Description
This a successful effort to bring the just intonation movement to the woodwind quintet.
Martin Bresnick, born in New York in 1946 and a faculty member of Yale University, wrote Just Time for the Norfolk Festival, where it received its premiere in 1985 by the Taft Quintet.
Bresnick indicates that the title of the work has several levels of meaning. Most important is its reference to the tuning system of "just intonation." This is the concept (going back to Pythagoras) that all notes in a scale should correspond to the natural overtone series of the key pitch. Just intonation produces the purest, most consonant intervals and chords; equal temperament, the system to which our keyboards and most keyed instruments are tuned, sacrifices this purity in the interest of ready modulation among the 12 standard keys and produces intervals and chords that are "out of tune" a little bit in any one key to prevent the same notes from being badly out of tune in certain keys.
Bresnick in this work applies just intonation to the medium of the woodwind quintet. This is a tonal work -- it is in B flat -- that does not use microtones as such; his scale is a seven-note diatonic scale, although some of those notes are often different from the notes that would be found in a piano scale in B flat.
The French horn is the key to the intonation of Just Time. From its deep fundamental note of B flat the horn naturally "wants" to play only natural-overtone pitches. In Just Time the hornist usually plays these naturally just intoned notes, and the four woodwinds must bend their pitches up or down from their usual notes (or use different key combinations to produce notes outside the equal-tempered scale). Bresnick indicates these "retunings" in the score by arrows attached to accidentals.
The audible result of all this is an unusually resonant sound, warmer and less "tart" than that usually heard in wind quintets. Bresnick adds to this effect by sometimes calling on the use of the auxiliary instruments -- the alto flute, the English horn, and the bass clarinet -- of the top three woodwinds. The music is tonal, with slow-moving harmonic motion that allows one to savor the purity of the resulting chords.
On the other hand, the pulse of the music varies widely, as does its texture. It opens and closes in a sort of music on the overtone series, and then moves into action with rapidly repeated chords. Its rhythms are tightly organized into 24 cycles of 121 sixteenth notes. (An example of the subdivision of one of these cycles is nine measures of 3/4 time plus one of 13/16.) There is a copious use of polyrhythms, such as five notes against six or eight against three, for instance. (Bresnick usually uses polyrhythmic relationships whose ratios add up to 11.)
Notwithstanding all this theoretical complexity, Just Time is a very listenable, if somewhat abstruse, piece of music. ~ All Music Guide
