Joshua Mastel & Alec Goldfarb – Firmament

released digitally May 22nd, 2026

Firmament is an album from composer/performers Alec Goldfarb and Josh Mastel that contains two works for microtonal harpsichord and strings, featuring Austin Wulliman (JACK Quartet) and Daniel Hass (Renaissance Quartet).

The pieces are new experiments that filter renaissance tuning systems through a 21st-century lens. Rooted in the radical innovations of 16th-century theorist Nicola Vicentino, they use a microtonal double-manual harpsichord, played by Mastel, whose tuning is modeled after Vicentino’s Archicembalo. The ensemble is rounded out by Goldfarb on electric guitar, Wulliman on violin, and Hass on cello. Rather than a historical reconstruction, the music expands Vicentino’s vision into new harmonic dimensions, blending speculative Renaissance theories with contemporary experimental practices.

Mastel and Goldfarb depart from Vicentino’s tuning system and construct a living musical language that combines elements of 1/4-comma meantone, 31-EDO, and Just Intonation, creating new tonal grammars in which modulations move with the intuitive pull of harmonic gravity.

The Goldfarb-written opening track The Tree of Heaven engages in musical world-building by imagining a parallel universe of thematic and harmonic movement that builds and cadences across 27 minutes in an alternate paradigm—at once strange and uncannily familiar. A revelatory lyricism animates textures from low harpsichord clusters to luminous deceptive cadences. Improvisation forms a core of the piece, tethering invented logics to a speculative new world of tonality. 

In its 25 minutes, Mastel’s sky goes dark moves through episodes of austerity and rupture, inflected by different instrumental configurations, and tracing a formal arc that thickens time. At the climax of sky, Mastel surprises with a hidden instrumentarium behind the quartet. From the suspended tremor of a 32-foot organ pedal cluster to a solenoid-driven castanet machine that metronomically ticks, the piece finally arrives at an elegiac coda weighted by the memory of what came before.

These pieces offer contemporary expressions of grandeur, awe, dread, and transcendence, acting as portals into shifting constellations of tone which are at once imperfect, earthly, and sublime.