In the autumn of 2025, I received a commission I hadn't quite imagined. A contemporary Italian-Swedish composer wanted a Meråker clarinet, but not in any tuning I had worked with before. It was the start of a project that made me reflect on traditional instruments and the tonal systems we all relate to.
A surprising order
Timoteo Carbone is a composer and sound artist. His work ranges from experimental contemporary music to early medieval polyphony and fieldwork in traditional music, and he is interested in how tuning is not just a technical issue, but something that shapes the entire musical thinking; harmonies, interaction, spatial sound, and the relationship between instrument and surroundings.
The commission was for a Meråker clarinet with its own sequence of pitches, given with microtonal deviations in cents from position to position. The root note B3 (246.94 Hz), and then a piece of a scale that does not follow the equal temperament system, but is rather taken from the natural tone series and overtones.
I usually work towards known standards. Here there was no one to lean on. It was all about listening.
Full circle - or a step back?
There is something paradoxical about the Meråker clarinet in 2026. The instrument comes from a world where intonation was shaped by nature - by the material, by the noise in the air, by what the ear heard in the countryside. Then, gradually, it was expected that all instruments would fit into a common, equally tuned system. It's practical. It works. But something also gets lost in translation.
Timoteo's work points in the opposite direction. He lets the overtone series and the harmonics control the choice of intervals, and builds a framework where the tuning is active - not just a background standard. It's a project rooted in Norwegian music research, including The work of Eivind Groven with the natural scale and traditional instruments such as willow flute and lur.
Intonation system
Deviation in cent from equal (12-TET).
Finished clarinet
The result is a Meråker clarinet that looks the same as it always has; same shape, same material, same grip. But tonally, it's something else. A bastard. Each finger hole is positioned and dimensioned for Timoteo's intonation system, and the intervals that emerge are shaped by the natural tone row rather than the equal temperament scale.
A little extra finesse was added to the back of the instrument: a «transposition plug». With the plug out, the clarinet plays in A -> with the plug in, the fundamental is raised to B. A simple mechanism, but one that gives the instrument a wider range of uses without changing any of the acoustic basis.
Video series
At the same time as building the instrument, we created a small three-part mini-series documenting the process chronologically - from the first order to the finished instrument.