Microtonal Music in Central and Eastern Europe. Historical Outlines and Current Practices

Rūta Stanevičiūtė is a professor of musicology at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Her current fields of interest are modernism and nationalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, philosophical and cultural issues in the analysis of contemporary music, and music and politics. She has authored books on the International Society for Contemporary Music (2015) and Lithuanian music and the Cold War (2018) and has been the editor and co-editor of collections on music philosophy, cultural studies of twentieth and twenty-first century music, music semiotics, and Lithuanian music history.

Let's put the new road of quarter-tones straight through the old block of our scale of 12 steps! Let's double the number of scale steps!

All darkness and everything narrowness will then have to recede as we gain the new, bright and broad road of the 24 step scale.

Then the course will lie open for an unrestrained advancement of harmony, the main expressive means of the art of music, and thus for progress of the art of music itself.

Willi Möllendorff (Musik mit Vierteltönen, 1917)

ISBN 978-961-06-0311-5

9 789610 603115

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Microtonal Music in Central and Eastern Europe

Leon Stefanija is a professor of musicology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. His main research and teaching areas are the epistemology of music research, contemporary (primarily Slovenian) music, the sociology of music, the social psychology of music, and the history of music theory. He is an author, editor and co-editor for volumes on Slovenian music, the sociology and psychology of music, and music theory and analysis. Stefanija is one of the founding members of the Music and Cultural Studies Study Group (2007–) at the International Musicological Society. He is active in this field nationally as well as internationally.

Microtonal Music in Central and Eastern Europe Historical Outlines and Current Practices

Edited by Leon Stefanija and Rūta Stanevičiūtė

Over the centuries of Western music, microtonality has been primarily a theoretical issue which did not enjoy much practical interest. The attitude towards microtonality has radically changed since the early twentieth century. This volume is based on the conviction that microtonality is a fundamental change-indicating concept for Western music history. It focuses on the development of microtonal music in Eastern and Central Europe from World War I to the present. The book presents new research as well as some testimonies on rich and varied theories and practices of microtonal music in Czechia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Austria.

The authors examine how diverse concepts of microtonality have given way to new composition theories and practices. Throughout the book, the contributors explore the interactions of Central/Eastern European and Western music and musicians as creative forces that illuminated cross-cultural exchange. Organized into four sections, the book encompasses a broad interdisciplinary trajectory combining analytical approaches with historical studies and artistic research.

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Microtonal Music in Central and Eastern Europe Historical Outlines and Current Practices

Edited by Leon Stefanija and Rūta Stanevičiūtė

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Microtonal Music in Central and Eastern Europe Historical Outlines and Current Practices Book series: Glasba na Slovenskem po 1918 Edited by: Leon Stefanija, Rūta Stanevičiūtė Book series editors: Leon Stefanija, Aleš Nagode, Svanibor Pettan, Urša Šivic, Darja Koter, Boštjan Udovič Editorial board: Katarina Bogunović Hočevar, Matjaž Barbo, Branka Rotar Pance, Andrej Misson, Mojca Kovačič, Drago Kunej, Jana Arbeiter Reviewers: Jānis Kudiņš, Dušan Bavdek Proofreading: Kerry Kubilius Design: Petra Jerič Škrbec and Jure Preglau Published by: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts) Issued by: Oddelek za muzikologijo Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani, Akademija za glasbo Univerze v Ljubljani, Znanstvenoraziskovalni center Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti, Fakulteta za družbene vede Univerze v Ljubljani For the publisher: Roman Kuhar, Dean of the Faculty of Arts Ljubljana, 2020 First edition Printed by: Birografiko Bori d. o. o.

Print run: 200 Price: 24,90 EUR The publication was supported by Javna Agencija za raziskovalno dejavnost Republike Slovenije (Slovenian Research Agency)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. / To delo je ponujeno pod licenco Creative Commons Priznanje avtorstva-Deljenje pod enakimi pogoji 4.0 Mednarodna licenca

First e-edition. Publication is available free of charge on https://e-knjige.ff.uni-lj.si/ DOI: 10.4312/9789610603122 Kataložna zapisa o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani Tiskana knjiga COBISS.SI-ID=304666624 ISBN 978-961-06-0311-5 E-knjiga COBISS.SI-ID=304666880 ISBN 978-961-06-0312-2 (pdf )

