The Out Door

Four (or 40,000) Vuvuzelas

How the vuvuzela relates to noise and minimalism, plus interviews with Z’EV, Duane Pitre, and George Chen.

Marc Masters and Grayson Currin
, July 9, 2010

Four (or 40,000) Vuvuzelas

III. Duane Pitre: A Space for Sound

Duane Pitre by Lauren Cecil

Lately, it seems, some of my favorite records remind me to turn it up. Last year's Monoliths & Dimensions by exploratory metal pair Sunn O))) once again proclaimed "Maximum volume yields maximum results." Meanwhile, Jim O'Rourke's The Visitor insisted, politely, that you "Please listen on speakers, loud."

This year, add Duane Pitre's Origin to the list: The latest release from the New Orleans-based Pitre, Origin was written and recorded during the young composer's crucial years in New York, using guitars meticulously strung and tuned using just intonation and, here, bowed by an ensemble of six. To be as reductive as possible, just intonation is any tuning system where the musical intervals might be represented by ratios of whole numbers. Equal temperament, the basis of the music familiar to most Western ears, divides an interval into a number of equal steps, most frequently 12. Consider the neck of a common electric guitar, for reference.

When used in loud, immersive drones, such as those of La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and James Tenney, just intonation can produce overwhelming musical phosphorescence, with tones reflecting around and radiating through whatever room they fill. It's a sound of curious depth, sort of always inviting the listener to come closer, to listen a little bit more. "Origin was composed for live performance, to be performed at loud volumes in a resonant space," the liner notes methodically explain. "To recreate this experience via this recording, the listener should try playing it at relatively loud volumes in a space large enough to convey the piece's resonant qualities." Follow through, and you'll be rewarded by a record that embraces with sound. Each movement of each bow feels like an invitation. By the time Origin peaks, in its final and fifth movement, the sound has become its own, massive world.

Origin is Pitre's most compelling work to date, but it might not be his most enduring. Pitre has become a casual but essential advocate for just intonation. That is, while he insists that just intonation is more of a tuning system and a way to get a certain sound than some way of life or cult of idiosyncrasy, he's helped make it accessible. Last year, Pitre curated the terrific eight-track set called The Harmonic Series: A Compilation of Musical Works in Just Intonation for Important Records. Uniting three generations of just intonation composers and a half-dozen approaches and instruments, it's a statement of the vitality and variety possible with one alternate approach to tuning. As first impressions go, it's perfect.

Duane Pitre: "Mvmt II: Carpenter"

Duane Pitre: Mvmt II: The Carpenter

You left New York last fall and returned to New Orleans. Origin was your last major New York piece, and it's quite different from your first major New Orleans work, Feel Free. Do you think your composition is affected by your location?

Duane Pitre: I'm very much affected by my environment. It comes through in my work. I was interested in seeing how that would come about from moving here and what results would come out of it. There's already been one major piece, Feel Free, that I've written here that I feel is definitely a direct result of living here.

The result of being here and how this piece came about would have to be that there's more silence. I mean silence in a relative way, obviously. My section of my neighborhood in New Orleans is quite quiet. You can hear some things that I couldn't hear in New York on a day-to-day basis, or, if I heard them, it just became part of the mass noise. I've lived in several different places when composing in this realm of music, and one of those places was San Diego. That was before New York. That's another quiet place. When I live in these places, the music I create has more space. I don't mean necessarily silence within the music, just more room to breathe in the piece. It's more about the decaying of notes and listening to them fade away and the new ones coming in instead of it just being a mass.

Moving to New Orleans, I had the desire to make more music like that. That's what Feel Free is based on. It's self-organized guitar harmonics-- and when I say self-organized, it's randomized via computer. They're pre-recorded guitar harmonics I've recorded on a bunch of different guitars, which are the guitars I used in Origin. I collected all of those guitars for Origin specifically-- cheap, beater guitars on Craigslist. I wanted to get more use out of them, so I recorded these guitar harmonics. They're all in just intonation. I use these to turn patterns into randomized melodies, in a sense of how wind chimes are erratic yet orderly. That's something I can definitely hear around my neighborhood-- and church bells.

I can play the piece solo with a simple synth that I've also connected to my computer so it sounds like a Rhodes organ, or it can be played with an ensemble. I did a sextet version of it in New York recently-- harp, contrabass, cello, violin, hammered dulcimer and myself on that synth. We basically improvised, but I say improvised loosely. It's rule-based, with strict parameters with the harmonics that are being randomized, weaving in and out with them. The title points to the fact that this is probably the freest I've allowed musicians playing a piece of mine to be. It's still playing within parameters, but they're a little more free. This piece is a freedom from what I was doing before. It's also the first piece that's kind of a break from these long-tone drone pieces.


Duane Pitre by Lauren Cecil


Pitchfork: In Origin, you're a performing composer, so that you're playing with the ensemble. And that work seems very carefully composed and rehearsed. Everyone seems very much in control. Do you think Feel Free is also a reaction to the feeling of being in absolute control, or of wanting to put some of the music back in the hands of the musicians?

