It is the duty of the Conscientious Speculative Musical Theorist (CSMT) to go where no one has gone before; to venture into the spaces between all harmonics and all equal divisions (Darien 4297)
I myself prefer to be known as a “natural approximationist” of [the] Augusto Novaro school (circa 1927). I will not be the one to split hairs in this matter; it’s the way one splits the tones that really matter, and I prefer to split them lengthwise, as opposed to those who split them sideways, or not to split them at all, for that matter. My entire philosophy of musical intonation can be wrapped up in one succinct little quote: “Nothing that exists is unnatural.” This includes the arts and artifices and artificiality of the musical imagination. Or, indeed, “why settle for the real thing when one might as well be having artificial?” (Lou Harrison, the 2nd funniest thing I ever heard him say). All scales are artificial, as are all other great works of art and products of the human imagination. You want to know what “natural” is? Let me tell you what “natural is. You don’t want to know? Well, I’ll tell you anyway.
— Erv Wilson, Xenharmonicon: Erv Wilson Remembered
It wasn't through reading his book [Genesis of a Music] that I finally understood what the diamond was. I had to, my own self, reinvent the diamond before it finally came to me what he was talking about. I take different harmonic modules, you know, take the harmonic tetrad and so forth and manipulate it in the classic ways that we manipulate any module and take the hexad and manipulate it. And slowly I began to realize that if I would take the common tone inversions of the harmonic hexad, I would get all the notes necessary to make the common tone inversions of the sub-harmonic hexad. And I said, wait just a minute, isn't that what Harry's talking about? And so I reviewed his diagrams and sure enough that was precisely what he was talking about.
— Erv Wilson, D.6 Interviews: Erv Wilson
The feature about Erv is the feeling of surprise. He operated from surprise. He worked his way through something, he knew something, but then he was always open, questioning how he was learning. He was a real learner. What he said about the diamond, how he had to create it for himself. That’s how he works. And his dreams entered into it a lot. When I first started studying with Erv in 1964, he would tell me that he dreamt scales and then would mathematize them. Mathematics was his language because it’s the language of relationships rather than things.
He learned on the edge. He read books and he read other people’s works, but he used it as a database rather than gospel. He was always present. His presence to what he read, or his presence to what he heard. He had a little keyboard and would play one interval, and he would let that interval play throughout the day. And he would hear the interval as music.
— Gary David, Microtonal University 146, Oct 27, 2024
One of them [reasons I wanted to meet you] is that you did know him [Harry Partch] and he said that you were probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the theoretical area.
— Ben Johnston, D.6 Interviews: Erv Wilson
Erv was one of the most intuitive mathematicians I've ever known. He just sees relationships that other people don't.
— John Chalmers, Musical Mathematics of Erv Wilson
I'll start off by saying that Erv Wilson is probably the most influential person in my life, both musically and philosophically. And it's probably his nature as a human being that has more to do with me spending 20 years studying his work as well as actually realizing many of his tunings and acoustical instruments.
— Kraig Grady, Kraig Grady Interview - Microtonal Composer on Erv Wilson
[Erv had a great ear] and a greater imagination for new tuning systems, keyboards, and notations that all came in families that propagated and mutated like those corn or quinoa hybrids.
— Scott Hackelman, Erv Wilson (1928-2016)
(On Erv introducing Greg to a septimal interval)
The revelation was like the experience of seeing a landscape for the first time in color after only ever having seen it in black and white.
— Greg Schiemer, An Extended Interview with Greg Schiemger. Xenharmonicon, Sept 13, 2024
In August ‘95, when I was in LA, I actually met Erv and he turned out to be completely welcoming and charming and wide ranging in conversation.
…
I think his work is so fertile that everyone who takes it seriously probably brings out something totally different from it. And that's actually the mark of a good teacher. Erv may never have had a formal teaching position, but he was certainly a mentor and a teacher in the oral tradition sense. And so anyone who ever came in contact with him probably gets something different from his work.
— Warren Burt, Dr. Warren Burt - Erv Wilson's Impact on Future Directions in Music
I once asked Erv, why was it that he didn't actually write compositions so much? He said that when he first got interested in music, he realized that there were certain things that were needed in order to do the type of music he wanted to do. So, he thought that he would actually be able to influence the future music more by solving these problems as opposed to, you know, writing a few compositions that might or might not get played or played so much.
— Kraig Grady, Kraig Grady Interview - Microtonal Composer on Erv Wilson
In my mind scale formation and composition are not two different things. You compose the scale as you're composing [the music]. And you use the scale that is right.
