Microtones

Intervals smaller than a semitone, how composers built them and why notation struggles.

Related

IntervalScaleModernContemporary

A semitone is not the smallest step. Arabic maqam, Indian raga and the avant-garde place finer steps between keys; a piano's twelve keys and staff notation cannot hold them.

The question

Microtones are intervals smaller than a semitone; quarter tones, sixth tones and cents measure them. To write and play them, composers invented signs and instruments. Ears trained on equal temperament hear them as out of tune.

Historical arc

Greek tetrachords already contained microtonal steps. Vicentino built a 31-tone keyboard to split the semitone further. In 1929 Hába wrote the quarter-tone opera The Mother; Wyschnegradsky continued the work in Paris. Partch built instruments for a 43-tone scale; Penderecki used quarter-tone slides in Threnody; Ligeti treated pitch as a continuous band.

The turning point

In the 1920s and 1930s microtones moved into institutions and repertory. Electronic music and spectral analysis took over, while MIDI's grid shut them out again. Players rely on the ear and special fingerings, theorists count cents, notation has no single answer.

What to listen for

Start with Hába's quarter-tone piano pieces: a layer remains between two neighbouring keys. Then Wyschnegradsky, whose harmony sounds like a stretched shadow. Ligeti crowds clusters toward continuous pitch; Scelsi lets a single note wander inside itself. The library versions are mostly piano reductions, so you hear an outline.

Related

The scale of intervals is Interval, the edge of the scale Scale; the line runs from Modern into Contemporary and leaves a trace in the Violin's slides.

Sources

• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry "Microtonal music" — historical outline checked, not quoted
• Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After (Oxford University Press, 3rd ed.) — context checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.