DP: Possibly. A lot of the work with my pieces goes in before the ensemble even touches it. You could say that about a ton of composers, that it's all in the score-- it's note for note, it's dynamic for dynamic, every marking, every score. My pieces aren't like that, so I guess I can only come at it from my angle.

With Origin, a majority of the work went into how I would go about stringing the guitars-- what gauge strings were going to be used, how many of that string. On one guitar, for instance, the top four strings will be one gauge, all the same note, and the bottom two will be a different gauge of a different note, both of those being the same. A lot of the arrangement of the piece was literally in the guitars, how it all stacked on top of each other.

It definitely took a lot of concentration, and I had to find guitarists that had some experience in bowing. In certain performances of it, there were people who had very little experience, but I gave them specific guitars which had certain gauge strings at certain intervals that didn't require as much control. The lower, deeper notes-- the ones that have to be more steady-- needed to be in the hands of someone who had more experience. There's definitely more rehearsal that goes into Origin, but I wouldn't say it was out of hand. But Feel Free does allow me some freedom as well. That's how the piece was prepared. It's a little more open and looser, whereas Origin is definitely more concise and precise. There's not much leeway for the performers-- a little bit in movement four, but not very much. You could say it was a reaction in a sense, but I think it's a reaction to something bigger, not just necessarily Origin.

Duane Pitre: "Mvmt V: Sun PM"

Duane Pitre: Mvmt V: Sun PM

Especially in the last two movements, Origin becomes very dense and busy, and all of these different strands are moving through and around each other. It reflects, to me, the sound of a city.

DP: Very much so. Feel Free has this openness, which is a reaction to the environment here. There is a lot of space so you can actually hear the wind. In New York, there's this constant hum of the city. I feel like Origin, and especially that last movement, is drowning out the city. It's really simple in my mind: You're sitting, trying to work on a piece that has a lot of space in it, space that allows the external sounds of your surroundings to come through. Those sounds are going to be influential on the actual piece. I think I got to the point where I did not want to hear those sounds in New York. A lot of people do-- they want to hear those sounds, and it drives their music. At some point, I didn't want to hear those sounds, so I wrote music. It wasn't a conscious thing. This is a reflection that I made upon moving here. I saw that I was writing music to drown out the city.

Pitchfork: It seems like that situation-- being blanketed by sound, or any sort of information-- transgresses geographical borders now. Anywhere, given an iPhone and Twitter or a laptop, you're just swimming in information.

DP: Absolutely. I think about that on a regular basis, especially from living in New Orleans because it's more apparent now. Living in New York, it's part of the big machine. You have everything in the palm of your hand-- your e-mail, everything you need. You kind of need that because it's part of life, whether you get caught in it and you don't enjoy it or whether you do enjoy it. And I have to think that if you live in New York, there's a part of you that has to enjoy it because, if not, it's probably not a very good place to be.

By moving here, I get to see it from a different angle. Things are just slower. The place we have here has a porch. When we first got here, we would just sit on the porch and listen to the extreme quiet around. You're less bombarded with this layer of information and sound and advertising and this video of some monkey doing some bullshit that may be funny, but do we really need 18 videos of 18 different monkeys? And then there's a giraffe...

Three days ago, I had an epiphany of some sort-- you might call it a freak-out. I work at home on a freelance basis, and I sit in front of my computer too much. I have this iPhone with e-mail on it, and I was just like, "You know, I don't need to be connected that much."  It's draining, and I think it's bad for-- for lack of a better term-- the soul and your being and a calmer state of mind. I took e-mail off of my phone. I shut it down.

I spend a lot of time on my computer and being bombarded like that with Facebook and dealing with people's updates-- not to be negative-- but it's just too much. We don't always need to know everything that's going on. There's value in it, but there's inherent badness in it, too. I feel sometimes that my music is a way for me to-- I don't want to say escape because it's not about escapism-- but to take time to have a calmer state of mind. It's not meant as a meditative tool. That's not why I'm creating it. But if that's something that someone can get out of it to take them out of the information loop and all the layers of data, and if I can help them retreat, then I feel I'm doing some kind of good.

Pitchfork: When do you first recall hearing just intonation, or, at least, music you realized later was operating through a different tuning system?

DP: There was a period of time when, with some artists, I found their music was curiously different. It was interesting in a way that I didn't necessarily realize. There was Terry Riley, and then there's also the traditional world music of India, Japan, Persia. I now know with tuning systems why these things sounded different and interesting. A lot of people use the term "exotic-sounding." Basically, the way I look at it, "exotic-sounding" means different tuning systems.

I would say the first time that I learned on the spot was the first time hearing The Well-Tuned Piano by La Monte Young. That, for me, was very obvious. We've all heard the piano hundreds of times in front of our faces and on recordings, and it's the piano. It's become the centerpiece of Western music. But hearing that sound, it was, "What the fuck is going on? What is this?" A friend played it for me, and I said, "Why does it sound this way? What kind of processing does he put on this to make it sound this way?"

