Angine de Poitrine, because Wenatchee The Hatchet was going to have to have some kind of post about a microtonal progressive rock duo from Quebec

No offense meant to Rush fans but it is nice to be able to say that there's more to prog rock from Canada than just Rush. :) 

The chain of introduction for me can be charted like this--Rick Beato featured them to silence the flood of "Why haven't you featured .... ?"  Bryan Townsend shared the KEXP performance at his blog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO8bt94-ybg 

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2026/03/todays-listening-angine-de-poitrine.html

 

Ethan Hein recently wrote about the duo at MusicRadar and I'd meant to do a blog post about the duo.

“They describe themselves as a Mantra-Rock Dada Pythago-Cubist Orchestra, and the band name translates to ‘angina of the chest’”: The microtonal music theory behind viral math-rockers Angine de Poitrine

https://www.musicradar.com/guitars/they-describe-themselves-as-a-mantra-rock-dada-pythago-cubist-orchestra-and-the-band-name-translates-to-angina-of-the-chest-the-microtonal-music-theory-behind-viral-math-rockers-angine-de-poitrine

 

…

Angine de Poitrine’s grooves are immediately distinctive. Sarniezz is in regular old 4/4 with a triplet-y 12/8 feel, but it has peculiar accents. Mata Zylek is in 10/4. Fabienk is either in very strangely-grouped 7/4 or conventionally-grouped 28/4. Finally, Sherpa is in 17/4.

 

The band constructs these wonky grooves using a loop pedal. Khn plays both the bass and all of the guitar parts on a Stratocaster-style double-neck guitar that’s half electric guitar and half bass, and he can only do that by layering them with the looper. This creates serious restrictions in song structures and arrangement choices. Once the loop is going, the only change you can make is to either add layers or mute them.

…

The loops’ constraints have several musical benefits. The songs have to focus tightly on a single idea, rather than wandering aimlessly. Because every song has to have essentially the same structure, it forces the band to be creative with the details. The loops also make the songs somewhat predictable, and that is a big help for listeners struggling to parse the odd time signatures and unusual tuning.

…

 

In classical music theory books you may come across the concept of the passacaglia.  The gist is that there is a ground bass and the form is an approach to variation technique. Anything and everything may happen around the ground bass but the ground bass never goes away.  

Defined very loosely, Angine de Poitrine can be heard as contemporary prog rock microtonal exponents of new possibilities in a venerable old form known as the passacaglia.  

Traditionally defined as being in triple meter there really isn’t any reason you can’t have a passacaglia in 5/4 or 17/4 or whatever meter you want.  Strip away the classical music genre and what it means is that jamming by way of riff bashing goes back centuries.  Calling what you do jamming over a riff-bashing exercise a passacaglia is a long-standing tradition and it’s a fun form to work with.  At the same time, we also don’t need to be especially snobby about the idea that jamming over a riff-bashing groove in classical music is somehow ontologically different from the same thing being done by a prog rock power duo.

 

It’s easier to catch the grooves in their work than it would be to follow some of the forms used by Alois Haba (String Quartet No. 3 from 1922) or Ivan Wyschnegradsky.  I lean slightly more toward the string quartets of Ben Johnston and the guitar music of Lou Harrison than Haba or Wyschnegradsky (although the latter’s 4^th piece from Op. 22 kind of has a proto-prog rock vibe to it for me).  

 

Microtonality has been getting played with for a bit more than a century now and it’s been regarded as a theoretical possibility for literally centuries.  I came across Anton Reicha’s Treatise on Melody (HT Kyle Gann) and therein discovered that Reicha extolled the use of quarter tones in performances.  The thing about microtonality that is fun is that it’s not 12-tone equal temperament but there’s no real constraints on what not-12TET you go with.  You could do quarter tones or you could do extended just intonation.  You could do fifth-tone and sixth-tone tuning systems like Haba did.  As a guitarist with no access to bowed string instruments the closest I could get to doing something microtonal or using extended just intonation would be trying to write a whole set of works using only natural harmonics because nothing is more natural than using only natural harmonics. 

 

The internet being what it is, looks like someone went to the effort to do some transcriptions.  One of the advantages of riff-bashing and loop work is that transcription can be easier if you know what loops keep recurring.  Not that I would personally find it easy to transcribe quarter tone prog rock but there are transcriptions on Youtube.

 

Mata Zyklek (Angine De Poitrine) transcription

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAtWy-s0FOY

 

Sarniezz (Angine de Poitrine) transcription

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZW_NV-RIoc

Kyle Gann once wrote somewhere that although he did like quarter tone music he found that his capacity to listen to it in large chunks was limited.  If the twelve-tone equal temperament tuning system is artificial than slicing every half step in half is twice as artificial, right?  Still, I have heard music built around quarter tones that I've enjoyed and it's been fun to listen to this duo lately.  I'll reiterate a sentiment I shared over at The Music Salon, I'll take this duo's music over the annoying four-chord soul bro balladeers I've been stuck hearing on mainstream radio.

Ben Johnston String Quartet No. 9 (w read-along score?)

