| Works by Larry Polansky for instruments in just intonation with Robert Black, Krystyna Bobrowski, Tom Erbe, Ron Erickson and Alyssa Hess Reit.
All pieces digitally remastered, edited and assembled for CD by Tom Erbe with Larry Polansky between January 1992 and July 1994 at Dartmouth College, the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, and California Institute for the Arts. HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language) is written by Phil Burk, Larry Polansky, and David Rosenboom
Another You (1978; slight revisions, 1981) is a set of variations on a jazz standard, although the tune itself (and the chord changes) appears in only a few of the variations. Each variation explores different formal, textural, or harmonic ideas, and the entire piece deals in a somewhat unusual way with extremes of register, dynamics, and time.
Slightly different diatonic tunings, all drawn from the harmonic series, are used for each octave of the harp. The harp is treated like a large folk harp in that no pedals are used, except in the last variation, where the C/C# pedal is used briefly as a kind of tuning pun on the minute difference between the seventeenth harmonic and the equal-tempered minor second.
Movement for Andrea Smith (My Funny Valentine for just string quartet) was written in 1978 for a dance by Toronto choreographer Andrea Smith, and revised a few months later to its current form. It is scored for two violins and two violas. Like the earlier Movement for Lou Harrison, for which it is a kind of companion piece, Movement for Andrea Smith is written for retuned strings in just intonation, using only natural harmonics (here only up to the fifth harmonic). Unlike Movement for Lou Harrison, which uses a large scale harmonically-derived form, the two short sections of Movement for Andrea Smith are loosely based on related "found" musical sources: the jazz standard "My Funny Valentine" and the opening chord from Carl Ruggles' Angels. Both these musics seemed to me suggestive of and suggested by the tuning itself.
Movement for Lou Harrison (for just bass quartet) is one of my earliest works. It was first written as a duet for two violins in 1975-6, and later rewritten for four retuned string basses in 1976-77. The score was recopied and slightly revised in 1988. p> In Movement for Lou Harrison I was mainly interested in harmonic movement. All pitches are part of the harmonic series of a RphantomS 1/1, which is actually the III (A) string of the bass itself. That note is never sounded (the piece ends on the perfect fifth, or 3/2).
Horn (for Krystyna Bobrowski) is a version of the harmonic idea I first used in Psaltery (one of several such "orchestrations" I've done over the past fifteen years): a continual modulation between three harmonic series. Horn was recorded by Tom Erbe at California Institute for the Arts, January 16, 1994. Richard Zvonar, co-producer. A final copy of the score was made in 1991-2 and published in Xenharmonikon 14, 1993. |