Shimmer Wince: A Conversation with Anna Webber on Just Intonation

It is common for musicians to incorporate recent discoveries – whether the adoption of cutting-edge technology or novel compositional processes – into their works to present a new sound. Far less discussed, however, are cases where artists revisit old conceptions to see how they can forge previously uncharted paths. Anna Webber’s explorations of just intonation – a tuning system that dates back to at least the Babylonian empire – on Shimmer Wince (Intakt, 2023) is a prime example of the latter. 

Concepts of just intonation are not easily comprehendable by those unfamiliar with music theory. Most Western music uses a tuning system, equal temperament, where an octave divides into twelve equally sized semitones. Equal temperament has been the standard for most Western music partly because it enables keyboard instruments to play in all keys with minimal flaws in pitch accuracy. Equal temperament provides a practical solution for tuning but does not adequately match sonic reality. The frequencies across an octave do not always neatly match an arbitrarily divisible sequence. For example, one tone may be a third higher than another according to equal temperament, but closer analysis of the frequency of the two tones confirms it’s not actually a third higher; it’s slightly off. Because of this problem, just intonation, one of many alternative tuning methods, discards equal division in favor of a focus on whole-number ratios between frequencies. 

Although it predates equal temperament, which became mainstream during the Baroque era, just intonation is still overwhelmingly relegated to outsider status in Western music. Most significant just intonation Western compositions were developed over the last century by artists like Harry Patch, Ben Johnson, James Tenney, and, more recently, Catherine Lamb and Marc Sabat. Formal incorporation of just intonation concepts into improvisation-heavy “jazz” is practically unheard of. 

But Anna Webber long ago proved her prowess in adopting the extended compositional techniques that undergird New Music into improvisation-heavy works. The 2018 Guggenheim Fellow’s Clockwise (Pi, 2019) dug deep into the percussion works of Xenakis, Feldman, Varése, Stockhausen, Babbitt, and Cage. Follow-up, Idiom (Pi, 2021) made significant use of woodwind extended techniques, including multiphonics, alternate fingerings, and overblown notes. Even earlier, Webber built Binary (Skirl, 2016) around assigning pitches and intervals to her computer’s IP address. So, pushing at the outer edges of compositional approaches is hardly new to the saxophonist-flutist, but what does the incorporation of just intonation into her music sound like when our ears are so accustomed to the results of equal temperament?

Although highly listenable, Shimmer Wince often sounds a bit “off,” as the differences between just and equal-tempered tunings are starkly exposed. Rather than simply adopting just intonation and abandoning equal temperament, Webber amalgamated the two tuning systems, thereby further underscoring their differences. The result is pieces like “Swell” which exhibit a pulsing vibrancy clad in sharp slicing horn lines. Or “Wince” where mysterious-sounding horns present ideas that often seem to decay into the backbeat and synthesizer-fueled background. Shimmer Wince puts the comfortable and familiar on equal footing with the foreign and exotic, pleasantly disorienting the listener as they try to find their way through. It is a fascinating recording. We sat down with Webber to discuss the project and her interest in just intonation. 

PostGenre: Where did the title Shimmer Wince come from, and how does it reflect the group’s music?  

Anna Webber: Well, the name ‘Shimmer Wince’ comes from pushing together two of our tune titles. There’s a piece called “Shimmer” and another called “Wince.” But more importantly, I thought those terms, together, reflect how just intonation sounds. There is often a shimmering quality to many just intonation based chords. But, at the same time, some of those chords are so different from what we are used to hearing with equal temperament that they make you wince a little when you hear them. I thought that ‘Shimmer Wince‘ was a bizarre grouping of a few words that evoked something in the music. 

PG: How did you become interested in just intonation?

AW: I guess it was a slow process. I remember a conversation I had almost ten years ago with the great drummer Sam Opsovat about the relationship between polyrhythm and pitch and how if you speed up any regular pulse to the threshold of human hearing – about 20 pulses per second – you start hearing a pitch. If you have two regular pulses and speed those up, you get an interval. All of those intervals- on some level – correspond with the overtone series, where just intonation comes from. 

I had been thinking about that, and it simmered in my brain for a long time. I’ve long been trying to find interesting ways to make the rhythmic content of my music cohere with its pitch content, so this was a very compelling area for me.

I am also married to a New Music composer, and when we first started hanging out, we talked a lot about composition. He’s very much in this just intonation world. He took my pre-existing interest in the relationship between intervals and rhythms and showed me an actual framework for using the ideas for composition. I talked with him a lot about that stuff and continue to. 

PG: You also had a residency at the American Academy in Berlin

AW: Yes, in 2021, I had a residency there. As part of my application for the Academy, I proposed that I would research just intonation. I’d been thinking about just intonation for a long time and saw the time at the Academy as a great opportunity to slow down and research the area. Often, in the world of professional music, you get very busy. It becomes difficult to find time to research things. You play a lot and write several pieces, but you do not have much time for research.  

