Investigating the experimental legacy of Victorian polymath Alexander J. Ellis, author of the 1880 paper, The History of Musical Pitch, composer Seamus Cater uses 74 tuning forks tuned to represent Elliss research of just ratios of 480Hz, in three compositions focusing on the most consonant tones of the system, and balancing them through minimalist chamber work from a 7-piece ensemble.
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Sample The Album:
Seamus Cater-composer
Koen Nutters-double bass
Seamus Cater-concertina
Germaine Sijstermans-clarinet
Anne La Berge-flute
Dante Boon-Rhodes piano
Rishin Singh-trombone
Fredrik Rasten-e bow guitar
Peter Adriaansz-tuning forks
Hugo Bell-tuning forks
Yannis Kyriakides-tuning forks
Danya Pilchen-tuning forks
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Label: Another Timbre
Catalog ID: at216
Squidco Product Code: 34093
Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2023
Country: UK
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded at Pest House and Splendor, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, between Spring, 2020, and Summer, 2022.
"In 1880, Alexander J. Ellis presented a paper, The History of Musical Pitch, to the Royal Society in London. Alongside the extensive footnotes in his English translation, the pitch history was also included in the translator's appendix of On the Sensations of Tone by Hermann L.F. Helmholtz. The 74 tuning forks used in these pieces were tuned to represent the research of Ellis, where he succeeded in gathering 223 instances of the note 'A' from intact historical organs and assorted instruments and makers. These 'A's' ranged between what we now call F# and C#.
Ellis was a measurer. As mathematician and inventor of the musical cent, philologist, collector and translator, he is commonly thought of as the initiator of comparative musicology, but what I looked for around all this data were traces of his private musicality. I knew he had been an amateur performer, who had demonstrated airs at the Royal Society with his experimentally tuned concertinas. While he didn't leave us any music, I wondered if he might have considered how these pitches would sound, united in a single room or building. Vaguely resembling the Scheibler Tonometer, which he used to measure Victorian instruments, these 74 forks were tuned in just ratios of 480Hz. They make up a system comprising only one note name. A History of Musical Pitch tries to focus the most consonant tones of the system, moving slowly through an historical timeline of 1495 to 1880.
"Checking" is more concerned with the act of checking each fork with an instrument, an inversion of checking the instrument with a tuning fork. Musicians who brought their instruments to Ellis for measuring had to maintain a pitch for 20 seconds, which was unreasonably lengthy for the period, so that he could check their tone against a suitable fork from his tonometer. When the closest tuned fork produced the least beatings, a chronograph was needed to calculate the frequency. I like to think Ellis might also have used a concertina or a double bass to check the 'A's he encountered, to compare them to his own 'A' string or reed, and to see whether holding pitches for such periods could in fact be musical.
The cover artwork is a painting of Epping Forest by Ellis's son, the painter Tristram James Ellis."-Seamus Cater (July 2022)
Artist Biographies
• Show Bio for Seamus Cater "Born in England, son of an Essex folk singer, Seamus Cater was surrounded by English revivalist folk music from day one. He eventually moved to Amsterdam in 2000, where he has been working on different kinds of music; acoustic, electronic, composed, and improvised. Cater organizes two Amsterdam concert series, DNK Amsterdam and Pest House, and is the founder of Nearly Not There Records, a small stock, non-profit record shop in Amsterdam specializing in new music in many forms, mostly avant-garde and experimental. The Three Things You Can Hear follows Cater's 2010 collaboration with NYC banjoist Woody Sullender (When We Get to Meeting) and his 2012 collaboration with Finnish multi-instrumentalist Viljam Nybacka (The Anecdotes). Recorded in Amsterdam and Berlin, The Three Things You Can Hear is a solo album consisting of a group of songs developed over a period of about three years. They were written and performed using a duet concertina made in 1941 (serial number Crabb 9807), which Cater found in a junk shop in Amsterdam. Given Cater's folk music background, and the fact that his father also played a concertina, it was a fortuitous event to find an instrument such as this, a black leather squeeze-box made in London. The slow repair and learning of this instrument led to a close relationship and unconventional playing style. By no means a concertina virtuouso, Seamus set out to find simpler, more primitive techniques of playing, and as the songs became ready, he invited some Berlin musicians to accompany him on different songs. The album includes contributions from Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke (The International