''Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media'', Op. 28, is a set of pieces in various

microtonal Microtonal music or microtonality is the use in music of microtones— intervals smaller than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of t ...

equal temperaments composed and released on LP in 1980 by American composer Easley Blackwood Jr. In the late 1970s, Blackwood won a grant from the

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

to investigate the harmonic and modal properties of microtonal tunings. The project culminated in the ''Microtonal Etudes'', composed as illustrations of the tonal possibilities of all the equal tunings from 13 to 24 notes to the octave. He was intrigued by "finding conventional harmonic progressions" in unconventional tunings. "What I was particularly interested in was chord progressions that would give a sensation either of modal coherence or else of tonality. That is to say you can actually identify subdominants, dominants, tonics, and keys.""Easley Blackwood: The Composer in Conversation with Bruce Duffie"
''BruceDuffie.com'' Blackwood likened the task to writing a "

sequel A sequel is a work of literature, film, theatre, television, music or video game that continues the story of, or expands upon, some earlier work. In the common context of a narrative work of fiction, a sequel portrays events set in the same ...

" to ''

The Well-Tempered Clavier ''The Well-Tempered Clavier'', BWV 846–893, consists of two sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys for keyboard by Johann Sebastian Bach. In the composer's time, ''clavier'', meaning keyboard, referred to a variety of i ...

''. The ''Twelve Microtonal Etudes'' were re-released on compact disc in 1994, accompanied by two additional compositions of Blackwood's in tunings he explored in the ''Etudes'': ''Fanfare in 19-note Equal Tuning'', Op. 28a, and ''Suite for Guitar in 15-note Equal Tuning'', Op. 33. The fanfare, like the etudes, was performed by the composer on Polyfusion synthesizer. The suite was performed by guitarist Jeffrey Kust on an acoustic guitar with a modified

fretboard The fingerboard (also known as a fretboard on fretted instruments) is an important component of most stringed instruments. It is a thin, long strip of material, usually wood, that is laminated to the front of the neck of an instrument. The st ...

Sources

Further reading