Kraig Grady: While Australia had Elsie Hamilton who can claim as Australia’s first western microtonalist, you seem to be the father of a more substantial re-emergence of interest. Most present day practitioners seem to have a line to you or your students. Since your work has been primarily in electronics, what sparked your interest in microtones?
Greg Schiemer: After several decades teaching music it was inevitable that some students would eventually steer in a direction that reflect my musical interest. While I am honoured, the one who probably deserves it more is the composer, musicologist and performer Graham Hair though he too would probably feel the same way I do about a father-figure title which seems a bit like a proclamation of terra nullius in musical terms.
While my interest in microtones began before 1984, it was during my visiting artist residence at the Sydney Conservatorium that year, Graham played me examples from the LP Easley Blackwood Twelve Microtonal Etudes as his interest lay in equal division of the octave tunings. Graham was well aware of problems associated with the Tupperware instruments I had built for the One Extra Company the previous year.
In 1986 Graham eventually became my boss. I will never forget the visiting artist residency in 1988 during which Bill Coates presented one of Fokker’s original archiphon instruments to undergraduate students in the BMus composition and performance programs as part of the composer-performer workshop elective. During the six-week residency Graham trained the students to sing music notated in 31-tone equal temperament and presented a public concert program of music in 31-tET by Coates and others.
There was some initial grumbling from composers who felt the music was unworthy of their brand or instrumentalists who felt demoted by being asked to sing, but the experience of taking part in this elective changed student attitudes. Graham, who they knew as a founding member of groups like ACME and Flederman, who had presented dozens of premieres during the 70s and 80s, had given them first hand experience of a less fashionable development in contemporary music with connections dating back to Vicentino — all without promoting his own music.
By 1988 I had already developed and performed algorithmic compositions on the Datum, the microcomputer I had hacked for developing MIDI applications in 1984. It can be seen on public display in the display cabinet between the two Recital Halls at the Conservatorium. Somewhere I still have a draft of Motorola 6800 assembler code for translating MIDI note numbers into 31-tET scale pitches which were to be played on a Yamaha FB-01.
The following year Graham left the Conservatorium to take up a professorial appointment at the University of Glasgow where his specialty became composing and performing music in 19-tET. To this day he has continued to train elite vocalists such as Scottish Voices in Glasgow as well as groups from Radford College, Virginia and Boston. Before he left Sydney he began training VoiceWorks and as its artistic director in 1994 commissioned me to write the Vedic Mass.
KG: So how did you approach microtonality during this commission?
GS: By that time I had begun to deal with tuning more formally, thanks to resources like John Chalmer’s Divisions of the Tetrachord and David Doty’s Just Intonation Primer. I highly recommend Doty’s book for anyone struggling to comprehend Partch’s Genesis of a Music as I did. I am also indebted to Barry Vercoe’s Csound and recommendations on tuning opcodes made by Bill Alves, whose chapter in The Csound Book is still a resource I refer to.
The Vedic Mass was my first creative foray into a systematic tuning. The work is based on a 7-limit tonality diamond with complementary major and minor tonalities on intersecting axes. The diamond has dominant 7th chords and half diminished chords which can be expressed as pure just intonation intervals and pitches that can be notated using standard music notation with a slight variation on two notes.
My assumption that this would make it easier for singers to sing just intonation intervals scale was short lived. By the time VoiceWorks premiered the Vedic Mass in 1998 Graham was no longer its artistic director. The premiere in Eugene Goosens Hall at the ABC resulted in an excellent performance — but in 12-tET. Over the past two years Graham has rehearsed Scottish Voices as they learn to sing it in the intonation originally intended for the Vedic Mass. It has just been recorded on CD which is scheduled for release at a concert in Glasgow on September 8.
KG: Congratulations on the recording and I look forward to hearing this piece. It is quite different than the use of cell phones that many might know you for. Can you tell us how this came about and how this evolved?
GS: In the US you call them cell phones, in Indonesia they call them hand phones, but for argument’s sake let’s call them mobile phones. Before I began trying to make music with mobile phones I had already been playing with mobile sound using bespoke hardware, custom-built for that purpose. The idea to build such an instrument dates back to the very first time I saw and heard a moving loudspeaker demonstrated during an experimental music and dance workshop directed by Bill Fontana and Nanette Hassall in the Recording Hall of the Sydney Opera House in 1976.
