HELMHOLTZ-FUNK

Franz Ferdinand’s voice flickered, sputtered, and jumpily repeated fragments of “Take Me Out” on KROQ as I sat in still traffic on the 5 out to Lancaster from Echo Park. My instinct was immediately confirmed after tuning into another station – a 5.1 seism had shaken the Valley and hence, somehow, the radio waves. Continuing merrily along to the 138, the signals from LA turned to distant static and crows increasingly decorated telephone lines, the sides of highways. They unequivocally declared their presence as I pulled into the compound where German-Angeleno composer Wolfgang von Schweinitz lives – a perching crow sculpture surveys any visitor prior to entrance into a former transmission station, now living and working artist space, adorned with crow art by Schweinitz’ partner, Cecile Bouchier. 

Wolfgang von Schweinitz (b. 1953) made two bold shifts straddling the new millennium. One, the aforementioned move to California in 2007 to fill James Tenney’s composition faculty position at CalArts following Tenney’s passing. The other, that he told me there is “no going back from,” is the move from equal temperament tuning to Just Intonation (JI). Along with Berlin-based Marc Sabat, he founded Plainsound Music Edition in 2000, an indispensable resource and historical record for those interested in JI Tunings. 

In March, pianists Vicki Ray and Jack Dettling released their recording of von Schweinitz’s first JI album “HELMHOLTZ-FUNK” (1997/2000/2020) on composer-violinist/violist and Calarts professor Andrew McIntosh’s LA-based Populist Records. Taking its name from the German word 'funk,' meaning 'radio' or 'message,' “HELMHOLTZ-FUNK” for two digitally ring-modulated pianos tuned in Helmholtz-Temperament is von Schweinitz’ first foray into JI tuning, and it’s the ultimate example of diving in the deep end. He speaks about the piano tuning devised by 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz straight from the gate, and I will leave you to read from the source. For more technical information about Helmholtz-Temperament, von Schweinitz and Marc Sabat authored a 2004 paper, The Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation, which you can read here on the Plainsound website in English and German.

Part of what is so gripping and mysterious to me about this work is the conjunction of how his first JI piece is also a sonic translation of Psalm 119 in Hebrew; the Psalm can optionally be recited in synchronicity with the music in Hebrew and/or his German translation. As he says below, he rarely works with text and this specific work is an outlier sonically. “HELMHOLTZ-FUNK” doesn’t wash over you, inviting you to meditatively listen into the rich sonorities like many JI counterparts – it’s awesomely fast paced with a bit of edge. To my ears it’s very clearly mimicking speech with a formal process of JI tuning that is connected to the text. The sense of meaning is palpable with inevitably recurring rhythmic, pitch, and registral motives hammering in a sense of knowing structure and syntax. But good luck figuring out how. To our benefit, Wolfgang von Schweinitz generously welcomed me into his home and took the time to talk through the work. I’m very happy to share the excerpt below of our conversation. 

Before we sat down, he offered me water – fresh from the desert property’s underlying springs – and asked how I take my coffee. I shared that I only take my coffee with milk and he responded in a very SoCal fashion that this was good, because he hadn’t seen the sugar in years. So grab your coffee however you like it, and get comfortable.

Wolfgang von Schweinitz (WvS): The first strictly Just Intonation (JI) composition I ever did was “HELMHOLTZ-FUNK.” I use two pianos that are re-tuned in what I call the Helmholtz-Temperament, which is kind of a JI tuning or extended 3-limit tuning. Helmholtz had a harmonium with two manuals, so he had 24 pitches per octave. He tuned it in a combination of 3-limit and 5-limit intervals, meaning perfect fifths and pure Major thirds – which have been sacrificed in our standard equal temperament tuning system. You ideally need 53 pitches in the octave to get all of the non-tempered perfect fifths and Major thirds you would ever want to use. The 24 Helmholtz pitches are a subset of that extended Pythagorean tuning system with 53 pitches. 

