Julián Carrillo's Preludio a Colon was the first musical composition written by Carrillo in the system he devised, called the 13th Sound. Dedicated to the discovery of America, this work proposes to recreate the combined impressions of fear, astonishment, and joy which are perceived when one discovers the mystery of a new universe. A harp in sixteenth tones, a flute playing quartertones, and a string quartet creates a sonorous space where the singer's voice moves around in supple quartertone contours.

Carrillo was born in 1875 in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. In 1895 he made the personal discovery of the 16th tone. This led to his published theory in 1909 of the Sonido Trece, the "13th sound," created by placing the left hand forefinger on the nut of the G-string -- which in producing a single 16th tone - results in a thirteenth note added to the previous 12. When Carrillo started considering the following small steps, his one extra note quickly expanded the octave into 96-tones per octave. It was not until after World War I that his works were able to be performed. Carrillo studied violin with the Belgian virtuoso Ysaye, and conducting with Nikisch. His music was performed by his own microtonal orchestra in Mexico, and also by Leopold Stokowski in the US. There still exists a Carrillo violin prize, awarded each year at the Paris Violin Conservatory. A prolific composer, his last work, a Papal Mass, was written shortly before his death at age 90. In Carrillo's honor, a postage stamp with his portrait was issued, and his name has been used to name streets in quite a few Mexican towns and cities. In Santismo, one can visit the Carrillo Museum, which features a collection of pianos tuned in various equal temperaments.

Harry Partch's 2 Settings from Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake' was written New York City in 1944. It was dedicated to a Mr. John McKinney, Jr., was written for soprano Ethel Luening, and is in two sections - Isobel and Annah the Allmaziful. The text is drawn from James Joyce's famous work of 1939. The first movement is written for either a flageolet or 2 flutes, tuned differently. The second movement is a more standard Just Intonation and the two flutes play in the same tuning. This performance from 3/20/92 features 2 Kithara players, one moving the bars and the other strumming, due to the rare virtuosic writing for the instrument of 72 strings.

Lou Harrison's At the Tomb of Charles Ives pays homage to the great composer, with whom Harrison had worked closely. Many of Ives's published compositions had their introductions and/or endings determined by Harrison. This 4-minute long composition in Just Intonation paints a picture of heavenly tribute. Rather than specify the exact frequency of an individual note, Harrison chose to measure the space (vector) between notes. Ives had only one reference to Just Intonation in his corpus. In the section "When the Heavens Meet the Firmament" in the Universe Symphony, Ives scored for a Just Intonation "machine" amid quartertone tuned strings. The harps and the kanon were built by Skip La Plante.

Scelsi, a Roman nobleman of the 20th Century, sometimes called the "Italian Ives," was famous for his privacy. He did not allow any photographs to be taken of him. After he died, Europeans wondered loudly whether or not he actually wrote his own compositions. The now available plethora of compositions that clearly have his compositional voice makes any possible derision as to their authorship moot.

Iannis Xenakis' Anaktoria was premiered in New York with this performance. It makes extensive use of quartertones, thirdtones and glissandi. It was to describe his handling of sound masses that Xenakis introduced the term "stochastic music" (a word derived from the Greek "stochos" meaning "aim" or "conjecture"). The term stochastic applies to situations in which the number of elements is very large, so that the behavior of individuals cannot be determined, though the behavior of the whole collection can be. Jan Maguire, a French journalist, described Xenakis' method in the following way: "instead of thinking in terms of harmony, as musicians have for many centuries, Xenakis thinks in terms of sound entities which possess the characteristics of pitch, intensity and duration as associated to each other by and within time." The result of this thinking is evident in Anaktoria when the separate voices cannot be discerned, but the shape of the sound mass which they generate is clear.

Xenakis wrote of Anaktoria (which means "Beautiful, Like a Palace" in Greek): "It was a very beautiful girl from Lesbos that Sappho fell for. The piece is dedicated to Love in all its forms: carnal, spiritual, logical..." Eight instrumentalists, the "Octuor de Paris, " fed up with traditional concerts and publics, decided to bring an unusual style of music to unusual places and so asked Xenakis to write them a new work. After consulting each musician of the Octet one by one, listening to both the possibilities and impossibilities of each instrument Xenakis wrote Anaktoria, using these possibilities and impossibilities. Ana is high, Ktor is a construction; Anaktor is a palace; Anaktoria is the name of the wife of a Lesbos worthy, the woman Sappho fell in love with. And ANAKTORIA sounds good, has an archaic resonance, the resonance of a beautiful girl from the past, (translated by Edward Craxton). Xenakis, born in Romania in 1922 of Greek parentage, studied engineering in Athens, and after moving to Paris, architecture with Corbusier and composition with Olivier Messiaen. Essential to Xenakis' philosophy is the following admonition: "We must open our eyes and try to throw ridges towards other cultures, as well as to the immediate future of musical thought before dying suffocated by electronic techniques, applied either on the instrumental level or on the level of computer compositions."

Charles Ives's String Quartet #2 has three movements: Discussions, Arguments, and The Call of the Mountains. The intent is to have a group of 4 people that interact with each other, using music as the metaphor. While Ives's music can be very dissonant in equal temperament, it was discovered by Johnny Reinhard that there was a different intent, ideally, in producing the intonation. This performance by the Flux Quartet makes use of extended Pythagorean tuning, giving 21 specific notes. The intonation changes dramatically the impact the music has on a listener and we are pleased to present the first such recording for commercial release.