Easley Blackwood: Microtonal Review
Easley Blackwood's Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, a landmark exploration that drew widespread critical praise upon its release in 1980, has been reissued for the first time on compact disc. Also new on the CD are two never-before-released Blackwood microtonal works. The intriguing études culminated Blackwood's research, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, into the techniques and expressive possibilities of microtonal tunings. Microtonal tunings are those that divide an octave in some other manner than into 12 equal parts. Blackwood wrote études for equal tunings of 13 to 24 notes to the octave and has likened the task to writing a "sequel" to "The Well-Tempered Clavier," JS Bach's famous collection of preludes and fugues in each of the major and minor keys. Blackwood let the "flavor" of each tuning suggest an established musical form or style for each étude: a Classical piano sonata (track no. 13), Russian nationalism (track no. 8), jazz (track no. 11), the sound of South Pacific gamelans (track no. 5), and the form of a Baroque violin sonata (track no. 4). This approach also allows listeners to hear how microtonal tunings affect familiar musical genres. The Fanfare in 19-note Equal Tuning (1981) was commissioned by Chicago fine arts radio station WFMT, along with fanfares by other Chicago-area composers, to celebrate the station's 30th anniversary. The Suite for Guitar in 15-note Equal Tuning makes use of the properties Blackwood discovered when he wrote the microtonal étude in 15-note tuning. It's cast in four movements with dance-like rhythms akin to those found in Baroque suites. "For the performance of microtonal music on conventional acoustic instruments, those with fretted strings are the least problematic because the frets automatically and accurately establish the location of each pitch," Blackwood writes in the CD booklet. Read more...
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