Jon Catler has spent a lifetime inside microtonal music, mapping territory most guitarists don’t know even exists. He’s played with La Monte Young for over 30 years, writing countless pieces for solo and ensemble performance, while also writing a book, The Nature of Music, that traces the philosophical and technical roots of Just Intonation.
His newest album, The Young Mountain of the East, is sonically enveloping, a lambent document that feels singular. Using a 7-limit Harmonic system (with additional pitches from the 13-limit system Catler has worked with for decades), he wrote these 12 pieces to “go higher up the mountain,” building on the opening chord section of The Well-Tuned Piano. Precision and resonance become devotional acts. Twelve emanations emerge, each a rung. Each descent prepares for the next climb. Magic lives in the subtleties of each step, revealing itself in deep listens.
The Young Mountain of the East is OUT NOW on Chaikin Records. Jon Catler’s website can be found HERE.
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What are some of your earliest sound memories? And how did you first find your way to the guitar?
They told me that after I was born, I reacted to a bird singing. I’m not sure I remember that. I do remember that whenever Louis Armstrong came on TV when we were kids, my grandfather would watch it, and we would be very quiet and listen with him.
I started off on trumpet and listened to Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass. When my mother gave me guitar lessons at the local music store as a gift one Christmas, I told her I was a trumpet player. She suggested I just give it a try. I’m glad I listened to her.
You’ve described Just Intonation as ‘Nature’s tuning system’ – something that feels discovered vs. invented. When did that idea first kind of grab and take hold for you? Did it change the way you hear things?
For me, the discovery happened one day as a teenager practicing my favorite technique, feedback, in my drummer’s converted garage.
I was playing an E note, and the note that was feeding back was a D, but it was a lot flatter than the fretted D note that I had. I could not understand why there was no fret for this beautiful, powerful, and perfectly in-tune note. This was well before the Internet, so it took a while before I found out that I was hearing the seventh Harmonic of the Overtone Series, and even longer until I found out that the seventh brings awareness.
In 1981, you attended a five-hour performance of La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano. What was that experience like, and how did it, and La Monte’s work more generally, alter your approach to playing and writing music?
At that point, I was playing a 31-tone equal-tempered guitar. After seeing La Monte play The Well-Tuned Piano the first time, I realized that I needed a guitar fretted to the Harmonic Series.
I spent the next two months designing a Just Intonation fretting, which I had put on an interchangeable fingerboard guitar. When La Monte and I put together the Forever Bad Blues Band, I used the JI fingerboard and would switch it out with a Fretless fingerboard. I have been using Harmonic pitches ever since.
And at this point, since then, you’ve been performing with La Monte Young for more than 30 years, across several different ensembles/projects. What does that kind of long-term musical relationship teach you that shorter collaborations can’t?
Patience.
So your new record, The Young Mountain of the East, is great. The more I listen to it, the more it opens up, and I feel like I hear more each time. It’s really, really great. The title comes from Terry Riley’s description of La Monte Young, and the album itself feels like an act of homage that also pushes further up the mountain, in your words. How did you think about honoring that legacy while still making something that belongs entirely to its own moment?
Thank you for your kind words!
La Monte’s music was a combination of intellect and intuition. I had designed the JI fretting to use the first complete scale found in Nature, which is the 8th – 16th Harmonics. This is a 13-limit scale, as 13 is the highest prime in that scale. So I knew that to honor his legacy and originality, I had to start with La Monte’s 7-limit notes, and then add my own 11ths and 13ths.
The piece moves through twelve emanations/discrete movements, each one ascending harmonically and then descending, like going up and down a mountain. There’s something almost devotional about that architecture. Did that structure come first, or did it emerge from the material?
Going higher up the mountain was the inspiration from which it emerged.
This record began with a conversation with Brian Chase, who runs Chaikin Records. He approached you about making a more drone-oriented piece. How much did that initial prompt shape the direction, and how much did the music find its own logic once you started?
I would say both, as Brian’s initial prompt was the catalyst for the composition, and then there was some intuition and improvisation that happened over that.
Jung Hee Choi, who has collaborated extensively with La Monte Young and the late Marian Zazeela, created the artwork, calligraphy, and design for the album. How did that visual dimension come together, and what does her work bring to the album as a whole object?
All of the Blues Band and Raga band gigs were always under Marian Zazeela’s Magenta Lights, which were also used for The Well-Tuned Piano performances. Marian’s calligraphy was unique and appeared on the programs, posters, and recordings. Jung Hee’s work was also inspired by Marian, but has original elements that made it ideal as the artwork for this record, and in a way completes it.
