Ervin Wilson (June 11, 1928 – December 8, 2016) was a Mexican/ American (dual citizen)

music theorist Music theory is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding the practices and possibilities of music. '' The Oxford Companion to Music'' describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first is the " rudiments", that ...

Early life

Ervin Wilson was born i
Colonia Pacheco
a small village in the remote mountains of northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, where he lived until the age of fifteen. His mother taught him to play the reed organ and to read musical notation. He began to compose at an early age, but immediately discovered that some of the sounds he was hearing mentally could not be reproduced by the conventional intervals of the organ. As a teenager, he began to read books on Indian music, developing an interest in concepts of

raga A raga ( ; , ; ) is a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music akin to a musical mode, melodic mode. It is central to classical Indian music. Each raga consists of an array of melodic structures with musical motifs; and, fro ...

. While he was in the Air Force in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

, a chance meeting with a total stranger introduced him to musical harmonics, which changed the course of his life and work. Influenced by the work of Joseph Yasser, Wilson began to think of the musical scale as a living process—like a crystal or plant.

Works

Despite his avoidance of academia, Wilson has been influential on those interested in microtonal music and

just intonation In music, just intonation or pure intonation is a musical tuning, tuning system in which the space between notes' frequency, frequencies (called interval (music), intervals) is a natural number, whole number ratio, ratio. Intervals spaced in thi ...

, especially in the areas of scale, keyboard, and notation design. Among his developments are Moments of Symmetry, Combination Product Sets, Golden Horograms, scales based on

recurrence relation In mathematics, a recurrence relation is an equation according to which the nth term of a sequence of numbers is equal to some combination of the previous terms. Often, only k previous terms of the sequence appear in the equation, for a parameter ...

s (scales of "Mt. Meru"), and mapping scales to the generalized keyboard. He cited Augusto Novaro and Joseph Yasser as influences. Wilson built instruments and explored the resources of 31 and 41 equal divisions of the octave. He supported the work of

Harry Partch Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century com ...

, proposing the design of the Quadrangularis Reversum and helping build the instrument, as well as providing diagrams for Partch's book

Genesis of a Music ''Genesis of a Music'' is a book first published in 1949 by microtonal composer Harry Partch (1901–1974). Partch first presents a polemic against both equal temperament and the long history of stagnation in the teaching of music; according ...

. The goal of Wilson's research with scales was to make them musically accessible to the composer and the listener. "I sculpt in the architecture of the scale. Other people come along and animate it."

Musicians influenced by Wilson

* Warren Burt * Jim French * Kraig Grady * Catherine Lamb * Terumi Narushima * Paul Rapoport * Emil Richards * Marcus Satellite * Greg Schiemer *

Stephen James Taylor Stephen James Taylor (born September 28, 1954) is an American composer best known for his film and TV scores. He has earned four Emmy nominations, two Annie nominations, and a DVD-X Award on "Best Original Score (for a DVD Premiere Movie) to dat ...

* Daniel James Wolf

References

External links

The Wilson Archives at Anaphoria.comGems from the Wilson Archives
Blog devoted to Erv Wilson's work
''Microtonality-and-the-Tuning-Systems-of-Erv-Wilson''
by Terumi Narushima. An introductory and explanatory introduction to the work of Erv Wilson. *Xenharmonikon - Informal Journal of Experimental Music:
Archives (1974-1998)

Online Journal (2018-)
* ttp://www.thesonicsky.com/ The Sonic Sky- site (with video) about ''the musical realm of Erv Wilson, and the vast universe of his musical structures'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Wilson, Erv American music theorists Mexican music theorists 1928 births 2016 deaths Mexican emigrants to the United States