Wolfgang von Schweinitz

Ever since musical thought began in ancient Greece, it has been known that the sound within an octave contains much finer gradations than the keyboard allows us to think. While this phenomenon has frequently formed the basis of musical practice in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, since around 1700 it has frequently been excluded from the history of Western composition due to the compromise of tempered turning. Quarter tones and other microintervals then became a widely-accepted part of the musical vocabulary of the avantgarde after 1945. Hardly any other composer has made such a systematic and thorough exploration of the world of microtones as Wolfgang von Schweinitz.

Von Schweinitz was born in Hamburg in 1953, where he studied Composition, amongst others with György Ligeti from 1973 bis 1975. His own compositions first attracted attention at the end of the 1970s and he was soon categorised a spart of the “New Simplicity” movement. In the middle of the 1990s, von Schweinitz began to free his compositions from tempered tuning. His attention was primarily devoted to making it possible to compose using the intervals hidden within natural overtones and partials. He created a new form of notation for compositions using extremely fine tone differentials. His works notated according to this system predominantly consist of slowly changing, calm and meditative seeming sound tapes in which the simple opposition between consonance and dissonance is resolved by merging the notes to varying degrees. Here the old interval qualities manifest themselves again in heightened form. Consonances can sound fuller and more rounded than usual, whereas dissonances can be sharper and more cutting. Since September 2007 von Schweinitz has taught at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, where he succeeded James Tenney.

As of June 2023.