In meantone temperament, you stack the fifths C G D A E. That’s your Major third – C to E. Meantone temperament is a historic tuning. They squish the fifths a little bit, making them narrow, so that the Major third between C and E will be much better. That’s the meantone. You are creating a Major third out of four consecutive fifths. But what Helmholtz did is go downwards from C – from C to F Bb Eb Ab Db Gb Cb Fb. Eight fifths downwards and you get a wonderful sounding Major third over your C. You construct the Major thirds out of eight fifths downwards rather than four upwards. That’s the trick! It has been used by Arab musicians since the Middle Ages. It was likely established in India more than 2,000 years ago this way. They were tuning fifths but going further than twelve, resulting in a 3-limit Pythagorean tuning with four Major thirds. 

Organists found this out too around 1480, that got them into the attempt to establish more of the Major thirds. They were outlandish thirds – between F-sharp and B-flat for example, they had a pure third. The meantone was developed then, around 1500. The issue is that you would need more than twelve notes per octave to really get somewhere, without the outlandish thirds. Then the idea was born of sacrificing the purity of the fifths to get the thirds. The solution to this issue of the fifths and the thirds is the extended three-limit tuning – you just need more notes. That’s what Helmholtz did for his harmonium and my first JI piece is trying it out for my own composition.

With the two pianos [in “HELMHOLTZ-FUNK”] I have 24 notes. I can tune about eight tonalities, or keys like E Major, in JI. If I wanted more keys, I would need three pianos.

Anna Heflin (AH): The word sacrifice is telling. I’m wondering if you could speak a bit about the text you chose to set?

WvS: The text is based on Psalm 119, which is by far the longest Psalm and the least poetic. You are interested in literature too, so I will share this. I was living with Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013), one of the great German poets, for fifteen years. I had another writer friend Sabine Hassinger in Berlin. I’m interested in literature, but I put this in brackets because it’s as much as I have time for reading. Just two or three times in my composition career I ended up writing literature myself, as you do. Most recently, the piece I just composed this spring for New York-based vocal ensemble Ekmeles.

AH: Love Ekmeles.

WvS: You’ve heard them, yes? They asked me to write a piece for them about twelve years ago and I could never do it because I was afraid of writing just for six voices without instrumental support. I’m into JI and thought that it would be much easier to have instruments carrying their voices. It took me twelve years to figure out my way of doing it. They haven’t started rehearsing it yet, but that’s coming up next season. 

Another reason is that I never found the text. I didn’t have the time or energy, so I ended up writing it myself. That was a little bit of poetry work. And this Psalm in the late ‘90s, after the premiere I spent half a year translating Psalm 119 into German. 

AH: Patmos (1989) uses text too. 

WvS: Yes, Patmos uses text and that’s my only music theater piece. Not really an opera – three hours and the entire apocalypse of John.

AH: It’s not an opera, but there’s also You Are The Star in God’s Eye.

WvS: Yes, we did it here at Redcat with the text projected.

AH: I really enjoyed the video of that.

WvS: Yes! Let me pull up the Helmholtz score. This CD project is a revival from 1997. I have to thank Jack Dettling, who was in the DMA program [at CalArts]. It was his idea to do this. 

The notes are the same as the old version…here’s the tuning. You can make an A Major seventh chord with sharp seven in this piano, and so on. The setup is so they are distributed, the two pianos will always play together and these are the inaudible sine tones. It’s for two pianos which are electronically ring modulated. The original version in the ‘90s was done in Freiburg, Germany at the Experimental Studio. That’s the place Luigi Nono was working in the ‘80s doing all his great late electronic compositions. That still was analog – these analog ring modulators were the best in the world. The idea for this piece is that this isn’t piano music at all, I’m just using the pianos. You can hear the original piano sound in concert, a little bit, but they are ring modulated. Back then I used eight sine tones using the overtone series – the third partial, fifth partial, seventh partial, and so on. In the new version I wrote a Max patch, it’s digital live electronics and actually I just use a clarinettish sound. Totally easy, I didn’t even use additive synthesis! It’s a compressed sine wave. The sine tone is tuned in this way…we must come back to the text.

This is the text. This is actually my score. Did you get that?

AH: Yes, I did. I picked up that it had to be the Hebrew, because it didn’t track in English. And I can hear that you’re translating the text because all of these motives keep coming back (sings example).

WvS: You have the rhythm.

AH: And the pitch, or are they repeated intervallically?

WvS: This Hebrew text creates my rhythms. [speaks a line quickly to illustrate rhythmic point] There you have a rhythm, but you have a melody too.