Nothing), Koen Nutters and Morten J. Olsen (from The Pitch), and Johnny Chang (of Konzert Minimal). When asked about the influences that informed the making of the album, Cater mentions Scottish folk singer Ivor Cutler and English folk singer Peter Bellamy, as well as music from other cultures, chiefly African, Arabic, South American, Indonesian. . . . His distinctive phrasing recalls at times the fragile music of Robert Wyatt's solo releases, and at others the elaborate folk constructions of Peter Blegvad and John Greaves, particularly their surreal 1977 concept album from Kew. Rhone. Seamus Cater: voice and duet concertina. With: Koen Nutters: double bass; Morten J. Olsen: bass drum and vibraphone; Michael Thieke: clarinet; Kai Fagaschinski: clarinet; Johnny Chang: viola; Han Jacobs: saw. Recorded by Seamus Cater, mixed by Clare Gallagher, and mastered by Jeff Carey." ^ Hide Bio for Seamus Cater • Show Bio for Koen Nutters Koen Nutters is an upright bass player, born in The Hague, Netherlands in 1976. He is a founding member of the N Collective, and also organises the concertseries: DNK-Amsterdam. ^ Hide Bio for Koen Nutters • Show Bio for Seamus Cater "Born in England, son of an Essex folk singer, Seamus Cater was surrounded by English revivalist folk music from day one. He eventually moved to Amsterdam in 2000, where he has been working on different kinds of music; acoustic, electronic, composed, and improvised. Cater organizes two Amsterdam concert series, DNK Amsterdam and Pest House, and is the founder of Nearly Not There Records, a small stock, non-profit record shop in Amsterdam specializing in new music in many forms, mostly avant-garde and experimental. The Three Things You Can Hear follows Cater's 2010 collaboration with NYC banjoist Woody Sullender (When We Get to Meeting) and his 2012 collaboration with Finnish multi-instrumentalist Viljam Nybacka (The Anecdotes). Recorded in Amsterdam and Berlin, The Three Things You Can Hear is a solo album consisting of a group of songs developed over a period of about three years. They were written and performed using a duet concertina made in 1941 (serial number Crabb 9807), which Cater found in a junk shop in Amsterdam. Given Cater's folk music background, and the fact that his father also played a concertina, it was a fortuitous event to find an instrument such as this, a black leather squeeze-box made in London. The slow repair and learning of this instrument led to a close relationship and unconventional playing style. By no means a concertina virtuouso, Seamus set out to find simpler, more primitive techniques of playing, and as the songs became ready, he invited some Berlin musicians to accompany him on different songs. The album includes contributions from Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke (The International Nothing), Koen Nutters and Morten J. Olsen (from The Pitch), and Johnny Chang (of Konzert Minimal). When asked about the influences that informed the making of the album, Cater mentions Scottish folk singer Ivor Cutler and English folk singer Peter Bellamy, as well as music from other cultures, chiefly African, Arabic, South American, Indonesian. . . . His distinctive phrasing recalls at times the fragile music of Robert Wyatt's solo releases, and at others the elaborate folk constructions of Peter Blegvad and John Greaves, particularly their surreal 1977 concept album from Kew. Rhone. Seamus Cater: voice and duet concertina. With: Koen Nutters: double bass; Morten J. Olsen: bass drum and vibraphone; Michael Thieke: clarinet; Kai Fagaschinski: clarinet; Johnny Chang: viola; Han Jacobs: saw. Recorded by Seamus Cater, mixed by Clare Gallagher, and mastered by Jeff Carey." ^ Hide Bio for Seamus Cater • Show Bio for Germaine Sijstermans "Germaine Sijstermans is a composer, installation artist and musician. Her works combine ephemeral, often site specific installations with indeterminate music, open to the serendipity of location and time. She explores the phenomenological experience of a space and all that occurs within it through the use of silence, light, sounds, space, and physical presence of oneself and others. Sijstermans is constantly cooperating with composers and performers, developing music and performances. She has had the pleasure of premiering many pieces that were composed for her. Her performances have taken place in venues varying from traditional concert settings to underground stages, located from the Netherlands to Brazil, equally enjoying performing at each one of them. Germaine Sijstermans is based in Heerlen (NL) at the heart of the historically rich Meuse-Rhine Euroregion. She is connected as artistic developer to Intro in Situ (production house for contemporary music in Maastricht), with the support of the Performing Arts Fund NL. Sijstermans is a board member of Stichting Pro2, a platform for professional/amateur collaborations, and a member of the Root51 music theatre group. Furthermore she is involved with SLIM (foundation for improvised music in Limburg). Germaine Sijstermans obtained her master's degree as a performing musician at