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Content Preface....................................................................................................................................5 I. MICROTONALITY VERSUS MICROCHROMATICS: CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS Lidia Ader Introduction to Microtonal Music ............................................................................ 11 Leon Stefanija Microtonality in Slovenia: The Concept and its Scope ...................................... 45 Rima Povilionienė From Tone Inflection to Microdimensional Glissando: Observations on Microtonal Manner in Contemporary Lithuanian Music ........................... 67 Miloš Zatkalik Microtonal Music in Serbia: A Newly (Re)discovered Resource....................115 Gabrielius Simas Sapiega Microtonality in the Post-spectralist Context: Microintervalics in the Compositions of Gabrielius Simas Sapiega and Mārtiņš Viļums..........157 II. CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE OF COMPOSING AND PERFORMING OF MUSIC WITH MICROINTEVALS Agustín Castilla-Ávila Writing Microtones for Guitar...................................................................................197 Zoran Šćekić Introduction to the Five Limit Intervals Harmony.............................................205 Rytis Mažulis Structural Cycles in My Microtonal Compositions............................................217 Rytis Mažulis Composing Microtonal Melody...............................................................................227 Tomaž Svete Ekmelic Music in Slovenia..........................................................................................237

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III. FROM THE HISTORY OF MICROTONAL MUSIC IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: ALOIS HÁBA AND HIS SCHOOL Vlasta Reittererová, Lubomír Spurný Alois Hába: A Poet of Liberated Music ..................................................................245 Rūta Stanevičiūtė The Alois Hába School, Jeronimas Kačinskas, and the Beginnings of Microtonal Music in Lithuania.............................................................................261 IV. EKMELIC MUSIC Franz Richter Herf The Presence of Ancient Greek Music in the Today’s Musical Work............297 Franz Richter Herf, Rolf Maedel, Horst-Peter Hesse Microtones.......................................................................................................................307 Editors................................................................................................................................313 Authors ............................................................................................................................315 Summary..........................................................................................................................321 Povzetek...........................................................................................................................329 Name Index.....................................................................................................................337

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Preface

Preface

Western art is accustomed to novelties. New musical styles must cope with the expectations of the different, the unheard, the unexpected, the unimagined or unimaginable, of the inexperienced, the unique, the different, the authentic, even of the incommensurable. The novelty-oriented culture is somehow “self-evident” in spite of the voices that question it. The novelty– the production of an other–is a “must” of our everyday life even in the arts.

However, strong attachment to tradition, pragmatic links to different “futures pasts,” to paraphrase Koselleck’s idea of conceptual histor(iograph)y, tend to take our attention away from the fact that there are but a number of re-evaluations of certain values that fill up the history of Western music and that the ideas of revolution, avant-garde, progressivism, modernism and the like are but handy, pragmatic tricks. The notorious difference between revolution and evolution in which Arnold Schoenberg found the difference very handy is not a difference of opposing substantial concepts but of cultural complementarity: the Expressionism of the fin de siècle grew into a variegated, heterogeneous and heteronomous set of phenomena by the 1930s–there is hardly any doubt about its colorful existence in the era of the video and gaming-loving culture. Moreover, if Expressionism was a “deepening” of the artistic endeavors fundamental to Impressionism, we should differentiate the pragmatic breaks between the “knuckles” of the long historical tail connecting different modernisms throughout music history with mimetic theory.

Leaving the historical perspective aside for a moment, we would like to emphasize five fundamental joints or “waves” as crucial for today’s music culture: 1) Impressionism paved the way for folk-music-oriented imagery, 2) Expressionism elevated the “freedom of expression,” 3) electroacoustic music offered amplification of expression of different kinds, 4) Neoclassicism stimulated “New Age” realism as well as the rituals of the middle-class, while 5) popular music (in its widest sense) encouraged heterogeneous musical idioms empowering the DIY (do-it-yourself) culture. The five indicated phenomena may be understood as the musical analogy to what Matei Calinescu epitomized as the faces of modernity in twentieth-century literature: these concepts coexist today on different levels of different musical practices. Microtonality is certainly one of them.