Here you go, somebody posted the audio for a performance of Ben Johnston's Ninth and included a read-along score, I trust for strictly educational purposes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO7yTiM-YJk&

The Fourth is marvelous and is the variations on "Amazing Grace" and I do love that string quartet, too, but the Ninth and Tenth could get some more love. 

If you can follow a Bartok or Stravinsky score this won't really be that tough. 

For me the notable string quartet cycles of the 20th century would have to be Bartok, Shostakovich, and Johnston.  Rochberg had some good moments and so did Hindemith but their cycles don't hold up as well for me if you try to marathon them.  I admit I haven't tried going through the Villa-Lobos cycle .  :)

Of the microtonalists Johnston's is the cycle to hear.  I am not gonna say you're desperately missing out if you skip the quartets of Alois Haba or Easley Blackwood. 

Big Louisiana, Willy Rafus & Arthur Davis - Let Your Hammer Ring--a digression on the norm of not ending on your starting pitch in unaccompanied vocal performance

One of my siblings ran this by me, found it (finally) decades after hearing it on a CD some time in the last century. There are a variety of versions of "Let Your Hammer Ring" out there but this was the specific one the sibling remembered.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RIV5gP6u0Y

If you listen along and you don't have any training for this kind of thing you won't realize that the microtonally shift up a half step (minor second) across the roughly seven-minute story embedded in the work song.  Ending on a different pitch than you started on is one of the things that you don't tend to hear about from people who perform, study and teach instrumental music but in vocal music it's fairly normal.  It takes a ton of training both physical training and ear training to not modulate to a key that's different from where you started if you're getting into the music you're performing.  Sometimes you slide up and other times you slide down.  It's notorious in choral performance to overshoot descents and ascents.  

John Schneider plays Lou Harrison's "Round" on a microtonal guitar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyO_jB4ZT1Q

Manuel Barrueco played a few pieces by Lou Harrison this weekend for his recital at Benaroya Hall.  I haven't shared links to microtonal guitar much because while I admire and respect some microtonalist composers it's not my usual jam, so to speak. But when I hear things that sound fun I do like to share them. 

Maybe it's a lifetime of hearing blues guitar, jazz guitar, and rock guitar but microtonality on the whole seems more persuasive to me in guitar music than in keyboard music. Having said that I've certainly stumped for the string quartets of Ben Johnston ... but I was just saying microtonality comes off better on strings. ;) 

UPDATE

Ouch!  Didn't spell the guitarist's name correctly when I hit "publish".  Sorry about that. 

Tolgahan Çoğulu: I Vrisi Ton Peyiotisson for microtonal guitar and string quartet

We haven't featured microtonal guitar in a while at Wenatchee The Hatchet.  So this little piece is something you can listen to, an arrangement of a Greek tune for microtonal guitar and string quartet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDXnogQ8KM8

My first microtonal guitar performance with a string quartet! We played anonymous Greek tune I Vrisi Ton Peyiotisson with Anadolu Quartet. String quartet arrangement is by Ahmet Tirgil Microtonal guitar arrangement is by Benjamin Barbaric

Ethan Hein blogs on D sharp and E flat distinctions, it reminds me of a Haydn's Op. 77, No. 2 string quartet as discussed by Ross W Duffin

One of many reasons music theory and acoustics are valuable fields of study is because each of us who plays and sings and writes and studies music will often have conceptual constraints we may not be aware of as we are beholden to the limits of what our bodies can do and perceive and (crucially for those us who play instruments with fixed tunings, keys and frets) the in-built conceptual and physical constraints of the instruments we play.

Ethan Hein, a music theorist who is (like me) a guitarist, describes how D sharp and E flat are different; why they are different; and how guitarists can sometimes not fully or immediately appreciate the distinction.

If memory serves there are now microtonal fingerboards for guitarists who want to be able to play the difference between D sharp and E flat.  John Schneider shows samples in the updated and revision edition of The Contemporary Guitar, which is a beauty of a book you should pick up if you’re a guitarist of any style or instrument.  If you want to see what such a fingerboard looks like on a real guitar Paul Davids (with Adam Neely as guest) has a video for you.

But it’s been in the last half century such innovations have come about and they are generally only known to guitarists who want to play stuff by, say, Alois Haba (who wrote a suite for guitar in quarter-tones).  It has a teensy bit of an Ivan Wyschnegradsky vibe for me … .  Haba also wrote a guitar sonata.

But for those of us who don’t play microtonal guitar music, D sharp and E flat are totally the same. Which is a reality Ethan Hein notes in his post.

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/why-are-d-sharp-and-e-flat-considered-to-be-two-different-notes/

Ben Johnston: Suite for Microtonal Piano (with read-along score)

The "Blues" movement has a fun 13/15 groove in it.  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx27dfey6iM

The Etude has some motoric dissonant elements but unlike stuff from the New Complexity scene, Johnston's Etude has a groove.  I'm thinking that Johnston's more or less life-long love of Duke Ellington might have had something to do with that.