Codarts in Rotterdam with clarinet teacher Jan Jansen in 2013. Prior to that she did her bachelor studies at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague with teacher Pierre Woudenberg.She received composition and artistic mentoring from i.a. Antoine Beuger, Jürg Frey, Michael Pisaro, Marcus Kaiser, and Joachim Eckl. As a teacher, Sijstermans has been teaching clarinet to beginning and advanced students, young children as well as adults, in both individual and group education." ^ Hide Bio for Germaine Sijstermans • Show Bio for Anne La Berge "Anne La Berge's passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music has led her to storytelling and sound art as her sources of musical inspiration. Her music gathers the elements on which her reputation is based: ferocious and far-reaching virtuosity, microtonal textures and melodies, and her unique array of percussive flute techniques, all combined with interactive electronic processing and text. She performs regularly as a soloist, with the ensemble MAZE and with her husband David Dramm. She is a founding artist of Splendor Amsterdam, a collective of musicians who have transformed an old bathhouse in Amsterdam into a cultural mecca, where she rehearses her own projects and shares small scale concerts with international guests. In 1999, together Steve Heather and Cor Fuhler, she founded Kraakgeluiden, a improvisation series based in Amsterdam, exploring combinations of acoustic and electronic instruments using real-time interactive performance systems. Many of the resulting musical collaborations have have taken on a life beyond the Kraakgeluiden series, which ceased in 2006. La Berge's own music has evolved in parallel, and the flute has become only one element in a sound world that includes computer samples, the use of spoken text and electronic processing. She works regularly as an improvisation and live electronics coach worldwide in the context of residencies and private coaching. She can be heard on the Largo, Artifact, Etcetera, Hat Art, Frog Peak, Einstein, X-OR, Unsounds, Canal Street, Rambo, esc.rec., Intackt, Data, verz, Relative Pitch and Splendor Records labels which include recordings with Ensemble Modern, United Noise Toys, Fonville/La Berge, Rasp/Hasp, Bievre/La Berge, Apricot My Lady, Big Zoom, Corkestra, La Berge/Williamson, MAZE, Phil Maguire, Henneman/Branch/La Berge and the family Dramm La Berge La Berge Dramm. Her music is published by Frog Peak Music, Alry Publications, Donemus and many of her Max patch based compositions are available as Apps from her privately. She is the Managing Director of the Volsap Foundation that produces innovative music projects." ^ Hide Bio for Anne La Berge • Show Bio for Dante Boon "Dante Boon (1973) is a Dutch composer and pianist living in Amsterdam. At the age of 14, he started his piano studies at the Amsterdam Sweelinck Conservatorium. At the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, he studied composition with Diderik Wagenaar. After having been the keyboard player and arranger for a major Dutch rock band for several years, he went back to the classical, especially contemporary piano repertoire. With Samuel Vriezen, he recorded Tom Johnson's Symmetries (piano four hands) for Karnatic Lab Records. Recordings for other labels include works by Rozalie Hirs (Attacca Records) and Philip Corner (New World Records). his first solo CD cage. frey. vriezen. feldman. ayres. johnson .manion was released 2010 on Edition Wandelweiser Records to international critical acclaim." ^ Hide Bio for Dante Boon • Show Bio for Rishin Singh "Rishin Singh (born 1985, Kuala Lumpur) is a musician/artist/writer living in Berlin. He studied classical trombone at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (Bachelor of Music Studies) and received Honours 1st Class in a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney. As a composer and performer, Rishin's work investigates modes of perception, quietude and repetition. He has performed across Asia, Australia, Europe and Canada with collaborators such as Ensemble Offspring (AU), Toshimaru Nakamura (JP), Konzert Minimal (DE), Koen Nutters (NL), Catherine Lamb (USA), Karen Power (IR), John Godfrey (UK), Cathy Milliken (AUS), Johnny Chang (DE), Jon Rose (AU), and his own ensemble Songs (DE). Selected festival appearances include DAAD Mikromusik (DE), The NOWnow (AUS), Lacking Sound Festival (TW), Audio Art (PL). He has premiered new works by composers such as Clare Cooper (AU), Martijn Tellinga (NL), Eva-Maria Houben (DE), Antoine Beuger (DE) and Goh Lee Kwang (MY), and has been commissioned to compose for artists such as Claire Edwardes (AU), Ur 1st Luv (AU), and Ensemble Manteia (AU). His writing has been published by Editions Kahn (CH), RealTime (AUS), Insub (CH), and Lateral Addition (USA). Selected exhibitions include at ArtSpace Sydney (AUS), Ithaka Festival Leuven (BE) and Errant Bodies (DE)." ^ Hide Bio for Rishin Singh • Show Bio for Fredrik Rasten Fredrik Rasten, guitarist / improviser / composer "I am a Norwegian guitarist (b. 1988) working in the field of experimental