Max Vinetz

Program note:

At the outset, Wax Catalog was a study of integrating Extended Heimholtz-Ellis Just Intonation (HEJI) into the fabric of my own musical language. I found the task daunting at first, and didn’t quite understand how, or even why HEJI would find its place in my own music. To make this project more personal to me, as opposed to being solely based in a musical or theoretical technique, I decided to draw musical materials from two string quartets that were formative in my music education: Bartok’s String Quartet no. 2, and Beethoven’s String Quartet in Bb Major, opus 130. I used materials from the 1st movement from Bartok (second theme, a chorale), and from the “Cavatina” from the Beethoven quartet, as these movements held a lot of emotional weight for me.

As I dug deeper into my studies, I realized that I had already been exploring just intervals in my earlier works without even thinking about it whatsoever. At this point, the compositional process began to feel more comfortable, and akin to my typical practice where improvisation and intuition make their  way into my formal decision-making. Both movements of this quartet make extensive use of a technique I like to call “intentional misremembering,” in which I channel my favorite parts of the source material (as opposed to its literal, notational representation) into the final, composed music itself. 

The title “Wax Catalog” refers to the Edison phonograph wax cylinders that Béla Bartók used to capture field recordings and thousands of folk songs from his travels to remote Eastern European villages in the early 20th century.

This work makes use of 5-limit, 7-limit, and 11-limit HEJI.