Re: 55-tet

Hi Brian

Saw this at the end of the last digest:

> As for 55-equal -- you might find it amusing to note that 55
> equal, called "the musician's tuning," was championed loudly by
> Telemann and Sorge and others during the 18th century. 12 out of
> 55 equal received wide praise among the elite musicians of
> Central Germany. 55 got plenty of press probably because its
> step-size approximates the syntonic comma (81/80) pretty well.
> Around the same time 51 equal also got some good reviews, since
> 51 equal approximates the size of the Pythagorean comma pretty
> well.
> As a compromise twixt 51 and 55, 53-equal got considerable
> attention from Sauveur and von Janko and others. 53 equal still
> gets lots of adulation from fanatical 5-limit JI ideologues
> nowadays. Of course, real composers in the real world recognize
> that all of these tunings are simply heard as "a whole buncha
> small intervals" by listeners and practicing composers alike.
> Once you get past about 29 equal, hands-on experience composing
> in these equal temperaments shows that there's no significant
> audible musical difference between (say) 51 as opposed to 55 or
> 53, or 60 as opposed to 65.
> Not many people have done anything with the full chromatic
> set of 55 equal, or for that matter other nearby chromatic sets
> like 60 equal or 65 equal. 72 has proven much more popular,
> probably since it's relatively easy to get 72 by rolling a bunch
> of harps next to one another (James Tenney) or pianos (Carrillo)
> etc.

I'd like to quote this on my tunes page, to give interesting background
to the tuning for visitors, if that is okay. As recorder player I
have practiced Teleman pieces, so that link is of particular
interest...

I've been thinking about the way one composes in a n-tet, and
how it influences one.

I think the inspiration is at a kind of subliminal level actually.
The analytical mind isn't so good at picking up that kind of thing,
if one asks what temperament a piece one hears is in, at least
I'm not good at that. But if one plays in it one gets affected
all the same, my intuition says anyway, would be hard to do
objective tests of it. Ditto if one composes.

Seems like the composition is inspired by the tuning.

Then idea I have is that one can have a tuning in 55-tet
say, and by playing or composing, be inspired by it, and then having done
that, if someone else plays it on, say, an acoustic instrument,
then one would just say, play it pretty close to 12-tet,
and follow the inspriation of the piece (which itself then derives
from 55-tet originally). Then maybe performer would destabilise
some of the fifths slightly naturally because of the way the
chords are used - the context etc, and maybe play others a bit
more pure, or vary the width of the thirds, and maybe it wouldn't
exactly follow the way it happens in 55-tet, but it might follow
the same inspiration.

I'd say that a 12-tet realisation would also be okay if it worked
- that would be the test, if the result sounded okay. Might or might
not depending on timbre, and the way the piece works, and the
tuning. But if it did, what one would have would be a 12-tet
piece whose origins were inspired by, say, 55-tet.

Just as today we have many 12-tet pieces whose origins were
perhaps inspired by the variety of flavours of keys that performenrs
and composers were used to in C18 and C19 temperings. That too
is okay I think.

> Robert Walker deserves praise for epxloring a relatively
> exotic tuning system. How about trying some of the more notable
> and beautiful but lesser-used equal divisions of the octave,
> Robert? For example, 9 equal? Or 15 equal? Or 10 equal? Or 21
> equal?

Thanks. I'll certainly explore other things, and try these
particular ones too.

One idea I've had from 55-tet is to use a tuning that can be in two exotic ets, and
also their product which has a fairly conventional twelve tone
scale. 55-tet suggest that idea as one could have sections in 5-tet
and in 11-tet using subsets of the scale, and then also have
sections in twelve tone. The 11-tet tones would be the large semitones
of the 55-tet twelve tone scale, so that could be interesting.
Just a thought, and not sure how it will work out.

> ---------
> One last issue -- LIME by Lipppold Haaken incorporates
> microtonal accidentals. WHen you pair the LIME notation program
> witht he FB-01, you get the ONLY *true* microtonal musical
> notation in existence. LIME will actually send microtonal pitches
> to the FB-01!
> Why not try getting in touch with Lippold, Robert, and see if
> you can get him to hook your FTS into LIME in some way?
> Shouldn't be that hard. And if you and Lippold can do that,
> you'd have a truly awesome microtonal notation program *that*
> *actually* *sends* *microtonal* *pitches* *to* *the*
> *sythesizer*!!!

Okay I will do. Thanks very much for this suggestion.

Robert

HI Brian,

I've also had a nice idea for some subsets of 55-tet.

First of course, the meantone scale.

Then, a twelve tone scale consisiting of closest approx
to 7-tet on the white notes, and exact 5-tet on the black.

The 7-tet would have six steps of 8 out of 55-tet,
and one step of 7 out of 55.

So it would have three fairly pure fifths at the 55-tet
fifth of 698.18 cents.

The 5-tet might perhaps start from the same 1/1 as the 7-tet
in tradition of the pelog on white, slendro on black
tunings of 12 tone keyboard (even though pelog isn't 7-tet).

Then have an 11-tet mode of some sort on the white notes.

Then do an improvisation, or a composed piece going through these.
For the 12 t one, have four copies at shifts of a
syntonic comma, so that one can play around with
movement by syntonic comma too.

Just an idea of an idea at present,...

Robert