Introduction to Microtonal Music 11 Lidia Ader Introduction to Microtonal Music Microtonal music is one of the key components of the contemporary com- poser’s language. The history of microtonal music is old and young at the same tme. Some may dare to use this term when referring to the non-tem- pered system epoch of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while oth- ers will say it begins in the twenteth century. Microtonal music was widely discussed in the last century in terms of theory, practce, compositon, and performance. This paper raises numerous questons, focusing on the mi- crotonal music pathway in the beginning of the twenteth century. What is microtonal music? What defnes it? How did it originate and what were its infuences during the century? Microtonal music has always been a counterpoint to musical history. This phenomenon has never disappeared from the point of view of Western Euro- pean music, but its role and mode of existence in the global context are sub- ject to reassessment. Strengthening and dominaton of equal temperament in the eighteenth century was historically predetermined (Reinhard 2009). Although at all historical stages of the evoluton of European music the for- mal equalizaton of tones in the octave did not correspond to the acoustc nature of sound, the relatve “purity” of intervals over three centuries began to be perceived as the only representaton of what was true and accurate. Within the equally tempered system, subsystems based on the form of sub- ordinaton of sounds and their hierarchy appeared. Microtonality was formed frst as the multplicaton of twelve sounds in the octave by two, three, four and more, and later as a phenomenon of a new order, canceling out the equality of halfones. Thus, we face metatonality, a term coined by Claude Ballif (1924–2004), which combines the features of tonality with serialism and contains fxed and free sounds (“invariants harmoniques” and “variants mélodiques” as the composer described them) (Ballif and Galliari 1992, 30). The idea of microtonal music atracted the atenton of musicians, physicists, and acoustcians from the second half of the nineteenth century. In an ef - fort to expand the twelve-tone equal temperament, a fundamentally new approach to sound emerged. If in the pre-Bach epoch the plurality of tem- peraments was a natural phenomenon, then with the acquisiton of a system in which each octave is divided into twelve mathematcally equal intervals