ISSUE Project Room : an open and versatile environment in which established and emerging artists conduct, exhibit and perform new and site-specific work

More from Tony's brain today: this one comes from the MIVOS Quartet's June 2009 performance at ISSUE that also featured Luke DuBois's string quartet "Hard Data." Tony Conrad's "Minor" takes a 31-pitch-to-the-octave scale (a step up from the usual twelve), and fairly common harmonies become unfamiliar.

The first chord sounds, then the second, in an angular harmonic move like something from late Wagner, and back to the first chord again. Or, wait, it sounds like a new chord now--the microtonal inflections giving each chord a different vector and acceleration, like looking at the same object at dusk instead of dawn.

The contentious history of the "minor" scale might have something to do with this. Harry Partch, whose influence trickled down through La Monte Young (and many, many others), used an "undertone" scale as well as an "overtone" scale. In this tuning, the composer would (essentially) multiply the base pitch by whole numbers for a major scale, and divide the base pitch for the minor scale. Young, on the other hand, just used the upper-reaches of the major scale (the multiples 6, 7, and 9) to form the minor triad: there were many more different conceptions of "minor" theorized in the 20th century alone, which is not to mention that the minor chord was the number one roadblock for just about every tuning theorist since "minor" came into being.

Tony Conrad uses these "minor" tunings and more to defamiliarize the scale as we know it. For this performance, the MIVOS Quartet detuned their instruments ("scordatura") so that they could play in the same hand positions to reach strange notes on mistuned strings. The performance resonates with the open strings, and feels less like moving through standard chromatic harmony than like looking through a microscope at a large object and trying to keep the whole thing in your head at once.