ANAHATA

In ANAHATA, the internationally acclaimed harpist Gwyneth Wentink combines a 400-years’-old instrument  – the triple harp – with electronics in a bid to explore a new sound-world by means of the unique tuning system known as ‘Just Intonation’- which is the tuning of musical intervals as whole number ratios of frequencies. This project goes back to the earliest, most fundamental way that music was tuned. By re-adopting it in our time we gain a fresh artistic experience of the original mathematical relationships that exist between musical notes.

Together with a designer of interactive media, Beer van Geer, Gwyneth Wentink has been exploring innovative ways of transposing the patterns of musical/harmonic proportions through various visual means and by drawing on interactive media. These visual additions represent and complement the harmonic ratios’ energy in motion and through geometric patterns.

(BEST VIEWED ON PC OR TABLET WITH BIG SCREEN, NOT FOR MOBILE)

In the 5th century BC Pythagoras postulated that everything could be predicated and measured as rhythmic patterns or cycles. The mathematical proportions that he discovered in sound and its overtones such as the octave, the perfect 5th etc are found widespread in nature. These harmonies are based on whole numbers. For Pythagoras music is connected to all the natural phenomena around us and indeed to the entire cosmos. His  belief in the perfect natural and geometric order and in the predictability found within the harmony between notes resulted in music gaining an immensely influential role in society, extending to education, psychology, as well as to mathematics.

As music evolved over time, becoming ever-more complex in tonality, the tuning of  instruments according to this system of pure intonation turned out to be more and more problematic and in fact impossible for instruments that play chords. To accommodate greater flexibility a tuning system was invented in which the octave was divided into twelve equal steps, resulting in slightly adjusted ratios. This became a necessity to allow for  the complexity of harmonic music prevalent from the mid-19th century onwards. This tuning system of equal temperament is something we have become used to in Western music, so much so that it is hard to recapture the consternation and controversy that this new way of tuning caused when it was gradually introduced in the lifetime of JS Bach. 

Unlike equal temperament, just intoned intervals are not equally spaced, but then neither is the natural harmonic series. Just Intonation permits us to align the natural overtones produced by ‘just’ or ‘pure’ intervals in a unique way, and allows composers to bring out what makes each and every key unique. By reverting to Just Intonation and to exploring these alignments, Anahata is creating new (or ancient) sound-worlds and acoustic phenomena on the harp. As a result we can reacquaint the ways we listen to music and thereby enrich our perception of natural phenomena. It allows all of us, not just performers and composers, to new and inspiring avenues.