Pacific Pythagorean Music Festival 2021
Come explore the world of natural resonance and pure ratios!
San Francisco’s first festival celebrating 'just intonation’ compositions with an all-star lineup of performers from around the world showcasing experimental and traditional styles!
Most music traditions …
…around the world tune musical intervals as whole number ratios of frequencies. The Pythagoreans did this, playing the monochord, a single-string instrument that generates simple divisions of the string to create music. Touch the string at ½, ⅓, or other fraction of the length, and you get tones that create beautiful resonant intervals. In Europe, the rise of the piano, designed to move between keys without being retuned, forced a compromise in this mathematically rational system.
San Francisco’s Del Sol Quartet presents San Francisco’s first festival to return to the world of pure intervals often called “just intonation.”
The Bay Area is the birthplace of American just intonation composition, from archetypal outsider artist Harry Partch to composer Ben Johnston, and continues to nourish this tradition. The Del Sol Quartet brings together the just intonation specialists of the Bay Area, as well as fantastic performers from around the world, for a four-hour festival hosted by Old First Church in San Francisco. We took the opportunity to invite performers whose work involves large instruments that cannot easily be moved for live performance, including deVon R. Gray and Michael Harrison’s specially tuned pianos and Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument. Santur master Dariush Saghafi and erhu virtuoso Hong Wang will perform non-European classical tunings. Stephen Kent will work his didjeridu magic sure to expand the space inside our headphones. The festivals featured performers also include cult vocalist Daisy Press, guitarist Giacomo Fiore, Seattle-based composer Marguerite Brown, Canadian innovator Gayle Young, and the Bay Area’s own Cornelius Cardew Choir.
This first festival also officially launches a new commissioning arm of Del Sol Performing Arts Organization to produce future works in just intonation, beginning with A Popular Tune by Jungyoon Wie, commissioned for the 2020 PPMF and finally getting its PPMF premiere by Del Sol!
All times Pacific!