By
Published: Tuesday, 05 November 2024 at 10:30 AM
What are microtones? The tiny building blocks of all music…
Read on to discover more about microtones, intervals smaller than a semitone….
What are microtones?
Microtones. Even the word conjures up visions of forbidding experimentalism: the generic term for any note that falls in between the gaps of the semitones (half steps) of the keyboard, the smallest interval in Western-inspired music, the distance between the black and whites notes of the piano.
But composers began dreaming of escaping the constraints of semitones over a century ago: among them, the Italian visionary – and one of this year’s centenary celebrants – Ferruccio Busoni, who imagined a music made of splitting tones into third-tones, an innovation only electronic music in the later 20th century would fully realise.
Electronic music… natural home of microtones
Electro-acoustic and electronic sounds don’t recognise the tyranny of semitones, and can slip and slide around the musical lands in between, in which quarter-tones, sixth-tones and glissandos smear and snarl around musical convention. Listen to Bebe and Louis Barron’s score for the 1956 movie The Forbidden Planet to hear those electronic homunculi come to thrilling life: unnameable microtones sounding the uncanny alien world of Altair IV.
Microtones… they’ve been around longer than you think
Or so it has seemed, according to the myths of modernist exploration where previous generations and centuries supposedly feared to tread. Yet in the late-18th century, Mozart taught his pupils how to divide tones into unequal semitones, depending on the harmonic context, so that – on a string instrument or in vocal music – you’d know to use an interval that was 5/9ths of a tone or 4/9ths, whether you were leading into or away from a key note.
In fact, we’re all using microtones all the time. The semitones of the keyboard do not represent musical totality; they are only a distillation of the most dominant notes in the spectrum of overtones that resound in every note we sing or play on an acoustic instrument. We ended up with semitones because of decisions about what music should be that reflect centuries of Europe-specific enculturation. The musics of other cultures, from Indonesia to India, from Mongolia to Japan, have instead made traditions that resound with intervals that are based on the richer realities of how the harmonic series actually sounds – which is to say, they’re full of microtones, not merely semitones.
Microtones… we hear them every day
If you want to hear microtones in action, you don’t only need to listen to 20th- and 21st-century music like Ben Johnston’s string quartets or Éliane Radigue’s Occam series.
Listen too to the singers of I Fagiolini singing the 16th-century music of Victoria, or to Maria Callas and her tremulous, microtonal vibrato sing everything but sanctioned semitones in Bellini’s ‘Casta Diva’, and… open your own mouth to speak, to sing or to scream. You don’t need electronics, you don’t need experimentalism: just experiment with the exquisitely microtonally expressive instrument known to the universe – your voice!