Six American Composers on Nonstandard Tunnings

T HIS ARTICLE IS BASED on individual telephone conversations with six American composers who work with microtonal scales or other nonstandard tunings: Easley Blackwood, John Eaton, Lou Harrison, Ben Johnston, Joel Mandelbaum, and William Schottstaedt. These six represent only a sampling from the list of interesting composers in the field. Although their remarks are interleaved here for comparison, none of the interviewees was aware of the others' responses to the same questions.