The opportunity to conduct research at the undergraduate level is invaluable. The process inevitably involves a deep-dive into some aspect of your broader field of interest—helping with your more traditional classes and academic pursuits while sharpening a host of scholarly skills such as close reading, clear writing, and locating and evaluating sources/data. Unfortunately, there is a general assumption that high-level, independent undergraduate research is confined to the STEM fields, with the humanities—and more specifically the arts—relegated to the lecture hall or studio. As both a music major and a SURF recipient, I can confidently say this assumption is unfounded! In this blog post I'll describe the basic structure of my work this summer in the hope of demonstrating the research process in a liberal arts context.
The aim of my SURF project is to explore the interplay of music technology and tuning theory, an understudied corner of contemporary musicology. I am doing this by comparing the role of music technology in the work of several 20th century and contemporary 21st century microtonal composers.
A brief foray into terminology:
Figure 1. Two keyboards designed by Marin. The upper keyboard uses the same twelve-note octave we do; the lower, with twenty-seven keys per octave, is microtonal. Despite its start and end notes being the same, this keyboard packs more than twice the intermediary notes in the same frequency-range. Mersenne, Harmonicorum, Liber Primus, pp. 66 & 68 (Paris, Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1636).
Music technology refers to the tools, both mechanical and electrical, that facilitate the writing, notating, and performing of music: the instruments, notational/engraving systems, and—for contemporary composers—synthesizers and computer software. Tuning theory is a branch of music theory that explores how we determine the notes our instruments should play as well as the process of making those instruments play the desired notes. Microtonal music is music that is written for/ performed on instruments tuned to play more than the standard twelve repeating notes available on, for example, a piano or guitar. See, for instance, Figure 1, which shows two keyboard designs by the French polymath Marin Mersenne.
In practical terms, this means that all the composers I am studying have written music that lies outside the theoretical bounds of traditional Western music. Consequently, they also compose outside the bounds of the traditional tools available to composers. To hear their music played they have to engage with the tools of music creation and performance in ways non-microtonal composers don't, either modifying or creating anew the means to notate and perform their music. Some of these composers, such as Harry Partch and Lou Harrison, built their own custom instruments; Partch’s music could only be played on the large ensemble of unique instruments he created throughout his life.
Others, notably Ben Johnston and Amelia Huff, adapt the performance techniques of existing instruments to achieve their microtonal vision. Johnston, for example, wrote extensively for a string quartet made up of unmodified violin, viola, and cello, leaving it to the players to eschew decades of training and muscle-memory to produce the “out of tune” notes he wanted. It is the history of these augmentations of traditional music technology—either through creation or modification—that I am studying.
Figure 2. The “Quadrangularis Reversum,” designed and built by Partch in 1965. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32963091
I am not focusing on the theoretical systems developed by my chosen composers; instead, I am looking at how each composer interfaced with music technology to apply their given tuning theory to the actual creation and performance of music. Most of my days are spent either reading biographical and academic material or listening to and analyzing music. When it comes to written material, the kind of work I am doing is not dissimilar to that of a researcher studying literature or philosophy, or perhaps even one of the social sciences; careful and critical reading is combined with diligent note-taking in the effort to evaluate both primary and secondary sources, with the goal being to synthesize the information in these texts around the specific aims of my project. My materials include (auto)biographies, performance reviews, diaries, as well as academic papers and journal articles. Most of these sources don’t focus on the technological aspect of whatever they are discussing, so much of my reading is spent trying to tease out the foundational, but often subsurface, technological threads that weave through a given text.
There is also the vital task of musical analysis. It makes sense that the musical periphery—the history of music, the physics of music, etc.—can be studied, but what about the music itself—that ephemeral, emotional, and entirely subjective expression of some seemingly ineffable part of the human experience? The answer lies in the act of listening. The listening I do for my research is not the listening I do when I am tuning into the radio in the car or humming along the music playing in the background of the grocery store; it is active, it is focused, and, most of all, it is critical.
It may surprise those who lack experience with music research, but this listening—and the analysis that emerges from it—strives for a certain element of objectivity, or at least empiricism. It is true that the academic study of music can never reach the levels of objectivity that the sciences can; nor, for that matter, should it attempt to. But the goal of having a clear and strong methodology is as real in my research as it is in any lab. Finding a suitable analytical methodology for the wide range of music I am covering has been one of the most challenging aspects of my project. Like the composers I am studying, I had to modify a more conventional tool—music analysis— to make it work for microtonal music. Ultimately, I decided to base my work on the analytical methodology presented by music theorist Dora Hanninen in her 2012 book A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization. Hanninen's method is extremely scientific in its goal of breaking down a given piece of music systematically; in fact, it draws inspiration in part from a branch of music analysis originating in the 1950s that applied the mathematical concepts of group theory to music.
All told, my research this summer has been extremely rewarding. It has helped me cultivate a deeper understanding of both my chosen field and the broader world of academia; further, it has improved my note-taking, writing, and analytical abilities. I hope it is clear from my process that liberal arts research is possible and, what's more, both practical and fun! I would sincerely encourage anyone in the arts or the humanities to consider doing a research project of their own. Dedicated, heartfelt research into art is both personally invigorating and, most importantly, vital to any thriving academic community and society.