Bill Fontana presented a demonstration that involved swinging a loudspeaker on the end of a rope — I seem to recall there were two people swinging — with speakers connected to a power amplifier, each playing a sine wave. Apart from a spinning loudspeaker event at Clifton Hill Community Music Centre in May the following year, Bill never took the idea of speaker swinging further but he had essentially released the idea into the wild where it became public property. My strongest recollection from what I had heard in the Recording Hall was the wonderful chorus effect produced by the interaction of sine waves.
At first you would notice the Doppler shift produced by the moving sound source which people usually associate with the sound of the bullroarer — a ceremonial instrument used by Aboriginal people in Australia but also found in traditional cultures in other parts of the world.
In Bill Fontana’s demonstration, you would then notice a chorus sound as the Doppler-shifted reflections of the sine wave mixed with the original sine wave. This produces a very subtle form of amplitude modulation, an effect resembling vibrato that one hears from a Leslie speaker.
Each speaker was still physically tethered by a rope to the person swinging it while at the same time it is tethered to the cable that feeds audio signal from the amplifier to the speakers. After several rotations, cable and rope became hopelessly plaited to the point where the swinger had to stop and untangle everything. And it was difficult not to feel a bit nervous watching two large lounge room hi-fi speakers flying past you as you sat there just a few feet away. It was like something teenage kids might try with the home hi-fi system while dad’s at work and mum’s at the shops. Obviously anything involving mobile electronic sound had to be self-contained and battery-powered.
To that end several years later, I built four mobile electronic oscillators, each with in-built battery-powered amplifier and speaker. Each unit was mounted in plastic kitchenware and swung from a 1-metre length of venetian blind cord. I called them UFOs — an acronym for Ubiquitous Fontana Oscillators, named to acknowledge the one who released the idea into the wild several years previously.
KG: A fine tribute to Fontana. Can you tell us more about this ensemble and the pieces you did?
GS: The UFOs became part of the set of instruments known as the Tupperware Gamelan. The impetus to build the first UFOs was a large outdoor performance trilogy Between Silence and Light by choreographer Yen Lu Wong, staged by Kai Tai Chan’s One Extra Company in 1980.
For music to accompany the third performance in Yen Lu’s trilogy, I created bespoke instruments: four UFOs, 12 handbells made from appropriated metal objects and 12 bamboo poles. The poles were played by dropping them vertically onto the ground and while they were not being played, placed on the ground radiating from the centre of a circle in the shape of a mandala.
The performance took place on the northern broadwalk of the Sydney Opera House, in other words, outside an architectural enclosure which meant you only heard the Doppler shift without reflections that result in chorusing. I have since referred to the accompanying music as Mandala because it was the first of several pieces using mobile sound sources.
KG: There was a special context to Mandala 2 from what I understand. Can you tell us about that?
GS: Mandala 2 was created specifically for a group of women who had spent most of their lives incarcerated in a religious institution founded in the early part of the last century. One of the nuns, realising that the institutional culture of a bygone era had compromised gospel values, had decided to move out of the institution and, in the spirit of Dorothy Day or Mum Shirl, to live among people she served. These women, along with community support workers and people working in theatre and music, performed Mandala 2 in the former Council Chambers in Johnston St, Annandale as part of the 1981 Leichhardt Festival. None of the women had previously appeared in public and none had any performance experience.
For Mandala 2, I constructed a single etched printed circuit board with an oscillator and amplifier circuit and provision for mounting a loud-speaker, battery holder and tuning potentiometer. There were 16 UFOs with circuits mounted in plastic containers with speaker grills made from spice bottle filters and coloured lids identifying the four pitch registers for each circuit board, i.e. yellow (soprano), orange (alto), blue (tenor) and green (bass). Each group spanned a range of approximately a compound fifth (i.e. an octave and a fifth). The entire compass of 16 instruments spanned about four and a half octaves.
