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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2020
This article examines the relationship between orchestration and microtonality in the music of Marc Sabat through a score-based analysis of two recent works, Asking Ocean (2016), for string quartet and large ensemble, and The Luminiferous Aether (2018), for large orchestra. Excerpts from these two compositions are discussed to highlight the challenges of composing for orchestral forces in a musical style that demands a high degree of microtonal pitch precision. Through retuning, alteration, and a sensitivity to the construction, techniques and performance practices of orchestral instruments, Sabat has developed a unique manner of orchestrating that is at once timbrally rich and uncompromising in pitch precision. After a brief introduction to the extended just intonation framework that Sabat employs, his concepts of ‘fixed microtonal pitches’ and ‘tuneable intervals’ are discussed and connected to orchestration in his scores. Drawing upon this analysis, connections are made between the microtonal system with orchestration and musical aesthetics broadly.
1 Taylor Brook, Synergy of Form, Rhythm, and Orchestration in Three Microtonal Compositions (DMA thesis, Columbia University, 2018).
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5 Marc Sabat, Introducing My Work in Microtonally Extended Just Intonation, Lecture, Ostrava Days, Ostrava Centre for New Music, 2020, p. 1.
6 Sabat, Introducing My Work, p. 10.
7 Thomas Nicholson and Marc Sabat, Fundamental Principles of Just Intonation and Microtonal Composition, Universität der Künste Berlin, Studio für Intonationsforschung und mikrotonale Komposition, unpublished, 2018, p. 31.
8 Marc Sabat, Introducing My Work, p. 1.
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11 Leonhard Euler, Tentamen novae theoriae musicae (New York: Broude, 1968; orig. pubd 1739).
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13 Throughout this article consonance and dissonance describe a gradual increase in interval complexity, with 1/1, 3/2, 4/3, etc., representing the gradation from relative consonance to relative dissonance. This is sometimes referred to as ‘sensory consonance’.
14 Sabat, ‘Three Tables for Bob’, pp. 47–63.
15 Sabat, Asking Ocean.
16 Marc Sabat, email to Taylor Brook, 13 February 2017.
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22 Sabat, The Luminiferous Aether.
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25 Sabat, Asking Ocean, p. 1.
26 Sabat, Luminiferous Aether.
27 Sabat, email to Taylor Brook, 13 February 2017.
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