The microtonalist composer and theorist Johnny Reinhard
invited me to his New York apartment Sunday to hear a new recording, which he is
producing, of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. There must be dozens of recordings
of the piece. What makes this one unique is that it involves two pianists ― the
young powerhouses Gabriel Zucker and Erika Dohi ― playing separate instruments
tuned according to what Johnny calls an “extended Pythagorean” system, or “the
spiral of fifths.”
The tuning creates 24 tones per octave and, Johnny says, comes
closer to what the composer must have had in mind when he wrote the sonata. In this
score, as in others, Ives distinguishes between tones that in equal temperament
are enharmonic ― placing, for example, an F sharp beside a G flat in the same
measure. To his copyists, this was just bad notation, and it drove them batty. In
the Pythagorean system, however, the tones are distinct, and Johnny insists
that with his version, he is merely taking Ives at his word.
He also finds justification for his approach in this
paragraph from the Epilogue of Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata:
In some century to come, when the school children will
whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones ― when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete
as the pentatonic is now ― perhaps then these borderland experiences may be
both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe the music is not
intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope
that music may be a transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. Possibly
the power of literally distinguishing these “shades of abstraction” ― these
attributes paralleled by “artistic intuitions” (call them what you will) ― is
ever to be denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a circle
are to be denied.
The century Ives predicted, Johnny said, is now. The circle
has been broken, swept up into a spiral of fifths.
Of course, the proof of any theory is in the listening, and I
have to say, there are many stunning, ear-stretching moments in this recording.
The word that kept recurring to me throughout the 40-minute running time was “liberated.”
The dense, complex “Emerson” movement, in particular, gains a new power and
resonance. The music seems propelled by a long-pent-up energy, like a tiger suddenly let loose from a cage. The fresh charge comes at a cost, however, as the last two
movements, in which Ives progressively thins out the textures, lose some of
their accustomed flavor. “The Alcotts” sounds less naive, “Thoreau” less transparent,
with the flute solo at the end (performed sensitively enough by Erin Keppner)
struggling to break through the haze. But these are initial impressions, derived
perhaps from a lifetime of familiarity with standard performances ― if any performance
of the Concord may be called “standard.” With repeated listening, I expect I might find
new values to replace the old.
The two-piano version did not require any form of re-arrangement,
Johnny said. All he did was take two copies of the score, black out some of the
notes in each, and highlight others. The problems of coordination for the two musicians
must have been staggering, but Zucker and Dohi rise to the challenge with astonishing
precision. The performance is seamless.
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Tuning for the two-piano, microtonal Concord Sonata:
Piano I (Zucker)
C# D# F#
G# A#
C D E F G A B
Piano II (Dohi)
Db Eb Gb Ab Bb
B# Cx Fb E# Fx Gx Cb