A Festival Displays the Expressive Power of Tuning in Music

New York Times

24-03-2025

The subject of tuning in music tends to attract two kinds of enthusiasts: scientists and poets.
Scientists speak in ratios, fractions and cents, a unit of measurement that captures tiny distances between pitches. For them, the question of temperament — how to space out the steps of a scale so that its component notes ring out in tune with one another — is a beautiful mathematical riddle.
For the poets, the subject is rich in metaphors. It is about relationships, of one string on the violin to its neighbor. When affinities line up perfectly, you can hear the sound glow with sympathetic resonance. The impurities that creep into certain intervals under the Western system of equal temperament reveal truths about conflict and compromise.
Last weekend, 92NY became a laboratory for exploring both the mystical and the physical dimensions of alternate tunings as part of the festival Darkness Sounding, presented by the Los Angeles-based collective Wild Up under the direction of Christopher Rountree. 'In music, tuning sets the stakes and the boundaries of our world,' Wild Up's program notes said. 'It is the carbon we build mountains with and the oxygen we breathe in; it is our environment, and within the duration of a piece, it becomes us.'
The three-day festival included world premieres, 20th-century works and a rare complete performance of the 'Rosary' Sonatas by the 17th-century composer Heinrich Biber. It offered a vibrant spectrum of sound worlds, from booming drones amplified at earsplitting levels to placid pools of shimmering textures. As a luxury-cast demonstration of the expressive power of tuning, the concerts were a ringing success. But as an immersive listening experience — as a 'space for reflection and transformation where sound becomes landscape, ritual, and revelation,' as the program described it — the festival fell short of its ambitions.
Darkness Sounding started out in California as a winter ritual that mixed innovative programs with novel settings, such as moonlit serenades and sound meditations for listeners seated in circles. In New York, Wild Up's innovative programs were shoehorned into a traditional concert setting. This contrast felt especially jarring during Friday night's opening concert at Kaufmann Concert Hall, which consisted of three long, static works that ask a listener to surrender control and allow time to dissolve into physical sound, but that would have benefited from a more mindful setting.
In the auditorium, it was still possible to enjoy Andrew McIntosh's 'Fixations' for strings as an arresting study in interdependence in which the players painstakingly piece together melodies out of minute gestures. Insectoid clouds of harmonies seem to expand and grow denser, interspersed by plucked and feathery bowed accents. As parts moved in and out of consonance with each other on Friday, I was struck by the way tuning seemed to affect timbre, with microscopic dissonances creating a finely abrasive, powdery sheen while the Pythagorean purity of other intervals came out in a golden rich sound.
Tony Conrad's 'Four Violins' (1964), here heard in a new arrangement by McIntosh, blasted out pungent loud chords sustained with ferocious power over the course of some 30 minutes. As pitches changed almost imperceptibly, different overtones pierced through the growl, clashing with squealing distortion. With no pulse or other audible measure of time passing, I sat through the assault with my ears jangling, trying to stay open to potential revelations.
As a demonstration of the painful repercussions of minute differences, Conrad's music certainly seemed to speak to the human experience. But I would have preferred to weather this sonic storm inside a space that allowed room for movement and, in the absence of earplugs, maybe escape.
The second half of Friday's program was given over to the world premiere of Sarah Davachi's 'The Lower Melodies,' a languid sound bath opulently scored for two bass flutes, two bass clarinets and strings. The work begins softly, on a low note in unison that eventually splits, creating layered sustained harmonies. As pitches changed, the sound seemed to form delicate ripples. Davachi's transfixing work seemed to encourage a physical identification with the music; with more space and a yoga mat, an audience member could have a transformative experience with it.
Saturday's concert was anchored by Leilehua Lanzilotti's 'with eyes the color of time,' the festival's highlight. Inspired by the exhibition galleries she grew up playing in when her mother worked at Honolulu's contemporary art museum, the work moves dreamily through states of spacious stillness interrupted by skittish pops, scrapes and crunches created by string players pressing their bows hard on the string. With subtle tweaks of tuning, the sound seemed to alternately evoke the unpredictable natural world and the realm of human memory.
Scott Walker's powerful 'Rubato (It: 'Stolen Time')' started with the wail of a siren and tore onward at high-decibel throttle until it melted, unexpectedly and disarmingly, into a simple chorus sung by the instrumentalists. The title of the work refers to the musical practice of taking liberties with tempo, but its performance instructions ask the musicians to play in strict time. Sampled recordings of military machines are blended with acrid brass into growling chords. In other works at the festival, nonconformist tunings evoked the intelligence of the nonhuman natural world. Here, it stood for the inhuman logic of war.
Claude Vivier's 'Zipangu' (1980) is a lustrous and slippery work that offers an almost sculptural play on contrasting surfaces and blocks of sound. The Wild Up players brought out its stark, Expressionist colors in a performance that hummed with intensity. The energy was more diffuse and exploratory in James Tenney's 'Saxony,' which begins with a double bass sounding the harmonic series of a single string and builds up a throbbing monument of sound that feels monolithic even as it is animated with rhythmic accents and keening slides.
The festival concluded on Sunday with a marathon performance of the Biber sonatas by McIntosh, who as a violinist specializes in the Baroque. He was joined by a stellar continuo ensemble with Ian Pritchard on harpsichord and organ, Maxine Eilander on Baroque harp and Malachai Bandy on viola da gamba. Biber wrote the sonatas as musical meditations on the stations of Jesus's life, death and resurrection, with each work specifying different string tunings for the violin. In the crucifixion sonata, the two middle strings even cross each other.
McIntosh had to constantly retune in between works. His playing had exceptional clarity and rhetorical verve, and the sound colors resulting from the different levels of tension placed on the strings lent variety to a recital almost three hours long. But for all the deep musicality on show, the stop-and-go nature of the event made it feel — as too much of the festival had — more like a demonstration than a mystery.