In between
With the Boston Microtonal Society concert coming up in less than two weeks, I’ve been busy getting Bob Hasegawa’s Ajax is all about attack under my fingers. I’m always surprised at how difficult it feels to learn a new quarter-tone piece. For me, it’s often like learning to play the instrument all over again—the response time between my mind reading the notes on the page and my fingers depressing the often odd key combinations is much slower than if I was sight reading regular notes. Of course, there’s a simple explanation for all of this: quarter-tones don’t appear very frequently in music, which results in a much steeper piece learning curve than usual.
Fingerings can also be problematic and often require digging deep into my bag of alternate fingerings as well as a little creativity. For example, in Bob’s piece there’s a fast arpeggiated 16th-note sextuplet run that includes a leap from G 1/4-step flat to D natural. The fingering I use for G 1/4-step flat on soprano is 123/5 Tf—an F# with the alternate F# key played with the right-hand ring finger. The problem is that I need my right-hand ring finger to play D and playing the G 1/4-step flat like that makes it impossible to make a clean connection within the context of that fast run. Dilemma: that’s really the only way to play G 1/4-step flat. Solution: instead of finding a different 1/4-tone fingering (or faking it), I changed my D fingering from 123/456 to C2. There’s a timbre change but it preserves the correct interval relationship and in the context of the run, the change in timbre is nearly imperceptible.
I wonder if people are cringing outside of my hotel room, thinking I’m playing extremely out of tune.
Playlist (quarter-tone-free):
