Name: Harmonium #1 (James Tenney, 1976) by Trio Scordatura
Duration: 10 min 31 s
Description: Early just intonation piece by the late, great James Tenney, dedicated to Lou Harrison. Live at LA Microfest 2010, Venice, California.

wow! a wonderful interpretation of Tenny's piece :)

WOW! Wonderful interpretation – this track should be a MUST for everybody who fancies himself or herself to be interested in microtonality and/or making something new. 

Maybe in concert it would be a bit too long for me, but here it is exactly right and very thought-stimulating.

...and the circle is closed, go back to the beginning. Great stuff and playing lending such a hallucinatory timbre to it!

Eriu

Revelavit

This is the second in the London Nanosessions. First is Shoreditch Distant Memory

Rose Petal

This is part of a series of tracks designed for headphones.... although it works on speakers too. 
It is about memory and place. 

Place, Time, Space

Our arrangement of a sixteenth century enharmonic madrigal. Listen to the astonishing microtonal intervals in the last verse.

Musica Prisca Caput (Nicola Vicentino, 1555)

Early just intonation piece by the late, great James Tenney, dedicated to Lou Harrison. Live at LA Microfest 2010, Venice, California.

Harmonium #1 (James Tenney, 1976)

Elisabeth Smalt, viola; Riko Fukuda, fortepiano.

Georges Onslow Sonata op.16 no.2 in C minor mov.2

E (And Sometimes Why)

Cicada 4AA (feat. Trio Scordatura)

for voice, viola d'amore, and microtonal keyboard

Dedicated to the friends of Trio Scordatura: Alfrun, Elisabeth, Bob and Keiko 

Recording of the premiere: 01/02/2013, Hamburg, Kampnagel, Festival klub katarakt 37

Score: https://www.dropbox.com/s/d3nbukiliaumioq/stein-sum%20Partitur%2022022012.pdf

Programme note

It would probably be unfair to shrink Western European new music into a single lament for the lost principle of major-minor tonality, after we have had a 20th century of outrageously fascinating compositions. But a search for the missing sense of con---sonance is timely and directly linked to the question of the dissolution of the seemingly indisputable system of modern piano tuning.

If one were to immediately replace the tone order one has just gotten rid of with a new tuning system, the possibility of a multicoloured, changing harmony could be gone. In stein-sum, I pursue the idea of "free microtonality" and assume a pitch continuum without fixed steps, which I can subdivide freely in principle when composing. As a reference point for intonational-harmonic shifts, I chose the pitch D. The initially 12-tone tempered intonation soon gives way to pure tunings over changing fundamental tones, which include ever higher partials. "Modulations" take place over common or approximated pitches between the individual sections. I was particularly interested in the ambiguity of different intonation levels of thirds.

The singer is integrated into the chamber trio as an equal member. Her part takes a single phrase by Gertrude Stein as the basis for semantic and phonetic variations: "it was a way a day, this made some sum." This is drawn from her experimental prose work Tender Buttons. As early as 1914, Stein was already putting narratives aside in favour of unusual word sequences, repetitions and new formations; she focused on language itself and achieved a quasi-musical ambiguity in her poetry.

Similar to such treatment of language, the differently pulsating melodic lines of the three musicians in stein-sum are also based on variations of a single initial pattern. The flow of the three voices aims at a mental space in which free and strong individuals repeatedly bundle their forces into joint action.																				(HM 2013)

Harmonium #1 (James Tenney, 1976)

Trio Scordatura

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