Allotonality

Adam Silverman wrote:
> (Ken): Who uses the word "allotonality", and who came up with it?

Back in the 70's there was some discussion in the tuning community (I
think it may have been in Jonathan Glasier's Interval journal) about
what name to use for what we were doing. "Xenharmonics" was already
widely used by many, but the implication that non-12-TET tunings were
necessarily "strange" (xenos = alien) was not fully satisfactory to
those using historical tunings or Just Intonation to get more pleasant
sounds using conventional harmonies -- to the latter, JI was the (natural)
native and 12-TET was the stranger/intruder.

The term "microtonal" was also criticized for a couple of reasons.
First for being culturally and tonally biased, since a microtone is
defined as any interval smaller than a 12-TET semitone. Also, to some
people the term implied music in which one would necessarily hear tiny
melodic intervals, which required explaining that "macrotonal" scales
like 7-TET are also included in the definition, not to mention
alternative 12-tone scales derived by selecting a subset from a
microtonal source scale.

Anyway, at that time I coined and proposed the term "allotonality"
meaning "alternative tunings" (allos = other), which seemed more
all-inclusive and captured the essential spirit of "xenharmonic"
without the implication of oddness. I've never heard anybody else use
it, though I was glad when I discovered the Alternate Tuning mailing
list had come up with the same idea in naming themselves. Under that
concept, 12-TET just becomes one valid alternative among an infinity of
tonal possibilities.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
|/ Ken Wauchope (wauchope@aic.nrl.navy.mil) 202-767-9004
|\_| Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC
_| http://www.aic.nrl.navy.mil/~wauchope/audio
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My experience with Ben Johnston gives high marks for exactitude, but
loses too much due to the slowness with which it is read. Often conflicting
directions are used for a single note and so a mathematical calculation
is necessary. This process takes one out of real time.

Johnny Reinhard
Director
American Festival of Microtonal Music
318 East 70th Street, Suite 5FW
New York, New York 10021 USA
(212)517-3550/fax (212) 517-5495
reinhard@ios.com


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