The Bohlen-Pierce clarinet was created by woodwind maker Stephen Fox, instigated by Georg Hajdu, a professor of multimedia composition, who realized the clarinet's natural overblowing to a perfect twelfth suited the new scale.
Cultural Impact
Bohlen-Pierce music offers new aesthetic horizons, with audiences finding its octave-avoiding tonal system intellectually provoking and its 'otherworldly' sound inspiring.
Performer Biography
Nora-Louise Müller, a clarinetist on this album, is one of the few worldwide who performs on the Bohlen-Pierce clarinet and has researched its playing techniques for her PhD dissertation.
Composer's Artistic Vision
The Bohlen-Pierce scale was independently discovered by German engineer Heinz Bohlen in the early 1970s and American engineer John R. Pierce in the mid-1980s, both of whom worked in satellite technology.
Compositional Technique
The Bohlen-Pierce (BP) scale divides the perfect twelfth into thirteen equal steps, creating a harmonic system where the octave does not appear and chord structures are acoustically different from traditional ones.
Instruments
This album features works performed on the Bohlen-Pierce clarinet, an instrument designed to play in an alternative tonal system where the perfect twelfth, not the octave, is the interval of equivalency.
Interpretation
A specific six-line notation system, using the last thirteen letters of the alphabet (N-Z) for pitches, was developed by Nora-Louise Müller and Georg Hajdu for the Bohlen-Pierce clarinet to avoid confusion with traditional notation.
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