19-Tone Theory and Applications

Abstract

Microtonal music is one of those subjects that has always been around, but few people have ever had the will to investigate it thoroughly. The main reason why more people have not dealt with microtonal music is that there are almost no instruments that allow composers to experiment with it. In spite of all this, the music of many cultures even at the present time employs non-equaltempered scales, and even Western music did until the eighteenth century, when mathematicians worked out the logarithmic basis of equal temperament. In this article, the author explains how he became interested in 19-tone equal temperament and how he explored the possible resources available in such a system. This involves creating a chord grammar based on similarity relationships, similar to what he has used in his music written in 12-tone equal temperament. Through these considerations he discovered a particular set of chords that have special properties in terms of their interval content, number of transpositions, and relationships to other chords. Finally, the author explains how he used these properties in the music he composed in this temperament.