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Recently, I came across a paper with an incredible title: Formal negativities, breakthroughs, ruptures and continuities in the music of Modest Mouse. The music of Modest Mouse has been very dear to me since high school, and it remains, in my opinion, one of the most distinctively soul-rending musical acts I have ever heard. Obtuse texts are also dear to my heart, so I searched for a free PDF and skimmed over the paper. It went over a number of the elements that make the alternative rock band from Issaquah so special: Isaac Brock’s complex and often paradoxical lyrics, sudden changes in key and time signature, disruptive song structures, dynamic timbres, just to name a few. However, I felt that the paper was missing out on the element that inspired me so much as a young guitarist: Isaac Brock’s penchant for microtonality.
What is microtonality? Basically, any note that doesn’t fit within the modern standard tuning system in the West counts as a microtone. If you think of the “Do-Re-Mi” song from the sound of music, the space from the low “do” to the high “do” is called an octave. The modern Western tuning system splits this octave into twelve equal parts, which make up the keys of the piano. Notes that cannot be played on the keys of a standard tuned piano are considered microtonal. It is only recently that this system has become dominant and standardized. Classical musicians like Bach and Mozart used unequal tuning systems that gave each key its own unique expressive character. Persian music theorist Safi al-Din came up with a 17 tone scale in the 13th century, while modern Arabic scales have simplified to a Western-style equally spaced octave using 24 divisions instead of 12. Indonesian gamelan ensembles use five and seven tone scales that have very little relation to anything we would recognize as being “in tune” in the West.
Listening to older Modest Mouse records, one notices immediately that the guitar and vocals have a distinct “out of tune” quality. Pitch is often unstable, and the harmonic landscape is unlike anything else. While I imagine this is not…
