On September 27, Tubist Robin Hayward and bassist Christopher Williams will present the New York Premiere of Christopher Williams’s Arcanum 17, with 8-channel spatialized sound by Charlie Morrow. Interpretations spoke with them about the history of their duo Reidemeister Move and about their extensive explorations into Just Intonation.
James Ilgenfritz: When did the two of you start performing together as a duo? Was the Just Intonation tuning system the concept right from the beginning?
Robin Hayward: In 2010 Christopher contacted me about collaborating in his piece Arcanum 17. He explained he thought of me as I’d been working both with noise and pitch. When we met we started tuning long tones together, so in terms of playing, Just Intonation was there from the beginning.
JI: The duo’s vinyl release, Robin’s “Borromean Rings” features one long piece that takes up both sides of the record. Is this the first piece you guys performed together a duo?
RH: If I remember rightly we premiered this plus a preliminary version of Arcanum 17 together, but it wasn’t Arcanum 17 in its current form with the speaker setup etc.
JI: Can you talk a bit about how it works? What about it makes it related to a boardgame or chess?
RH: Borromean Rings grew out of our tuning sessions and the structure of the double bass. The color coding refers to subharmonics descending from E, and the harmonics of each of the four strings – the subharmonics are colour coded blue, the harmonics orange, and the pitch of each open string green. Each quadrant of the circular score signifies a string of the bass, and we explore the harmonic potential of each quadrant in real time, which is what makes it similar to playing a game.
Each quadrant is then connected by a tuning clash between the two instruments technically known as a ‘comma’, and these are also the only parts in the piece in which Christopher uses both up and down bows. The idea of using exclusively down bows in the rest of the piece arose in response to my needing to breathe between each tone. So, the down bow is analogous to breathing out, and resetting the bow position analogous to breathing in.
JI: On the September concert, the duo will play Christopher’s piece with Charlie Morrow, Arcanum 17, which uses conch shells and field recordings, as well as text by Andre Breton, with 8-channel surround sound. What are your roles as performers in this piece, amidst the surround sound?
Christopher Williams: Both the recorded material and the performed material are fairly heterogeneous, which requires us to respond to each other and the sonic environment in different ways. Sometimes we hide in the field recordings, sometimes we are paying closer attention to each other in the foreground, sometimes we improvise with the recordings as soloists.
How did you end up using 8-channel sound in this piece? Is this Charles Morrow’s area of specialty?
CW: MorrowSound is a modular immersive sound system developed by Charlie. He uses it for artistic projects as well as commercial installations in all kinds of spaces — museums, hospitals, restaurants, planetariums, etc. I met him in 2008 when he came to Barcelona (my home at the time) for a big installation at the NOKIA World conference. We became friends and stayed in touch when I would visit New York. When the idea to make a piece with bass, tuba, and field recordings based on Breton’s text fell from the sky a few years later, I thought MorrowSound would be perfect for the concept, and Charlie agreed.
JI: How is the setup arranged? It seems like sometimes these types of setups can emphasize localized sound coming from different corners of the room, or it can be more of an immersive sound-world… or both!
CW: Its cube-like array (speakers above ear level and on the floor, left and right, front and back) creates a special kind of sound bubble that tricks you into thinking you’re somewhere else.
How does Andre Breton’s text get used Arcanum 17?
CW: In at least three ways. First, the book is chock full of references to sound and music. Many are literal — flags, gannets, a quarry, the sea in a hundred different guises. These sounds we actually recorded at Rocher Percé, the subject of the book and the location of its inscription, and integrated them into in the soundscape. Other references are structural or metaphorical — discussions of the golden section, references to Bach, or images of instruments like pipe organs. These inspire the music (esp. the instrumental music) more loosely. Second, we use spoken text fragments from the book in original French and English translations directly in the piece. Charlie and his muse Maija-Leena Remes recorded them. Whereas the soundscapes are fixed media files — i.e. they run predictably from start to finish — the voices pop in unpredictably, sort of floating over the structure of the piece. The conch shell fragments work in a similar way; the software randomly selects from a pool of fragments and plays them back at irregular time intervals. Third, there is of course a less tangible ethical and/or spiritual connection we feel to the book and Breton’s work in general. He was decidedly anti-fascist and anti-war, and might be considered a proto-ecologist. He had great faith in the human spirit despite the horrors of his day. His concept of hope requires a daily processing of contradiction, a deeper exchange with one’s environment(s), a faith in eternal renewal over dogma. Important qualities for our time as well.
Robin, How did you develop the color-coded Tuning Vine? What is a good way for someone to start to learn about how this works?
RH: I’d been using color-coding in various pieces in the years preceding the tuning vine. In retrospect I can see that I was searching for an intuitive of interacting with the harmonic space implicit within Just Intonation. In my piece Stained Glass Music I color-coded prime numbers 3, 5, and 7, corresponding musically to the 3rd, 5th and 7th (sub)harmonics. As the piece was composed for amateur musicians I portrayed the resulting harmonic structure in lattice form, so everyone could immediately grasp the harmonic relationships.
The tuning vine originally arose out of a desire to include the prime number 2, corresponding to the 2nd (sub)harmonic – the musical interval of the octave. I started exploring hyperdimensional space and once I’d found a way of including the octave, it followed logically to include higher prime numbers too.
The best way to learn how the tuning vine works is to download the demo version from www.tuningvine.com and work through the pdf manual, which may also be downloaded from the website.
JI: While a musician might already be well acquainted with the harmonic series, there’s an interesting next step to get from there to a more complete understanding of how Just Intonation works… I suppose it’s topic that may never be fully answered, but I’d love hear some thoughts about what you see as a meaningful introduction to Just Intonation.
RH: I’ve come to see most musicians – my former self included – as having become deaf to the significance of the harmonic series due to music theory being taught via the equal-tempered piano keyboard. So they’re aware the harmonic series exists, but unaware of its significance in forming the basis for harmony, as the name implies.
RH: Just Intonation remains fairly limited if restricted to the harmonic series alone though. It’s through combining it with the subharmonic series that it becomes fully possible to navigate harmonic space. An image I sometimes use when I’m giving tuning vine courses is that the harmonic series corresponds to the branches of a tree, and the subharmonic series makes it possible to move between different trees.
JI: Just Intonation is clearly distinct from Microtonality by principle; like with +/- cent deviations, etc… but I wonder if you have thoughts, as performers, about how the two are similar or different.
RH: I actually see Just Intonation as a subset of microtonality, where microtonality is defined as music that deviates from 12-tone equal temperament. Although the musical intervals in Just Intonation are not necessarily small, this is also the case for tempered microtonal systems.
For example, a perfect fourth plus a quarter-tone is much larger than a tempered semitone, but it’s nevertheless clearly a microtonal interval, as it includes the quarter tone. Similarly, an 11:8 in Just Intonation is an augmented fourth minus 49 cents, so the 49 cents constitute the ‘micro’ part of the interval. So far I’ve been focusing on Just Intonation because I find it offers a much richer harmonic palette then tempered microtonal systems.
JI: Well, thank for talking with me! We are very excited for you concert.
So are we!
