Tuning in to Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos experimented with many microtonal systems including just intonation, using alternate tuning scales she invented for the album Beauty In the Beast. "This whole formal discovery came a few weeks after I had completed the album, Beauty in the Beast, which is wholly in new tunings and timbres" (Carlos & 1989–96)
Tuning in to Wendy Carlos by Connor Freff Cochran
http://www.wendycarlos.com/cochran.html
EM: If each step of exploration is built on the previous one, I expect the last track you finished must have been pretty unusual. Which one was it?
WC: "Beauty in the Beast." It's sort of a rondo-like form, with two main themes that come round and round again, always in motion. This track could only be written for the electronic medium. It's built on two scales I discovered. One uses 78 cents per step, which is what you get if you split a pure minor third into four equal parts; it happens that if you do that you have virtually perfect triads, but no octaves, creating beautiful harmonies and very exotic melodies, because the steps are so strange. Motion from chord to chord is unlike anything you've ever heard, and yet the arrival points are so perfectly in tune that you know it's something very natural to us, for all its wildness, something distant and strange and yet at home and peaceful. The other scale is derived very much the same way, but from a a perfect fourth broken into four equal steps of about 125 cents, and then splitting each of these in half. We have a hard time describing a split fourth melody because we've never heard that in Western music. But it works! And the track as a whole is kind of a whimsical blending of two different quasi-grotesque ideas in the very best "Ballet Ruse" style.
EM: You actually started dispensing with the octave entirely, then?
WC: After the album was recorded I started exploring tunings in a more analytical fashion, using the Hewlett-Packard 9825 and some programs I wrote to plot the "fit" of different intervals as you change the number or size of equal steps in an octave. Twelve steps in an octave happens to hit the fifth well, as we know. It doesn't do as good a job on the thirds; sixths are a little better. The next good fit occurs as we move on to 15 steps. That one actually misses the fifth, the third, and the minor third by being a little too small, but it is also equally a little too large for the fourths and the sixths .... not bad, but kind of equally out all the way around. Nineteen steps fits the minor third almost exactly, but is less good on the major third and the fifth. After that it isn't until 31 steps that things start to get interesting: the minor third is not quite perfect, but the rest all group together very high in consonance. That includes the seventh harmonic. There's an oddly near-perfect group near 34 steps, but the next most useful is perhaps at 53 steps--it sits really nicely on a crest--and another one that sits a little less well occurs at 65 steps in the octave. And so on, to an infinite number of steps! But if we take away the restriction of having only scales which form an octave, if we throw out the octave completely, use the hardware to get our octaves through 16', 8', 4', and so on, and say okay, just within one octave let us make equal step divisions, because equal steps are lovely: they allow you to modulate conveniently and linearly all over the place...whooptedoo! We start finding some really remarkable configurations, including the tunings I used in "Beauty in the Beast." I hadn't plotted and figured these out when I composed that piece, but afterwards I wanted to know why it worked so well, and here it is. And since this is virgin territory, like Christopher Columbus I hereby christen these three peaks in the plot Carlos Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Alpha is the temperament that "Beauty in the Beast" is written in, the equal splitting of the minor third. Beta is the interlude that starts it, the divided fourth. Notice that these things, in cents, are simple numbers. Alpha has steps of 78 cents...but that's equivalent to something like 15-and-a-third steps in an octave, which makes no sense. How do you put a third of a step in an octave? Build in scales with hiccups? It has to be treated as a special case. But throw out this one unorthodox quality by handling it with the hardware, leaving only the harmonic point of view, and it's a great tuning. With an approach like this, we can get very close to just intonation without any of the problems that prompted people to say "oh,just intonation simply doesn't work." Well, in a practical world, here it is.
EM: What about Gamma? Worked with that one yet?
WC: No, I'm waiting for Stoney to get me a way to play more than 12 notes meaningfully at one time. Gamma has something like 34.5 steps per octave, and arranged on a normal keyboard even someone with huge hands simply couldn't physically span more than a third. A fourth would be out of the question.
EM: Of course, these things can always be explored with multi-track recording.
WC: For final performances, sure! But for composing and gaining familiarity it isn't an easy way to work. I'm a composer who very much believes in the Debussy dictum: "do whatever please the ear, and the rules be damned." There have been a lot of proposed tuning variations in the last 200 years, different kinds of keyboards and controllers, but nothing has actually changed. The number of people using any of these alternative systems has always been appallingly small. The feedback I'm getting now suggests that a sizable number of people are getting interested in alternative tunings, but will a real majority adopt it? Probably not. There's one very good reason, laziness. In these areas, most musicians you encounter, and most musical theoreticians for that matter, are just very lazy. It's a human foible we all share. I can tell you that after doing the perfect tunings piece, 'Just Imaginings," in which there was a passage of only two measures that took over 12 hours to compose six chords, I'm not so sure I won't flee to their side very soon! In some ways it's preposterous that the difficulty of using these things is so great. But that's the price of admission. You're not going to find anyone looking for a fast dollar coming into this at all. Those who do will run in and run right back out again. On the other hand, with Alpha--and maybe even Beta--and a practical keyboard, you could become an empirical musician. You could just comp on it and start finding things that sound good to your ear, then put them in your MIDI sequencer or what have you... it would actually allow you to write music in these tunings without quite knowing what you're doing, which is how I went about "Beauty in the Beast."
EM: Sequencers would be ideal for just slinging experiments around, for editing later.
WC: Even so, I find I like the idea of not having anything stored rigidly, because as I move from tuning to tuning the way the melody wants to move is different for me. It's less interesting to take some existing tune and move it around from one temperament to another. That might be useful as an exercise, as an etude, as a quick way of getting some results out. But I think that if you're going to really explore the depth of these things, you've got to allow the implications of the particular tuning to steer you. You can't be dogmatic. You can't go in with preconceptions, or you'll just be overlooking the true beauty and power of the particular scale.
EM: What about the next generation of instrument technology? Could it knock down enough barriers to attract a lot of people to new tunings?
WC: It might. If the manufacturers get feedback from people who want to cut with their cutting edges, instead of sloughing. Me, I'm very impatient. I'm discovering how different timbres demand different tunings, such as the Balinese examples. You can put together any kind of sound and hear what sorts of tuning it cries out for (literally). In this arena, tuning and timbre are really kind of the same thing: overlapping and combining overtones in a pleasing way. It's a very exciting place to be, but also very frustrating, because the support hardware, new keyboards and the rest, are not at all in place and it will require the expenditure of much time and money to get there.
EM: You are on the way, though.
WC: If, as it often seems, everybody else wants to waste these new tools doing diatonic new age equal-tempered tunes and triads, fine. Let them. But before I die I want to find out what lies beyond all these new horizons. And I'm doing it for the best motive in the world: I'm curious.
Addendum Beauty in the Beast is currently scheduled for a November release through JEM records. Wendy's contract with CBS concludes with a "lecture-with-musical-examples" record tentatively called Wendy Carlos' Guide To Electronic Orchestration, after which Wendy, like all good explorers, will be moving on.
(Freff lives in Brooklyn with three friends, three cats, seven computers, and a recording studio. Aside from drowning in article deadlines, he writes documentation for synths and software, is the American reporter for a BBC show about computers, and is working on various book and record projects.)
