World Harmony Project

History of Interval

by Jonathan Glasier

The history of Interval began with a three year old boy who happened to experience a magical world of music that was literally laid at his doorstep.I (JDG) was born in the Spring of 1945. My father John S (JSG) was a professor of Music at the University of Arkansas and  mother a high School English Teacher. In 1947 they moved to El Centro California. Shortly thereafter their friend, Harry Partch, having just finished his book, The Genesis of a Music, was invited to stay with us and lived in our garage. With Harry came his instruments (see Harry Partch Instrument Photos). Harry stayed a few months. and the little three year old's idea of music was molded by that experience. Father John was a composer of traditional music, mostly for strings and orchestra. He was a violinist and violist. But Partch's instruments were large marimba type and plucked string affairs that made exotic sounds.

Harry Partch continued to visit our family when they moved to San Diego in 1949.  Harry would also visit his other long time close friends, the Driscolls every time he came to town. At different times during my childhood he would have a diamond Marimba, Boo, or Harmonic Cannon in

the Music room of their Kensington (neighborhood) home. When he moved to San Diego in the mid-sixties I was an assistant and learned to tune his instruments to his Just Intonation 43 tone scale. Partch was accepted as a Regents Professor at UCSD in 1967, and I enrolled and was Partch's assistant while he was there (one year). My main job was tuning all 472 strings before every rehearsal and concert. That is where I gained my microtonal ear.  After Partch left UCSD I understood that the music department was not going in the direction of microtonal music but I stuck it out and graduated in 1969 with a BA in Music and re-enrolled as a graduate student until 1972. Partch stayed in San Diego and was living in Encinitas (north  SD county) but in 1968 the Partch instruments were in UCLA  for the production of Partch's last big work, "The Delusion of the Fury" and the energy that Partch and his instruments brought to UCSD fizzled and there was little microtonal activity for decades.

At that point, I was working on developing new tunings on the guitar and improvising  with my father (JSG). In 1972 I dropped out of my Graduate Program and started my first business, Making Music, in La Jolla CA. There were classes for children that taught music through speech and rhythm and Ensemble classes for guitar and recorder. The concept for my largest program The Beginning Music Experience, was that "one doesn't learn to read and write before learning to speak", and "We are all real-time composers as we have conversation because all of the elements of music are at hand."

Then in 1975 I met Tom Nunn and began a musical-social experiment called the ID (Improvisation Development) Project, which was born of improvisation and new instruments. It was there that the "Wing" and "Godzilla' were invented and that group performed for two years mostly in San Diego and San Francisco. It was during that time through John Chalmers, a Partch acolyte, that I met Erv Wilson and Ivor Darreg, the two standard bearers at that time of microtonal music. That is when my interest became focused on promoting Microtonal music. To me it was a "garden of delights" that was mostly not available to the ears of the public. We are still working to widen the perception of Xenharmonics (another word for microtonal music). That is the reason for the development of Interval: "To promote the composers, musicians and instrument innovators who are forging a new music and widening the scope of perception of intervals and producing good music."

In 1976 I went to Webster College for the introduction of the Huygens-Fokker Foundation's exhibition of "Tricessimolprimal Music" (31 EDO).

There I met many microtonal people and heard the 31 EDO synthesizer Archiphoon. It was sometime after that I began the task of promoting microtonal music by creating a magazine (Interval) that would be easy to read and inform people of events and show some of the scales and instruments that come from the creators. I felt that with the collection of microtonal people at that conference was the nexus of a subscription base, and there was a vast resource of content available from those microtonal pioneers at that time.

The first issue of "Interval/A Microtonal Newsletter" came out in the Fall of 1978 with Ivor Darreg and his Megalyra on the cover. By the time the Secord Volume came out, the magazine had expanded and the name was changed to "Interval/Exploring the Sonic Spectrum." Finally the last Volume (V)was changed to "Interval/Journal of Music Research and Development." By 1987 there were other magazines (including "Xenharmonikon" which actually preceded "Interval") that had taken up the slack, like the Just Intonation Journal "1/1," the "Experimental Musical Instruments" magazine edited by Bart Hopkin, the "Computer Music Journal," and "Pitch," edited by Johnny Reinhard of the American Microtonal Music Festival in New York. During that development there were major articles about Harry Partch in several magazines (Rolling Stone) and newspapers (San Diego Reader) and I felt like I had done the job of promoting microtonal music to a point and it was time to shift gears and create a local voice for the microtonal and improvisational activity that was happening locally in San Diego."

So... in the fall of 1987 I opened the first Sonic Arts Gallery in Downtown San Diego. The effort to put a local microtonal and experimental musical instrumental statement actually brought the end of Interval. It was actually an evolution into creating another forum for the same material. The "Sonic Arts Gallery I" lasted until 1990 and resurfaced in the South Park neighborhood in 1995 (The "Sonic Arts Gallery II") and lasted through a couple of more evolutions until 2015 where it resurfaced again in a building in the Nestor area of San Diego as "Kalimba Center for the Arts." There were two sonic art exhibits at Kalimba and then it closed in 2016 because of zoning difficulties. I stayed on, there at my building and moved to a more modest space to continue my microtonal activities and started to work on the Interval and Ivor Darreg websites with Joseph Monzo until we had to move because the space was needed for rental income. Since that time Joseph and I have been working daily to create the Interval and Ivor Darreg websites as a time capsule of the time when microtonal and new instruments were blossoming into the rich fields today that are witnessed by many who join us on Sundays at the Microtonal University "MU" with Johnny Reinhard and Witold Maciak.