NEW RELEASE ON STREAMING PLATFORMS!
Homenaje a Salinas
by Jim Dalton, for 19-div flugelhorn – played by Stephen Altoft- is now available on Spotify, Apple Music etc. The sound engineer and producer was Vasiliki Kourti-Papamoustou.
Homenaje a Salinas
When I think about 19-tone equal tuning, the 16th century Spanish music theorist and organist Francisco de Salinas is never far from my thoughts. He was the first to clearly define the form of tuning called 1⁄3-comma meantone (which is very closely approximated by dividing the octave into nineteen equal parts). In this composition I chose to honor Salinas with three movements inspired by the Spanish baroque. The number nineteen is represented in different ways in each movement — sometimes overtly, sometimes not.
- Preludio sin compases — This is an unmeasured prelude, a form popular in France; however it has a few elements of “harmonic labyrinth,” a feature that I have seen frequently in Spanish baroque guitar music. My version of the labyrinth moves through all of the nineteen tones.
- Zarabanda — a form brought to Europe from Central America by the Spanish. It is first mentioned during Salinas’ lifetime. The rhythmic form of the dance seems to have evolved over time. I use the rhythm of the sarabande as it had evolved by the late Baroque.
III. Canarios Extraños — a dance form with roots in the Canary Islands. The original canarios was a 6/8 rhythm with groupings of eighth notes shifting between groups of two and three.
I maintain the interplay of twos and threes but use a meter of 19/8.
James Dalton is an American composer and performer. He has been a professor of music theory at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee since 2000.
Dalton’s compositions have been performed throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe by the Providence Mandolin Orchestra, Enigmatica, Toronto Camerata, Ensemble Decadanse, Transient Canvas, Scottish Voices, Sharan Leventhal, Stephen Altoft, Paul Ayres, Aaron Larget- Caplan, Michael Nix, Donald Bousted, and Carson Cooman; and at such venues as the National Cathedral (Washington, D.C.), the Kansas Symposium of New Music, Musiques Nouvelles (Lunel, France), EUROMicroFest, Sound (Festival of New Music, Scotland), Fifteen Minute of Fame (various cities and online) and Akademie der Tonkunst (Darmstadt, Germany).
He studied composition with George Walker, Louie White, Neely Bruce, Robert Dickow, and Daniel Bukvich; and guitar with Michael Newman and John Abercrombie.
Dalton’s compositions have been published in anthologies for carillon, organ, guitar, and mandolin. His works have been recorded by Michael Nix, Donald Bousted, Carson Cooman, Aaron Larget-Caplan, Stephen Altoft, Enigmatica, and the New England Mandolin Ensemble. Two of his text scores are published in the anthology, A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press, 2025).
As a music theorist (as well as composer), Dalton’s interests and research have ranged from palindromes and symmetrical musical structures to just intonation and microtonality. He has presented at conferences in the United States and abroad, including the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, “Beyond the Semitone” (Aberdeen, Scotland), the 17th International Music Theory Conference (Vilnius, Lithuania), the Nova Contemporary Music Meeting 2018 (Lisbon, Portugal), Mikrotöne: Small is Beautiful 2021 and 2023 (Salzburg, Austria) and The Microtonal Village 2024 (NYC).
