmony is between the aesthetic pleasure of color and sound and the abstract logic of form and function, woven together as physical sense and reasoning are in us.

There is a duality too to man: body and spirit, percussion and repercussion, inflection and innuendo.  A man is not only actions and words, but the principles which govern them.  Long after the body is gone, the spirit persists, kept alive by the memory of those principles and their imitation by others, just as lightning persists in thunder even after its flash has ceased or the sound of piano survives in the acoustic of a hall after the dampers have been released and the strings stifled.

On November 16th, 2017, my colleague and friend Dr. Xiaoying Wen tragically passed away.  He was the finest musician I ever knew, and the most generous.  Xiaoying was the kind of man incapable of acquaintanceship—everyone who met him loved him, and everyone he met was immediately welcomed as a friend.

While Xiaoying has left our physical world too soon, his spirit persists in those who knew him.  He set an incredible example for any musician of hard work and passion, and more a desire to share with others his ideas and unique understanding of music.  By adopting those principles—ones of generosity, of reverence and respect and passion towards art, and of kindness—we can allow Xiaoying and all the vivid excitement he brought to everyone to persist.

Froberger & Scarlatti

This toccata by Michelangelo Rossi is his most famous, largely due to the gratuitously chromatic final section.  Played with the tuning systems of today, much of the drama of this final section is lost.  This recording, however, was created using a quarter-comma meantone organ from the 18th century organ builder, Domenico Traeri.  In the proper temperament, and with these authentic Italian sounds, the music really comes to life.

Keyboard instruments are problematic.  All twelve chromatic pitches tuned perfectly to one tonal center will be far out of tune with the other eleven.  To properly tune a keyboard instrument, the technician has to compromise; throughout history, that compromise has taken many forms.  One of these forms, popular from the early 16th century even into the 19th, is quarter-comma meantone.

The comma is defined as the distance between the third as derived from the circle of fifths (four perfect fifths, or a ratio of 81/16) and the corresponding third as derived from the harmonic series (two octaves and a just third, or a ratio of 80/16).  Quarter-comma meantone seeks to resolve this discrepancy by detuning each perfect fifth one quarter of the comma, so that the third can remain pure and the fifths be only minimally out of tune.

These small adjustments add up.  By the time the circle of fifths returns to its starting point, it has built up such a deficit that the final fifth (usually G# - Eb) is about 30 cents sharp.  This fifth is called the "wolf", and the keys in which the major third (four perfect fifths) crosses that wolf are so out of tune as to be unplayable.  This was the compromise: give up some keys in exchange for beautiful pure thirds.  Composers frequently used this to their advantage—certain dissonances are especially expressive in this temperament—but Rossi's toccata settima takes it to the extreme, exploiting the tuning system for every possible color it might provide.

John Solari