Chris P. Thompson

True Stories & Rational Numbers

An Album-Length Work of Justly-Tuned Piano Music

Duration: 42 minutes
Composed: 2019
First Recording: October, 2020
Premiere: November 23, 2021 - Barbican Centre, London

Instrumentation
Pianos or Keyboards (4 players)

See it live at Saffron Hall, UK - Feb 11 2023

Liner Note by Sarah Feldman :
A simple idea underpins Chris P. Thompson’s True Stories & Rational Numbers (2020): Pitch and rhythm are not distinct categories. In fact, the only thing that differentiates pitch and rhythm is speed. Thompson is not the first person to recognize this. In Karlheinz Stockhausen’s pioneering electronic piece, Kontakte (1960), a sustained tone drops in pitch until it slows so much that we hear the repeating boops that comprise it. The boops eventually slow down so much that there’s nearly an entire second between them. Kontakte demonstrates that if you repeat any sound quickly enough, the repetitions will fuse together and you’ll hear a pitch. If you slow those repetitions back down, you’ll hear discrete sound events again.

So we usually think of rhythm and pitch as being two of the fundamental parameters of music, each requiring a distinct formal logic. Traditionally, we have ideas like meter and harmony, which say when events should happen, and which pitches should go together. But we can also think of rhythm and pitch as being different parts of a single musical parameter: time. This change in perspective can be a jumping-off point for a new way of organizing music.

But how do you devise a new set of limitations after deconstructing two of the most basic musical parameters? Thompson’s solution is one of the oldest examples of music theory, the arithmetic ratio. If you divide a vibrating string in half, you get an interval double the frequency of the open string. We usually call this interval an octave, but we can also say that it has a ratio of 2:1. If you divide the string into three equal parts, the first third produces an interval of 3:2 (or the perfect fifth). Ratios like these have been used for thousands of years to define pitch relationships. But now with our deconstructed view of rhythm and pitch, we can simply say that these ratios describe proportions of time. A ratio of 3:2, for example, describes three events happening in the time it takes two events to happen. It could be wave cycles, or it could be metric pulses. Thompson uses ratios like 3:2, 5:4 and 7:8 to define both the pitch and metric relationships used in True Stories.

There are technical challenges to performing music with alternative tuning systems. Instruments with fixed pitches can’t play scales based on ratio tuning, and instruments without fixed pitches need extensive training to play ratios in tune. Thompson again has a clever workaround for this. True Stories, first realized as a piece of electronic music, is written for four electronic keyboards. The various tunings are saved in the keyboards as presets and are recalled by the performers while playing the piece. The score uses an extended notation system to indicate which pitches are heard, but the note-heads always correspond to the piano keys they normally do. This allows for any performer to play the piece, regardless of their knowledge of ratio-based tuning.

Thompson is also not the first person to have thought deeply about the ratio. Another person who did was Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physicist who wrote one of the formative texts of acoustics and pitch perception, On The Sensations of Tone (1863). Although his writings continue to be celebrated, the technical limitations of acoustic instruments, and the explosion of serialism in the early 20th century, have kept all but a few composers from actually realizing Helmholtz’s ideas.

For Thompson, Helmholtz is the protagonist of True Stories, both in an intellectual and emotional sense. He became a widower at an early age, and was apparently depressed, self-isolating and a workaholic. However, he experienced a profound transformation in his middle age after meeting the salonniere and translator Anna von Mohl. She was extroverted, and pushed him to become less guarded, and more open to spontaneity and pleasure.

True Stories explores the dichotomies of Helmholtz’s troubled but striving internal world. Control and surrender; perfectionism and self-acceptance; paralysis and spontaneity; and melancholy and peace. The broader formal structure of the piece, separated into two parts, reflects these emotional polarities and the narrative of his personal evolution. Part I is nostalgic and sensitive. It’s rigid, strictly ordered and develops systematically. Part II, in contrast, is hopeful and whimsical. The rhythms and formal development feel more human and organic.

This gets to one of the most striking aspects of True Stories. It’s theoretically and technically advanced, totally unconventional, and yet it is deeply emotionally self-aware and relatable. It deconstructs some of our most fundamental assumptions about music, yet it is beautiful and moving. It is enjoyable to listen to. True Stories is irrefutable evidence that the ratio is a powerful, nuanced and expressive tool to organize music, and deserves much more attention from composers than it has thus far received.

Sarah Feldman, Fall 2021