Of course, I applied for the residency pre-pandemic. When the pandemic hit, I had a lot of time to sit down and research. It was still very special to be at the American Academy in Berlin and to be able to do a lot of listening, reading, and figuring out how to apply concepts of just intonation to my work.

PG: As just intonation is a part of a lot of Indian classical music, did you study Indian classical music as part of your research at the American Academy in Berlin?  

AW: I did work through a book called “The Harmonic Experience” by W.A. Mathieu. The author studied Indian classical music, and his way of teaching just intonation comes from Indian music. However, I didn’t study Indian music specifically. I’ve always tried, to some extent, to avoid tourism as an artist. I didn’t want to start exploring Indian classical music unless I was willing to fully commit to that path.

PG: Your listing on the American Academy in Berlin’s website notes that you also conducted interviews as part of your research. What do you feel interviews provided you that were lacking from solely looking at scores, reading scholarly pieces, or listening to music?

AW: Because of the pandemic, I didn’t end up meeting in person with anyone. But I did talk to several musicians about things they’ve dealt with on both performance and compositional sides. For example, I spoke with Steve Lehman, who is not involved in just intonation, per se, but has done a lot of work with spectralism, which is somewhat related. I was mostly curious about writing microtonality for improvisers who are not usually used to several different types of notation systems.

I also spoke with Josh Modney, who’s a great violinist. He’s very proficient in using just intonation in his performance practice. I was curious about how he thinks about just intonation, how he practices, and how he listens.

Most of my interviews focused on practical considerations like how I can learn the music myself and help the other musicians I would be working with learn it. Of course, part of the challenge was also trying to figure out how to write the music down in a way that makes the most sense to those who would be reading it.

PG: Which raises the question – what was your process for composing with just intonation?

AW: It’s a little challenging because with just intonation you are no longer restricted to, more or less, twelve pitches.  

With my most recent record, Idiom (Pi, 2021), I worked with my own improvisational language. I had some concrete saxophone and flute language to use. If there was microtonality in that work, it was essentially a byproduct of these various techniques that I was using rather than a superimposed focus on microtonality. With Shimmer Wince, it was challenging to figure out a way to hear various things without, necessarily, even knowing what I wanted to hear. The possibilities get pretty limitless pretty fast.

But before I even wrote a note, I heavily practiced hearing various just intonation intervals against drones. I became curious about certain intervals and kept a notebook while I researched things I was interested in or might want to try or pursue further. When I started composing, I had several little ideas I wanted to check out, and I went from there.

In general, my compositional practice remains the same no matter what I’m writing. I try to make pieces connect through some small starting place. I start with an idea and see how it expands. In that sense, this project is no different than my prior ones. But I think a significant difference was in trying to figure out how to hear the music and spending much more time being very frustrated at technology than usual.

PG: You mentioned earlier listening to these intervals against drones. Many just intonation works become very droney. Was that aspect something you consciously avoided?

AW: I tried hard not to fall in line with an existing school thought about just intonation. It’s a very old intonation system, but there are also a lot of modern microtonality schools. I’ve been less interested in falling in step with one of those schools and more about how I can use just intonation as a tool to expand my compositional language.

One thing that became very clear as soon as I started listening to a lot of pure just intonation music is how often it gets a little droney. The music is very slow-moving. Here’s a pitch, then here’s the next pitch. I’m not interested in writing drone music and never my intention to do so.. Not that I have anything against it, absolutely the opposite, but that’s not the kind of music that I write. Coming from a jazz background, a sense of groove is very important to me. 

PG: So, it was fairly easy to avoid the more drone-like aesthetic?

AW: It was not difficult to avoid it. But I would say that drone music did make me think about things differently. The advantage of drones is that you can hear precision and specific things unfolding. If you get a little faster, people’s ears have less time to adjust to those specific sounds. So, you have to make it clear what you’re doing when that note might only be around for a few seconds. How do you still bring clarity to the harmony? That was my concern.

PG: Your language is one of the more interesting things about this recording. You do not use solely sounds from just intonation. Instead, you take some ideas from just intonation and some from equal temperament. How did you figure out what parts to take and what to leave behind from just intonation?

AW: That’s a good question. I think practicality was part of the decision process. The band did not originally have a synthesizer; it was just a quartet with myself, trumpet, cello, and drums. I wrote the music entirely without a synthesizer as a primary element, which I think significantly impacted how the music turned out for a few reasons. 

First, we had to work without a reference pitch. Some people who work with microtonality and instruments with flexible pitch – saxophone, cello, and trumpet, for example – have to produce those pitches on their own. With a synthesizer, you can use some crazy reference pitch, and people can find their way through that pitch. I knew that we had to be able to make the music work without having a reference pitch.

I also wanted to make sure that I wasn’t asking other musicians to do anything I wasn’t able to do yet. So, I didn’t go up too high in the spectrum – basically, I don’t think I’d go much higher than 11th partial stuff on this record – because that was the edge of what I felt comfortable with. 

PG: At what point did you decide to add a synthesizer?