Quite by chance around the same time I was building the UFOs, the Canadian composer Gordon Monahan created a piece that was actually called Speaker Swinging. His work was inspired by hearing hi-fi systems from passing motor traffic and pure Doppler-shifted sound as it moved relative to the listener.
KG: I was about to mention Gordon Monahan’s work. I happened to share a concert with him at New Music America.
GS: My inspiration came from hearing a sound source moving within the confines of a building where the Doppler-shifted reflections mix with the original sound source. This is quite different to the traditional bullroarer which makes sound aerodynamically. Its pitch is affected by varying the speed of swinging. In the case of the UFOs, the pitch of the sound source is not affected by aerodynamic movement but interacts with its Doppler-shifted reflections to produce chorusing.
KG: Do you know of others who also have investigated this direction?
Yes, Ron Nagorcka and Warren Burt were two I know of who also took up where Bill Fontana left off. In 1977 at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, their duo Plastic Platypus performed Warren’s Hebraic Variations introducing another variant of speaker swinging. Warren and Ron used portable cassette players, to record and play back sounds, a la Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. Both have also experimented with microtonal tuning.
KG: There was other work that emerged working with Kai Tai Chan?
GS: As I mentioned earlier, One Extra Company had staged Yen Lu Wong’s production in 1980 and Kai Tai was keen for me to use the 16 UFOs as sound-producing pendulums to accompany a new choreographic work for the company’s 1983 season. Design changes required to accommodate the choreography meant the UFOs would no longer fly, meaning Mandala 2 would no longer be playable. Nevertheless, with Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music in mind, I went ahead. The working title was Porcelain Dialogue but by the time the show opened it was called Moving Sound/Falling Light.
The choreography involved dance movement accompanied by 16 pendulums set in motion at the start of the performance, all lit by a chandelier of 144 miniature lights. A lighting chandelier, designed by John Bayliss, used the same plastic kitchenware I had used to build the UFOs. As the pendulums gradually came to rest, the lighting chandelier gradually descended from a height of several metres to less than a metre above the stage area. In choreographic terms, dance movement was gradually restricted from a wide area at the start to a small area at the end.
I modified the UFOs by adding a multiplexed tuning circuit that allowed each pendulum to play one of four pitches. These were pre-tuned using four circuit-board-mounted potentiometers. I built a pseudo random sequence generator (based on a design by Carl Vine) to make the 16 pendulums playable by one cast member when the group went on tour. In concert, the pitch of each oscillator was sequenced by a train of digital pulses emitted by the pseudo random sequence generator under the control of toggle switches. Using switches the operator enabled or disabled logic gates and clock signals to generate cyclic patterns that translated into hocket-like melodic sequences alternating between different groups of two, three or four pendulums. The resulting polyphonic texture was overlaid with phase shifting which became more noticeable as each pendulum gradually came to rest.
KG: How systematic were the tunings of the Mandala pieces ?
GS: Not systematic at all. In Mandala, with its ritualistic performance gestures that complement the dance action — e.g. dropping bamboo poles, ringing handbells and swinging UFOs — I was conscious of Cardew’s The Great Learning, Paragraph 4, where players enter in canon, singing and sustaining random pitches in sync while striking all manner of bespoke percussion, described in Cardew’s score as “sonorous objects”.
And in Mandala 2, I instructed each player to tune their UFO until it produced a sound consonant with the entire ensemble. This essentially fast-tracked the gradual process that happens over the duration of the Great Learning, Paragraph 7 where Cardew instructs players to “sing on a note you can hear being sung”. It wasn’t until 1983 when I had to tune the modified UFOs for the One Extra Company and delegate instructions to an operator that I realised the limitations of this approach to tuning.
KG: Seeing this limitation, how did you then proceed and develop from there?
GS: Tuning UFOs by ear offered an aural choice limited to pure just intervals like perfect 5th (3/2), major 3rd (5/4), etc., but it gave me no perceptual or theoretical framework that allowed me to create anything more than just diatonic or pentatonic scales.