music, both improvised and composed. My main focuses are exploring and utilizing the acoustic possibilities of the steel string guitar, motivated by a fascination for the almost tactile experiences of acoustic phenomena. The last months I have been working extensively with intonation, with an extended concept of consonance as a point of departure, both in solo work and in duos with trumpeter Torstein Lavik Larsen and bass player Jonathan Heilbron. I have also had the lucky opportunity to take lessons in this field with composer and violist Catherine Lamb. Other music that I am inspired by includes wandelweiser music, traditional british folk and early music." "Fredrik Rasten works with acoustic guitar and in exploring the possibilities for putting this instrument in new musical contexts. With extensive use of preparations and different non-tempered tunings, he creates warm sounds in gradual development. He also includes subtle use of the voice to make interfering thick timbres and tonalities in combination with the guitar. A goal for the music is to open a room for details that invites the listener inside the musical material in an active and exploring way. He is also playing composed music, especially related to quiet / Wandelweiser music and Just Intonation music, and has performed pieces by Johan Lindvall, Antoine Beuger and Catherine Lamb." ^ Hide Bio for Fredrik Rasten • Show Bio for Peter Adriaansz "Peter Adriaansz was born in Seattle in 1966 and studied composition at the conservatories of The Hague and Rotterdam, where his teachers included Louis Andriessen, Brian Ferneyhough and Peter-Jan Wagemans. Characterized frequently as 'one of the most singular composers active in the Netherlands at the moment' Adriaansz has worked as a free-lance composer since 1993, receiving commissions and performances from ensembles, Festivals and individual musicians from all over the world, as well as writing for ensembles with more unusual instrumentations for special occasions. His works are performed and broadcast regularly worldwide and have featured on many stages, from the Holland Festival to Huddersfield and from Tashkent to Toronto. Adriaansz' work can be characterized by a systematic, research-oriented approach towards music. An approach in which sound, structure, harmony and audible mathematics constitute the main ingredients. Starting in 2005 an interest in flexibility, variable forms and - especially - microtonal reflection gradually became predominant in his work. This latter interest lead, among other works, to several large-scale compositions for amplified ensembles, such as Prana (2007), Music for Sines, Percussion, ebows & variable Ensemble (2008) and Three Vertical Swells (2010), works for orchestra and voices (Anekabahudaravaktranetram, 2007, Verdichtingen, 2009), two extended series, on spatial harmony (Structures I-XVI, 2005) and micro acoustics (Waves 1-13, 2008) and many (electro-) acoustic works for incidental commissions, with detailed sinewave patches as a constant feature. In recent years his work has focussed largely on expanding the world of microtonal reflection with an increased interest in speech and the role of context. In the words of Bob Gilmore: 'If music can be a medium in which to explore the most profound existential questions, as the medieval scholars believed it could, then each generation must rephrase these questions to make them relevant to their own time. Few contemporary composers have delved so fearlessly into this realm as has Peter Adriaansz. His work is abstract music of a high order, reanimating the mediaeval idea of music as applied number: but the questions it asks are defiantly of the twenty-first century, questions about musical perception, about the nature of sound and the passage of time'. Several of his works were nominated for various prizes, such as Chant Ascendant, for the 1994 International Gaudeamus Composers Competition and Waves 5-7, Verdichtingen and Three Studies on Elevation; selected in 2009, 2010 and 2011 respectively for the Dutch Toonzetters Award. In 2015 his work Scala II was awarded the Matthijs Vermeulen Prize. In 2010 his solo CD Waves, recorded by Ensemble Klang, was released to much national as well as international press acclaim. This was followed by several other releases on labels such as Unsounds and Ergodos and most recently (2021) by the release of one of his largest works to date, Environments, on the Klang label. Adriaansz teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague." ^ Hide Bio for Peter Adriaansz • Show Bio for Hugo Bell "Hugo Bell is a composer, performer and artist based between The Hague and London. He has worked with ensembles such as Ensemble Proton Bern, Residentie Orkest, New European Ensemble, Britten Sinfonia, Ensemble Oerknal, Decibel, Royal Northern Sinfonia and The Tallis Scholars, and has collaborated with performers such as Ere Lievonen and Jacob Lekkerkerker. His music has been presented across Europe and North America including performances at festivals such as Gaudeamus Muziekweek (2020 & 2021), CODA (2018) and Cheltenham