Quarter tones

In 1924, Charles Ives (1874–1954) wrote these Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for Two Pianos (these were the years in which, in Europe, the Viennese formalized the rules of twelve-tone music).

It's interesting and even fun to learn more about Ives's relationship with microtonality and how it is achieved in these pieces.
Making a piano microtonal is, in fact, a problem. At first glance, it seems there are only two options: either you retune the piano entirely, losing half the range, or you use a specially constructed instrument. There is, however, a third option, the one Ives uses in these pieces: using two pianos, one tuned a quarter tone higher than the other. Obviously, the two instruments must be identical, and the two pianists must be very accurate in terms of timing, touch, and dynamics, because everything must sound like a single instrument. There are chords and phrases in which one player plays complementary notes to the other (imagine a phrase of four eighth notes in which the first and third are played by one pianist and the second and fourth by the other).

The relationship between Ives and microtonality is curious and dates back to his childhood in a family of musicians. His father, however, was also a keen tinkerer. He had built a kind of harp with 24 or more strings to experiment with quarter tones. Later, as Ives himself recounts, he composed some songs in quarter tones and tried to persuade the family to sing them, an attempt that was quickly abandoned, only to be revived again as a form of punishment.
Nevertheless, little Charles enjoyed some of these songs, the ones that were tempered and used microtones only as passing notes.

Ives also recalls his father having perfect pitch, but he considered it disturbing and almost shameful, saying, "Everything is relative; only fools and taxes are absolute." And to a friend, a graduate of the Boston Conservatory, who asked him why, despite his ear, he insisted on producing dissonances on the piano, he replied, "I may have perfect pitch, but, thank God, the piano doesn't have it." His father's influence also explains Charles Ives's attitude toward tonality: "I don't see why tonality, as such, should be eliminated, just as I don't see why it should always be present." Thus, while in Europe an ideological conflict between atonal and tonal was brewing, in America the foundations of that neutral attitude were being laid that would produce people like Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and many others, extending its influence to the present. In this piece, the first and the third movement were conceived for a single piano with two keyboards. Such a device had actually been built experimentally and, in practice, consisted of two harps, two mechanics, and two keyboards placed one above the other, included in the same box. These two movements are based on a series of chords, almost in the style of a hymn, which initially allow the ear time to absorb the strangeness produced by the quarter tones. This is particularly noticeable in the first movement, which presents the listener with the sound material in a gradual, almost didactic manner. This does not change the fact that, to our ears trained in the equal-tempered system, the ensemble often gives the impression of an out-of-tune piano.
Across this texture, a cantabile line unfolds, which, in the third movement, takes up and distorts a folk song (America, my country, the tis of thee), emphasizing the line "land where my fathers died!".
The allegro, on the other hand, is vigorous and lively, rhythmically divided between the two pianos.

Charles Ives – Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for Two Pianos (1924)
Elizabeth Dorman and Michael Smith, piano

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