I like the whole thing or I wouldn't have posted it but for folks who have never heard of Ben Johnston and may have gotten the idea from some quarters of the internet that microtonal music or works in forms of just intonation don't have any "tunes" I think Johnston provides a counterexample.  I enjoy his work, complex as it gets in various places, more than the so-called New Complexity school.  I'll take Ben Johnston over Brian Ferneyhough, who is lionized by some but whose work for guitar duet used a bunch of extended techniques and more or less all of those were pioneered by African American and Native Hawaiian guitarists somewhere between 1890 and 1910 but, ah, folks in the new-music "zero hour" scene managed to take all those techniques and not have one single tune or groove in all of it.  If you're into "no time (at all", alright.

Ted Gioia's history of music as Europe vs. Africa traffics in an artificial binary--exploring the Native Hawaiian ancestry of slide guitar and Anton Reicha's advocacy of microtonal melodic ornament in 1814

… No matter what the political structure one advocates, the wrong music can apparently send it toppling. Perhaps the strongest aspect of this evolution is its reversal of the ancients’ philosophical dichotomy. The guitar, a kind of modern lyre, is now the dangerous source of disorder, while the flute is seen as a prim, subdued instrument evoking respectability and orderliness.  This is one of the most striking examples of the dialectic at play in music history in which things turn into their opposites.

 This is not mere happenstance. The guitar shook things up in the twentieth century because it was the focal point for the African diaspora’s attack on the Pythagorean paradigm that had dominated Western music since 500 BC. As blues guitar techniques entered the mainstream, they validated the use of bent notes and introduced sounds outside conventional scales. This assault on Pythagorean notions of playing in tune—which for centuries had required musicians to keep within the boundaries of carefully delineated scales and maintain a proper tone—threatened to overturn all the hierarchies of established music, both social and aural. [emphasis added] …

 … This African counter-paradigm represented the most forceful attack in more than two millennia on the codification of music into a system of discrete notes. The knife could bend a guitar note in a way that a hand or finger could not. With a weapon in hand, the subversive performer could rediscover music’s origins in unconstrained sound. As such, the modern guitar represents the exact danger that Plato had perceived in the flute more than two millennia before: an untuning of the universe. Music: A Subversive History, page 106

 The rise of the blues may offer the most powerful test case we could devise for assessing a key thesis of my book, namely, the assertion that musical innovation comes from the underclass. This hypothesis, if it could be proven, would show how different music is from other art forms.  Innovation in painting and sculpture, for example, has almost always happened in close proximity to rich patrons—even today, a couple hundred affluent collectors set the tone for the visual arts economy. The rise of the novel drew momentum from the wealth-creating enterprises of the Industrial Revolution. The new artistic mediums of today—video games, virtual reality, and probably whatever is coming next—appear inextricably connected to profit-generating businesses in Silicon Valley. Only music plays by different rules, almost defiantly so. Music: A Subversive History, pages 335-336

Being a guitarist I’m flattered that Gioia thinks the guitar has been so revolutionary in music in the last century. I’m tempted to agree but …   is Ted Gioia imagining that all post-Pythagorean bids at tuning system represent repressive norms?  Did blue notes really defy the established order by not obeying “the rules”, whatever those are of “properly” ordered scales and notes?  Are we talking about the rules of sixteenth and seventh century species counterpoint grounded in the performing traditions of acapella vocal music? Those rules emerged for some practical as well as theoretical reasons. 

Or is Ted Gioia trying to say that blues riffs with notes a quarter-tone away from the notes E flat or A natural on a keyboard is subversive?  String players who perform Haydn string quartets already know that E flat and D sharp are not the same pitch, which was why when Haydn went to the trouble of saying to play a passage scored in E flat starting from the pitch of D sharp that was because he felt he needed to. 

Toby Twining: Chrysalid Requiem--Sanctus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgGqm_jnL_0

I, of course, learned about this reading Kyle Gann's The Arithmetic of Listening, which is a great book on the history of tuning systems I'm going to have to blog about at some point this year.  I'm still committed to composing using the equal-tempered set-up we guitarists are given who don't have access to fretboards that have alternate tunings, but I've been intrigued by a lot of work done in what's maybe too colloquially known as microtonal music. 

Toby Twining--Chrysalid Requiem, Dies Irae

Not that I'm really at all committed to composing microtonal or extended just intonation music myself (the classical guitar is in its most conventional form the most stuck-to-equal-temperament instrument an instrument can be), but I do like to listen to music that's composed without being tethered to equal temperament.  String quartets by Haba, keyboard music by Wyschnegradsky or Ben Johnston, especially the string quartets of Ben Johnston, I find that I can enjoy microtonal music.  Johnston's been my favorite because, to put it bluntly, Johnston was the microtonalist/extended just intonationist composer who didn't forget that tunes have to be in the music, which is not necessarily the case with, say, Easley Blackwood (although, frankly, I don't dislike the Blackwood string quartets, I just don't come back to them as listening experiences the way I repeatedly have with Johnston's quartets).

Anyway, having read Kyle Gann's wonderful recent book on the history of tuning systems I learned about Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem.  So, fair warning to people who aren't into microtonality or extended techniques in choral singing, don't click on the link but if you are ... a link to the Dies Irae from Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem is after the break