Sustain is such an integral part to this music. It almost asks listeners to recalibrate their relationship to time. What happens to your own sense of time while you’re deep in this work, whether recording, playing live, composing, etc?
I find experiencing different temporal states to be very interesting. For instance, birds, which do not usually sing in standard 12-Tone Equal Temperament, have a much different temporal sense than we do. They can sing anywhere from 16 to over 100 notes per second, which sounds like a buzz to us.
With the Blues Band, we would roll into town and play a single piece, which started at 2 hours and progressed to 3 hours by the end. That’s long enough to experience what La Monte calls the Drone State of Mind. Strangely enough, when you finally get to the end of such a long piece of music, there can be a feeling of ‘it’s over already?’.
I also looked to Nature to inform my understanding of time by playing Harmonic Rhythm, which gives each Harmonic its own proper place in time. So the 8th Harmonic is played 8 times in the bar, the 9th Harmonic is played 9 times in the same bar, and so on.
So it gets pretty dense quickly, and you get a Time Chord, which is a cascade of notes. This was used in the 11th Emanation of The Young Mountain Of The East.
You developed the 12-Tone Ultra Plus system, the first guitar fretting system to add harmonic series pitches to the standard equal-tempered scale, and it’s become one of the more widely used alternative systems available. What problem were you trying to solve when you designed it, and did it end up solving the problem you thought you were solving?
I had heard for 20 years people say that Equal Temperament and the Harmonic Series were worlds apart, and could not coexist.
By doubling the amount of frets on the guitar, I figured out a way to get Harmonic Series pitches of the 12-Tone Equal notes. This led to an increase in the availability of parallel modulation, which led to Harmonic Jazz as heard on the Fretless Brothers’ records. Eventually, I kept the 24 frets per octave idea, but made all the frets pure Harmonic Series pitches. This allowed most of the modulations of the Ultra Plus, but with all Harmonic intervals, including the pure thirds, not available in 12-Equal.
This 24Fret JI is now my favorite system, and I did not foresee that when coming up with the Ultra Plus.
You’ve written two books, The Nature of Music and The Lost Chord. Writing about music, especially music as physically and experientially rooted as this, is its own challenge. What can a book do that the music itself can’t?
Hopefully, like this interview, the words can help illuminate some of the concepts behind the music.
I also learned so much from reading Genesis Of A Music by Harry Partch; it helped me understand the concepts Partch was using, which I couldn’t have gained a complete understanding of from his music alone.
You mention translating birdsong and the Fibonacci Series into harmonic series pitches. I’d love to hear more about that process. How does something like birdsong become a harmonic proposition, and what draws you to that?
We did a tour of Europe, where we did one night of Partch music followed by a night of my music. The vocalist hired for the Partch was Meredith Borden, and she sang in my music as well.
When we got back to NYC, I asked her what she wanted to do musically. She said she wanted ‘to sing like the birds’.
We did the Birdhouse record using some transcriptions of birdsong.
One bird, the Hermit Thrush, was such a virtuoso that we could not accurately play his melody, so I took the chord progression implied by his song instead.
Humans think of themselves as the best musicians, so it can be a humbling experience to transcribe a bird’s song and realize what they can do.
And Meredith and I are still together.
On our new record with 13 O’Clock, WorldWind, most of the songs feature a translation of the Fibonacci Series into Harmonic Series pitches.
Hearing this, it becomes evident that the Fibonacci Series produces a triple spiral, which is not apparent from looking at the numbers.
On songs like the first single, “Wolftrap,” and the next one, “Dogbite,” we divided the triple spiral among guitar, keys, and bass.
There’s a philosophical current running through your work, this idea that nature provides answers, that the harmonic series models something true about coexistence and diversity. Has that conviction deepened over the course of your career, or has it ever been tested?
The Harmonic Series is a fountain of information that lets us peek directly into the workings of Nature and natural forces. It contains the properties of Nature that propagate energy into matter, such as the Doubling Sequence and the Fibonacci Series.
From my experience, the deeper you look into it, the more you see, like when you move to higher ground, and you can see much farther.
In the Harmonic Series, every step up the Series is a brand new interval different from what came before, and if you were to remove a single pitch, the whole structure would collapse.
An infinite set of pitches coexist, all generated from a single fundamental.
So far, it has never let me down, and it has deepened my conviction that
Nature provides the answers.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
A cat purring, an ocean stirring, and still, when a note feeds back in a way you didn’t expect, but it’s just right.
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