Music For Sixth​-​tone Harmonium

Composers Fredrik Rasten and Ian Mikyska present new compositions for Alois Hába’s unique sixth-tone harmonium, performed by Miroslav Beinhauer, who has single-handedly revived the instrument after decades of slumber. Alois Hába, Czech composer and pioneer of microtonal music, commissioned a number of microtonal instruments in the 1920s and ’30s, including the sixth-tone harmonium, two of which were built. Hába himself wrote only one solo piece for this instrument, and also included a part for it in his sixth-tone opera ‘Thy Kingdom Come’. The opera was first performed in 2018, when the Ostrava Center for New Music organised its world premiere, which inspired a number of initiatives to create new pieces for the harmonium. Nine of these pieces were premiered in 2021, ‘In’ and ‘Concord’ among them.

Warm Winters Ltd. is releasing the two pieces as a double CD – each containing seamless audio – with extensive liner notes written by Ian Mikyska, describing Hába’s microtonal compositional approaches, inspirations and the context within which these pieces were made. The two pieces by Fredrik Rasten and Ian Mikyska (both created for a project initiated by the Prague Quiet Music Collective aimed at utilising the harmonium) are the longest of these, as well as those written for the smallest instrumentations: Mikyska’s piece is for harmonium and electronics (fixed playback), while Rasten’s features the harmonium along with the composer himself on two fretless electric guitars played with e-bows. Both pieces are performed by Miroslav Beinhauer, currently the only performer on the sixth-tone harmonium in the world.

Mikyska’s ‘In’ employs sixth-tones to create shifts and discrepancies within tempered microtonal harmonies, whilst also exploring the possibilities of the harmonium’s interactions with sounds of the “real world” through field and object recordings. ‘In’ comprises an organic long form music of rich timbres and playful sonic interactions between harmonic and noisy tonalities, and between natural and processed sounds. Rasten’s piece ‘Concord’ is an extended meditation in long tones that creates vibrant harmonic interactions in its explorations of just intonation harmony. By utilising some of the harmonium’s approximations of just intonation intervals and seamlessly blending them with the electronically produced string oscillations of the two guitars, both static and subtly moving tones create a sense of liminality within the slow unfolding of the piece.