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As part of EUROMicroFest 2024, we will once again host a concert in Freiburg, Germany (8th March, 2024, 8pm) under the title ‘Das Stimmt!!’ – this time ‘with strings attached!’ It will be held at the Elisabeth Schneider Stiftung, Weinschlösschen Freiburg, and focusses on microtonal trumpet and flugelhorn (Stephen Altoft) with strings, using local musicians, and juxtaposes composed works with improvisation in 19-divisions, 24-divisions, Spectral and Just Intonation tunings.

This is our ‘new start’ following the pandemic and the sad loss of our artistic director, Donald Bousted.

To mark the coincidence with the International Women’s Day, Stephen will give the world premiers of music by Emily Koh, and Eleri Ralli and the german premier of a piece by Eleri Angharad Pound. Dialogue for 19-division trumpet and computer by Cambridge (UK) composer, Paul Rhys receives it’s german premier too. Katharina Schmauder will play viola music by Horatiu Radulescu. The improvisations will be performed by FLOWduo (Stephen Altoft, 19-division trumpet and flugelhorn, Johannes Nied, double bass) and Harald Kimmig (violin) with Lee Ferguson (malletKAT).

PROGRAMME

Stephen Altoft will be back in the UK in February giving a short tour on the 19-division trumpet and microtonal flugelhorn (19-and 24-divisions of the octave). He will be appearing at the Universities of Huddersfield, Manchester and Cambridge. This is the first tour using the microtonal flugelhorn!

At Huddersfield he will play a concert dedicated to our founder, Donald Bousted, who was a composition tutor there in the ’90s, and will include a first performance of his former student, Geoffrey Cox; now himself a Senior Lecturer in Music at Huddersfield. Geoff’s work, ‘Don’s Vision’ is for 24-division flugelhorn, and is based on quarter-tone material on which he orginally worked on with Donald. The programme also includes Donald’s ‘Time Dreaming’, plus two pieces for which he produced the electronics for- ‘Hidden Jewels’ by Stephen Altoft, and ‘Lud’s Church‘ by Richard Whalley. Stephen will also give the premier performances of ‘Flugelhornpipe’ (for 19-divison flugelhorn, live plus 4 recorded parts) by Ben Lunn, and a new flugelhorn work by Eleri Angharad Pound.

At Churchill College, Cambridge, Stephen will give the first performance of Cambridge Composer, Paul Rhys, ‘Dialogue for trumpet’ (19-div) and a new flugelhorn work by Hilary Robinson (London). Also on the programme, the same works from the Huddersfield concert by Stephen, Donald and Richard Whalley.

In Manchester, Stephen will give a workshop on ‘Improvisation and Intuitive Music’.

Calendar:

Thursday 8th February, 2024, 1pm. ‘Time Dreaming’- Microtonal Trumpet and Flugelhorn. St. Pauls’ Hall, University of Huddersfield, UK.

Dedicated to the memory of former composition tutor, Donald Bousted. Music by Stephen Altoft, Donald Bousted, Geoffrey Cox (WP), Ben Lunn (WP), Eleri Angharad Pound (WP), Richard Whalley.

https://www.hud.ac.uk/performance/february/

Friday 9th February, 11am, ‘Workshop: Improvisation and Intuitive Music’, University of Manchester

Friday 16th February, 2024, 6.15pm. ‘Time Dreaming’- Microtonal Trumpet and Flugelhorn. Churchill College, Cambridge, UK.

Music by Stephen Altoft, Donald Bousted, Paul Rhys (WP), Hilary Robinson (WP) and Richard Whalley.

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/churchillcollegemusicsociety/1133835

19.5 Playlist

To mark the birthday of our late friend and artistic director of Microtonal Projects, Donald Bousted, on 21st November, we are releasing three movements of his 19.5, recorded live to video by duo Contour. They which were originally one online performance made as part of the ‘Mikrotöne: Small is Beautiful’ Symposium hosted by the Ekmelic Society in 2021. The 19.5 playlist is on our YouTube channel.

