Neil Thornock - Neil Thornock: Another and Still Stranger Sky (2025) Hi-Res

Composer and pianist Neil Thornock releases his second New Focus album, this time a collection of solo retuned-keyboard works in an extended just intonation tuning. Thornock's fascination with microtonality is grounded in his extensive experience playing and composing for carillon, while his approach to keyboard writing is shaped by years of organ and piano performance.

In his liner notes for Another and Still Stranger World, Thornock makes an analogy between this adventurous project of new works for extended just intonation piano and Captain Ahab's audacious search for an individual whale in the iconic novel Moby Dick. Indeed, the process of venturing into a new tuning system can be akin to setting out on unknown waters. Thornock has spent much of his musical life exploring the subtleties of microtonal systems, particularly as a carillonneur. This collection of mostly short character pieces and etudes for his carefully cultivated tuning demonstrate his ingenuity as applied to pitch, but also to the textures he creates that highlight exhilarating characteristics of the tuning.

Thornock's extended just intonation temperament consists of all thirty-one prime number harmonics from 2 to 127 over a fundamental C. The resultant tuning includes octaves that are not in tune with another, beating effects between intervals that push up against their nearby overtones, and detuning effects. The otherworldly quality of Thornock's tuning system opens up a wealth of expressive avenues for the music, from the simplest gesture to dense, complex sonorities.

The album opens with three Etudes that draw the listener into the temperament with oscillating, repeated figures. In equal temperament, the opening minor 3rd and major 3rd motives of Etude 1 might conjure Phillip Glass, but here Thornock eases us into this strange world gradually, introducing more pitches that reveal the tuning's richness one by one into the fabric of the moto perpetuo texture. Etude 2 opens with a somber minor triad arpeggio supporting a poignant melody, each note calibrated to extract the maximum expressive impact from its unique intervallic space from the others around it. Etude 3 introduces rhythmic irregularity into the mix, varying odd groupings of alternating accompanimental dyads.

Cascade is evocative and descriptive; descending arpeggios drop gently to a fixed pedal point in the bass, articulating partials of the fundamental as they fall. Midway through, Thornock changes direction with ascending figures and tolling chords. Lithic Bell highlights the resonance of pitch collections in permutations of deliberate rhythmic figures before dramatic chords expand the register. The short two movement Diptych focuses on simple gestures, gently rising melodic phrases in the first and an exuberant march-like figure with quick arpeggiated rolls in the second.

Bellody is evocative of both Lou Harrison's just intonation works as well as Indonesian gamelan (which itself was a big source of inspiration for Harrison). Thornock uses harmonizations of the primary bell inspired line in rhythmic unison across different registers to highlight the subtle discrepancies in pitch between octaves in this ritualistic work. Fantazia 1 is the longest work on the album, and the most ambitious structurally. Opening with a a series of harmonies that toggle back and forth between each other, Thornock stretches the pace of unfolding to give the ear a chance to absorb the exotic pitch relationships. The oscillating repetition of the Etudes returns, here with watery figuration on top in the higher register that becomes more insistent over time, before closing with a angular, unpredictable coda that hints at the singular genius of Thelonius Monk.

Versets are short vignettes, only one of which lasts longer than one minute (Verset 9 at 1:07). They range from the impressionistic (#1, #8, #9) to the earthy (#2, #5, #6), and from the the quirky (#3) to the somber (#4 and #7). Fantazia 2 opens with a pedal point in the middle register (perhaps a nod to Chopin's famous raindrop Prelude in D-flat major) around which shimmering sonorities sound. Midway through the piece Thornock obscures the pedal point pitch with closely spaced double stops that surround it and increasingly dense chord voicings before a new pedal point emerges at a higher pitch level.

The four Poems are, like the Versets, ruminations on a musical idea, but slightly more extended and developed. "Poem 1" is a chorale texture that introduces connective phrases between the harmonies. "Poem 2" features melodic fragments that over-ring due to a depressed sustain pedal, drawing the ear to the remaining resonance between phrases. A simple contrapuntal dialogue unfolds in "Poem 3" and "Poem 4" establishes a spacious, reflective atmosphere by crafting gestures that jump in register before mysterious, planed chords finish the piece.

Microwaltz lives up to its name, with a characteristic waltz accompaniment in the left hand and fluid figuration in the right hand. The tuning takes the familiar stylistic context and puts it behind a distorting filter; Thornock intensifies the texture with dense chords as the dance threatens to go off the rails, before a reprise of the opening theme. Rain opens with a similar descending figure as Cascade, this time in a more compressed register. It is a fitting close to this beguiling and hypnotic album, filled with entrancing new sonorities.

– Dan Lippel