That all changed in 1998 when I met tuning theorist Erv Wilson for the first time at his ‘ranch’ in North Los Angeles. He showed me the aural difference between the tuning of two mallet instruments he had built, one tuned in 5-limit, the other in 7-limit. He invited me to play a short musical fragment on each instrument which resulted in an epiphany, revealing how different prime-numbered harmonics affect tuning, an effect immediately noticeable to an untrained ear, a revelation like seeing a landscape in colour for the first time after only ever having seen it in black and white.
Erv also gave me a copy of “D’alessandro, Like A Hurricane”, which outlined his theory of Combination Product Sets. This ultimately led to a work called Tempered Dekanies composed in Csound, a music synthesis language created by Barry Vercoe. The Csound opcode cps2pch, added by John ffitch, converted linear factors into frequencies and provided the basic tools for working with CPS scales.
The work premiered in 2002 as an interlude in a concert program given in the Glass Herbarium of Sydney’s Botanic Garden by contemporary duo Charisma. Incidentally, Julia Ryder, co-founder of Charisma, remembers the flying foxes going berserk when the piece started. It was my Rite of Spring moment, thanks to a local colony of urban fruit bats.
My meeting with Erv in 1988 turned out to be a watershed that ultimately laid the harmonic foundation for the Pocket Gamelan, a project to implement microtonal tuning systems in mobile phones. This was a project funded by the Australian Research Council between 2003-2005. The project resulted in some of the first performances using mobile phones and additional pieces in the Mandala series from 2005 to 2009.
For Mandala 3 to Mandala 9, multiple j2me phones were programmed to a Wilson scale, except for Mandala 6 which used an Al-Farabi dorian scale. The pieces mostly involved some form of Bluetooth interaction between three or four players. The exception was Mandala 7 for 16 players where each phone was independently controlled with pre-tuned notes activated by commands initiated on each phone by the player. Mandala 7 used the same configuration as Mandala 2 except players no longer tuned their instrument by ear.
For Mandala 4, I created a desktop GUI for experimenting with Wilson’s Euler-Fokker Genus scale (a close relative of his CPS scale). The GUI was generated in Scala, open-source tuning software authored by Manuel Op de Coul, using one of three Scala command files I wrote to export tuning data directly from Scala scale memory to other applications such as Pure Data (pd-scales.cmd), Csound (cs-demo.cmd) and 128-key tuned MIDI SysEx dump (header.cmd). These command files are included as part of the distribution when users install Scala (https://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/cmdlist.txt).
KG: Going back for a minute, there’s quite a gap between the Mandala pieces created for Tupperware instruments and the Pocket Gamelan …
GS: There was a hiatus of more than two decades between Mandala 2 and Mandala 3. This was time well spent in an environment surrounded by colleagues working in music. There were students to challenge my musical assumptions which had been formed through study with Peter Sculthorpe, taking part in AZ performances, collaborating with dancers and working as a digital technician. The new environment saw public radiophonic projects like A Concert on Bicycles and composition projects where instrument-building became an integral part of the creative process. All this opened pathways for students to become research assistants and eventually, independent research collaborators. At the University of Wollongong, Mark Havryliv wrote Bluetooth applications for j2me phones, Eva Cheng got my software instrument for Tempered Dekanies running on a Linux phone (the Open Moko Neo Freerunner), and Etienne Deleflie created an initial iOS template that eventually became the Satellite Gamelan, and Erv Wilson’s microtonal tuning systems became the focus of research by Terumi Narushima.
KG: Am I correct in sensing that the focus on mobile phones has some special meaning for you?
GS: For me, mobile phones have always been about a collective of instruments that would be easy to play and quick to learn, just like the 16 UFOs I built for Mandala 2. We have to realise that this technology is also the entry level computer technology for the majority of the world’s population, and that media players embedded in such devices unwittingly propagate a single system of tuning at the expense of tuning diversity that still exists in many places on earth. In Indonesia I had the good fortune to come face to face with microtonality in a culture where musicians don’t have to ‘rediscover’ it, the way I do.
KG: The Pocket Gamelan led to some unexpected directions and performances?
GS: It led to musical collaboration that exceeded my wildest musical expectations, like the one you saw at Ubud during Indonesian Music Expo 2013, organised by composer and musicologist Frank Raden Notosudirdjo.
