New Album: The Moses of Stuttgart

The music is in quarter-tones, but taking a different approach to what I'm used to and I liked this way of working a lot. I'll say a bit about that below the fold.

I started off with the idea of quarter-tone pentatonic scales, evoking the idea of the harp as an ancient instrument with a fixed gamut of notes. I chose four melakata tunings since they tend to have a mixture of quarter-tones and ordinary sharp/flat notes on the black notes, and my plan was to use the pentatonic scales made of only the black notes only.

The tunings I went for are the following -- I'll add ^ to a note to mean "raise by a quarter tone":

• Vagadishvari: C C#^ D# D#^ E F F# G G# A A^ A#
• Jalarnavam: C C^ C# C#^ D F# F#^ G G^ G# A A#
• Chitrambari: C C# D D# E F# F#^ G G#^ A# A#^ B
• Bhavapriya: C C^ C# D D# F# F#^ G G#^ A# A#^ B

You can see that in each case the black notes contain a mixture of quarter-tones and regular notes and they provide a reasonable contrast with each other. Scala files for all the melakata tunings, including these, are available on my GitHub.

My initial idea was to write only harp music and only in pentatonic scales but the process took me towards more instrumental variety and led me to add the white notes in to create a wide variety of scales on the fly. The instruments are the harp and vibraphone models in Pianoteq and the SWAM bass clarinet, which provided a strong contrast with the overall tinkly effect the other two tend to have. There are two tracks featuring harps only, two featuring solo bass clarinet and one featuring only vibes; the other three are a mixture.

I wanted to bring out the jangling dissonance of quarter-tones alongside the songlike simplicity of more spaced-out pentatonic material. This approach ended up being very fruitful. Each track combines two or three tunings and focuses on the black notes, bringing various white notes into play to create variety. I found it great fun to compose with this loose-but-structured setup and expect to use it more in future.

Like the previous album, The Moses of Stuttgart is available on Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-like basis and will be arriving on all the streaming services shortly.