When he first retired, Duane Pitre was 23.
It was the winter of 1997 when the money started pouring into professional skateboarding. Pitre was on the cusp of becoming one of the sport’s lucrative stars as it transitioned from a counterculture to a commercial empire. He was an early member of Alien Workshop, the start-up equipment company that helped shape the aesthetics of skating.
The founders of the company fell for Pitre’s lithe form and easygoing charisma. He effortlessly performed the tricks of street skating, a burgeoning urban approach, replete with slides along railings and gravel over picnic tables. He starred in groundbreaking skate videos. Signs were printed with his name.
But just as profits rose, Pitre bought a cheap bass, realized his true love was making music, and said goodbye to skating.
“I was paid to do what I didn’t want to do,” Pitre, now 47, said recently during a phone call from his home outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan. “There was no option for me to skateboard for just my life. It wasn’t about that; it was about self-expression.”
Pitre eventually played in heavy rock bands and moved to the weirder side of the genre until he became entrenched in experimental music twenty years ago. Over the past twelve years, he has emerged as an apostle of just intonation, an ancient tuning system linked to Indian and Chinese traditions, but often ignored by Western composers. Proudly self-taught, Pitre moved between elongated electronic drones, mercurial acoustic improvisations and shimmering string meditations, all with clean intonation.
Released this fall, his pensive new album, “Omniscient Voices,” puts the piano in conversation with computer programs and electronics across five pieces that suggest damaged photographs of beautiful horizons. Pitre has used the same traits that made him a street-skating phenomenon—timeless rebellion, tenacious focus, unwavering restlessness—to inspire younger musicians to explore intonation, too.
“Duane is like a shepherd to my generation,” organist and composer Kali Malone, 27, said in an interview. She once played a formative spring alongside composer Caterina Barbieri on “Feel Free,” Pitre’s 2012 album. (Malone’s own pieces in just intonation have introduced yet another group of performers into the system.)
“Intonation alone is not a genre,” Malone said, “but a tool that allows you to create many kinds of music.”
It’s no surprise that music was Pitre’s destiny. His parents were fond of rock clubs in New Orleans; they named him after Duane Allman and indoctrinated him into the Beatles and Black Sabbath. Pitre bought new wave singles for his small plastic record player.
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His father thought the preteen Duane had a long future — perhaps a professional one — in football. But the first skate scene in “Back to the Future” got him so excited that he spent an entire summer mowing the lawn to buy his first cheap board. And just as Marty McFly was chased by a mob of bullies in that 1985 film, Pitre and his friends were often bombarded with homophobic remarks while skating through New Orleans, long before skating was ubiquitous.
“We were outcasts — naughty kids,” said Pitre. But when he “found a way to run off in the street,” he added, “I was hooked. I have never practiced any other sport.”
When he was 15, Pitre earned his first sponsorship. Two years later, Alien Workshop released its first official board, paying him two dollars for every board sold — enough for him to buy a Super Nintendo. When he was 20, he moved to San Diego to live in a skater house that resembled a sorority.
The residents shot cult-classic videos and did photo shoots that became the gospel of skateboarding’s ballooning community. But Chris Carter, a founder of Alien Workshop, recalls how Pitre started skipping recordings to play bass or his obsessions with indie rock, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.
“I thought he would be one of those legends who has been skating at a high level for 20 years,” Carter said in an interview. “He could have made a lot of money. But he was very honest about the fact that he didn’t want to be paid for something he didn’t want to do.”
After Carter offered six months of retirement, Pitre hit the road with a string of bands. He bought a guitar pedal that allowed him to stack loops into drones. He moved to New York, which de facto served as a conservatory. For example, a new friend was shocked that despite his aspirations to create experimental music, he didn’t know who Meredith Monk was.
“All these ideas and concepts — that’s what college should be,” Pitre said.
In 2004, a friend Pitre had met while skating in San Diego invited him to East Village Radio’s studio, where a soft section of La Monte played Young’s landmark “The Well-Tuned Piano.” Pitre was stunned: he had used circuitry to alter his sound, while Young only used tuning. The DJ only knew the name of the style: just intonation.
“It felt like confusion, in the best sense of the word,” Pitre said. “I started asking people what intonation was, and they said it was nature’s tuning system. I didn’t want the New Age explanation. i wanted the science.”
He dug into the question, just as he had skated two decades earlier. He visited the sound and light environment of Young’s Dream House. He browsed rudimentary websites, read scholarly essays, and ordered a spiral-bound workbook called “The Just Intonation Primer.” He tackled its mathematical models as a student struggling with mathematics and internalized the axioms of just intonation.
In the simplest terms, just intonation means that the proportions between notes are integers, rather than the irrational proportions that divide the octave in the familiar framework of equal tuning. For Pitre, the resulting sound – which felt exotic and disobedient, like a surreal representation of the world – was the draw. The esoteric status also attracted him, because after skating he decided not to tie his creativity to commerce. Just intonation would never sell.
During this tutorial, Pitre found that intonation-only samplers bored him because they were more concerned with mechanics than music. Before releasing his first album in the system, he staged the 2009 compilation “The Harmonic Series” in response. The eight tracks showcased the different ways in which artists like Deep Listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros or the resonator guitarist R. Keenan Lawler made a just. can handle intonation.
“I tried to say two things,” recalls Pitre, a married father of two who still speaks to the boyish casualness (and the long hair) of his skate adolescence. “Here’s this music that I love. And I spoke to a version of myself two years younger and said, ‘You can do this yourself.’”
That ethos has guided Pitre’s diverse output. While the mix of harp, dulcimer, strings and electronics on “Feel Free” suggested a renaissance recital on a technical peak, “Bayou Electric” added a southern touch to clean intonation through tidal guitar harmonies and recordings of Louisiana’s Four Mile Bayou, where Pitre’s grandmother grew up. “Omniscient Voices” has the meditative warmth of Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s “Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror” or the softest etudes of Philip Glass – perhaps if they were heard on distorted vinyl.
Likewise, Pitre’s second installment of “The Harmonic Series,” released in July, begins with Malone’s floating organ and ends with Barbieri’s disorienting electronics. They both play with time and texture, as if tickling the mind through the ear. The six pieces — and just intonation in general — “allow us to rehearse sound,” said Tashi Wada, a compilation contributor who admired Pitre as a skater before hearing his music.
Experiencing younger musicians using clean intonation in new ways, Pitre said, forces him to keep exploring — in a way that skating never could.
“In high school, I hated writing down your work because then I would find my own ways to solve problems. Only intonation related to the same part of my brain,’ he said. “It’s almost universally accepted that 12-tone equal temperament is the only way to vote, but that’s wrong. It felt important for people to know.”