February 02, 2022

The Equal-Tempered Keyboard has been available since January 2022, and has received a (surprisingly?) warm reception. Some readers have also expressed interest in the "forthcoming" text that is mentioned in the preface. In correspondence with those interested, I've had to admit that that text, tentatively titled "Composing in Equal Divisions of an Octave, 5ET to 20ET", remains unfinished. The idea is to discuss each tuning at some length, showing my approach to working with each tuning, along with musical examples from sketches and final scores. This kind of text can be useful not only for those interested in microtones, but for anyone interested in tonal composition, because each tuning imposes curious limitations on the kinds of patterns that will sound acceptable. For example, have you ever tried writing a piece that sounds minor, but contains no minor thirds? Have you ever written music that contains no perfect fifths? These are the kinds of challenges that arise when working with non-standard divisions of an octave. All quite interesting, but also very time consuming work. Having focused my efforts on completing the music and publishing the book, I unfortunately completely lost my motivation to work on this explanatory text. But I'm happy to report that, after admitting this, I received some encouragement, in the form of donations towards this work. So I will be working on this with an aim to publish as soon as I can.

So far I've determined that the text I've written up to this point (which was done sporadically over many years) is mostly worth keeping, but I will have to redo all of the musical examples, which is unfortunate, but at least better than having to rewrite the entire work. The book is planned as an A5 paperback, probably around 70 pages, but since I consider it worthwhile to translate texts into German and French, the end result will likely be around 200 pages. If the number of pages increases substantially, I suppose translations may also be printed separately, we'll see.

Thanks to those who are donating for this work. If you would also like to help, please support this project.

Stay well,
Aaron