The Yogis of Music

By Joshua Kosman, "Composer Michael Harrison uses 'just intonation'" - San Francisco Chronicle - San Francisco, CA, USA
Sunday, March 1st, 2009

For most Western musicians since the 18th century, the tuning system known as equal temperament is the structural bedrock of musical life.

By compromising the pure harmonies of the natural world - what musicians call "just intonation" - it smooths out the contradictions of that system, making all intervals equal (and equally impure), and as J.S. Bach famously demonstrated in "The Well-Tempered Clavier," makes it possible to play in any key.

For composer and pianist Michael Harrison, equal temperament is more like a prison he's determined to escape.

"Music in equal temperament is like Indian food without any of the spices," he said during a recent visit to San Francisco. "Once you become accustomed to hearing it, the difference between the two systems is like night and day.

"A major triad in just intonation is a gorgeous thing. But in equal temperament - well, it's kind of raunchy."

Harrison has put those views into practice in "Revelation," his 75-minute magnum opus for specially tuned piano (the piece is available on a splendid new CD on the Cantaloupe label). And this week, as one of nine composers participating in the 14th Other Minds Festival of New Music, he and the Del Sol Quartet will unveil "Tone Clouds," a new arrangement of some of the music from "Revelation" for piano and strings.

In either form, "Revelation" is more than simply a composition. It's an entire sound world, created by selecting certain pure acoustic intervals and arranging them on the piano keyboard.

The details are a little wonky, but at its heart, "Revelation" is built around two groups of pitches, one on the white keys and one on the black. Within each group, the pitches are tuned to pure intervals; but because of the slippages inherent in just intonation, the two groups are a little bit out of whack with each other.

In particular, the keynotes in each group are almost identical - but not quite. Their vibrations form a ratio of 63:64, an interval known as the "Pythagorean comma," and the resulting pair of notes sound at first like a failed attempt at a unison.

But listen deeper, and the two notes, like the separate groups of notes they anchor, yield a rich, evocative clangor. It also helps to have Harrison as an evangelizing guide.

"When you hear something like this" - here he strikes the two notes on the piano in a baldly unadorned dyad - "it sounds a little ugly. But once you put it into context" - this inspires a cascade of shimmery, oddly colored keyboard arpeggios - "it's beautiful.

"Schoenberg talked about the emancipation of dissonance. What I'm doing is what I call the emancipation of the comma."

At 50, Harrison is thin and voluble, with an enthusiasm for his subject that is geekily endearing. He grew up in Eugene, Ore., a progressive rock aficionado who played keyboards and tried to emulate Keith Emerson and, later, Keith Jarrett.

But his induction into the world of just intonation came by a sidelong path, through an interest in Sufi mysticism.

"There was a Sufi sage named Inayat Khan who was one of the first Indian musicians to come to the West. A friend gave me a book of his lectures, saying, 'Sufis are the yogis of music.' Well, I was very into yoga, so that interested me.

"Now, I was a pianist, not a singer, but Inayat Khan said that singing was the highest element of music. So I moved to Berkeley and began studying Indian vocal music with the great teacher Pandit Pran Nath. Even now I sing ragas every day."

Vocal music led to an interest in the mysteries of tuning - "once you're used to singing pure thirds, the tempered thirds of the piano can sound pretty bad" - and soon he had bought a second piano and was retuning it himself, by ear.

But the moment that Harrison says changed his life came in 1979, when he met the visionary composer La Monte Young. In addition to being counted by some (including himself) as the founder of musical minimalism, Young, 73, is best known for "The Well-Tuned Piano," a mammoth multi-hour exploration of abstruse tunings that is regarded by its acolytes as something more like a spiritual practice than a work of art.

"I got the job of being La Monte's tuner," Harrison recalls, "which is more than just being a tuner. It's like being the keeper of the keys of the palace.

"I learned the piece, first by tuning the piano, and then by sitting next to him during performance. And that's how I learned to compose in just intonation."

The roots of "Revelation" lie in a 1999 music festival in Rome dedicated to American experimentalism. Young was invited to participate but was unavailable, and Harrison went in his place.

"It was five days of concerts and performances - a very inspiring time for me - and on the morning after the last concert, I woke up and just had the whole tuning layout in my head. I got back to New York and immediately tuned it on my piano."

Then came a year and a half of improvising in the new system, followed by a six-week composing crunch before the 2001 premiere. After that, Harrison took an unprecedented step: He wrote down the piece.

"That was a big deal for me, because La Monte never wrote things out. But in the process the piece got much better - and then I had to learn it all over again."

The notion of recasting "Revelation" for strings came from Harrison's manager Peter Robles, who also manages the Del Sol. In part, the goal was simply to make the music more widely accessible (the original plan was for the quartet to play along with the CD).

"Presenters have two problems with this music," Harrison says. "One is financial, because they have to put aside a piano and have it retuned four or five times, and then another four or five times to get it back afterward.

"And then there's the psychological barrier: My tuning doesn't actually damage the piano, but they're always nervous."

Harrison dreams of a day when alternative tunings for the piano are the exception, not the rule, and when pianists can choose among different tunings with the flick of a switch.

"The technology is already there, but there's no demand for it yet. But once a big manufacturer gets behind this, I think it will take off. You can play Beethoven or Chopin in the same tuning that they would have known. It'll create a revolution.

"I'm sure this will happen within the next 100 years. I just hope it's within my lifetime."

Other Minds Festival of New Music: Thurs.-Sat. Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center, 3200 California St., San Francisco. $25-$35. (415) 292-1233, www.otherminds.org.

Photo: Brant Ward/The Chronicle.