‘Standoff’ is a piece pinned in time against its will in the middle of a confrontation where each player is nudging themselves in their tight room of possibilities into an exit is in sight, which rarely happens. Thanks to Prof. Saar Berger’s incredibly talented, hard working and open minded class it was a mere breeze. We’ve worked hard to reach the 7-part perfect Extended JI (Just Intonation) chords and even had time and energy left over to improve on the piece together.
To compose this piece I had to develop a purpose built MaxMSP patch to calculate the Extended JI intervals. Before even attempting to begin writing though I first had to organise my thoughts about Extended JI music. When it comes to music theory, in comparison to how much exploration has been made historically regarding 12-EDO (12 equal division of the octave, our default way of tuning), Extended JI is basically uncharted territory Calculating harmonies past the decimal point has its ups and downs: you have a much higher precision and thus payoff, but the amount of thought you need to put in rises exponentially.
I’ve started by looking at Ben Johnston’s magnificent 10 string quartets, specifically the 7th one. Reading the score was hard since it was handwritten with a relatively thick pen, so I developed the [emr.verhaeltnis] score analysing tool to accurately read these chords.
Here I could quickly transcribe any music written with Ben Johnston notation onto solid frequencies. This helped me analyse Ben Johnston’s way of writing harmony, modulations, different emotions, build-ups and climaxes. Of course, my transcriptions were not always perfect, so I used multiple AI and non-AI tools to filter out inconsistencies among numbers. So many hours spent looking at Excel sheets full of frequencies for an 8 part chord…
Writing “perfectly”
While hearing and subjectively classifying Extended JI chords was something I’ve been doing for the past 4 years, this Rosetta stone of a software brought my understanding one crucial step further to actually allow me to create my own Extended JI chords. Don’t get me wrong, writing in Extended JI is not a hard thing by itself; the difficulty arises when you try to approach Ben Johnston’s vision of having perfect sounding harmony and sensible modulations using mutual tones. This is why this software has been crucial for me to write standoff.
Standoff asks its hornists to play absolute frequencies with no wiggle room. Thankfully all the 7 hornists from Prof. Berger’s class were both capable and motivated to pull through.
Piyano Bloğu | Emre Nurbeyler 