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Leon Stefanija and Rūta Stanevičiūtė

Microtonality is usually addressed as one of the “technical” aspects of modern musical production and reproduction, although it has a fairly longer history within modern-age music theory as well as ethnomusicological research practices. We believe that microtonality is one of the fundamental change-indicating concepts in Western music history. The search for the new brought about a break in the tonal system, and microtonality is the central aesthetic, theoretical, and perceptual concept: it has been advocated as being the further differentiation of the tonal system that may offer highly elaborated–highly differentiated–poetic idea(l)s. Besides, microtonality is a common issue in folk music, Expressionism, electro-acoustic music, and the contemporary DIY music culture as well as in the New Age culture, music in the world of smart technologies, and sound art. All these “waves” of modern music practices include microtonality as common topic.

This collective monograph focuses on the development of microtonal music in Eastern and Central Europe from World War I to the present. The authors examine how diverse concepts of microtonality have given way to new composition theories and practices. These scholars hold the view that even between WWI and WWII, microtonal music and its theoretical reflection was the outstanding contribution of Eastern and East-Central European composers to the contemporary discourse of avant-garde music. That provoked radical changes in the composition and performance practice of new music and affected several generations, sustaining and transforming early avant-garde insights.

The volume is organized into four section topics. Throughout the book, our contributors explore the interactions of Central/Eastern European and Western music and musicians as creative forces that illuminated cross-cultural exchange. The first two sections address the issue of current microtonal trends in both composition and performance, presenting analytical studies and composers’ reflections on their practice. The section “Microtonality Versus Microchromatics: Concepts and Contexts” begins with the chapter by Lidia Ader that encompasses a broad interdisciplinary context from which early twentieth-century microtonal music evolved. The overview of the contemporary microtonal composition practices in Slovenia, Lithuania, Serbia, and Latvia is continued in the chapters of this section by Leon Stefanija, Rima Povilionienė, Miloš Zatkalik, and Simas Sapiega, combining historical and philosophical approaches with analytical study. The second section, “Contemporary Practice of Composing and Performing of Music with Micro­intevals,” provides composers’ own reflections on aesthetic orientations and microtonal compositional techniques presented in the chapters by Agustín Castilla-Ávila (Austria), Zoran Šćekić (Croatia), Rytis Mažulis (Lithuania), and Tomaž Svete (Slovenia).

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Preface

The third and fourth sections focus on a historical exploration of early microtonality in Central and Eastern Europe: the ekmelic movement and Alois Hába’s microtonal music school and its international reception. In the section “The History of Microtonal Music in Central and Eastern Europe: Alois Hába and His School” Vlasta Reittererová and Lubomír Spurný discuss the historical role of Alois Hába as a leading protagonist of the Central European interwar avant-garde that moved between Vienna, Berlin, and Prague. The following chapter of the third section by Rūta Stanevičiūtė examines Hába’s creative impulses that laid the foundations for the modernization of music beyond the great centers of new music in Europe by exploring the beginnings of microtonal music in Lithuania. The fourth section (“Ekmelic Music”) offers two articles by Franz Richter Herf–the founder of the concept of ekmelic music–and his co-authors, presenting an important source of knowledge on the twentieth-century transformation of microtonality.

This volume is a testimony to a watershed in research on the history of the microtonal music of East-Central and Eastern European countries. Taken together, the collection presents new research as well as some testimonies on a rich and varied theories and practices of microtonal music in Czechia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Austria. A wide-ranging collection of studies is a nice opportunity to share information on microtonality from the involved countries with the international scholarly community. Namely, the contributors explore the interactions of Central/Eastern European and Western music and musicians as creative forces that illuminated cross-cultural exchange. Viewed as a whole, this volume is neither a comprehensive nor an exhaustive account on microtonality within the discussed musical cultures. However, individual contributions as well as the whole volume–and this was exactly what the editors were after–encourage further interest and discussion about history and contemporary musical practices involving microtonality, hopefully not only in Central and Eastern Europe.

The editors feel deeply indebted to all the contributors to this volume. We also express our appreciation to Dušan Bavdek and Jānis Kudiņš, the scientific reviewers of the volume. Not least, we would like to thank Rima Povilionienė for editorial assistance and Kerry Kubilius for proof-reading. Partial financial sponsorship for this publication was gratefully received from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.

