Contented Waltz

A gentle waltz, this music began life in 1995 as a sketch called “Waltz for Guitar”. I knew and loved the expressive sound of the instrument from my friendships with excellent guitarists like Stephen Aron at Oberlin and Tom Olson in Clevelend, as well as my twin brother. Kevin.  It was rewritten as “Kevin the Cricket Waltz” in 2001, but was too hard to play and keep relaxed at the same time. The music did not fit the instrument well because the harmonies were too thick and poorly placed on the fretboard.

In 2011, Ballet Pixelle from Second Life asked for a dance piece and I proposed arranging it into electronic music. I don’t remember what happened with that contract, but it prompted me to move it to electronic instruments. 

To me, “core” music only needs pitch and rhythm to work. “Core” music can be played on any instrument(s), and as long as the pitches and rhythms are played, the music’s meaning clearly comes through. Think J.S. Bach inventions, for example: whether played on the piano, saxes, synths, xylophones, or with voices. – it’s essentially the same piece with different costuming. There are other aspects of sound which are just as important to weave into a composition, but staying true to writing a work that is fixed to the standards of written pitches and metric rhythms remains the most challenging. “Contented Waltz” is a piece that is pure music. 

In this 2022 version, I use synthesized sounds  in counterpoint (“note against note) to render the waltz in its original form.  Like many electronic music productions before EDM like Walter Carlos’ “Switched On Bach”  or Tomita’s “Snowflakes Are Dancing, these electronic voices are used symphonically (sym= together, phon=sound). Since the piece was already composed, I could explore new, expressive sounds of electronics and fashion them in a binaural mix for headphones.

432Hz

That December, I had been invited by Dr. Don Wood, who ran the Inspired Performance Institute, to explore the effects of tuning my music down to A4=432Hz instead of the 440Hz standard. The common conjecture was that putting it there was better for health.

I could do so in two ways: 1) keep the piece in C major and move the tuning down to 432Hz, or 2) transpose the entire piece down to Amajor, and lower the tuning to A=432Hz. The latter seemed a better choice just in case the frequency of 432 was ‘magically’ healing, it would be heard more often in the new key.  and kept open to see how it made me feel. I also tried different scale-interval tunings, in particular, Pythagorean.

When moving back and forth between the tunings, 432 tuned tracks felt more relaxed than 440 or 450 of the same music, but I think that was because it was a lower pitch. Playing each on separate occasions, I was not aware of being made more or less relaxed from the sounds. And perhaps because I’ve heard equal temperement tuning all my life, Pythagorean tuning’s perfect 4th and 5ths sounded out of tune to me (and Joy, too). Maybe I’ve listened to modern tuning too long to be able to hear tuning any other way. 

I hope to understand the reasons people support 432. I find more fallacies around than solid reasoning. Supposedly it was used in old music, particularly in the music of Verdi. But the Nazi’s in the 1930s usurped the International Standards board and forced 440Hz as the tuning standard with a secret goal to weaken music’s power across the globe. The board making that decision were from across the globe – that meeting was just held there. Also noteable is the fact that A4=440 Equal Temperement was the first tuning standard agreed upon in history. Before then, every city had its own tuning, ranging from the 420s to 460s. One of the reasons for standardization was to make it easier to build musical instruments that could be used anywhere.

A popular reason that 432 is more ‘natural’ stems from the number being a multiple of 8Hz, the “Earth’s magnetic Heartbeat” scientists refer to as the Schumann Resonance. But there’s a glaring problem with this thinking: If that magnetic field is more ‘resonant’ with 432Hz tuning since it is the 54th harmonic (8×54=432), then why not its nemesis, 440Hz? which is the next harmonic higher (8×55=440).  But a more potent argument against 432 is that the Schumann Resonance is almost never at 8Hz. It’s constantly in flux, ranging from 7-9Hz. For example, a Schumann Resonance of 9 Hz would make 432, the 48th harmonic. 

I attempted to put both versions of “Contented Waltz” 432 and 440 on Spotify and Apple Music, but the uploading software couldn’t tell the difference between them so denied anyone putting up the same music twice, even with slightly different names. But you can compare them both here: