Joe Monzo Photo courtesy Joe Monzo

Ever since encountering Harry Partch‘s Genesis of a Music in the early 1980s, I’ve been most interested in just-intonation (JI) tuning systems. The initial reason for my interest …

On August 9, the National Endowment for the Arts announced the release of a landmark research report on artists’ employment, specifically examining multiple jobholding or “moonlighting.” Commissioned by the NEA’s Research Division, More Than …

Johnny Reinhard in Kazan, Russia Photo by Svetlana Sokolova

Here in the new millennium composers look about and wonder what connects them together. The answer appears to be the musical intelligence that they …

Twelve-tone equal temperament, as this common tuning is called, is a 20th-century phenomenon, a blandly homogenous tuning increasingly imposed on all the world’s musics in the name of scientific progress. In short, twelve-tone equal temperament is to tuning what the McDonald’s hamburger is to food.

I’ll never forget the utter amazement I experienced the first time I was exposed to the notion of “microtonal music.”

Johnny Reinhard“What is the virtue of sticking to any single system of tuning? Why a system, and not an approach, or multi-systems?…”

Joe Monzo“The desire to simplify Partch’s numerical (ratio-based) notation led to me create harmonic …

John EatonPhoto by Lloyd DeGrane, courtesy of The University of Chicago Chronicle

August 3, 2000 – 1:00 to 3:30 pm
John Eaton in conversation with Frank J. Oteriat The American Music Center
Filmed by Jonathan Murphy …

New music needs a new paradigm for funding.

Virgil Thomson outside his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel

Virgil Thomson at home