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CHICAGO, ILLINOIS (January 8, 2024) — An early supporter of composer Easley Blackwood’s pioneering work in exotic tunings and microtonality, Cedille Records issues a new recording of his Twelve Microtonal Etudes (1980) that offers a fresh take on this unique work. Rather than presenting it in the manner typical of microtonal compositions — performed by electronic instruments or a single, specially tuned acoustic instrument — the new album, Acoustic Microtonal, uses today’s most powerful recording technology to make Blackwood’s “impossible” notes possible for an ensemble of mixed-timbre acoustic instruments (woodwinds, brass, and strings). The arrangement was prepared by Grammy-nominated composer and orchestrator Matthew Sheeran, who also produced the recording. The featured performers are members of the Budapest Scoring Orchestra. The album was mixed by engineer Brian Bolger.
A digital-only release, Acoustic Microtonal will be available on Friday, January 19, via all major streaming platforms and CedilleRecords.org. Cedille has previously released 14 recordings featuring Blackwood’s music, including Easley Blackwood: Microtonal (1994), comprising a re-issue of Blackwood’s original 1980 LP recording of Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, performed on synthesizer by the composer, plus new recordings of then-recent Blackwood microtonal works. In addition to serving as an acoustic follow-up to that release, Acoustic Microtonal honors the memory of the composer one year after his passing on January 22, 2023.
Blackwood’s etudes explore a variety of “equal temperament” tunings, in which the musical octave is divided into a series of smaller, equally sized steps. Nearly all Western music created today employs 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET), in which the octave is divided into 12 equal steps. Most listeners, and even many musicians, take 12-TET for granted as simply the way musical notes ought to be tuned, but Blackwood’s etudes demonstrate that there are alternate tonal universes where notes in-between the standard pitches (called microtones) hold the potential for new expressive possibilities.
Each of Blackwood’s twelve etudes uses a different equal temperament, with the collection covering all divisions of the octave from 13 to 24. Blackwood composed each etude in what he felt was a style befitting the tonal resources of each tuning. For instance, the pitches in Etude IV. 23 notes: Allegro moderato (23-TET) closely align with scales used in traditional gamelan music, so for his etude in that tuning he adopted a gamelan-influenced idiom. The pitch content of the final Etude XII. 19 notes: Allegro moderato (19-TET), by contrast, shares many similarities with common-practice period tunings, which Blackwood illustrates by casting his corresponding etude in a style reminiscent of Mozart.
It is difficult, even impossible in many cases, to perform the microtones in these etudes on standard Western instruments, which are all constructed with conventionally tuned music in mind. It is for this reason that Blackwood originally composed his etudes for “Electronic Music Media.” He even cautioned against attempting to perform these works on acoustic instruments due to the seemingly insurmountable technical hurdles involved in achieving the correct pitches. But much has changed since 1980. For this recording, Sheeran deciphered the original score — which has 180 unique pitches overall — and arranged 12-note versions of the Etudes by approximating the musical logic and sound of each. He then leveraged cutting-edge “pitch correction” technology (much more commonly used in popular music) to realize a grander vision for Blackwood’s microtonal music, essentially pitch correcting the musicians into sounding as if they were naturally performing together in these exotic tunings. The result is a new frontier for the performance and composition of microtonal music, no longer restricted to electronic instruments and specially fretted guitars, but now able to span freely the full gamut of instrumental color.
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