As students in the late 1980s, Julia Werntz and Pandelis Karayorgis both enrolled in Joe Maneri’s Microtonal Composition and Performance class at the New England Conservatory, beginning a formative period of mentorship and collaborations with musicians in the scene surrounding that course. During those years a special mindset was cultivated regarding rhythm and musical form, as well as the rich world of microtonal melody and harmony. We also were married during that period, but our musical paths diverged and have run in parallel ever since—Julia being a composer of contemporary, mostly microtonal concert music and Pandelis being a jazz pianist (on standard, equal-tempered pianos). Almost four decades later we have joined forces musically for the first time, to create this project: a fully composed, microtonal piano piece, Capricious Nocturnal Variations, that becomes the source of material for a jazz trio—who expand further on the piece’s themes and special tuning.
Climbing to Sleep also reunites another group with roots in that early Boston scene: the Pandelis Karayorgis Trio with bassist Nate McBride and drummer Randy Peterson. The trio was active from 1997 to 2005, releasing three CDs and touring in Europe and the US. Here, Pandelis still uses the standard grand piano, but with the addition, on tracks 1-6 and 8-12, of a keyboard tuned with the same microtonal scale used in Werntz’s Capricious Nocturnal Variations—which is heard on track 7 performed by pianist (and composer) Eric Moe.
The commission for this piece led to yet another happy musical reunion; Julia and Eric had worked together in the past, but to compose a new, microtonal work for keyboard, specifically for Eric, was a fantastic opportunity. As the title implies, Capricious Nocturnal Variations was written in a nocturnal spirit (after some moon-gazing on a spring night), and it is a theme and variations form—an introduction and theme followed by seven distinct variations. A certain friction is present within the early variations, resembling the tug-of-war between wakefulness and sleep on nights of insomnia. Eventually this leads to two variations that embody the states of Non-REM sleep and REM sleep, just before the closing variation. The premiere was in February 2025 at the Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival in Pittsburgh.
Finally, some technical things, for anyone interested: the “Werntz Nocturne Scale,” used on this CD, is a twelve-note, microtonal scale that is mapped easily onto a standard keyboard using the re-tunable Pianoteq virtual instrument. (Pianoteq also offers superb piano sounds.) Nine of the scale notes comprise a 2/3-tone scale starting on C. Stepwise runs sound wonderful here, and a curious, two-octave, extended “diminished” chord is possible using small minor thirds of approximately 267 cents. The remaining three scale notes, D, F#, and A#, create areas of micro-chromatic density within the scale, and they also make it possible to build conventional major thirds and augmented triads on any scale note—some using all microtonal pitches and some using pitches from the standard equal-tempered system. These major thirds can be played off of each other to expressive effect, and they also sound exciting played off of the shrunken minor thirds described above.
