Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup makemicromusic Georgia

On Sun, 14 Jul 2002, Kraig Grady wrote:

> A transcription and cents deviation in a Georgian song
> from CD Georgie: Polyphonies de Svanetie. Le Chant Du monde ldx 274 990
> http://www.anaphoria.com/georgia.PDF

Hello, there, everyone, and thank you for the discussion of Georgian
or Kartuli music, which has both reminded me of some very exciting
listening experiences over the years, and led me in the direction of
some new music.

Here, following at least something of the focus of "MakeMicroMusic!"
with its friendly emphasis, I'll share some Scala files for some
"possibly a bit Georgian-like" scales which this thread inspired me to
come up with, duly cautioning that while I'll vouch for the beauty and
inspiration of Georgian music, the quality of my derivative scales is
something the user must evaluate.

The following is what I wrote before seeing the awesome transcription and
intonational analysis that Kraig has so generously shared, itself an
approximation which shows how the subtleties of practice parade their
beauty while theory tries to explain -- and sometimes succeeds to a
certain degree. Maybe that's as important a lesson as anything that
follows, and an appropriate lesson for this group.

Based on the transcription, I might say that my scales seem to contain
_some_ "Georgian-like" intervals -- but with voices freely following
their own flexible intonation as they traverse the spectrum, that
isn't so surprising.

- - -

Kraig, that _Georgia I_ album by UNESCO was also my initiation to this
music around 1970 or 1971, and the experience was especially powerful
for me because it was like meeting a friendly cousin with striking
affinities as well as differences.

Coming from my own tradition of medieval polyphony from Western
Europe, I found that the Georgian traditional polyphony was indeed
often strikingly similar: the music "spoke my language," although also
of course its own unique language. (Following a remark by Bill Alves
once, I wonder how Georgian singers might hear French music from
around 1200.)

Just yesterday, at the library, I read part of a fine article on
Georgian music in the Garland encyclopedia of world musics, and was
reminded of my love for this music over the years. Thanks to MMM for
providing the occasion for me to revisit this friendly ground -- and
get some ideas for my own musicmaking.

For example, I was looking over one two-voice piece in a related
article on the North Caucasus, and reflected that it could almost have
looked like a piece by Leonin, a composer often associated with the
Parisian school sometime around 1175 -- or that Leonin could have
almost come from the same school as these skilled musicians. Here I
say "almost," because there were inflections which marked the music as
coming from its own special place.

Then, I reflected, how might I play something like this now -- as
someone who has walked similar paths of improvisation (albeit on
keyboard, a different thing than the fine coordination and cooperation
of singers) for some 30 years?

Then I got some ideas: how about making this sustained minor seventh
a 7:4 (or a tempered approximation?), this minor third a 7:6, and this
inflected minor second a narrow step around 30:29 (no choice, unless I
transpose, since that's the step available in the tuning I was
considering).

It's curious to feel this kind of musicmaking shaping up on the basis
of looking at a score in what inevitably is the metaphor of notation,
with the imperfections of my own keyboard technique and ability to
follow the subtle rhythms indicated by the notation (let alone get
close to what fluid performers were actually doing in this piece)
making the "translation" process of my rendition yet more
metaphorical.

How strange in the early 21st century, as a follower of one
13th-century tradition, to be inspired by another (Georgian
three-voice polyphony has a documentation going back to the 11th or
12th century) -- helped along by means of mass communication which
also threaten the witting and unwitting destruction of many world
cultures and musics if "inertia" is allowed to proceed.

Anyway, now to the scales. One question would be how close Georgian
fourths should be to a pure 4:3 -- gamelan music, for one, teaches us
that the primary concords of _kempyung_ (the equivalent of "fifth" or
"fourth") can be quite a distance from these ratios.

One trait of Georgian music, as some Western European schools of
13th-century music, is the use of sonorities like 6:8:9, a fifth and a
fourth together above the same lowest note. Should all these intervals
be close to simple ratios, or should we have a fifth at about 3:2, but
a wide fourth (and major second narrower than 9:8, as some of the
sources quoted here propose)?

The temperaments I'm about to give offer some different "solutions" to
these questions for fixed-pitch instruments, with some emphasizing
near-pure 6:8:9 concords, and others featuring stretched fourths, and
in one scale also octaves.

