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My dear friend of thirty years and longterm collaborator of twenty-five years, Donald Bousted, composer, and Artistic Director of Microtonal Projects passed away last Saturday after a second and short battle against cancer.

He founded Microtonal Projects in 2004, ran four UKMicroFests in London (having visited LA MicroFest), nine Wild dog media events in London and then founded  the EUROMicroFest with me in Germany. We travelled to South Korea together, we toured the UK and around Europe presenting the Microtonal Trumpet.

I have been co-director sind UKMicroFest 4, but performed at the events since the beginning because of our Microtonal Trumpet project.

We will try to continue what he started, always with him in our hearts and mind, remembering his vision, energy and determination, and ‘just getting on with it’.

Both Resource Folders are now hosted on my Dropbox, so I have invited those whom we still had registration records of to join the new folders, but if you find that you no longer have access, simply re-register using the registration forms on the appropriate pages.

Stephen Altoft

Time Dreaming is available on most digital platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music etc)

This third album featuring the 19-division (of the Octave) trumpet deals very thoroughly with harmony: in the form of electronics, multi-tracked trumpets, duo with a malletKAT, and ultimately with very precisely defined 19-division three-part harmony in the title work, Time Dreaming by Donald Bousted. As 19-division tuning is a modern version of the historical third-comma meantime temperament from the early baroque, there exists a constant link to the distant past, at the same time as a glimpse towards future harmonic possibilities still to be explored.

Four of the works were premiered as part of a US Tour in 2014, playing at American Festival of Microtonal Music and Boston Microtonal Society events. Others were first played in 2019 at EUROMicroFest, TechFest Aberdeen and Festival Mikrotöne Basel. This album also sees the premiere recording of the 19-division Flugelhorn, with ‘Sarabande?’ by Eleni Ralli, the first piece written for my ‘Inspired by Baroque’ project.

TRACKS

1. Time Dreaming (2018) Donald Bousted (UK) for 3 19-div trumpets 6:32

2. Upward in time (2013-2014) Elia Koussa (LBN) 8:35

3. noiwont (2014-2021) Georg Hajdu (DE) with playback 5:04

4. Cerulean (2018) Carlos Cotallo Solares (ES) 3:05

5. Hidden Jewels (2018) Stephen Altoft (UK/ DE) for 7 multi-tracked 19-div trumpets 9:01

6. Gathering Meaning (2014) Julia Werntz (US) 6:13

7. Interlude (2019)  Vasiliki Kourti-Papamoustou (GR) with malletKAT, Lee Ferguson 4:43

8. Sarabande? (2020) Eleni Ralli (GR) for 19-div Flugelhorn 4:12

9. Studie 2: Lines (2017) Manfred Stahnke (DE) with 3 pre-recorded 19-div trumpets 1:13 From ‘Vier Studien für 19ton-Trompete’

10. Studie 3: Dance (2020) Manfred Stahnke (DE) with 3 pre-recorded 19-div trumpets 0:37 From ‘Vier Studien für 19ton-Trompete’

11. Studie 4: Complex Flow (2019) Manfred Stahnke (DE) with 1 pre-recorded 19-div trumpet 5:12

12. Yiiiha (2014) Gordon Kampe (DE) 3:49

The scores for all tracks are now in the Microtonal Trumpet Website Resources Folder on Dropbox

Microtonal Projects have long been associated with the french composer, Pascale Criton. She was a featured composer twice at UKMicroFest, where she was a Keynote Speaker, and has also appeared with the ‘cellist, Deborah Walker at EUROMicroFest 2017.

We are delighted to announce that Pascale is now contributing to the Microtonal Trumpet project. She and Stephen Altoft have been awarded a Virtual Partner Residency by the Goethe Institut, and are meeting online to research a work for quarter-tone trumpet and pre-recorded electronics. 

On 17th October Microtonal Projects (Stephen Altoft and Donald Bousted) took part in the online MicroFest Prague 2020. We presented a video on the subject of 19-division Harmony, focussing on the Microtonal Trumpet project and took part in an online forum. Our intention was to encourage composers who had not written in 19 before by demonstrating the broad range of approaches possible and by defining the essential harmonic elements of 19-div compared to 12-div.

All video presentations are available to watch at
https://microintervalinstitute.wordpress.com

Stephen Altoft’s article on the microtonal flugelhorn can be downloaded here.

A free pdf book with many other resources free from this website via the contact form on The Microtonal Trumpet page.

Sometime in 2010, and I regret to say I’m not sure when, Kirsten Edwards and I were asked to present a programme for Resonance FM as a means of advertising our forthcoming UK MicroFest 4 at The Vortex Jazz Club, London.

These are the notes for the show. There was some improvisation and some editing too and I have to confess that I never heard the final version (there was a very stressful lead-in to that event!). But I know it did help bring a few people along for the performances and presentations (the full programme of the event, which was jointly hosted by the Royal Academy of Music, can be accessed by subscribing to our Dropbox Resources folder).

It’s not a perfect document, it’s more of a prompt for the show, but reading it back 10 years later, it does give a sense of what Microtonal Projects was about then, and many aspects have carried through to the EUROMicroFest series.

ENGLISH PROGRAMME

Please click on the link above to see the full programme in English.  If you are coming, please bring this along.  Programmes for the three concerts will be available in German at the venues.

Attunement 

In this keynote, Marc Sabat, will share his artistic practice and how it is shaped by listening to qualities of tuneable Just intervals.

Marc is a Canadian composer of Ukrainian descent who has been based in Berlin since 1999. He makes pieces for concert and installation settings, drawing inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of Just Intonation and of various music forms — folk, experimental and classical. He is a frequent collaborator, seeking fruitful interactions with other musicians and artists of visual and literary modes to find points of shared exploration and dialogue between various forms of experience and different cultural traditions. Sabat studied composition, violin and mathematics at the University of Toronto, at the Juilliard School in New York, and at McGill University, as well as working privately with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney and Walter Zimmermann. Together with Wolfgang von Schweinitz he has developed the Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation and is a pioneer of music written and performed in microtonal Just Intonation. He teaches composition and the theory and practice of intonation at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Creative commons scores and artist editions are available from Plainsound Music Edition.

www.plainsound.org