Microtonal notations: an overview

The Twentieth Century, among the countless innovations it brought to the world of music, has distinguished itself for having nullified the function of alterations through the so-called emancipation of dissonance proposed by Arnold Schönberg with the theorization of the dodecaphonic system. It was Schönberg himself who suggested a new notational criterion to encourage and facilitate the development of these new compositional systems: this criterion had to provide that the symbols of alteration (sharp, flat and natural) should be valid only for the single note. In the same period (or perhaps even earlier) the European musical community was confronted with the hypothesis of widening the boundaries of sound and its perception through the adoption of alternative temperament systems, which would bridle units smaller than the semitone.

Microtonality (from the Greek mikro: small) can be associated with two main musical ideas: the use of intervals smaller than the semitones belonging to the tradition of Western culture (with the necessary exception of much traditional music); the use of unusual tunings.

It would be naive, however, to think that the idea of a music that exploits intervals smaller than the semitone is an invention of the Twentieth Century: first of all, because the entire history of Western music up to the consolidation of the equal temperament made use of systems that in good approximation employed microtones (just think of the mesotonic tuning alone and the difference between large tone and small tone); moreover, it is the very definition of microtonality that is flawed, since it does not take into account the fact that Western music – that is, European and North American cultured music – represents perhaps less than a fifth of the music of humanity, and in this sense it is not absurd to say that the vast majority of world music is microtonal.

Between the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth Century the idea of microtonal music got more and more popular to the point of becoming almost a fashion in the 1920s, and it was mainly composers such as Béla Bartók who profitably advocated the idea (it is no coincidence that he was greatly inspired by traditional music and can indeed be considered the father of Ethnomusicology).

The quarter-tone scale is definitely the most used of the microtonal scales. It is important to mention in this regard the Russian-French composer Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979), whose Quarter-Tone Harmony Manual he composed for the first time identified the monesis for the quarter-tone and the triesis for the three quarter-tone: in support of this new theory he composed in 1934 the Twenty-four preludes in all tones of the chromatic-diatonic scale, for two quarter-tone pianos. Another method to indicate the alterations was to specify with the acute accent the increment of a quarter-tone of the note and with the grave accent the decrease of a quarter-tone: this system was used by the mexican Julian Carrillo (1875-1965) in his essay Sonido 13. Pierpaolo Beretta (1958) instead devised the Armodue system which uses 16 tempered sounds within the octave, i.e. it divides the scale into sixteen equal notes (hexadecaphonic scale), and designed a system of notation discrimination based on tetragrams.

Below is a brief summary of the major microtonal systems used by the pioneers of the technique:

• Alois Haba (24-tET);

• Julian Carrillo (24-tET, 36-tET, 48-tET, 60-tET, 72-tET, 96-tET);

• Harry Partch (natural limit 11 tuning);

• Adriaan Daniel Fokker (31-tET);

• Ivor Darreg (from 13-tET to 22-tET, 24-tET and 31-tET), father of the first microtonal synthesizer;

• Easley Blackwood, author of the “12 microtonal studies for electronic musical instruments” in which he experiments with all the possible divisions of the octave from 12 to 24 tones;

• Augusto Novaro (15-tET).

However, the evolution of different microtonal compositional systems has been so rapid that there is no common notation for all composers regarding the classification of microtones. In Myles Skinner’s dissertation Toward a Quarter-Tone Syntax (2006) he compares the different microtonal notation symbols of some of the early microtonality theorists.

Today it is evident that Wyschnegradsky’s notation for the sharps is the most widespread, but during the Twentieth Century several symbols have developed to identify microtonal alterations, often different from composer to composer. This diversity made life not easy for the performers, who often had to know the composer personally in order to get a precise idea of the composer’s will to perform, and especially for the publishers, who had to decipher scores with symbols that were always different and could not obviously refer to historical practice.

It is interesting to underline how from the Eighties onwards the notation has progressively realigned itself to a more traditional style of Western influence, enriched by a whole series of new symbols (suffice it to say that the same change of time signature is quite rare in music literature prior to Stravinsky). To understand the extent of this phenomenon it is important to consider that many of these microtonal techniques were in the past seen as anti-musical, impossible to play and even inconvenient because they could damage the instrument or the voice, while nowadays most of these signs are commonly used in certain performance areas.

Students who have spent most of their training on classical repertoires often do not welcome composers’ use of non-standardised symbols, and considering that today’s composers are usually also responsible for the engraving of their works, it is not strange to observe how the notational exuberance of the Fifties quickly evaporated. What is certain is that the composer is not immune to the instruments at his disposal, and if on the one hand a greater semiotic clarity is certainly desirable, on the other hand he inevitably ends up curbing that need for expressive freedom which, in avant-garde composers on the one hand, and in aleatory composers on the other, has been the beating heart and irrepressible driving force behind the music of the Twentieth Century.