“Cinna” consists of a suite of incidental music created with Guggenheim Fellowship support to accompany a rod-puppet production of the classic French play, which did not materialize once the music was composed. Corneille's play “Cinna” is a grand political intrigue in which loyalty conflicts with revenge. Harrison's special "fully just 7-limit tuning""which produces a spectrum of finely-nuanced melodic semitone relationships and larger intervals of either ‘pure' or ‘poisonous' affect"is particularly appropriate to a theatre world obsessed with power inequities and strategic alliances, a world in which affinity is tempered by antipathy. Instead of the ‘totalitarian tonal regime' imposed by equal temperament (which often masquerades as democracy), just-intonation pitch relationships such as those of “Cinna” give rise to a complex and changeable tonal theatre, a stratified society of sound in which pitches become actors, creating interval relationships and motives of character. “Cinna” is pitched at A=415 at the request of the composer, bringing it closer to the world of Corneille while reducing the risk of broken strings. "Linda Burman-Hall Support for Linda Burman-Hall's appearance provided by New Albion Records |
