Report by Joseph Gusmano

This event occurred on April 10^th and 11^th of 2026 and brought together nine lecturers from around the UK, Europe, and the US to give presentations about various approaches to microtonal composition and performance. Each day involved a series of lectures in the afternoon followed by concerts in the evening. On Friday, April 10^th, we organised a listening session with submissions from composers around the world. On Saturday, April 11^th, we organised a live concert of small chamber works in a variety of temperaments.

            The festival is geared toward the development of practical and theoretical tools to aid the creation and performance of new microtonal works. This year, the presenters focused primarily on compositional techniques they employed when approaching microtonal music. On the first day of lectures, the composer Eddie Clijsen (De Montfort University) gave a lecture about a piece he composed using multiple equally tempered systems at the same time, including 31-, 48-, and 96-EDO, Amsterdamned (2025). Richard Whalley (University of Manchester) took us through his detailed, intuitional process In which he used the flowers and ferns on his bike rides around Manchester’s canals as inspiration for the melodic gestures and formal devices at play in a piece for two violins, Unwanted Wilderness (2023). Finally, the composer Joseph Gusmano (Goldsmiths University) discussed his new orchestral work An Inherited Nightmare (2026), which used, like Clijsen’s music, multiple equally tempered systems in a single composition. He also discussed the ways in which the engraving software Sibelius could be manipulated to render a fairly reliable microtonal playback of the piece.

On the second day of the festival, Geoffrey Cox (University of Huddersfield), explained the development of a film score he wrote for a documentary about a yarn mill into a chamber work, Something is Thrumming (2025), based around the overtones produced by the massive machinery at the mill. Following this presentation, Angus Barnacle (Microtonal Music Studios) focused on the difficulties composers and performers have with the septimal overtone, and the ways in which these difficulties can be avoided. The final presenter, Emily Koh (University of Georgia) gave a a remote presentation from the United States about the role of linguistics as a generative tool for microtonal music. In her piece for solo Baroque flute, inphonum (2021), Koh used the tonal structures found in Teochew, Mandarin, and Thai to create melodic material in a 48-note division of the octave.

This festival created a space for a wide breadth of compositional approaches to be shared amongst composers and theorists from around the world. The event was livestreamed, and future events will be posted to the Hyperchromatic Music Festival YouTube Page. The festival was attended by microtonal specialists, Goldsmiths students, and members of the general public. The combination of the listening session and live concerts allowed for a wider global participation in the event.