Quarter Master

Students who showed up last week for the previously announced band concert at Syracuse University's Grouse Hall were in for a jolt. The band had been canceled, and in its place was a performance with two pianos that were out of tune with each other, a soprano who bent her notes off pitch, and a chamber ensemble that blatted, swooped and squeaked like an ordinary orchestra warming up. At first it all sounded merely crabbed and comic, but soon it also took on the astringent freshness of a brave new musical vocabulary. It was a group of the Syracuse music faculty in a concert of quarter-tone music.

The familiar chromatic scale used in Western music is made up of half tones (the difference in pitch between two adjacent keys on the piano). Quarter tones are twice as close together, and thus produce an octave with 24 notes instead of the usual twelve. Such fine gradations of pitch are old stuff in the music of Asia and the Middle East, but only since the turn of the century have Western composers exploited the more complex, close-cut melodies and harmonies that quarter tones make possible.*

The Syracuse concert--in which the two pianos were tuned a quarter tone apart--was a repeat of a program put on by the Contemporary Music Society at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, where it was such a success that Columbia Records decided to record it. Three young New York composers--Teo Macero, Calvin Hampton and Donald Lybbert--wrote new scores for the occasion in which colliding lines sometimes sent out strangely affecting shivers of dissonance. But the most musical mo- ments were heard in three piano pieces by the late eccentric genius of 20th century American music, Charles Ives, who used quarter tones with a naturalness that suggested he had written them all his life (which he hadn't). Ives neatly captured such effects as tinny ragtime and plaintive New England hymns, framing them in a style that encompassed melting lyricism as well as the craggy melancholy of a wild, rock-rimmed seacoast.

"Quarter-tone music has a tremendous potential," says George Pappastavrou, one of the pianists and organizers of the concert. "The thing seems to be snow balling." Yet Ives predicted more than 40 years ago that it might be centuries before composers plumbed the quarter-tone system--or listeners' ears got accustomed to it. Meantime, he warned: "To go to extremes in anything is an old-fashioned habit."

* Notable experimenters: Czechoslovakia's Alois Haba, Russia's Ivan Vyschnegradsky, author of a text on quarter-tone theory, and Mexico's Julian Carrillo, who has invented instruments that play quarter, eighth and even sixteenth tones.

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