AH: Yes, so did you translate it [the Hebrew into music] intuitively? Or make a system?

WvS: I just briefly mentioned my little play with poetry. The idea was to translate the Hebrew to German as literally as possible in such a way so that the rhythm is exactly the same. The number of not just syllables, but phonemes, is the same. And ideally in the exact order so that the Hebrew syntax remains the same. Five years before composing this I spent half a year at home. I was freelancing, composing and then spending three hours learning Hebrew on my own because I was curious about this ancient language. It’s very powerful and concise. And then, my idea was that the translation would include the rhythm, melody, and meaning of each word in the same order. In other words, I go word by word so that the German would follow the syntax in the Hebrew. You can’t really do that with English, but with German it actually works. The result is completely experimental German – “concrete poetry” as it’s sometimes called.

We once then did a live performance of this when I was reciting my German translation. An Israeli woman spoke the Hebrew and we were reciting synchronized German and Hebrew, synchronized with the ring modulated pianos. I didn’t do the Max for this performance, my friend did, and it was spatialized across the 90 speakers, very fancy. This 2024 recording is much better with two speakers. Just stereo. Already Luigi Nono in the ‘80’s and Stockhausen in the early ‘60’s – every now and then in our composer scene there is a hype regarding spatialization. People freak out. I’m not going to criticize it. My first “HELMHOLTZ-FUNK” they had this halophone that Luigi Nono was exploring, it was just built. It sent the sounds flying around the air through the speakers. Not with AI, I’m not sure exactly how the machine worked. They wanted me to use it, every composer was supposed to use that fancy machine.

AH: Sounds familiar.

WvS: It’s not so great. With the spatialization, you have to sit exactly in the middle of the eight speakers. There’s one seat in the whole hall where it really works. That’s my opinion. It could still be interesting music. Now I think with all the YouTube we are back to good old stereo format. There are only very few occasions when you want to spatialize as a format. With this piece, it’s much better [in stereo]. We have the two pianos, left and right. There are two mics for each piano. The low sounds of the two pianos are panned a little lower in the center and the higher sounds extend up and out, like the angel with two wings. Much like pop music. This is generally my idea for stereo spatialization, if it works with the particular ensemble you have. You want the bass in the middle, like the stomach. The hopping around in stereo is much more interesting than all this fancy old-fashioned spatialization trying to have sounds flying around the hall. 

Now have I told you how these [Herbraic] letters are not only the rhythm and the melody. I haven’t really explained the melody yet. 

AH: There’s these big register shifts that we haven’t talked about, also the thought process behind when you use the ring modulation. 

WvS: Here’s the entire table. 

AH: Look at this, this is so fascinating.

WvS: Yes, so it maps out all of the characters. Now, the phoneme D for example can be vocalized with the various vowels.

I use the phenomenon that my piano has 88 pitches, like Morton Feldman was talking about, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 consonants. 22 letters fit exactly four times on the piano, and so I could lump the vowels together into four groups. That gives me a melody and the melodies hop around the entire piano. All the notes can be used. Now, the two pianos are considered one instrument and they play one melody. There are no chords, nothing. The maximum is three keys being pressed. Usually it’s just one. 

We haven’t talked about the rhymes yet, you can hear some of them. This Psalm has some essential concepts – love, commands, words, and so on. It rhymes in Hebrew and I was able to translate fifty percent of the rhymes to German. It taught me something about the German language; that it has super archaic roots. Which means that there are lots of one syllable words. Almost every word in my German translation is only one syllable. It makes it very powerful, it’s almost shocking. As a German speaker you can understand the meaning, even though it’s super abbreviated German. The sentences often don’t have verbs, like “king great” because you don’t use “is” in ancient Hebrew. You can say that in German but in English it sounds a bit funny. 

That’s the translation. It was the darkest period of my life actually, my mid-life crisis when I spent half a year translating that Psalm. So, it’s done. The translation is up on my website. I tried to maintain the meaning, syllables, and the phonemes of the ancient Hebrew. The whole project is experimenting with the meaning of words and if meaning is injected into the phonemes themselves, if the words incorporate the meaning in a more substantial way. Both in ancient Hebrew and the archaic German there are lots of examples like that. But I’ve forgotten 99% of the Hebrew I knew when I was working on this.