The culmination of my work with the Pocket Gamelan was several performance collaborations that happened as a result of a cultural workshop entitled GAUNG 21st Century Global Music Education directed by Frank Raden Notosudirdjo, Stomu Y’mashta and Jean-Claude Eloy in April 2009. The workshop was the brainchild of Franki, a composer, musicologist and a founding member of the Sacred Bridge Foundation, an organisation formed to overcome barriers that undermine social cohesion in a modern society with diverse ethnic, cultural and faith traditions. The Foundation ran previous workshops in response to ethnic rivalries, civil unrest and natural calamities, such as the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Aceh. After seeing performances of Mandala 7 at ISEA in Singapore in 2008, Franki invited me to bring the Pocket Gamelan to Indonesia.
Two performance collaborations happened during this workshop. Both used scales devised by Erv Wilson. Both performances took place in a wonderfully resonant acoustic venue in the central atrium of the Etnobotanic Institut, Bedugul in the mountains of Bali.
In the first collaboration, an elder Sufi singer from Aceh, Marzuki Hasan improvised chant in response to melodic fragments in a microtonal accompaniment provided by 16 phones played by 8 younger musicians. My initial plan was to train players to perform Mandala 7. However, during rehearsals Marzuki, who was present as an observer, was intrigued by the tuning and kept trying to vocalise. It was clear that sticking to my original plan would complicate things so I decided to abandon the performance of Mandala 7 and instead invited him through an interpreter to collaborate in creating a new work.
Marzuki accepted the challenge and against a microtonal backdrop created by 16 swinging phones tuned to a 35-note per octave scale by Erv Wilson, he improvised a vocal part, not just pitches but words. It was a powerful performance that moved some in the audience to tears. I don’t know exactly what he sang but was told he was calling out to people he knew who vanished during the 2004 tsunami. The performance was not recorded but a review appeared in Kompas which was published in all the major population centres throughout the archipelago.
And in the second collaboration, guzheng virtuoso Eni Agustien improvised against notes of a dekany with an accompanying electronic sound diffused throughout the concert space using a single battery-powered speaker lying on the floor projected at the ceiling.
Using source code for Tempered Dekanies to demonstrate possible harmonic flavours, a dekany was synthesised from harmonics which Eni chose to match the configuration of her butterfly guzheng, a string instrument built in 1978 by Hé Bǎo Quán. Alternate strings radiate like butterfly wings from a fixed bridge in the centre of the instrument to bridges on opposite ends. Strings on one side of the instrument were tuned to the odd-numbered pitches of the dekany, and on the other, to the even-numbered pitches.
For the accompaniment once again I resorted to the Csound instrument I created for Tempered Dekanies. The 2009 performance called Butterfly Dekany was never recorded but in 2022 a new version of the performance was produced online during the Covid lockdowns. It captures some of the sound diffusion in that venue. This was also the quality of sound I had in mind when I developed the Satellite Gamelan app.
KG: Csound has remained an important tool for you then.
GS: The Csound instrument in Tempered Dekanies uses a microtonal chorusing algorithm that is a variant of the harmonic glissando instrument created by Jean-Claude Risset in 1968. Unlike Risset’s instrument where detuning of sine wave oscillators is constant throughout the note, my oscillators are detuned gradually over the duration of a note to create a form of amplitude modulation; for each pitch, the oscillators start in unison, detune slowly then finish in unison. It creates an illusion of a gradually moving sound source that accelerates as it moves from a stationary point and decelerates as it comes to rest. No artificial reverb was added.
Chorusing provides an amplitude modulator that helps propagate an audible sine wave signal in large resonant spaces. It is analogous to the way voltages are transmitted efficiently over long distances with the help of an alternating current signal. It also functions somewhat like the vibrato that operatic singers use to project bel canto vocal sound into a large auditorium without the assistance of electronic amplification.
The Csound instrument with its unique form of microtonal chorusing is ideal for projecting high-pitched chorus sounds into large resonant spaces using miniature speakers less than a half centimetre in diameter. The concert space can become, simultaneously, a giant resonant instrument excited by a malleable array of miniature speakers and a shared listening space where an audience can experience electronic music in exactly the same way audiences have experienced music collectively prior to the advent of electronics.
