Erv Wilson

Excerpted with permission from Narushima, Terumi.  Microtonality and the Tuning Systems of Erv Wilson, Routledge, 2018, pp. 5-6.

A brief biography of Erv Wilson

Unfortunately, not a great deal has been written about Wilson’s life, but the following short biography aims to give an overview of what information is available.

Ervin McDonald Wilson was born on 11 June 1928 in Colonia Pacheco, a remote mountain village northwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. He was the second son of a large Mormon family who had migrated from Utah to Mexico by wagon in 1926. Colonia Pacheco was a small community originally established by Mormon exiles fleeing from the United States in the 1880s.

His childhood was spent helping with the family ranch, tending goats and other animals as well as cultivating crops, while attending grade school. Life during this period was probably arduous as it was the time of the Great Depression.

Wilson cites as his early musical influences Mormon hymns and popular Mexican songs. He also learned to read music and play the reed organ from his mother. Reed organs were “common on the frontier because they were light, easy to transport and tended to remain in tune” (Wilson, G 2009, p. 3).

Apparently Wilson was eager to compose music from a young age, but was confounded when some of the notes he could hear clearly in his head, such as the Mexican vocal tunes, could not be reproduced on the organ. He claims that this germinal experience launched his lifelong inquiry into musical scales (Wilson 1989).

At age 15, Wilson’s family moved to Oregon in the USA, where he attended high school for a year before being sent to live with his aunt in Salt Lake City, Utah. As a teenager he developed an interest in Indian music, and started studying the subject on his own by borrowing and reading books from the library. Eventually Wilson joined the US Air Force and served with the US occupation force in Japan at ages 19 and 20. In Japan, “a chance meeting with a total stranger introduced him to musical harmonics, which changed the course of his life and work” (Wilson 2001). Legend also has it that test results from around this time revealed his extraordinary powers of visualization which were applied to the analysis of aerial photographs. These abilities were later put to good musical use for visualizing complex tuning structures.

After serving in the US Air Force, Wilson briefly studied music theory at Brigham Young University, but being unable to find an explanation for “his concept of ‘missing’ keys in the musical scale” (Wilson, G 2009, p. 4), he was lured away to California which by comparison was a hive of musical activity at the time. There he continued his musical education through self-study and interaction with other microtonalists. He filled countless notebooks with charts, diagrams and written explanations as a record of his ideas and activities over several decades. These reveal his meticulously systematic and thorough approach to problem solving, and also an incredibly fertile mind that could perform breathtaking leaps of imagination. He also kept copies of letters he sent to various people with whom he corresponded about music and tuning theory. One of his chief correspondents was John Chalmers, his long-time friend and colleague, as well as founder and editor of the journal Xenharmonikôn (1974-1979, 1991-1998), and author of Divisions of the Tetra-chord (1993).

In the 1960s, Wilson and his father formed a small culinary and medicinal herb business that distributed herbs from the Sierra Madre of Northern Mexico to various outlets in the US (Burns 1986, p. 2). Through this work he
“became intensely interested in the cultivation and propagation of various medicinal herbs” (Wilson, G 2009, p. 4), and this led to his ongoing preoccupation with collecting and breeding plants, an endeavour that has persisted alongside his musical pursuits. Especially significant was his work with high-lysine corn which is a hybrid developed to improve the protein in corn over ordinary varieties. These efforts were motivated by his desire to help people living in countries like Mexico where corn is a staple of their diet.

Influenced by his work in breeding plants, Wilson “began to think of the musical scale as a living process” (Wilson 2001). He saw each kind of scale as a plant species that had the potential for growth and transformation, but was also subject to the forces of evolution where some species might survive while others may not. As Grady explains, “Erv is the great seed scatterer… he’s scattered all these different seeds and he’s not really sure which one of these plants will take hold and continue to grow. I think that’s the nature of his work” (Grady quoted in Taylor 2011).

For most of his adult life Los Angeles was Wilson’s home, thus placing him firmly with the American West Coast movement of microtonality that includes Partch, Lou Harrison (1917-2003), La Monte Young (1935-) and Terry Riley (1935-), many of whom he knew personally. He became a magnet for musicians from a diverse range of backgrounds and styles who came to visit him, or study and be mentored by him for varying periods of time. Wilson says that the goal of his research into tuning was to make scales “musically accessible to the composer and the listener…. I sculpt in the architecture of the scale. Other people come along and animate it” (Wilson 2001).