JOHNNY REINHARD
ODYSSEUS
by Michael Berest

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If you start talking to Johnny Reinhard, you may soon find yourself discussing Werckmeister III or Kirnberger III. Nope, these are not sequels to some Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay blockbuster. They are nothing less than listening to music in a new way by listening to it in a very old way.

“Everything old is new again,” the late Peter Allen wrote, and nothing is newer today than Johnny Reinhard’s one-man crusade to have music heard the way composers originally wanted it to be heard—in those lawless Baroque days when D Minor stood for something!

If I sound a little frivolous, it is simply that talking about retuning instruments to the way they were tuned 300 years ago doesn’t immediately have a large amount of caché to people. But it should. And if I need to be a little light discussing it, it’s just because most people assume it’s heavier than a black hole.

It is, of course, not the only thing Mr. Reinhard has going for him. If it isn’t enough to change the way we hear the classics, Reinhard also is a composer, a musician, a conductor, and a curator in the museum of supposedly lost musical classics. More about these things, momentarily.

Chances are if you played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with E-flat Minor as its central key, no one, except possibly those few with absolute pitch, would notice. So what difference does it make if it’s in D Minor or not? And why should Bach, in The Well-Tempered Clavier, write preludes and fugues in the 24 major and minor keys? Why not write them all in the same key? Who would know the difference?

Well, the people in Bach’s and Beethoven’s day would. Werckmeister III and Kimberger III were tuning schemes used in the days of those two composers, respectively. It meant D Minor did not sound exactly the same as E-flat Minor, nor any major or minor key sound like any other major or minor key.

For convenience sake, eventually a scheme that breaks up the octave into twelve nice neat little equidistant tones took over everything.

Today I did an Internet crossword puzzle which had a question, “same as C#.” The answer came out DFLAT. But in nature, C# isn’t the same thing as D-flat. But so what? So you lose—what?—nine tones?—it’s worth it not to have the guy with the tuning fork knocking on your door before every concert.

Or is it? Johnny Reinhard strongly believes it isn’t and he has set out with his ensemble, the American Festival of Microtonal Music, to prove it. The AFMM gives concerts (with those concerts also recorded for CD) of music where “play as written” really means something. A recent CD showcased Bach Brandenburg concerti, and others works by Bach and contemporaries, played as they were intended.

The experience of listening to such a recording is unusual. You may not immediately notice any perceptible difference from what you’ve heard before, except the music may seem ever so slightly out of tune. A prelude and fugue in E-flat may sound just ever so much more delicate than their equivalents in D.

To many, the distinctions may seem too subtle to matter—now. But that’s simply because we’re not used to such subtlety. What one can notice right away is that a performance of the Brandenburg Concerto #2 sounds better than it ever has. This isn’t to say that Reinhard and the AFMM don’t represent some of the best musicians on the planet; they do. It’s simply that, without really being able to tell why, the music just seems to have a greater richness to it than it might have had even under Herbert Von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic (no slouches either).

As stated above, making us allegorically take our fingers out of our ears is not the only thing Reinhard does. He is, of course, the conductor of the AFMM, and often doubles as one of the musicians, he being a virtuoso bassoonist, as well as well-versed in related instruments.

He is also the person who did the impossible by reconstructing Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony, a work which had built up the impenetrable legend of being something of which large parts were lost, or that Ives never finished because it proved beyond the ken of even his multi-planed mind.

In Reinhard’s book The Ives Universe—A Symphonic Odyssey, which should be available on the web in serialized form this month, he makes a pretty good case, even for a lay reader like myself, that Ives had written all the pieces of the Universe Symphony and just had never assembled them in an easily recognizable order. Easy or not, the order was recognizable with effort, which Reinhard expended in plenty, resulting in a 64 minute composition that sounds in no way incomplete, and which may call for re-evaluation of Ives as a composer on a level with Beethoven.

Indeed, imagine if we had to evaluate Beethoven without ever knowing the Ode to Joy or the Holy Song of Thanksgiving from one of his last string quartets. Reinhard’s accomplishment with Universe cannot be considered any less significant than if someone had done the same for Ludwig Von’s late masterworks.

Not surprisingly, Universe, is an example of a 20th Century work intended to be played with yet another different tuning scheme called Extended Pythagorean, meaning all those manly dissonances Ives is noted for may have been not so dissonant as we thought.

If all this were not sufficient, Johnny Reinhard also composes music, himself. I have heard what would probably be considered his magnum opus to date, Odysseus, a thirteen movement work for ‘cello, chamber orchestra, and vocalists which portrays the Homeric hero’s convoluted journey from Troy back home to Ithaca.

Odysseus is faintly reminiscent of another work, Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote. Both works feature a ‘cello in the role of the title character, a series of episodes portraying the famed adventures of that character, and a soloistic use of instruments to capture the sounds of animals and people.

Anyone, however, expecting something sounding like it came from the composer of Also Sprach Zarathustra or Salome will be surprised. Odysseus is austere and ascetic in the manner of the ancient Greek culture it recreates. It is not, say, as easily accessible as a work like Soren Nils Eichberg’s Qilaatsorneq, but it is no less masterful or significant.

Repeated hearings will reveal the bluesy melody the ‘cello plays to first introduce us to Odysseus, but it is placed against or surrounded by music meant to make that connection less specific. The whole piece is about creating new sonorities from traditional instruments. A French horn makes wolf-like cries than babbles indignantly away to represent Polyphemus, the Cyclops. A bagpipe produces a distinctly non-Hibernian melody to remind us of the Greek origins of Aiolius, the God of Winds. A trombone stands in for the victimized sacred cow of Thrinacia. Even the ‘cello says a “woo-hoo” or two to seduce the enchantress, Circe.

Perhaps the bleating muted trumpets standing in for sheep in Quixote may come to mind. But while Strauss was simply creating sound effects, Reinhard’s passages seem more like cadenzas for the various instruments he’s writing for. Indeed, Reinhard is striving for sounds of the real world; his own use of multiple tuning schemes presenting the “off-key” pitches of everything from speech to the sound of a folk instrument like the animal horn, sounding not unlike the Shofar that will be blown to ring in the Jewish New Year.

Perhaps the most powerful synthesis of natural sound and music comes in the tenth movement, the one representing the treacherous transit past the Sirens, as well as the monsters Scylla and Charybdis.

This movement starts with two sopranos singing Homer’s words for the Sirens almost as though this were a renaissance motet. In the distance we hear the Theremin that is Charybdis. As we sail past the sirens, Charybdis grows louder, to be joined unexpectedly by Scylla in the form of blasting, grinding electric guitar music. The sirens are still singing as the two sea monsters completely overwhelm the two women’s voices. In the churning sonic chaos, one, perhaps, can catch one more note or two of the siren’s song, but by then we have sailed too far off to hear anything but the vortex threatening to engulf us.

Certainly, the idea of using crescendo and decrescendo to symbolize something approaching or moving away is not new. But the way Reinhard does it, it is as though we were on Odysseus’s ship hearing not merely a simple descrescendo of the sirens, but having them buried, still singing, under the crescendi of Scylla and Charybdis. It reminds me of one of Charles’s Ives forte-fortissimo chords dying away to reveal a pianissimo melody underneath, except Reinhard does this in reverse order.

It’s difficult to sum up someone as multi-faceted as Reinhard briefly. But I will say his work, as conductor, composer, re-tuning advocate, and "curator," is opening paths to understanding of music not really available before. This is as exciting as atonality and 12-tone rows must have been for Schoenberg's circle. And I don't think that's an exaggeration.