Music Festival (2015). Hugo's awards include The Mendelssohn Scholarship (2022), The Conlon Foundation Prize (2021), Britten Sinfonia's Opus 1 (2021), The Philip Bates Prize (2017) and NCEM & BBC Young Composer Award (2014). Coming from a background in performance, his practice is heavily reliant on collaboration whether it be a traditional composer-performer relationship or a composer-composer/artist relationship. Hugo has collaborated with musicians and artists from a wide variety of creative backgrounds including early music practitioners, visual artists, electronic musicians and instrument builders. He began his musical career as an aspiring organist and conductor studying at Newcastle University and Gothenburg Academy of Music, during which period he was awarded the Lawrence Phelps Recital Award (2011). After completing his undergraduate studies, his enthusiasm for contemporary music led him to start composing. After two years of private lessons he was awarded a scholarship to study composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. In 2023, Hugo completed a Masters degree in composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague where his studies were generously supported by the Leverhulme Foundation." ^ Hide Bio for Hugo Bell • Show Bio for Yannis Kyriakides "Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969, emigrated to Britain in 1975 and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. He studied musicology at York University, and later composition with Louis Andriessen and Dick Raaijmakers. He currently lives is Amsterdam with his wife and two sons. As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematize the act of listening. The question as to what music is actually communicating is a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between perception, emotion and language and how that defines our experience of sound. In the last years his work has been exploring different relations between words and music, both in concert compositions and installations through the use of systems of encoding information into sound, synthesizing voices and projecting text to music. The latter work has led to about 20 music text films that play on the idea of imagined or inner voice. Yannis has written over a hundred compositions, comprising mostly of music theatre, multimedia and electroacoustic works for chamber groups and large ensembles. His work has been performed worldwide at many of the prominent music festivals, and by many leading contemporary music ensembles. His opera an ocean of rain, opened the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 2008. He has been featured composer at both Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2007 and November Music 2011 (NL). Recently his sound installation work has been receiving more exposure and he contributed two works for the the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. In 2000 he won the International Gaudeamus Composition prize for his composition a conSPIracy cantata. The CD Wordless, recieved an honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2006, and his recent CD, Antichamber won a 2011 French Qwartz Electronic music award. Other prizes include the Dutch Toonzetters prize for best composition of 2010 for paramyth, the Willem Pijper Prize for dreams of the blind and the International Rostrum of Composers Prize 2014 for words and song without words. Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded and runs the CD label for new electronic music Unsounds. He is a founding member of the ensemble MAZE, and teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague." ^ Hide Bio for Yannis Kyriakides • Show Bio for Danya Pilchen "Danya Pilchen is a composer based in The Hague. Danya obtained a Master's degree in composition from the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague in 2020. Danya's thesis, Losing Time, was centred around creating musical interactions based on musicians' communicating their internal feelings of time rather than relying on external time measures. The human experience of time and music's ability to shed light on it have since become the core concern of Danya's practice. Danya's music is closely intertwined with Danya's research into collective experiences of time in musical practices. Understanding time as an emerging property of consciousness affected by social interactions necessitates increased attention to the relationships between musicians and audiences in Danya's pieces. To facilitate these interactions, Danya employs various compositional strategies and listening techniques engaging the materiality of sound. This practice revolves around Songs, an ongoing series of chamber pieces on which Danya has been working since September 2019." ^ Hide Bio for Danya Pilchen
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Track Listing:
1. Checking 13:47
2. Tree Space: The Trees They Do Grow High 13:00
3. A History Of Musical Pitch 36:59
Compositional Forms
Large Ensembles
Historical Recordings
New in Compositional Music
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