There are a few things string-playing Jon Rose and keyboardist Veryan Weston would like to tell you. First, they love melodiousness and point out that the lack thereof is a societal detriment ("The melody became a tune, a memory device... Remembering the tune was critical to survival"). Second, they're irritated with equal temperament's long-standing reign (Rose from the liner notes: "...the piano achieved dominance, and every instrument had to get in tune with it").
A few things that I would like you to know about this duo. They aren't punters to this game. Both have devoted their lives to music, specifically instrument design (see Rose's interactive bow, the K-Bow) and historic investigation of the missed potential of antique string and hammer instruments (overlooked due to the aforementioned blasted Western tuning). From "New Pentatonic Scale Relationships" to compiling lists of fences across the world that yield superior musicality, their devotion is the epitome of putting one's money where one's mouth is. And unlike many performers who spend their days in rejection of performance chops for innovation, they know how to play — whatever instrument they get their hands on — really (!) well; each was trained (in universities, recurring club dates and marathon concerts) as well as they were untrained, so to speak.
The improvised mix here is the frenetic flood and speed of Well-Tempered Clavier, ragtime, Paganini with the invention of Partch and nods to various folk melodies, all expanded and skewed with tunings "from science and history" on unusual instruments (i.e. a Pythagorean tuned fortepiano, a meantone tempered harpsichord, a five-string violin in Eb, G, Ab, A, Bb, a tenor violin whose bridge houses four sympathetic strings, a portable organ that, when closed, resembles a "huge monastic bible"). "The Octave Stick" is a three-minute fireball: staccato blasts of pounded lower register harpsichord, virtuosic runs by both men, dizzying trills and walls of sound tightly realized with stop-on-a-dime rests are "deterritorialized" from so-called traditional harmonic and contextual relationships; the form lines up, somehow, but the pitch material is...free. On "Pentahose", the duo deftly riffs on a five-note ascending figure, pushing it up a hill with dizzying microtonality. Halfway through they plateau, slow the tempo and lock into a neat sotto voce con brio counterpoint of the gesture; then it's a methodical duet best visualized as siblings in recital in grandma's parlor — if you plug your ears and imagine I-IV-I-vi-ii-V-I instead of the actual sonic disorder. There are some slower moments, but these are just as aesthetically flailing: "Blow Dry" is a droning (Weston is on some exotic organ here), resonating, often jangled string search in the cracks around 440 Hz; similarly "Winding The Clock" is the same type of introspection hovering near 415 Hz (G#), Weston making good use of the "extremely variable temperament" of his instrument.
Tunings & Tunes is a terrific abstraction of the Classical world, though not one too far from the source (or maybe so far that it returns 330 degrees). It's not Rembrandt versus Rothko, but a Mona Lisa re-imagined with inverted colors, a beard on top of the Duchamp mustache, and as much sidewalk chalk, tea stains and magic marker as oil paint.
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