For these scales, however "Georgian-like" or otherwise, I've used a
tuning system called Peppermint 24. Erv Wilson and Keenan Pepper
defined the basic temperament with fifths at around 704.096 cents, or
about 2.14 cents wide. This 24-note version has two regular 12-note
chains spaced to form some pure minor thirds at 7:6 (~266.87 cents).

Curiously, based on my recollections of those albums of Georgian music
(which I should hear again), I really couldn't say how closely the
tuning comes to some of the models posted here. What sticks with me is
an impression of modes and cadences often vividly like those familiar
to me from a 13th-century Western European tradition, but with often
strikingly distinct inflections.

There's also a distinctive Georgian technique of having a high voice
with a "yodelling" pattern -- there's a term for it, and it adds lots
of excitement to the contrapuntal texture.

It was these traits that I noticed, without much reflection on fine
points of intonation -- maybe a common human response to beautiful
music, embracing it without necessarily considering niceties of ratios
or cents.

What I want to caution is that these scales are responses to the idea
of patterns with lots of neutral or semi-neutral steps and intervals,
rather like the Italian opera and oratorio around 1600 were responses
to ancient Greek music.

First, here's a scale starting with a "small major second" step and so
including a wide fourth at around 516.75 cents between the second and
fifth degrees, and also some steps of around 129 cents (near 14:13),
149 cents (near 12:11), and 159 cents (near 23:21).

! mmmgeo1.scl
!
Scale for MakeMicroMusic in Peppermint 24, maybe a bit like Georgian tunings
7
!
187.34894
336.86046
495.90439
704.09561
832.76485
991.80879
2/1

The next scale takes this approach a step further with a stretched
octave as well as fourth:

! mmmgeo2.scl
!
Scale for MakeMicroMusic in Peppermint 24, maybe a bit like Georgian tunings
7
!
208.19121
367.23515
516.74667
704.09561
863.13954
1071.33075
1220.84228

Another approach is to seek sonorities close to 6:8:9, as in this
tuning:

! mmmgeo3a.scl
!
Peppermint 24 scale for MakeMicroMusic, maybe a bit "Georgian-like"?
7
!
128.66925
336.86046
495.90439
704.09561
832.76485
991.80879
2/1

or this one:

! mmmgeo4a.scl
!
Peppermint 24 scale for MakeMicroMusic, maybe a bit "Georgian-like"?
7
!
128.66925
336.86046
495.90439
704.09561
832.76485
1040.95607
2/1

or this one, just a differen rotation of this last set of notes:

! mmmgeo4b.scl
!
Peppermint 24 scale for MakeMicroMusic, maybe a bit "Georgian-like"?
7
!
208.19121
367.23515
495.90439
704.09561
863.13954
1071.33075
2/1

The KEY feature of Scala permits lots of experimentation with these
rotations, and I hope that, given the people here, these scales might
help to instigate some more musicmaking.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@...

🔗jpehrson2 <jpehrson@...>

🔗M. Schulter <MSCHULTER@...>

Hello, there, Joe, and please let me quickly answer your question
about Georgian music, indeed from the Georgia close to Russia.
Since the majority (although by no means only) language of Georgia is
Kartuli, maybe that adjective could sometimes be helpful -- when
discussing the music of the Kartuli-speaking part of the population.

Anyway, the Georgian traditions of polyphony, often for three voices,
do go back over 800 years, and although we might not have tapes or
CD's of the performances described by some Georgian writers of that
era, I'd guess that a lot of the style practiced and recorded by
traditional performers of the 20th-21st century is quite similar to
what was sung or played back then.

Thus we are speaking of _a_ medieval tradition, but a different one
than that of Western Europe in the same era. The affinities, at least
for me, are indeed striking, and might raise the issues either of a
"common source" or of some "convergence" of traditions of a kind often
discussed in linguistics. Then, again, parallels between polyphonic
techniques in a wide range of musics is a favorite topic in
musicology, and something we could maybe discuss on the Tuning List.