Leon Stefanija and Rūta Stanevičiūtė

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Preface

I. MICROTONALITY VERSUS MICROCHROMATICS: CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS

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Introduction to Microtonal Music

Lidia Ader

Introduction to Microtonal Music

Microtonal music is one of the key components of the contemporary composer’s language. The history of microtonal music is old and young at the same time. Some may dare to use this term when referring to the non-tempered system epoch of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while others will say it begins in the twentieth century. Microtonal music was widely discussed in the last century in terms of theory, practice, composition, and performance. This paper raises numerous questions, focusing on the microtonal music pathway in the beginning of the twentieth century. What is microtonal music? What defines it? How did it originate and what were its influences during the century?

Microtonal music has always been a counterpoint to musical history. This phenomenon has never disappeared from the point of view of Western European music, but its role and mode of existence in the global context are subject to reassessment. Strengthening and domination of equal temperament in the eighteenth century was historically predetermined (Reinhard 2009).

Although at all historical stages of the evolution of European music the formal equalization of tones in the octave did not correspond to the acoustic nature of sound, the relative “purity” of intervals over three centuries began to be perceived as the only representation of what was true and accurate.

Within the equally tempered system, subsystems based on the form of subordination of sounds and their hierarchy appeared. Microtonality was formed first as the multiplication of twelve sounds in the octave by two, three, four and more, and later as a phenomenon of a new order, canceling out the equality of halftones. Thus, we face metatonality, a term coined by Claude Ballif (1924–2004), which combines the features of tonality with serialism and contains fixed and free sounds (“invariants harmoniques” and “variants mélodiques” as the composer described them) (Ballif and Galliari 1992, 30).

The idea of microtonal music attracted the attention of musicians, physicists, and acousticians from the second half of the nineteenth century. In an effort to expand the twelve-tone equal temperament, a fundamentally new approach to sound emerged. If in the pre-Bach epoch the plurality of temperaments was a natural phenomenon, then with the acquisition of a system in which each octave is divided into twelve mathematically equal intervals 11 Microtonal_music_in_central_and_eastern_Europe_FINAL.indd 11

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Lidia Ader

(halftones), a new axis of coordinates was established. This division was absorbed and confirmed for centuries in creative practice. Microtonal music appeared as an alternative to the mainstream soundscape at a time of satiety. As a result of the historical disposition of the principles of sound organization in Western tradition, microtonal music was understood as a pitch system rather than a system of twelve-tone equal division. Further, in connection with the extensive practice of dividing a tone into parts, the term “microtone” appeared as contrary to “semitone.”

In the last century, the twelve-tone equal temperament began to experience a crisis that continues to this day. Many composers agree that the system has almost exhausted its resources and today cannot be a creative tool, because the boundaries of this temperament have always been quite arbitrary.

The interest in other temperaments in the middle of the nineteenth century was natural and was the result of scientific and technological progress in the fields of physics and acoustics. By this time, extensive works studying the features of musical sound were originated by Jean le Rond D’Alembert, Da­ niel Bernoulli, Joseph Fourier, Hermann von Helmholtz, etc. Parallel to experiments conducted in scientific laboratories, there was a music laboratory for elaboration of sound perspectives. As a result of growing dissatisfaction in the composer’s environment with existing temperamental constraints, timid attempts appeared to split the tone into parts, introducing sounds into the music that are not included in the twelve-tone equal temperament system.

At the same time, musical theorists focused on the notion of “temperament” and began to substantiate the principles of calculating the true height of sounds. By the beginning of the twentieth century, favorable conditions developed for the emergence of composers and theoreticians who transformed timid experiments into more convincing level. Some results were hidden, and some were in the shadow of more vivid mainstream phenomena and were thus marginal.

Regarding microtonal music, it is difficult to talk about an organized group of composers, physicists, or acousticians who would purposefully develop this phenomenon. Microtonal music has been created by composers, who acted alone.

Examples of such composers include Ivan Wyschnegradsky in Paris, Alois Hába in the Czech Republic, Jörg Mager, Richard Stein and Willi Möllendorf in Germany, Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov, Arthur Lourie, and Arseny Avraamov in Russia.