I got this idea from Boomsliter and Creel, who set out to figure whether we actually tune scales in JI or in ET. And they set up sets of equipment to measure very, very carefully on a sliding string, what people were doing. What they found out is that people were not playing in either equal or just, they were playing impossibly out of tune. They began looking at things and they said, but it looks like they're playing with one tuning whether they're in one key, but if they move to another key, they go to a different tuning. Like, if you're in the key of C and you play a D chord, then the A will go upward by a comma (to 27/16), than if you're playing in C major (a 5/3). In fact, two things will happen if you just modulate from C major to G major, you have to raise the F by a chromatic semitone (135/128) and you have to raise the A, by a comma (81/80). And they call that “extended reference”.
They wrote a number of articles published in the Yale Journal of Music Theory, which I devoured voraciously, and I swear I must have been the only person on earth who had the remotest idea of what they were talking about, because Yale was publishing every article right down the line, not realizing that what Boomsliter and Creel were saying was pulling all of the props out from under ET!
Well, finally Boomsliter and Creel, for no particular reason whatsoever, ran out of funds. And so their research was brought prematurely to an unfortunate halt. If they could only have been allowed to continue their research they could have gone on, because they believed that probably the same kind of extended reference patterns existed in other cultures as well.
— Erv Wilson, 2005-08-14 Erv Wilson Interview 4/5
The act of scale formation is inseparable from the other creative aspects of music formation. The human voice illustrates admirably how scale formation participates fully in the whole creative process of song. The scale is perhaps as unique to the song as are its rhythms and melodies. And like rhythm and melody, the scale neither precedes, nor follows the song, but progresses in the full flow of real time as a soft and sensuous and endlessly malleable expression of human consciousness.
Particularly in fixed-pitch instruments the role of scale tends to be diminished, if not entirely put aside. Even in a polyphonic keyboard instrument, whose ostensible goal is scale-making, the spontaneous, song-like scale is far from being achieved. In the design of a new instrument, one does well to recognize the technical limitations, and to compensate accordingly. (1) The fixed-tone needs to be bendable. (2) The fixed-pitch must have alternate inflections. One makes “knowledgeable guesses” as to what these will be, basing one’s judgment on past creative explorations. These are assigned to a Generalized Keyboard in an appropriately organized pattern. (3) One must have the facility for introducing, in performance, and in creative explorations, new pitches/inflections that may not have been anticipated when the “best-guess” tuning was assigned to the keyboard. Particularly as we “compose” we must be able to create our tunings, immediately from the console, as part of the same, if I may say, somewhat ritualized, creative act. To whatever level is optimally feasible, we should espouse creative tuning as part of the “live performance” (again, a ritual). The wall separating the “composer” from the “performer” should not be designed into the instrument.
The keyboard may be visualized as a Navajo loom upon which intricately lovely and endlessly variable scale patterns may be woven. A canvas. Arbitrary limitations to this variability must not be designed into the instrument. The keyboard is an art, and an interface, a crossroads and a bridge. The keyboard is a ship. In the tunable generalized keyboard we have the birth of a new art and the rebirth of an old art, as ancient as man. The keyboard must Breathe, poetically speaking, for it is the extension of a living process. The scale is a volatile genie that knows how utterly to transform its shape. Every effort must be made to accommodate this mercurial creature-of-the-psyche through the keyboard. The keyboard/console must animate the scale. While undoubtedly it is valid and admirable to study the scales of other peoples and other times, we are concerned primarily with the creative processes and the development and expression of our own arts. We see the keyboard in an attitude of creative anticipation, and to jealously guard against closed, limiting, non-living attitudes, and the great body of “tacit assumptions” and “forgone conclusions” (which, incidentally, we do not assume ourselves to be free from) which might hobble or render ineffectual those subtle intuitions of beauty.
Design philosophy, in a word, should be OPEN. Keep it general(ized), viable, versatile, changeable. Guard against the proverbial cul-de-sac, the one-track, the squirrel cages! My heavens!
The keyboard is a transient lens through which a cosmos of musical relations may be observed. Keep it volatile. Forgive the metaphor! Our interests are primarily “just” and in that regard the acoustic universe is seemingly endless.
— Erv Wilson, Letter to Gary David, 1965
He had an amazing ear (I was once tuning some metal tubes in his workshop and, from time to time from up in his room, he would shout out the ratios of intervals as they were tuned up "135/128! 13/12! 64/45!")...
— Scott Hackelman, Erv Wilson (1928-2016)
Erv was a generous teacher and a friend. … He taught with generosity, mostly at his dining table, with excursions, when necessary, to the metallophones and bamboo marimbas and refretted guitars and the wheezing old Scalatron in his living room, and always began by asking if the student had anything to teach him first.
— Scott Hackelman, Erv Wilson (1928-2016)
(On teaching children)
...I wouldn't just talk to them. They're very playful. They love to play. That's the way they learn.
..you give her a toy that makes sounds. When she does something to that toy, it will make a sound. And show her slowly and carefully how to build up a little tree out of these sounds. Let her learn it that way.
— Erv Wilson, Erv Wilson Explaining His Work in the Tuning Field
~Comments and Questions welcome~