Here I might add, to tie this kind of cultural diversity to my
personal musicmaking, that recently I seem to be experiencing
something a bit parallel to either the 12th-century or 15th-century
Renaissance in Western Europe, with ancient Greek and Near Eastern
traditions widening my view of intonational matters.

One effect is a fascination with the gradations of "neutral" steps and
intervals, as they're often called (maybe a somewhat culture-specific
description). A related effect is a taste for melodic steps with
superparticular or near-superparticular ratios, with a variety of such
steps an elegant attraction.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@...

🔗jpehrson2 <jpehrson@...>

🔗booeyschewy <booeyschewy@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@y..., "jpehrson2" <jpehrson@r...> wrote:
> ***Thank you very much, Margo, for your prompt response on this. I
> guess the fascinating part for me might be the fact that then,
> apparently, this music stayed pretty much *the same* all those
years,
> whereas the Western European models changed drastically.
>
> I guess that might be associated with the relative isolation of the
> Georgians, but I don't know for sure.
>
> Thanks again!
>
> Joe

Well it has and it hasn't. Just like Western music contemporary
Georgian music has its own pop, a wonderful Western classical
tradition with some Georgian composers, and of course (to my suprise)
Britney Spears, M&M etc.

Its not really Folk music per say, it was actually traditionally
orthodox church music like Gregorian chants. Georgians have told me
that it dates back to the 3rd century, when the first Georgian script
surfaced, but that may be an exageration. It was largely passed down
orally and varies with Region. Georgia in fact is incredibly
culturally diverse and far from isolated. It once was the gateway of
the world standing between the mid-east and china's trade routes. It
has been frequented by the Persians, Turks, Mongolians, Huns, Romans,
Greeks, Europeans of all sorts, and all the familiar central asiatic
peoples... It sort of makes it a mystery that the Georgians remain so
unique :) Georgia isn't actually in Russia either, it is its own
nation between the black and caspian seas. One might note that the
Georgian language (like icelandic) has undergone a much slower rate
of change than other languages. They can still read 1000 year old
texts (like the Knight who wore panther skins) and understand them
more or less, and there are isolated nonurban areas where they still
speak similar dialects.

Sort of back on topic, many call this singing polyphonic yodling,
which is strange. I would never call the crazy catholics yodlers.

🔗M. Schulter <MSCHULTER@...>

Hello, everyone, and I'm writing in some excitement to share my first
experiences with a beautiful Middle Eastern _maqam_ or mode from
around 1300 called Buzurg, and documented by a famous Persian theorist
of that era named Qutb al Din al-Shirazi.

Interestingly, this is the same medieval era as the Gothic music of
Western Europe which provides much of the basis for my style, but a
different cultural tradition. As is well known, Islamic civilization
played a central and catalytic role in the "12th-century Renaissance"
of Gothic Europe, and my encounter with ancient Greek and Middle
Eastern tuning systems seems a kind of 21st-century Renaissance.

Since this group is especially devoted to the experience of making
music, and the promotion of that experience, I might say a bit about
my first encounter at the keyboard with Buzurg in a "gently tempered"
version (a term explained below). It's one thing to know the ratios,
another thing to have notes, intervals, and sonorities dance in
shifting permutations across and around the keyboard.

At first I tried to get the feeling of the scale -- actually, just one
variant of a Buzurg maqam or mode -- by playing it as unaccompanied
melody, or above a drone. There are charming variations in the sizes
of intervals, and also what seem to me stimulating "asymmetries" from
a medieval European diatonic perspective. Actually, this version of
Buzurg may have been a bit problematic from the viewpoint of Arabic or
Persian theory around 1300 also: there's a 7:6 step (about 267 cents),
which one opinion would hold irregularly large for an undivided scale
interval. One might, however, take the Syntonic Chromatic of Ptolemy
as a precedent.

Then I started to experiment with some progressions for three or four
voices, and quickly found some really striking things that seemed to
go from a somewhat "Middle Eastern" sound to 13th-century Europe to
something curiously rather "Gershwinesque."

One thing I often found happening was that the set of notes in Buzurg
seemed to guide me into progressions that I would not have found so
readily otherwise, because my conventional practice would have led to
more "standard" resolutions (e.g. "let an unstable sonority resolve,
if possible, by stepwise contrary motion in all voices").