Our longterm partners, The International Ekmelic Society have released the 4th Journal of the presentations from the 2021 edition of the ‘Mikrotöne: Small is Beautiful’ Symposium, at which Donald gave his last presentation- on 19.5, with duo Contour. Patrick Ozzard-Low provided an article reflecting on this work, together with a Foreword by trumpeter, and long time collaborator of Donald, Stephen Altoft. It can be ordered from here.

Table of contents

-Agustín Castilla-Ávila: Prologue

-Stephen Altoft and Patrick Ozzard-Low: Personal reflections on Donald Bousted’s 19.5 for 19-division trumpet and malletKat

-Navid Bargrizan: The Lineage from Harry Partch to Manfred Stahnke

-Sam Cave: Resonance, Overtones, and Miniature Voice

-Rami Chahin: Microtonal: Music Classifications in Theory and Education

-Jim Dalton: A Software Instrument and Tool for Just Intonation in MaxMSP

-Caroline Delume: Flexibility of sound space in Francisco Luque’s music for plucked instruments

-Vytautas Germanavicius: Identification of Microtonal Interval Relations in Lithuanian Vocal and Instrumental Folk Music and their Application in Music Composition

-Franck Jedrzejewski: Petr Chernobrivets and the 20-Tone Universe

-Gerhard Klosch: The sliding Keyboard – The Construction of a New Pure Tonal Instrument

-Raphael Ophaus: Microtonality as a structure-forming principle in the work of Michael Quell

-Felipe Pinto d’Aguiar: Two pieces for solo guitar and one piece for 33 guitars utilizing microtonal scordatura

-Viktor Pushkar:The Family of 24-tone Unequal Temperaments

-Ulf-Diether Soyka: Notes on ekmelic Harmony: Partials, 3rd Messiaen Scale and Maqam Husseini

-Manfred Stahnke: “Just Intonation” – Possibilities in Playing and Hearing on String Instruments, especially Viola

-Andrew A. Watts: Tensio Novum: Microtonal Approaches to the Guitar in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough

FLOW duo consists of Johannes Nied, double bass, and Stephen Altoft, 19-div trumpet and 19-div flugelhorn. Founded during the pandemic, playing in public parks, they then began creating special performances for their playlist on YouTube. Stephen contributed photos and video after the audio recording sessions. They are influenced by the outdoors, nature and are concerned with creating a flow, performing ‘long’ improvisations in an age where people usually stop listening (in this case watching) after two minutes.

Check out their newest, third video here and their playlist.

They are currently playing House Concerts, and return to public concerts on December 1st as part of the un-sound@Jos concerts in Freiburg, Germany.

Donald Bousted’s 19.5 for 19-division Trumpet and malletKAT has been described as a tour de force in 19-divisions-of-the-octave tuning. Written for long time collaborators of his, duo Contour, it begins with the recognisable materials (from the point of view of 12-EDO) and by the time the cycle finishes it is a poly-microtonal landscape. Now, two years after the release of the digital album on Bandcamp, Patrick Ozzard-Low (one of the dedicatees) has written ‘A Tribute and Mini-Review of 19.5’, which is available here to read.

from 22-24 March, the Microtonal Trumpet project returned to the north of England after a 15 year absence to present works from the RASP, TIME DREAMING and THE YASSER COLLECTION albums, and to give premiers by Richard Whalley and James Williamson- all for the 19-div trumpet!

We are very happy to share the live (video) recording of TIME DREAMING,  for three 19-division trumpets (two pre-recorded multitracks) by Donald Bousted. This was the  UK premier performed in Manchester (UK) on 23rd March. 

YouTube: https://youtu.be/3sFtrsX921k

See Bandcamp to purchase high quality audio recording:

https://stephenaltofttrumpet.bandcamp.com/album/time-dreaming

Time Dreaming..

of Battles past

Cornetts and Sackbuts lurking; muffled ghostly fanfares

of alien soundscapes,

Hampton’s corridors echoing to accompaniments of

Henry’s feasts.

Time Dreaming..

of future,

premonitions of sky and water,

breathing,

journeys

Dreaming of timelessness

Past and future dwellers of Earth existing in a parallel reality.

