MICROTONALITY - NOW AND THEN

Angine de Poitrine

With the sudden viral popularity of Quebecois “microtonal” duo Angine De Poitrine, I’ve been asked by various friends and colleagues to comment. My old friend and mentor Charles Keil once stated that white musicians have to wear funny hats to get over. ADP have taken this beyond the limit with their intricate “alien” costumes in a polka-dot theme complete with phallic prosthetic noses. As far as costumes go, this strategy harkens back to vaudeville, Broadway, and later on to Paul Revere and the Raiders, Kiss, The Residents, and the ultimate practitioners of this approach, Gwar.

Angine De Poitrine are not newcomers freshly teleported from a nearby star system. One can find references to their previous recordings and videos as La Poexe (Mark Mackin - baritone guitar, Charles Thibeault - drums) dating back to 2016 and on listening, it’s clear that this is the same band: the repetitive angular looping lines, twangy tones, and obscure distorted vocals. Post-punk prog math-rock. In a recent interview in Guitar World, guitarist Khn states “The whole idea of the band was to assume a bit of a satirical approach to rock music in general. We wanted an exaggeration, so the double-neck guitar was the perfect choice to kind of make fun of guitar heroes.” Thibeault created the microtonal necks by randomly hammering in frets between existing frets. The resulting sound gives the group their off-kilter tonality.

Gamelan percussion orchestra - every gamelan is tuned uniquely

One might say that it sounds “microtonal” but what we are hearing are intervals different than what we are used to. Most of the world’s music is tuned to something other than Equal Temperament with microtonal instruments predominating. Virtually all modern Western music is microtonal in that the use of Equal Temperament means that all semitone intervals are the same size, one-twelfth of an octave. In Just Intonation, where the intervals are derived from the overtone series of the fundamental pitch, the semitones would vary in size depending on their relation to the “key” of the musical passage. Two versions of Equal Temperament were proposed independently in the 16th century by two different scholars, mathematicians, and music theorists; one by Zhu Zaiyu in China in 1584 and the other by Simon Stevin in Holland in 1585. As composers began to write for the piano and employ more harmonic modulations in the Baroque era, it was necessary for all of the instruments to use Equal Temperament otherwise the music in the changed keys would sound overly “out-of-tune”. Ultimately, a tiny amount of general “out-of-tuneness” became preferable in the common practice. It has been found that the use of instruments not built with the bias of pretuned intervals, such as a string ensemble, often leads to the use of Just intervals thanks to the natural tendency of the human ear to orient itself according to acoustic principles.

Harry Partch with Adapted Guitar - probably 1941

Turning our focus to American music and its roots in African and other folk musics along with their evolution into blues and jazz, we find that it is almost always microtonal. Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Blind Willie Johnson, Billie Holiday, Howling Wolf, Albert King, B.B. King, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Jimi Hendrix, on and on - all microtonal. Notes are bent and slurred, glissed, screamed, and shouted in frequencies that lie outside of any Equal Temperament. One of the first American composers to shun Equal Temperament in favor of what he titled U-tonality and O-tonality was Harry Partch who devised a 43 note-to-the-octave microtonal system and built instruments that could operate in his system. He quipped that he was “a composer seduced into being a carpenter.”

https://www.harrypartch.com/instruments

LaMonte Young worked extensively with microtonal tunings in his magnum opus “The Well-Tuned Piano” and formed The Forever Bad Blues Band dedicated to extended-time microtonal blues-jams with guitarist Jon Catler. Catler has a company called Freenote Music which makes a variety of microtonally fretted guitar necks available to the intrepid luthier or guitar-hacker.

https://freenotemusic.com/

From listening to their intricate sonic constructions, it’s clear that Angine De Poitrine are dedicated musicians who have put lots of work and rehearsal time into their music. Though they dismiss it themselves, “It’s a bit of a caricature, because you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself and say, ‘What we do is ridiculous”, it’s clear that they have found a hook that will allow themselves to function in the more-than-ridiculous world that defines the current state of the “music business.” And if the “microtonal” label, opens people’s ears, more power to them.

Blind Willie Johnson - spine-chilling vocalized bottleneck guitar