We describe a project in which several collaborators adapted an existing instrument to make
it capable of playing expressively in music based on the microtonal scale characterised by equal
divsion of the octave into 19 tones (“19-EDO”). Our objective was not just to build this instrument,
however, but also to produce a well-formed piece of music which would exploit it
idiomatically, in a performance which would provide listeners with a pleasurable and satisfying
musical experience. Hence, consideration of the extent and limits of the playing-techniques of
the resulting instrument (a “Wind-Controller”) and of appropriate approaches to the composition
of music for it were an integral part of the project from the start. Moreover, the intention
was also that the piece, though grounded in the musical characteristics of the 19-EDO scale,
would nevertheless have a recognisable relationship with what Dimitri Tymoczko (2010) has
called the “Extended Common Practice” of the last millennium. So the article goes on to consider
these matters, and to present a score of the resulting new piece, annotated with comments
documenting some of the performance issues which it raises. Thus, bringing the project to
fruition involved elements of composition, performance, engineering and computing, and the
article describes how such an inter-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaboration
was co-ordinated in a unified manner to achieve the envisaged outcome. Finally, we
consider why the building of microtonal instruments is such a problematic issue in a contemporary
(“high-tech”) society like ours
