Microtonal Bach Christmas Radio Broadcast

Annual Microtonal Bach Christmas Day radio broadcast, 10 am to 2 pm on WKCR
radio, 89.9 FM in NYC, or on the Internet.

_http://www.columbia.edu/cu/wkcr/_ (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/wkcr/)

Happy Holidays,

Johnny Reinhard

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Happy holidays folks, I was going to get myself a holiday gift cause i have a little money left over after the holiday shopping... and i wanted to know a good book that can give someone with no theory knowledge other then octaves and power chords, a foundation to work in microtonal music.

Also is their anyone who has come up with a tunning theory that expresses things as pure hertz or is that just to clumsy?

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David Doty's The Just Intonation Primer available at
http://www.justintonation.net/ is a very good introduction to Just
Intonation theory. My experience is that a lot of tuning discussion
assumes some basic familiarity with Just Intonation theory, so it's a
good place to start.

The only other major micotonal text I'm personally very familiar with
is Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music, which is a wonderful and
fascinating book, especially if you're interested in his work. With
that said, only a moderate amount of the book is devoted to tuning
theory per se, and I can't imagine it's the most direct way to learn
about tuning. Some of his statements about psychoacoustics are now
known to be inaccurate, as well.

There are plenty of other books out there, ad I'm sure others will
recommend their favorites. I just haven't gotten a chance to find/read
them yet!

Also, in my experience, most people like to think of intonational
systems as sets of relationships between tones rather than absolute
pitches, ie, in hertz. Thus, pitches are usually expressed as some
sort of mathematical relationship to a tonic tone, either in ratios,
in cents, or in some other system (ie, using irrational numbers like
pi as a basis).

On Dec 25, 2007 8:13 AM, . . <offtheblvdrecords@...> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Happy holidays folks, I was going to get myself a holiday gift cause i have
> a little money left over after the holiday shopping... and i wanted to know
> a good book that can give someone with no theory knowledge other then
> octaves and power chords, a foundation to work in microtonal music.
>
> Also is their anyone who has come up with a tunning theory that expresses
> things as pure hertz or is that just to clumsy?
>
> ---------------------------------
> Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>

Mathieu's _Harmonic Experience_ looks like a great introduction. Has
anyone here worked with that?

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Jim K" <kukulaj@...> wrote:
>
> Mathieu's _Harmonic Experience_ looks like a great
> introduction. Has anyone here worked with that?

Mathieu's book is a good *practical* guide to just-intonation.
He takes the position that simple JI ratios resonate
within our body cavities, and are thus very easy to "find".
His book presents a series of ear-training exercises that
help you do just that. (pun intended)

I second the recommendation for Doty's primer. It is a
very simple explanation of JI and a great introduction.

Partch's book is what introduced me to tuning, and while
i can recommend it as a very interesting read, i would
say that it is actually a much better idea to read his
book *after* getting a good grasp of microtonality from
these other sources.

Another good practical intro, which is not based on JI,
is "Preliminary Exercises in the Virtual Pitch Continuum"
by Joe Maneri and Scott van Duyne. It is a book of
ear-training exercises in 72-edo.

Of course i'm going to have to toot my own horn: if
you want to find out about all manner of things microtonal,
you can find an alphabetical listing in my Tonalsoft
Encyclopedia of Microtonal Music-theory:

http://tonalsoft.com/enc/encyclopedia.aspx

And if you have a Windows XP machine and can get
Tonescape running on it, that's a terrific way to
try out anything you read about.

-monz

email: joemonz(AT)yahoo.com
http://tonalsoft.com/tonescape.aspx
Tonescape microtonal music software

> Also is their anyone who has come up with a tunning theory that expresses things as pure hertz or is that just to clumsy?

One could think of ratios (or roots, for that matter) as "pure hertz"
values that have been reduced. This also allows you to see
transpositions as equivalent: for instance, 300/200 and 798/532 are
both 3/2. If that doesn't make sense, think of your familiar power
chords: moving your hand down the fingerboard doesn't change the
interval patterns.

I think many electronic composers think in just hertz when microtuning
samples, either because they haven't delved into theory, or are just
turned off by it as a hindrance to "intuition." Fair enough, but to
me that seems slightly naive, like working in language without syntax,
or exploring geography without making any maps. But, to each his own
:)

Chris Bryan