Wild Up’s Darkness Sounding Festival: The Power of Tuning

The subject of tuning in music tends to attract two kinds of enthusiasts: scientists and poets.

Scientists speak in ratios, fractions and cents, a unit of measurement that captures tiny distances between pitches. For them, the question of temperament — how to space out the steps of a scale so that its component notes ring out in tune with one another — is a beautiful mathematical riddle.

For the poets, the subject is rich in metaphors. It is about relationships, of one string on the violin to its neighbor. When affinities line up perfectly, you can hear the sound glow with sympathetic resonance. The impurities that creep into certain intervals under the Western system of equal temperament reveal truths about conflict and compromise.

Last weekend, 92NY became a laboratory for exploring both the mystical and the physical dimensions of alternate tunings as part of the festival Darkness Sounding, presented by the Los Angeles-based collective Wild Up under the direction of Christopher Rountree. “In music, tuning sets the stakes and the boundaries of our world,” Wild Up’s program notes said. “It is the carbon we build mountains with and the oxygen we breathe in; it is our environment, and within the duration of a piece, it becomes us.”

The three-day festival included world premieres, 20th-century works and a rare complete performance of the “Rosary” Sonatas by the 17th-century composer Heinrich Biber. It offered a vibrant spectrum of sound worlds, from booming drones amplified at earsplitting levels to placid pools of shimmering textures. As a luxury-cast demonstration of the expressive power of tuning, the concerts were a ringing success. But as an immersive listening experience — as a “space for reflection and transformation where sound becomes landscape, ritual, and revelation,” as the program described it — the festival fell short of its ambitions.

Darkness Sounding started out in California as a winter ritual that mixed innovative programs with novel settings, such as moonlit serenades and sound meditations for listeners seated in circles. In New York, Wild Up’s innovative programs were shoehorned into a traditional concert setting. This contrast felt especially jarring during Friday night’s opening concert at Kaufmann Concert Hall, which consisted of three long, static works that ask a listener to surrender control and allow time to dissolve into physical sound, but that would have benefited from a more mindful setting.