Thursday Night Jazz: Microtonal Music Festival Kickoff with DSILTON

City of Asylum is hosting the kickoff concert of the 2025 Microtonal Music Festival, featuring 31-tone band DSILTON from Vienna.

A note from Mathew Rosenblum, Co-Director Music on the Edge, Festival Founder and Curator: “The Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival 2025 is a follow-up to Music on the Edge’s very successful Beyond Festivals in 2020, 2018, and 2015 which according to the Post-Gazette “made a compelling case for the continued integration of microtonal music into Pittsburgh’s performing arts scene and provided a look at the vibrant community that already exists.” Our last festival was in March of 2020, just days before the pandemic struck. We are very excited to present the Beyond festival again in 2025 together with our festival partners City of Asylum, Carnegie Mellon University, and WQED.

In the context of Western classical music, microtonal music uses tuning systems other than, or in addition to, the standard twelve-note equal-tempered system that has been the norm in Western popular and classical music. This norm has been evolving with many composers in all idioms currently using a variety of tuning approaches influenced by world music, early music, and physics and acoustics, to name a few.

The fourth Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival will explore connections between early music tuning and contemporary works, microtonal sound installations and sound environments, transnational microtonal jazz, and a wide variety of other approaches to microtonal composition. There will be five world premieres, works by local composers Paul Gallagher, Ryan McMasters, Eric Moe, Amy Williams and Mathew Rosenblum, and videos by Pittsburgh artists who have created visual responses to the music. Featured artists include JACK Quartet, Ekmeles, Ellen Fullman, Dsilton, Theophilus Root, Eric Moe, Ryan McMasters, and Scott Pauley. We look forward to seeing you at the concerts and talks.”

For the full lineup of the 2025 Microtonal Music Festival, visit www.music.pitt.edu/mote

About the Musicians:

DSILTON (pronounced “Zielton”) is the only band in the world playing highly complex newly written and improvised music in 31-tone tuning on specially developed enharmonic instruments. During the last ten years DSILTON, using their specially developed instruments—the 31-tone clavitones of Georg Vogel and the 31-tone guitars of David Dornig—has achieved new spheres of musical expression involving traditions of various origins bundled together into a unique holistic approach based on whole number ratios in harmony and rhythm. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “Georg Vogel on electric piano and other electronic keyboards, David Dornig on electric guitar, and Valentin Duit on drums…confidently presented a style that is unique even within the Dachau forum for new free jazz music…this music challenges. It inspires. While playing it. While listening to it. It’s stubborn, highly precise, skillful, funny, ludicrous and at the same time charming.” Their new album, DSILTON, was released in 2023. www.dsilton.net

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant Cucina Alfabeto is open for dinner from 5-10pm. Please visit Open Table or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.