Hello to all of our wonderful supporters! I am writing to let everyone know that we recently completed a second round of interviews in the Los Angeles area to help round out what we have so far. We are now back in post production on the movie organizing all the interviews and putting this massive project together:)

If you have any questions about it please feel free to ask! 

Thanks again for making the movie happen! 

Hope all is well!

Michael

Hello everyone,
I just wanted to let everyone know that we have started our editing process and all is going well on the movie!
Michael

Thank you to all the new backers within the last few days and a big thank you to the film's Executive Producer Robert Kay; whose contribution will make sure the movie is shot as pianotastic as possible!

We had a great time interviewing all the wonderful people who make up the Math and music world. Here is a list of some of the interviewees from the first part of interviewing.

Ben Johnston,
Johnston is a composer whose style is eclectic, employing serial processes, folksong idioms, repetitive processes, traditional forms like fugue and variations, and intuitive processes, as well as twentieth-century experimental modernism and neoclassicism, and rock music; one of his compositional goals is to demonstrate the versatility of just intonation tuning in many styles. Collaborators include John Cage and Kronos Quartet.

David Clampitt,
Clampitt taught music theory at Yale from 1997-2008, after receiving his Ph.D. in music theory at SUNY Buffalo. He is a leading researcher in the field of mathematical music theory, working especially on the structure of basic musical materials. Clampitt was editor of Journal of Music Theory and was guest editor for the second issue of Journal of Mathematics and Music. He is an active violinist in chamber and orchestral music, and has coached chamber music extensively.

Marc Weinert,
In 1987, Weinert returned to the States to take a position with world-famous Steinway & Sons at their flagship location on 57th Street in New York City. Marc has lived and worked primarily in New York since that time, eventually becoming the primary voicer for several of New York’s commercial piano restorers on 58th Street (also known as “Piano Row”). In 2000, Marc was appointed Head Piano Technician at the Manhattan School of Music, later being promoted to Director of Piano Technical Services. At the Manhattan School, Marc oversees the maintenance and restoration of close to 200 pianos, with the help of his dedicated staff. Marc’s unique system of regulating and voicing pianos is one he developed over many years of research and experimentation. As official tuner and member of the Board of Directors of the Microtonal Society of America, Marc also specializes in unusual tunings, including Michael Harrison’s Revelation tuning and various baroque and classical period tunings, such as Kirnberger II.

Stuart Isacoff,
Isacoff, a pianist and composer, is founding editor of the magazine Piano Today, Executive Editor of Sheet Music Magazine and a recipient of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. His numerous articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Grove Dictionary Of Music In America, Chamber Music, Musical America, Keyboard, Stagebill, Symphony, and Connoisseur. Believing that most musical boundaries are artificial, Mr. Isacoff performs recitals that combine classical repertoire with jazz improvisation in ways that illustrate bridges between musical works written centuries and continents apart.

David Kirkland,
Kirkland is head of technical services at Steinway and Sons.

Perri Knize,
Knize is an award-winning environmental policy reporter whose articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, Sports Illustrated, Conde Nast Traveler, and Outside. She lives with her husband in Montana. Knize chronicles in her book Grand Obsession, her life as the daughter of a professional musician; but, years have passed since she last played the instrument that mesmerized her most: the piano. Surprised by a sudden, belated realization that she is meant to devote her life to the instrument, she finds a teacher and soon decides to buy a piano of her own. So begins the author's epic quest to restore her piano to its rightful sound, and to understand its elusive power. This journey leads her into an international subculture of piano aficionados—concert artists, passionate amateurs, dealers, technicians, composers, designers, and builders—intriguing and eccentric characters all, whose lives have also been transformed by the spell of a piano.

Chris Lehrich,
Dr. Lehrich holds particular interests in early modern European intellectual, science, and religious history; ancient and medieval China; analytical theory and method; comparison; and especially the history of magic and occultism. He also has long-term interests in ritual and music. Lehrich’s current project is a comparative, theoretical examination of certain trends in Western “classical” art music, from Palestrina to Schoenberg, in which he will be investigating how the thought of Theodor Adorno, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez can shed new light on old problems in the study of ritual.

Michael Harrison,
Harrison, composer and pianist, has been called “an American Maverick” (Philip Glass). With an expertise in Indian ragas, rhythmic cycles, and an innate gift for melodic composition, he has developed one of the most distinctive musical styles of our time. Through his adaptation of Pythagorean principles of harmonic resonance to create new tunings and scales, he composed Revelation: Music in Pure Intonation, which was released on Bang on a Can’s Cantaloupe Music label (October 2007). Michael combines a lifelong immersion in both Western and Indian classical music to create “a new harmonic world…of vibrant sound” (The New York Times). He became a protégé of La Monte Young and a disciple of the late Pandit Pran Nath in 1979. Michael shares a passion for Indian music with composer and friend Terry Riley, with whom he has performed as a vocalist and on tambura in numerous concerts and trips to India. Today he works and performs with master Indian vocalist Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan. In 1986, Michael designed and created the “harmonic piano,” an extensively modified grand piano with the ability to alternate between two different tunings to play 24 notes per octave on a conventional keyboard. Kyle Gann from The Village Voice hailed the harmonic piano as "an indisputable landmark in the history of Western tuning."

