Nicole Reisnour grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota. She began studying piano at the age of 8, and violin at age 9. She later went on to pursue a B.A. in Music at Bard College where she studied composition and tuning theory with Kyle Gann, classical piano with German Diaz, and Balinese Gamelan with I Nyoman Saptanyana. She currently divides her time between pursuing an M.A. in composition at Mills College and performing with Gamelan Sekar Jaya. Her involvement with Indonesian music remains an invaluable source of inspiration for her work as a composer.
Nicole’s compositions explore intricate polyrhythms, microtonal tuning systems, and new uses of tonality. Her music has often been described as being reminiscent of the stark landscape of the Great Plains where she spent her formative years.
Lucky Creation
I have been thinking a lot lately about the idea of intelligent creation. I am interested in how the fear of nature has driven people to map human goals onto non-goal oriented, inherently chaotic natural processes. I believe this way of thinking has been at in European tuning theory since the 16th century when people began to fully embrace the concealment of certain acoustical facts that were at odds with the highly goal-oriented musical language they wished to use to express themselves. When I set out to write this string quintet I began by retuning some of the instruments. Using the natural harmonics of the open strings I then discovered a set of pitches that highlights the syntonic comma. This tiny interval 81/80 or approximately 21.5 cents) is the discrepancy that arises between two enharmonically equivalent pitches when one of them is derived from pure Perfect fifths (3/2) and the other from pure Major thirds 5/4). Early composers of harmonic music wanted to pretend that this discrepancy did not exist. Thus the concealment of the syntonic comma became one of the primary goals of Western tuning theory. In composing Lucky Creation I have attempted to bring this tuning phenomenon into the foreground with the hope of exposing it as a beautiful and useful aspect of the true nature of sound.