Microtonal music has no clear historic beginning or end. It has always existed, hiding behind different concepts or terms, or having no definition at all. It is impossible to find the reference point for its emergence. Rather, it is

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Introduction to Microtonal Music

possible and it is necessary to talk about the new understanding and perception of this phenomenon that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Microtonal music has become part of a phenomenon that the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo calls “intrahistoria.” History is a collection of transient and vanishing events and is the face of life, whereas there is always a parallel intrahistoria – an inconspicuous life with deep layers of memory. I suggest that microtonal music is submerged in such layers.

Microtonal music has never been at the forefront. Being parallel to the main artistic trends of the music of the twentieth century, it could not adhere to them, nor to new composition techniques. Microtonal music focused on the development of the primary element of sound as such.

1 Terminology In recent years musicians and scientists have not arrived at a single definition for microtonal music. Surprisingly, the term is not discussed even in the most authoritative encyclopedic source, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which includes an article on “microtone” but not on “microtonal music.” Microtonal, microchromatic, microdimension, ultrachromatic, infrachromatic, ekmelic, and xenharmonic music, among others, are all variants of the same phenomenon. Let us turn to each of these concepts.

The term ekmelic music has its origins in ancient musical theory. In Greek, ekmelos means “beyond the series,” that is, those pitches that were not in Greek modes. When two professors, Franz Richter Herf and Rolf Maedel, started to systematize microtonal music within the framework of the Institute for Basic Music Research at the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1970, they decided to name the results of their work Ekmelic Music (Ekmelische Musik) (Maedel and Herf 1972). Thus, at present the term is associated with works in which the composer uses new sounds compared to the twelve-tone temperament.

One could also find a seventy-two-tone system under this definition, where each step is equal to 162/3 cents whereas a semitone is equal to 100 cents. As their research has shown, our hearing is capable of perceiving a difference of, at minimum, five cents. Furthermore, the originators of this term insist that it unites 24, 36 and 72-tone temperaments, as well as other musical modes, including Arabian or Indian music, and the non-equal temperament.

The term ultrachromatic music arose in the works of Russian composer and theorist Arseny Avraamov and was supported by the writings of Ivan

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Rūta Stanevičiūtė is a professor of musicology at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Her current fields of interest are modernism and nationalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, philosophical and cultural issues in the analysis of contemporary music, and music and politics. She has authored books on the International Society for Contemporary Music (2015) and Lithuanian music and the Cold War (2018) and has been the editor and co-editor of collections on music philosophy, cultural studies of twentieth and twenty-first century music, music semiotics, and Lithuanian music history.

Let's put the new road of quarter-tones straight through the old block of our scale of 12 steps! Let's double the number of scale steps!

All darkness and everything narrowness will then have to recede as we gain the new, bright and broad road of the 24 step scale.

Then the course will lie open for an unrestrained advancement of harmony, the main expressive means of the art of music, and thus for progress of the art of music itself.

Willi Möllendorff (Musik mit Vierteltönen, 1917)

ISBN 978-961-06-0311-5

9 789610 603115

Microtonal_naslovka_FINAL.indd 1

Microtonal Music in Central and Eastern Europe

Leon Stefanija is a professor of musicology at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. His main research and teaching areas are the epistemology of music research, contemporary (primarily Slovenian) music, the sociology of music, the social psychology of music, and the history of music theory. He is an author, editor and co-editor for volumes on Slovenian music, the sociology and psychology of music, and music theory and analysis. Stefanija is one of the founding members of the Music and Cultural Studies Study Group (2007–) at the International Musicological Society. He is active in this field nationally as well as internationally.

Microtonal Music in Central and Eastern Europe Historical Outlines and Current Practices

Edited by Leon Stefanija and Rūta Stanevičiūtė

Over the centuries of Western music, microtonality has been primarily a theoretical issue which did not enjoy much practical interest. The attitude towards microtonality has radically changed since the early twentieth century. This volume is based on the conviction that microtonality is a fundamental change-indicating concept for Western music history. It focuses on the development of microtonal music in Eastern and Central Europe from World War I to the present. The book presents new research as well as some testimonies on rich and varied theories and practices of microtonal music in Czechia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Austria.

The authors examine how diverse concepts of microtonality have given way to new composition theories and practices. Throughout the book, the contributors explore the interactions of Central/Eastern European and Western music and musicians as creative forces that illuminated cross-cultural exchange. Organized into four sections, the book encompasses a broad interdisciplinary trajectory combining analytical approaches with historical studies and artistic research.

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