Dream House
The Dream House is still running. Third floor, 275 Church Street, New York, and it has been in that room since 1993. Thirty-two sine waves, amber and blue light, and you move around inside the chord rather than sitting in front of it. Marian Zazeela, who made the light, died in March 2024. Behind it is a rule La Monte Young set himself in 1958 and never broke. The Trio for Strings is an hour of held tones tuned to whole-number ratios, with no major third anywhere in it, because he had excluded the prime five. Almost everything here comes off that decision one way or another.
Some of these records were made by people who were in the room. Conrad, Flynt, Riley, Palestine. Others by people who reached the same place alone, the oddest case being Giacinto Scelsi, who in 1959 was in Rome writing four pieces on a single note and had no idea any of this was going on.
Reticence / Resistance LP
Thirty years of non-idiomatic improvisation and Eastern-leaning drone from an American group that once had the guitarist Jack Rose in it. They know the American folk vernacular well and have never treated it as a museum.
Ankle On: Electronic and Orchestral Works
Bartlett built chance into electronic music, worked on the Buchla 400 and made his own devices. He studied with Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and David Tudor, Carnatic singing in Madras, and gamelan in Java. He died of AIDS-related causes in 1993, after years of rejection from labels.
The Long Exhale
Seven pieces made in 2014 and 2015, half psychoacoustic experiment and half Feldman. The booklet is a long conversation between the two players that runs from the Brisbane underground of the 1980s to Chicago in the 90s, and includes what it was like working directly with Alvin Lucier and La Monte Young.
Overtones-Instrumental: Flowers (Pianos And Voice)
Vetter came from the recorder, where his work on multiphonics and microtones drew new pieces out of Stockhausen, Kagel and Bussotti. Here it is pianos and overtone singing, the upper partials pulled away from the fundamental until they read as a separate line.
Ouroboros
The Great Year and the Eternal Return as starting points, worked out across a narrow band of tempered frequencies that runs from low rumble to thin pipe. Clark and Renaud come from both the Canadian early music world and the experimental one.
Sanje
Twenty years of working almost only with sine waves, tuned by the laws of the natural harmonic series and produced by generators he builds himself. Della Marina thinks of the pieces as sound sculptures, and works between music and the visual arts.
Without Persistent Environments
A live trombone laid over recordings of the same material played in three places on the north side of Chicago: an apartment in Rogers Park, the shore of Lake Michigan, and the sanctuary of St Vincent De Paul. The rooms do a good part of the composing.
Down On Darkened Meetings
Dunscombe is part of the Berlin circle of just intonation researchers, and spent years on the music of the Romanian spectralist Horatiu Radulescu. Two Forests begins from a single central pitch and works outward from there.
Dream House 78'17"
Two sides recorded in 1973. On one, Young and Zazeela sing over a sine wave drone with Jon Hassell on trumpet and Garrett List on trombone. On the other, three sine waves alone, tuned on oscillators built for the purpose by Robert Adler. The sleeve tells you to turn the treble off.
Sucesiones
Studies written for 53 equal divisions of the octave, a tuning the Mexican theorist Augusto Novaro argued came unusually close to the harmonic series. Orozco Mora keeps the timbres to plain sine waves so that nothing distracts from what the intervals are doing.
You Are My Everlovin'
Recorded in a Manhattan loft on 16 June 1981, in one take of forty-two minutes: solo electric violin over a tambura drone played by Catherine Christer Hennix. Flynt coined the term concept art in 1961, picketed Stockhausen in 1964, and briefly replaced John Cale in the Velvet Underground.
Omaggio a Giuseppe Ungaretti
In 1957 he founded an improvising ensemble with Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros. In 1970 he wrote a drone for three amplified pianos on a single low D. In sixty years he has released almost nothing. Here he plays the Enhanced Piano in Just Intonation, on poems Ungaretti wrote in the trenches.
Chronic Shift
The only microtonal tuba trio there is, recorded in the Grosser Wasserspeicher, a disused water reservoir in Berlin-Pankow, and mixed with analogue synthesizers. Captured in binaural sound, so the room is as present as the instruments.
Monument of Diamonds
Built on Erv Wilson's Meta-Slendro scale, seventeen pitches to the octave, for an orchestra of brass and woodwind made or adapted for the purpose. The diamonds of the title are shapes that turn up inside the tuning when the intervals are drawn as a lattice.
Windfell
An hour for one performer who plays and sings at the same time. Mira Benjamin asked James Weeks for a long piece; rather than write for the violin he wrote for her, adding her voice to widen what a single player could hold.
Central Palace Music
A single forty-six minute piece recorded at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in March 1976, during an eight-day festival Hennix organised and named after the intuitionist mathematician Brouwer. Two amplified Renaissance oboes and a sheng against sine wave generators she built herself. It was the group's only documented public performance.
Nouveau saxhorn nouveau basse
Hayward found the noise valve, then in 2009 built the first fully microtonal tuba, then in 2012 made the Hayward Tuning Vine to see the harmonic space it had opened. Three extremely quiet and extremely long pieces for that instrument.
Closed categories in cartesian worlds
Four crotales, each bowed for sixteen minutes, with sine tones set against them four minutes at a time. The score offers ten possibilities for each crotale, two hundred and fifty across the range of the instrument. Greg Stuart chose four and sent Pisaro the recordings.
Orchestral Works
Three orchestral pieces played by the Janacek Philharmonic with Charles Curtis on cello. In Diamonds, split orchestras draw diamond shapes in the air through glissandi and unisons, the orchestra used as an instrument for hearing rather than for expression.
E (and E (And Sometimes Why) why)
Three years of work, and the first time Al Margolis wrote for another ensemble instead of for his own tape. Trio Scordatura is Elisabeth Smalt on viola d'amore, Alfrun Schmid on voice and Bob Gilmore on keyboard and laptop.