AW: After we rehearsed the first drafts of this music without synthesizer, I decided it would be nice to have a reference pitch. [Synth player] Elias [Stemeseder] is an old friend of mine, and I knew he would be interested in this project. I also wanted the music to have a little more low-end punch and knew he would also give me the option to also have synth bass.

PG: Did you start using synthesizer tunings once you added the instrument? 

AW: It was not as easy as simply retuning because I wasn’t using the overtone series as a tuning patch. I think many synthesizers have some preset alternate tunings, but they are generally very specific and not what I was seeking. 

Each piece on the album has a different synthesizer tuning based on the needs of that composition. Because I’d already written the pieces, I knew what I needed and what I needed to reinforce. In general, the synth bass used equal temperament, and the right hand of the synthesizer was retuned.

I used a program called Pianoteq to write this music, and then I sent Elias the 12 or 24-note scale that I needed programmed. Elias put the tuning into a program called Scala and was able to put that into his Prophet synthesizer. It was all a multi-step process. It was harder than I anticipated to set the tunings on the synthesizer. 

PG: When people think of just intonation, they sometimes consider Harry Partch, who made his own instruments to obtain the sound he sought. Did you modify the other instruments to obtain the sound you were seeking?

AW: No, I didn’t. I also worked hard not to use scordatura [ed. an alternate way of tuning a stringed instrument that varies from standard tuning] for cello, which is something many people do but some string players secretly hate. 

I restricted myself early on not to use scordatura or other methods. I did use some modifications on “Shimmer”, where I retuned the bass flute and the trumpet. But by retuning, [trumpeter] Adam [O’Farrill] simply pulled out tuning slide, and I pulled my flute head joint out a little so that I was two septimal commas lower than A440 and he was one septimal comma lower than A440. The result was essentially similar to the horns using scordatura rather than the cello.

But between the quarter tone scale and embouchure adjustments, if you can hear something, you can play it on the saxophone. I know some saxophone players who’ve created different fingerings for every adjustment. But, I would rather have fewer extra fingerings to learn and instead use my ears as much as possible. 

PG: In terms of combining ideas of just intonation and equal temperament, did you take any inspiration from [György] Ligeti’s work taking equal tempered notes and putting them up against natural partials?

AW: Totally. I’m a huge fan of Ligeti’s work. I’m less interested in purist systems and more in crazy hybrids. I think Ligeti also shared that interest. I’m interested in things like what equal temperament sounds like when you throw one just chord in the mix. Everything just has a certain quality, and everything equal temperament has a certain quality. What happens when you superimpose the two? Ligeti’s “Hamburgisches Konzert” with all the natural horns and the woodwinds coming as equal tempered notes against it explored this area. I find that juxtaposition fascinating.

PG: Just intonation has been studied to some extent by Western contemporary classical composers like Ligeti, but it is less common to incorporate those ideas into “jazz.” Any idea why that is?

AW: I don’t know. I think, in some sense, it is common in “jazz.” I’m pretty sure of blue notes are just intonation. When I first learned blue notes, I was told these are the notes, but they’re not really these notes. The actual note is one in-between those notes, and the notes we used were an approximation using the Western instruments. It makes sense to me to think that just intonation has always been a part of jazz in the sense that jazz is a hybrid music already and coming from a tradition that is coming from Africa, not solely Western classical music. If you listen to earlier jazz musicians, they use just intonation in really interesting ways. 

However, in a contemporary sense, with the kind of music that I play, it’s certainly less common to see just intonation. In some ways, the lack of exploration may come from the fact there’s a bit more of an arms race in classical music to explore everything and get it all written out. Maybe because jazz is more focused on improvisation, it doesn’t have that quality. But I also think many people use these ideas when they’re improvising. In some sense, I think it’s solely that jazz is an improvisatory practice, and most of the creativity tends to happen off the page, not on it. That is not to say there are not great jazz writers, only to note that the compositions are often shells for improvisation. 

PG: In terms of improvisation, was it more difficult to improvise with just intonation being a part of the music?

AW: That’s a good question. I would say the challenge for me is navigating chord changes. In general, my compositions do not focus heavily on chord changes. But I have spent most of my life learning to play over them. 

If I see an A7 chord, I have a lot of language that I can play, including superimpositions and many upper structures. As soon as I change that chord into a just intonation one, so that I have an A7 with an exceptional seventh rather than a minor seventh, it changes the type of language I know will work with the music. It was a challenge to improvise with these chords in a way that felt very fluid. It was difficult to figure out what to play over the chord changes when the chair’s been pulled out from under me in terms of all the years I’ve spent building up language over a certain type of chord structure. 

PG: Now that you are more adapted to it, will you continue to work with just intonation?

AW: I think everything I have learned, hopefully, becomes part of who I am as an artist and something I can draw on with different projects. I certainly notice myself incorporating different kinds of harmonies in new stuff I’m writing now. But ultimately, I’m all about learning and growing. Don’t just go down a path a little bit and stop. Instead, find ways to take your experiences and make them a part of your musical personality.

‘Shimmer Wince’ will be released on Intakt Records on October 20, 2023. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. You can learn more about Webber on her website.

Photo credit: Alice Plati