miCROfest is an international festival of microtonal music.
The content of miCROfest is microtonal music that uses intonation systems that we rarely hear within today's dominant way of tuning instruments. The goal is to familiarize the audience with microtonal instruments, compositions, microtonal music theory and the microtonal aspect of both Croatian and foreign traditional music. The richness and characteristics of different cultural narratives are equally evident, both in the way of life, customs and culture, as well as in traditional music and the sound it encompasses.
On the basis of the internationally recognized quality of the program, as one of the selected events in the field of microtonal music, miCROfest achieved a partnership and was conducted throughout European countries as an integral part of the EUROMicroFest 2017.
LECTURES
Hybrid harp
Just intonation & chord inversions
Lecturer: Zoran Šćekić
Hybrid harp
Modern harp is an instrument built in a such a manner that pitch shiftings achieved by changing the positions of the pedals are always producing 12 tone equal tempered minor second. In this way, in order to achieve identical pitch for enharmonic substitutions, harpist is forced to tune the strings of the harp according to 12 tone equal tempered Ionian mode. However, if identical pitch for enharmonic substitutions is not required, the whole new aria of different micro-tonal tunings becomes available to work with. What is common for all this different types of tunings available on modern harp is dual nature of interval structure. Since minor seconds produced by changing the positions of the pedals are always 12th root of 2, the pitch of the enharmonic substitutions will not be identical if we tune the strings of the harp in any other way except from 12 tone equal temperament Ionian mode. Lecture "Hybrid harp" explores the melodic, harmonic and enharmonic possibilities of the harp tuned in Just intonation.This kind of tuning produces 21 different pitch per octave and structure of the intervals differ from equal temperament to Just intonation. Sum or difference between equal temperament and Just intonation intervals results in large number of hybrid intervals that are becoming available on harp tuned in that manner.
Just intonation & chord inversions
The main structural difference between any equal tempered scale and Just intonation system lies in dimensions. Compared to each other, both systems have their advantages and disadvantages, but in the terms of harmony, the most important difference between these two systems, beside the sound of intonation itself, is the different way of handling the chord inversions.
This lecture is kind of preface to the lecture “Introduction to the five limit intervals harmony” while it explaines in detail why the five limit intervals are the only non-tempered system that allowes the use of chord inversions in the same maner as N-tone equal tempera¬ment does and why the chords in any higher limit intervals doesn’t function as a group any more but as a sequence which is the reason why they are not capable of inversions.