It's not processing: The piano normally has three strings. Two of those are taken off, so each hammer is only hitting one string, and they're all tuned to this system called just intonation. The curiosity came. The questions came. That's when I started my studies. It was something that grabbed me. It was one of those things in life that when the day comes, I fixate on them, and they become my life-- which can be good or bad.

Pitchfork: Where did you go next? There's a lot of information about just intonation, but so much of it seems either overly academic or simply not very rigorous.

DP: There's the good and bad qualities of this Web, the Internet, the huge layer of data. But I was able to go straight to the Internet and look up what it was. Every time you read a description of it, by no means did it clarify what it was. It told you what it was, but that didn't make it so clear. I found The just intonation Network (, which I think started in the early '80s, and they had the just intonation Primer. This Primer was basically this handbook to start you off and to teach you what just intonation was. I met certain people-- whether it be professors or people who had been studying this for a long time-- who were more than willing to talk about it. A lot of people in this community were quite responsive and excited that someone new and relatively young was interested in such a thing. There was correspondence through e-mail and getting books on the physics of sound, going to the root of it before even learning just intonation. The basis behind the tuning system is not the tuning system. It's physics and mathematics.

Duane Pitre by Larry Blossom

Pitchfork: How long did it take you to move from investing yourself in the study of just intonation until you actually turned that into music?

DP: The hard part for a lot of people with just intonation is that it's all theory and study. And they want to hear sound. I completely sympathize with that. In the end, it's about the sound for me. It's not about how the piece looks on paper. But with a lot of people, it's what stops them: You have to study for a decent amount of time before you can actually implement it. If you don't know what you're implementing, you're going to implement it wrong. You're going to hear wrong results, which could deter you from studying any further or give you the wrong idea.

After a year, I started messing around with small sine tone pieces, just taking sine tones that I could very easily use with the computer. I'd never been a very big computer music person, and I was just starting to get into using that as a tool. I was able to generate specific tones very easily and very steadily, so I'd make these little compositions. I hesitate to even call them compositions. They were more so just tests to hear how certain Just intervals interact with one another. But from the start of studying to an actual piece of music, it was at least two years. I had to check my list of works to actually know that. But I enjoy that, and it requires someone that enjoys studying and gets reward out of studying and not just "what I can do once I study this." To me, the studying, I enjoyed that almost equally.

Pitchfork: You've definitely become the rare young proponent of this system, especially with last year's compilation The Harmonic Series, which you curated on Important Records. I loved listening to it and reading each composer's ideas, but what was your goal for it-- to educate, to entertain or both?

DP: You'd be amazed at how many people are very defensive and how many people get pissed off. I'm not really sure where it comes from when people that work in Just feel that they are too good for equal temperament. For me, that's not it at all. It's just something else to work with that sounds good. It's just a tuning system. It's not a musical style. And that's something that, in your studies, you need to realize early on. That's all it is-- tuning. I wanted to make a compilation that used that tuning system and that, stylistically, had a common thread all the way through and could be listened to as a whole. That's something I was very adamant about-- the sequence, the tracks, how it flowed. I really wanted to make a nice sequence and for it flow as one album, not a compilation of pieces. Of course people have their favorites, but the goal was to make one record, not a bunch of pieces put together. I looked at it as if I was sequencing a record that was my own.

The compilations that I heard that were in just intonation, the only common bond was that the pieces were in just intonation. There really was no other common thread. No, it wasn't wildly different music, but it's not going to be when you're dealing with something as specific as just intonation. When I was learning about just intonation, there was nothing like this. It was older literature. It was still relevant, but I wanted something more contemporary where I could identify with the music being played and with the systems and hear what those composers had to say with their approach. I wanted to create this tool for curious minds out there-- one that had more focus and was a little more relevant to now.

John Brien at Important came to me with the idea to do this, so he had this interest in it initially. Putting this out on a label that had a lot of strong contemporary acts that people were digging, it gets some focus. It wouldn't be shoved under the rug of: "Here's a compilation that came out of academia." To have this comp come out on a label such as Important, where it could reach people that it wouldn't have been reached by it if it was published by a university, it was creating a tool to reach a crowd that necessarily wouldn't learn about this tuning system based on whole-number ratios. Will this person even care? Well, maybe now they'll care because they like the sound that's being created with it. Hopefully this will be another resource that goes into the library of resources that people go to when they learn about just intonation. That would be a huge honor.

--Grayson Currin


Duane Pitre: "Feel Free (Excerpt)" [Live at Zebulon; May 30, 2010]

Duane Pitre: Feel Free (Excerpt)

Duane Pitre: composition, simple-timbre synth, computer
Jesse Sparhawk: harp
Jim Altieri: violin
James Ilgenfritz: double bass
Jessie Marino: cello
Shannon Fields: hammered dulcimer


Next:> An interview with Bay-area musician and label head George Chen




















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