(Poem: Stephen Altoft)

‘Time Dreaming is a somewhat unusual piece for me. Although I didn’t conceive of it as a pedagogical work, it does clearly have a pedagogical function as part of the project. For that very reason, I wanted the work to be quite slow moving so we can clearly hear the intervallic make up of the chordal flow. I had to find a way to curb that emotional intensity, which often comes out in my work in the form of unusual metres and complex rhythms. And I did that by becoming someone else. I was a composer in the sixteenth century writing in extended third-comma meantime tuning and I was writing for the Queen’s trumpeters. But I had a strange feeling of connection to a future place, a sense that this music would be played in another time and in another space. I was time dreaming.’ (DB)

Donald Bousted was a composer and mixed media artist from the UK. His work was often based on an intimate exploration of one or two instruments, sometimes with electronics, and a smaller number of pieces for chamber and orchestral ensembles. In the work of the last 20 years, he had collaborated with visual artists and sought to integrate elements of film, still images and live art into his oeuvre. He is perhaps best known for his microtonal music, which has been an interest since he was a student. He wrote music using quarter- and eighth-tones and a substantial body of work in 19-division tuning (19 equal pitches per octave).

Check out the video of the premier of Richard Whalley’s Lud’s Church from the North of England project at Manchester University at the end of March. There are ten virtual and one live 19-division trumpet.

Richard writes: ‘Lud’s Church is a surprisingly deep chasm, hidden in the woodland of the Peak District in Staffordshire, England. It is dark, foreboding and damp, even in summer: an excellent hiding place – hence being associated with many stories and histories, including Robin Hood; and also Gawain and the Green Knight. Notably it is where a group of Christian reformers, followers of John Wycliffe, hid to escape persecution in the 15th century. It is thought that they sung psalms whilst hiding there, and it is speculated that their nickname, the ‘Lollards’ (or mutterers) refers to their style of delivery of such psalms – and this is how the chasm got its name.

Lud’s Church was the last place I visited for a hike before the first Covid-19 lockdown (in early 2020) made travel to such places impossible for a period. It was composed in a spirit of yearning for the freedom of exploration. Such exploration extends to the tuning system used here: 19 equal divisions of the octave, which results in a mix of familiarity and weirdness that seemed ideal for attempting to capture something of the essence of this magical place. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to write for Stephen Altoft’s 19 tone equal temperament trumpet, which prompted this musical exploration.’

Stephen Altoft, 19-division trumpeter, will give the World Premier of Richard Whalley’s Lud’s Church UK Premier of Donald Bousted’s Time Dreaming in Manchester on 23rd March at the University of Manchester. He will also give the UK Premier of Antenna by Dong Zhou. Programme includes music by Stephen himself, Eleri Angharad Pound and Elizabeth Adams.

On 24th March for York’s Late Music concerts Stephen will give a similar programme, including the World Premier of James Williamson’s Falling/Rising. Programme includes music by Donald Bousted, Chris Bryan, Eleri Angharad Pound, Richard Whalley and Stephen Altoft.

Check out this article about the York concert here.

Melancholia’ (2018), a piece for two horns by Donald Bousted

dedicated warmly to Michael Hugh Dixon, has been uploaded to the folder of Donald’s microtonal compositions on Dropbox (Microtonal Projects’ Resources Folder).

Michael writes:

Donald loved the films of Lars von Trier and gave this duet its title from the film of the same name. Donald said it was his first piece structured in just intonation but he had been thinking about something like it since around 2000 when listening to Erv Wilson at LA MicroFest. He structured the work very simply, from 4 scales which have tonal relationships to each other In an email he said “For me, there is a real power coming from the transformation of the 3 scales which have lots of connections to one which – although still the same scale – has only one pitch rooted in what has gone before. It’s a work with some emotion behind it and some movement away from the strictly ‘just’ would not be inappropriate.” Melancholia was performed in Sydney MicroFest 3 in 2019, both in Sydney and Wollongong by Michael Hugh Dixon and Gergely Mályusz.

The recordings, on Soundcloud and the play-a-longs on YouTube, are by Michael Hugh Dixon in 2022.