Keeping within the scale, and "doing what comes naturally" within that
set of notes, I found that a world of progressions opened where voices
move by thirds (often neutral or semi-neutral), maybe explaining some
of the "jazzy" or "Bluesy" feeling -- or where minor sevenths expand
to octaves and fourths expands to fifths by contrary motion, and so
on.

These types of progressions weren't totally new to me, but in Buzurg
they often step to the forefront; in another setting, I might indeed
briefly stumble upon and write down such "alternative" resolutions,
but mostly as asides to the "conventional" ones.

This exercise of trying to keep within the notes of the scale, and
exploring some of the rich permutations and combinations to be found
there, had a humorous aspect. Sometimes I would find a pleasant
resolution, write it down, and then realize that I had used one or
more notes outside the scale. I call such progressions _ekmelic_, a
Greek term which has "outside the scale" as one possible
interpretation.

Of course, such ekmelic progressions are also a legitimate musical
resource in one type of "fusion" style, and for me fit a 14th-century
European kind of technique where inflected or "invented" notes
(_musica ficta_) are often used to obtain intervals such as fifths at
desired positions in the gamut, for example.

However, the strength of staying within Buzurg is that it fosters a
special kind of sound, favoring progressions in many positions which I
might otherwise use only occasionally. One might say that in _musica
ficta_, the vertical progressions reshape to a degree the melodic
steps; in a more "scale-oriented" style, the notes of Buzurg often
reshape the patterns of vertical sonority and progression.

Now for the delicate matter of "gentle temperament," and its
compromises. First, I'll give a Scala file for a just intonation
version of this variant of Buzurg:

------------------- Scala file begins next line of text ------------

! buzurg1.scl
!
Variant of Buzurg (Qutb al Din al-Shirazi, Persian theorist, c. 1300)
8
!
14/13
16/13
4/3
56/39
3/2
18/11
21/11
2/1

------------- Scale file ended with blank line after "2/1" ----------

Here's a file for my tempered version in Peppermint 24, a system based
on the temperament defined by Erv Wilson and Keenan Pepper with fifths
of around 704.096 cents. In Peppermint 24, there are two such 12-note
chains of fifths at a distance of about 58.68 cents, forming some pure
7:6 minor thirds.

------------------- Scala file begins next line of text ------------

! pepbuzrg.scl
!
Peppermint 24 version of Buzurg variant (cf. buzurg1.scl)
8
!
128.66925
357.70273
495.90439
624.57364
704.09561
853.60713
1120.47803
2/1

------------- Scale file ended with blank line after "2/1" ----------

A comparison shows that generally the two versions are quite close,
but that the just version has some pure 3:2 fifths and 4:3 fourths,
for example, which are all slightly compromised in the "gentle
temperament." I'll also show my keyboard mapping, with an asterisk (*)
indicating a note on the upper manual, where each note is about 58.68
cents higher than the corresponding key on the lower manual:

128.30 231.17 138.57 128.30 75.61 150.64 266.87 80.54
14:13 8:7 13:12 14:13 117:112 12:11 7:6 22:21
1/1 14/13 16/13 4/3 56/39 3/2 18/11 21/11 2/1
0 128.30 359.47 498.04 626.34 701.96 852.59 1119.46 1200

F*4 F#*4 A4 Bb*4 B4 C*5 D5 E*5 F5
0 128.67 357.70 495.90 624.57 704.10 853.61 1120.48 1200

While keeping rather closely to the just Buzurg tuning, the tempered
version, for example, maps the two slightly different steps of 22:21
(~80.59 cents) and 117:112 (~75.61 cents) to the same size of about
79.52 cents (see B4-C*5, E*5-F5).

Anyway, I want to share my excitement about this beautiful tuning, at
once honoring the MIddle Eastern tradition of practice and theory
which it reflects, and celebrating a process of musicmaking to bring
about more global understanding.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@...

Georgia

🔗Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...>

🔗M. Schulter <MSCHULTER@...>

🔗jpehrson2 <jpehrson@...>

🔗M. Schulter <MSCHULTER@...>

🔗jpehrson2 <jpehrson@...>

🔗booeyschewy <booeyschewy@...>

🔗M. Schulter <MSCHULTER@...>