Hello, I have a weird question for you. I'm looking for some obscure composer that my grandfather used to tell me about.
I come from a family of musicians. When I was very little, my grandfather used to tell me stories about this composer who lived some time in the past, who was obsessed with finding new ways to create music. He believed that the heptatonic scale (the one we use today) could be further improved, so he spent his entire life looking for new mathematical ways for frequencies to resonate in a pleasing way to the human ear.
Obviously, my grandfather embellished, telling me that this composer would lock himself in his room and create sounds and tonalities that were other-wordly and abnormal, and that his house-keeper once accidentally heard them and soon afterwards committed suicide. He'd tell me that this composer once wrote a concerto based on his new scale, and the audience ran screaming from the theatre, traumatized and scarred for life. He also said that no human who ever listened to that music would ever dare to sleep again with the lights off.
Since both my grandfather and father died long before the age of the internet, I could never corroborate these stories. I have tried googling to find this supposed composer but it's really hard to find appropriate keywords.
My question, did such a composer ever exist, or did my grandfather make the whole thing up for his own amusement? Not like a composer who created creepypasta-level music that killed people, but a composer who tried to invent new music. Do any of you know of anyone who fits this description?
(I know it sounds weird and silly, but other composers with similar legends surrounding them have existed. For example, Paganini was thought to have made a deal with the Devil.)
I think it's reasonably likely that your grandfather was thinking of the American composer Harry Partch, who in the mid-20th century developed music based on 'microtonal' scales, where instead of using conventional 12-semitone scales, Partch developed a variety of different scales which used 'microtones' - notes between the conventional, based on a series of mathematical formula. You can hear a performance of one of Partch's pieces, Castor And Pollux, here.
Broadly speaking, Partch is definitely an American Original in a bunch of ways - he'd lived as a hobo in his younger years, for starters. And he clearly saw himself as creating new forms of music - he had a 1949 book called Genesis Of A Music. Partch, however, also broadly fits into a sort of post-modern moment in 'classical'/Western art music; there were many composers during this period who wished to break out of the (to them) stultifying conventions of Western classical music, with its 103-piece orchestras and its particular tonal conventions and structures (the symphony etc).
So - to give a very broad and very quick sweep over 'Western art music' of the 20th century - there's the famous 4'33" by John Cage, which - well, you should watch that video to get an idea of what it's about, and which very much was all about challenging pre-existing ideas of what music is about. Your grandfather may also have been thinking of composers in the serialist tradition - take the serialist experiments of composers like Schoenberg, which were deliberately atonal - and which now sound like scary movie music to us because the generation of composers who codified the use of orchestral styles in Hollywood had learned serialist techniques. Additionally, a strain of 20th century Western art music used electronic noise generation of various kinds in order to construct sounds that got called music; once you get audiotape recording, you get the musique concrete experiments of Pierre Schaeffer (who, for example, presented cut-up audio of trains as music), which eventually led to 'electroacoustic' music like Steve Reich's Pendulum Music, which entirely consists of microphone feedback against amplifiers as the microphones swing in a pendulum.
So yes, there's been lots of composers who've tried to invent entirely new forms of music!