Welcome back to my recording of the complete piano works of Erik Satie.
Volume Eight includes all 21 of the Sports et divertissements, as well as preliminary versions of "Tennis" and "Golf". So that's 23 quirky miniatures! Wow. I don't particularly care about tennis or golf but I recorded both versions of those pieces for you anyway. Many of the others concern things that I do like, however, such as swings, fireworks, flirting, octopus, and eternity.
As if that weren't enough, you also get two of Satie's trios of character pieces, one about dancing and another about time. And the "Petite Sonate", followed by five pieces of varying size which Robert Orledge believes were conceived as additional movements for this sonata, all of which have some nice counterpoint, as well as a preliminary version of "Les Pantins Dansent". I'm particularly happy about the selection of music in this installment, and I hope you enjoy listening to it!
Volume Eight was recorded on an electronic keyboard, in an undisclosed location, with a portable digital recorder, in February and March 2020. I programmed ten different original tuning systems for this volume.
What follows is a quick summary of how I constructed each tuning system. I used the system I called "Shiro" for the "Petite Sonate", "Karst" for the adjuncts to that sonata, "Fool" for "Les Pantins Dansent", "Meagre" for the "Croquis" and "Heures", and the other six were used for the "Sports et divertissements".
"Shiro" - To make this tuning system, I tempered pitches so that certain triads would consist only of the just intervals 3/2, 5/4, and 6/5. This of course results in certain chords sounding very pure and others sounding very clangorous. Like the mycelial network which I named this system after, the scheme resulted in a predominantly flat (subterranean) network of complexly interdependent elements.
"Rigging" - This is a 17-limit just intonation based on F#. There's a 11/7 and a 17/12 in there and I think those sound nice.
"Olympian" - This is the same tuning as "Rigging", except that it has E as the root and the pitch is adjusted upward by 10 cents with each ascending octave.
"Pelagic" - After reviewing the pieces I would use this tuning for, I detuned any tritone that appeared in those pieces by a quarter-tone. Then, I adjusted everything else to allow for a lot of just fifths and thirds.
"Thirst" - For this one, I widened certain intervals by 69 cents compared to 12-TET and then adjusted everything else to be just relative to those.
"Meagre" - In this one the notes of diatonic C (white notes) are in a loose 12-TET, while the others are adjusted by 11 to 37 cents.
"Chaos" - Here I rolled a bunch of dice (real physical dice) and consulted a simple chart to determine how many cents to adjust each note from 12-TET. I did this for each note of the keyboard - there were 176 dice rolls in total. This was a very tedious process and you may think it pointless, but note that this album is really great so it was worth it and you should be grateful if not envious.
"Horse" - Do you know about the ongoing classification controversy of the Devonian organism Prototaxites? Most paleontologists think that it was a huge fungus, but others think it was a giant lichen, while others think it could have been an unusual vascular plant. Whatever it was, Prototaxites towered 8 metres above the moss forests of the Devonian, looming ominously over the first tetrapods to set foot on land. That is, unless the fossils are just rolled liverwort mats. This controversy has been going on for centuries now and it's still going. Anyway. This tuning gets more and more detuned as you go further up in register.
"Karst" - This is a quarter-comma meantone temperament centered on G, but with the E and C adjusted to make some intervals more pure and others more interesting.
"Fool" - I made this one just by fucking around turning dials or whatever, just like I used to do before learning some stuff about microtonal theory for this project. This is an entirely legitimate way to do microtonality and don't let any one tell you differently. Microtonality is not the sole domain of academic nerds. Microtonality, like classical music, like all music, belongs to everyone.
If you like this project, want it to continue, and/or want to experience other weird projects from me in the future, please consider giving me money.
If you have any questions or comments, good or bad, please contact me through the link on the right.
See the notes of Volume One for more information about this project.
credits
released March 31, 2020
The album art for Volume Eight is derived from a mural by Mary Parrish at the National Museum of Natural History.
performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Carrie Z
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