AH: Okay, I’ll transition. I’m curious about your move to California in 2007 to start working at CalArts. How do you think the LA scene has changed? How has being here influenced you and how has your presence influenced the culture?

WvS: Well, it was a wonderful thing in my life that I got invited to assume James Tenney’s teaching position. I met him only three or four times in my life but I was talking to him on the phone three weeks before he died. Why? Because I was doing guest lectures on his work as a freelance composer. I was certainly one of the James Tenney fans in the German new music scene in Berlin, so it made sense for CalArts, and they wanted me to offer a continuation of the James Tenney tuning class. I call it the Intonation Workshop, which I’ve been always teaching. In composition lessons, as much as I can, I try to teach independently of my own stuff. (laughs) Of course some of it will come through, if the students are interested I can offer that. But mostly I do that in the Intonation Workshop. I share the thirty years of experience that I have collected in the field of Just Intonation. I think of it as a performance practice, thinking about how you listen – like what Jay [Campbell] was talking about in your discussion, for example. How to hear the pitches, that’s what I can offer. That’s a lot of fun! 

And the LA scene, I have a great number of wonderful colleagues. Now there are a whole bunch of people –  like Andrew [McIntosh], Mattie [Barbier], and Lukas [Storm] – who have been working with me. This job gave me the opportunity to work and collaborate with young musicians and introduce them to these playing techniques. Jokingly I can say that CalArts offered me the opportunity to educate some musicians that can actually play my music. It turns out that this field is so niche that I had to put up with losing all of my collaborations with the top-notch new music ensembles and musicians.

AH: You mean when you moved into JI composition?

WvS: Yes, almost thirty years ago. I lost my connection to the musicians I had been collaborating with on an occasional basis before. Why? They don’t have the time and patience to get their head wrapped around it. It all boils down to rehearsal time. You need two, three, or four times as much rehearsal time. Basically, all musicians who are great musicians have the ear.

AH: Yeah.

WvS: They could do it! The only reason they cannot is because they don’t listen that way. Jay was talking about it a lot, you have to activate a certain capacity of your ear that you usually don’t use in Western Classical music. If you bring Indian Classical musicians together, they would. It’s a field that’s totally uncultivated and unused in our Western musicians – but they could! 99% of all great musicians could do it, but they don’t. I cannot blame them because I cannot pay them the rehearsal time. I need musicians who are ready to dedicate their time out of sheer enthusiasm and interest in the subject matter, the experience and musical joy it can be. As a joke, I shouldn’t compare myself, I find myself like good ol’ Stockhausen who was working mostly with his own circle of musicians. It’s like that and it comes in every generation. It’s great, as composers, to write for our friends! It’s fun and very effective. You can test things out and get feedback, so that’s what I’m doing. Through the community at CalArts I have at least a dozen musicians, many of whom are in WildUp and so on, who enjoy collaborating. Andrew [McIntosh] played [Plainsound] Glissando Modulation, it’s about 80 minutes.

AH: I listened to the album, it’s beautiful. 

WvS: Played by Frank [Reinecke] and Helge [Slaatto], who I wrote it for. They did 70 rehearsals before the premiere. Not seven, which would already be a luxury. Ten times as many. Now if they play it again they polish it much faster. It’s for specialized musicians. I want it to work pretty precisely, not watered down too much. Why am I a JI fan? I think it is a beautiful new sound. New in Western music, in Indian Classical music you hear it all the time. We come back to the very beginning, we’ve been working with temperaments since meantone temperament. Since we abandoned the Pythagorean organ tuning, which was inherited from ancient Greek music. Since that beautiful, genius, invention to get along with twelve notes and perfect fifths, we’ve been tempering things. But unfortunately, the twelve tone equal temperament we have now doesn’t sound as great as the meantone. Mozart is all meantone. I explain it to my students, I can prove it. His D# and E-flat – the D# was lower for him than the E-flat.

The joke I tell my students, “can you not see it in the notes that the D# is lower than the E-flat? Just look!” They all talked about it at that time. We lost all that when we adopted the equal temperament, with a certain historical logic to it, but it was a big loss. It’s a complicated story. The composer who was most into tuning issues? Johann Sebastian Bach.