Fascinating worlds of sound
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CD release "Beyond the horizon"
What happens as soon as the octave is consistently deleted from the tonal system, not avoided or forbidden, but actually non-existent? As one of the people who independently described the Bohlen-Pierce scale in the 1970s and 80s, Heinz P. Bohlen worked on sound recordings at the Hamburg University of Music and Drama. As a sound engineer, he began to ask himself why all the music he heard was based more or less on the same tonal system and always had the octave as a frame interval. Based on this thought, he oriented himself to the tritave (octave plus fifth) and divided this purely mathematically into an equal temperament with 13 partials. The Bohlen-Pierce scale was designed, at least in theory! Only a few years later, John R. Pierce and Kees van Prooijen, who also gave the scale its name, came up with the same results - each independently of the other.
Artistic results for the BP scale - compositions by composers (most of them from the HfMT Hamburg) - have now been recorded by Nora-Louise Müller and Ákos Hoffmann on the BP clarinets and released as a CD with a detailed booklet by GENUIN classics. The title Beyondthe Horizon is borrowed from the eponymous piece by Georg Hajdu and says it all: the strangely fascinating sound world of the BP scale really does take the listener beyond the "event horizon".
The BP scene has been coming to life in Hamburg for some years now. In research circles consisting of instrumentalists, composers and music technologists, theoretical-practical studies, compositions and instrument construction have been developed. The small group led by Prof. Dr. Georg Hajdu and Prof. em. Dr. Manfred Stahnke has since been joined by the clarinettists and composers Nora-Louise Müller and Ákos Hoffmann, the composer and percussionist Todd Harrop, the composer and musicologist Dr. Konstantina Orlandatou and the composer Benjamin Helmer. In the course of Nora-Louise Müller's doctoral project and research work on the BP clarinet, several instruments from the clarinet family were designed solely for the BP scale: The clarinet is particularly suitable for practical use due to its partial tone composition and overblowing into the tritave, the frame interval of the BP scale. In addition to string instruments with a BP scale, a BP kalimba and a BP electric guitar designed by Georg Hajdu were also created.
Beyond the Horizon, 2020 at GENUIN classics:
Georg Hajdu - Burning Petrol
Todd Harrop - Maelstrom
Ákos Hoffmann - Duo Dez
Nora-Louise Müller - Morpheus
Georg Hajdu - Beyond the Horizon (Text by Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer: "End of Cosmology?")
Todd Harrop - Bird of Janus
Sascha Lino Lemke - Pas de deux
Benjamin Helmer - Preludio e Passacaglia
Manfred Stahnke - Die Vogelmenschen von St. Kilda
Fredrik Schwenk - Night Hawks
Nora-Louie Müller: BP Clarinet
Ákos Hoffmann: Clarinet in Bb / BP Clarinet
Julia Puls: BP Clarinet
Lin Chen: BP Kalimba / Percussion
Melle Weijters: 41-note electric guitar
Julia Stegmann: viola (in BP tuning)
Tair Turganov (in BP tuning)
Georg Hajdu: electronics / synthesizer
Sascha Lino Lemke: electronics
Marcia Lemke-Kern: narrator