Tim Johnson,
Johnson teaches at Ithaca College in all areas of the theory and sightsinging curriculum, ranging from introductory courses for first-year students to upper-level and graduate courses. His textbook, Foundations of Diatonic Theory: A Mathematically Based Approach to Music Fundamentals, is the first introductory, undergraduate-level book published on diatonic set theory. This textbook introduces a strong link between introductory pedagogy and recent scholarship in music theory by relating concepts in diatonic set theory directly to the study of music fundamentals through pedagogical exercises and instructions. This book is part of the Mathematics Across the Curriculum project at Dartmouth College, funded by the National Science Foundation. This innovative project was developed to achieve the goal of allowing students to concentrate on their disciplines while using and improving their mathematical skills.

Michael Fowler,
Fowler is Beams Professor Department of Physics University of Virginia.

Myles Jackson,
Jackson is the Dibner Family Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He received his Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University with Simon Schaffer in 1991. He is the author of numerous articles on the history, philosophy, and sociology of science and technology, with a particular emphasis on the cultural history of nineteenth-century German physics. He has also authored two books, Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (MIT Press, 2006) and Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics (MIT Press, 2000), which won the Paul Bunge Prize of the German Chemical Society for the best work on the history of scientific instruments in 2005 and the Hans Sauer Prize for the best work on the history of inventors and inventions in 2007. He is working on issues of genetic privacy and the effects of intellectual property law and the patenting of human genes on research in molecular biology and is serving as an expert for the ACLU in their lawsuit against Myriad Genetics on the BRCA 1 and 2 gene patents. In 2010 he received the Francis Bacon Prize in the History of Science and Technology from Caltech.

Bill Bremmer,
Bremmer, A Piano Technician with 40 years of experience, who has been creating a new sound for the modern piano based on carefully researched and practiced Historical Precedents. Along with the practice of tuning many historically documented temperaments, he has created a new temperament, which retains true "colors" or tonalities known in the past, suitable for virtually all kinds of music played on the piano today.

James Delaney,
Delaney works primarily in ethics, focusing both on the history of philosophy and, more recently, topics in biomedical ethics. He has published articles in the “American Catholic Philosophical Association's Annual Proceedings,” “The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” “Inquiry,” “For the Defense,” “National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly,” “the American Journal of Bioethics,” “The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal,” “Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics,” and “the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience.” Additionally, Dr. Delaney has written two books on Rousseau, Rousseau and the Ethics of Virtue and Starting with Rousseau.

Elaine Chew,
Chew is Founder and Director of the Music Computation and Cognition Lab (MuCoaCo) at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, where she conducts and directs research on music and computing. An operations researcher and pianist by training, her goal is to explain and de-mystify the phenomenon of music and its performance through the use of formal scientific methods. Her research centers on the mathematical and computational modeling of music; as a performer, she collaborates with composers to present eclectic post-tonal music.

Steven Pope,
Pope is a composer, computer scientist, and social and spiritual activist based in Santa Barbara, California. He is affiliated with the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE), in the Dept. of Music at UC Santa Barbara, and the Graduate Program in Media Arts and Technology (MAT). He is active as a software developer and consultant through FASTLab, Inc. His music and video compositions are released through HeavenEverywhere. Stephen is also a practising Quaker, an active conscientious objection counsellor, a trained Reiki practitioner, a facilitator in the Alternatives to Violence Project, and prison clergy registered with the California Dept. of Corrections.

Alexander Fancois,
François' research focuses on the modeling and design of interactive (software) systems, as an enabling step towards the understanding of perception and cognition. He is creator of the Software Architecture for Immersipresence (SAI), a general formalism for the design, analysis and implementation of complex software systems. His open source Modular Flow Scheduling Middleware (MFSM; mfsm.sourceforge.net) provides a cross-platform, multi-threaded implementation of SAI's abstractions.
His interdisciplinary research projects explore interactions within and across music, vision, visualization and video games. He was a 2007-2008 Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where he co-lead a music research cluster on Analytical Listening Through Interactive Visualization.

Philip Gilberti,
Gilberti is a film score composer.

Eric Wang,
Wang is in the UCLA department of musicology.

N Lincoln Hanks,
Dr. Hanks is a composer and music theorist.

Richard Plotkin,
Dr. Plotkin is a music theorist with specialized interest in filtered point symmetry and transformational theory.

Thank you to all of our new backers! Please Facebook us if you like: facebook.com/appassionatothemovie
We hope the Facebook page can be a forum for piano talk and asking questions of what friends would like to see in the documentary!
Hope all is well!
Michael

I was up all last night rewriting a script that made it into the second round of consideration for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab for next year; but, now that its rewritten. I can officially announce we are headed to the East Coast tomorrow to shoot a bunch of interviews with experts in the field of music and mathematics!
We have experts lined up from MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Ohio State, NYU, UVA, and a few other colleges and universities as well as a visit to the Steinway factory!

Here is a clip from the first week of shooting! Eric Wang of UCLA is playing harpsichords that showcase some of the different tunings through time and the improvements and compromises to music quality that have been made.

Hey everyone, there is a Q and A about the project on the Kickstarter Blog!

Tomorrow marks our first day of filming as we will be shooting experts in the field of mathematics and music theory all week! Professors, engineers, and musicians from UCLA, USC and Pepperdine University! We will also film some very old and odd piano like instruments from centuries past!