KG: Some of your recent pieces also involve using the mobile phones of the audience?
GS: With my recent pieces there was never a role for the audience in the way that Golan Levin used audience phones in 2001 in his Dialtones (A Telesymphony). The Satellite Gamelan app was initially made for concert performance by 80 musicians in multiple venues connected via internet as specified by rules of the International Space Time Concerto Competition. Ever since the premiere of Transposed Dekany on November 30 2012, I continued to revise the app and use it for performing the work in single venues.
Over the past few years I have experimented with a new technology called web assembly that will eventually replace the iOS app with one that works on other mobile platforms. Concert premieres using this technology were scheduled for Sydney MicroFest in 2023 and 2024 but on both occasions 11th-hour technical problems made it necessary to divert from the original plan.
I decided to challenge the audience. As they entered the concert space everyone was invited to scan a QR code using their phone before taking their place on seats arranged in a circle. The QR code downloaded an application onto each phone with a play button to start it. After a brief explanation why everyone should use speaker phones and not headphones, I gave the cue to start— a conductor’s count of 4-for-nothing followed by a downbeat. In response, everyone tapped their play button ‘together’ to start audio playback through multiple phone speakers, each playing the same audio almost synchronously — or plesiochronously.
In the premiere performance of Transposed Dekany, each phone family is tuned to a different transposition of the scale, represented here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFPpLMgUG5c) as five venues interconnected via internet. In the Satellite Gamelan app, a 5-bit Gray code ensured that every transposition is heard playing alone and in combination with other transpositions. Every combination occurs once and once only.
In this scenario each hand-held phone functions like a fold-back speaker that concert musicians use to differentiate sounds they play from the concert sound. The difference here is that there is no mains-powered amplification and concert sound relies entirely on fold-back speakers. Handheld phones project upwards towards the ceiling to diffuse the sound throughout the concert space. The ‘slop’ in synchronisation between phones creates the illusion of a virtual space much larger than the actual concert space.
This happened when Music for Mobile Sources was replaced by Six Dekanies at Sydney MicroFest 2024 on June 16 and though the program note was clearly meant for another work that synthesised audio on the actual phones, it explains the significance of what the audience experienced:
2024 marks the centenary of a musical premiere that laid a foundation for the work you are about to hear, Music for Mobile Sources. George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, which premiered in Paris in 1924, featured an array of bespoke musical instruments designed and built by the composer. Among these was a pneumatic mechanism for synchronising multiple player pianos that became the unlikely inspiration for a patent awarded in 1942 for a secret communications device. The Lamarr-Antheil patent is generally acknowledged by engineers as pivotal to the development of frequency hopping, one of the foundations of mobile phone communication. The inspiration for it came in Hollywood where Antheil met his collaborator, Hedy Kiesler Markey, an Austrian actress, better known as Hedy Lamarr. She migrated to the US after leaving her former husband, Fritz Mandl, a controversial businessman who had worked for the Nazis after the forced sale of his Hirtenberg munitions factory following the Anschluss. The Lamarr-Antheil patent was gifted to the US military as part of the allied war effort but was never used as initially intended — as an anti-jamming device for radio controlled torpedoes. It was first used during the Cuban missile crisis and when the patent expired in the 1980s, became crucial in global engineering initiatives to make better use of the broadcast spectrum thereby paving the way for mobile phone communication. It seems fitting that Music for Mobile Sources, performed using mobile phones, commemorates the premiere of the musical work that spawned the hardware platform for software instruments used in the work you are about to hear.
Six Dekanies continues to explore the nexus between melody, rhythm and timbre using the Csound instrument I originally made for Tempered Dekanies along with several other 10-note CPS scales I had tried but not used in 2002. I had also used the exact same program code in 2009 to play CPS scale examples for Eni while she selected a single scale to tune the butterfly guzheng. Six Dekanies sounded quite different playing on multiple mobile phones in the ambience of the concert space. Throughout the piece, scales flow seamlessly from one scale to the next simply by changing harmonic factors that define the characteristic flavour of each scale.
