UC San Diego

This dissertation details the musical vocabulary I have developed around the 1-3-5-7-9-11 Eikosany, focusing on five pieces I have written for Rotations Ensemble, a group formed to play Eikosany-based music. The Eikosany is a Combination Product Set (CPS) created by Californian experimental theorist Erv Wilson as a method for building Just Intonation scales. To better understand this uncentered spatial metaphor for microtonal pitch organization, I catalogued the smaller CPS contained in the five-dimensional pitch lattice, built a framework for functional harmony within it based on “Harmonic Class,” and codified a compositional process based on harmony studies that I call “Incomplete Open Forms.” Since Wilson’s theories have not received much scholarly attention, I consulted independent sources such as the online Wilson Archives, zine-like journals such as Xenharmonikôn and 1/1: The Journal of the Just Intonation Network, archives of conversations on the Mills Tuning List listserv, and guidance from former students and colleagues of Wilson’s like Kraig Grady, Terumi Narushima, John Chalmers, and Stephen James Taylor. Using what I learned, I created Rotations Ensemble to perform my Eikosany-based music. In this dissertation, I first give an introduction to Combination Product Sets as scale-building tools, followed by a dissection of the 1-3-5-7-9-11 Eikosany. After establishing the concepts and terminology, I turn to my development of Rotations Ensemble, detailing instrumentation, notational practice, techniques for generating form, and musical influences. In the final section, I describe five compositions of mine that were performed by Rotations Ensemble in Spring 2025, including important formal and harmonic elements, as well as any other relevant musical justifications for my compositional choices. Through this process, I’ve come to see Wilson’s theoretical ecosystem as a collection of tools for musical individuation rather than as a prescriptive methodology for high performance in institutionally validated metrics of success.