Beautiful City (1994) by Marc Sabat

live performance by the Sonar-Quartett Berlin 11.April 2010 Köln
Susanne Zapf & Kirsten Harms (violins)
Nikolaus Schlierf (viola)
Cosima Gerhardt (cello)

Beautiful city (1994)
for string quartet in a scordatura tuning

This piece was written and premiered in Toronto for a workshop and performance of experimental music by the ensemble “Critical Band” with guest composer/violinist Malcolm Goldstein. The texture of the slowly-evolving sound was inspired (in part) by working with Malcolm and by his style of improvisation. I had also been thinking about a 1960s article by Steve Reich, “Slow-Motion Sound”, in which he envisions the utopian possibility of microscopically examining every possible detail of a sound expanded in time.

At the time, I had recently encountered the theoretical ideas of Harry Partch, expressed in his book “Genesis of a Music” (1949). Partch recasts the conventional understanding of “harmony” and “tonality” in terms of Just Intonation, proposing an expanded understanding of musical intervals, tone systems, consonance and dissonance. His system is based on ratios of natural numbers, primarily ratios built from the first 5 prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. I was already then convinced that Partch’s conceptualization was sound, radical and of crucial importance to any future evolution of musical harmony.

The piece “Beautiful city” is a slowly moving chorale which explores harmonies based on the “neutral” third produced between the 9th and 11th partials of a harmonic series.