A few months ago, I was asked to be a respondent for a talk given by the great Johnny Reinhard about his views on Charles Ives, and specifically the use of extended Pythagorean tuning in Ives's Concord Sonata.1 After the talk, Johnny kindly gave me a couple of his CDs. I was quite captivated by much of one of the discs, and coming on the heels of last month's CCM, which also involved issues of tuning, I am happy to present my favorite track from Johnny and the AFMM's disc, Chamber.Like Revueltas, the last Mexican composer to be featured in a classical clip of the month, Julián Carrillo was a composer with an unusual sensitivity to the evocative possibilities inherent in the careful interplay of subtle timbral control and pitch material. In Carrillo's case, he was light years ahead of others, and surely must be counted among the founding figures in microtonal music. His principal innovation in the field was the development of what he called the "13th Sound," and the work here, the Preludio a Colón, named for Christopher Columbus, is one of his first works to explore this new sound world. With a scoring which includes a 1/4-tone guitar and a 16th-tone harp, along with more conventional forces, the delicate nuances of the work are finely demonstrated in this expressive performance.
--------
1 Incidentally, whether Ives "meant" for the work to be performed in this tuning or not, I argued that he almost surely would have been in favor of the performance which took place a few days after the talk. Those interested in these ideas in general might consult not only Reinhard's work, but also the work of my former Buffalo colleague, Myles Skinner.