All Sides Sit At Table; Peace At Hand...

As Paul Turner confirmed, he meant no denigration of live players/playing,
which is what I suspected anyhow. No harm, no foul.

>It happens that for one reason or another, playing live can fail,
>temporarily or otherwise, to be an option. Then the resort to non-realtime
>at least has the compensation of being potentially without the encumbrance
>of notation. I suspect that quite a few readers of this list may be in
>that position - which would explain why not many could respond when asked
>what method of notation they used.

Couldn't agree more, and I would have been sunk long ago in my compositional
development (hah! such as it is...) without the wonderful tools available to
us now. Whether used as a mock-up for future live performance or as a
creative avenue itself, we are having and eating cake.

>The appeal of software can be compelling for all sorts of reasons. But
>perhaps this is not the place to discuss the socialogical aspects of live-
>versus canned music. Or is it?

Hard to say, but then I'm relatively new here. As to my comments about the
plethora of numeric data recently, Gary Morrison responded:

>That's an old but valid criticism of the list traffic. I personally
>think that there's value in both theoretical and musical traffic.
>Some of it I believe has to do with the fact that it's easier to
>discuss math in pure ASCII text mail than pure musical ideas.

The latter point is undeniable, yet one would assume that the purpose of a
specialized community like the tuning list is to have an environment to
discuss issues of a more narrow focus. My only point (and this is where I
am at a disadvantage for my short tenure on the list) is that *all* of the
discussion is in the service of creating some sort of musical output, or at
least a sonic field of dreams, is it not? I am guessing that the various
forms of tuning aren't being explored simply for how they come out in a
spreadsheet but for their current/eventual use in a musical context, and
what I had not seen represented here, in healthy proportion to the datum,
was the *end result* of these investigations.

But then, I am new, and maybe have missed listings of the works composed by
the parties involved. In any event, we're done, and the notation wars are
clammering for fresh cannon fodder.

Of which I will lurk blissfully on the sidelines.

Cheers,
Jon
*--------------------------------------------------------------------*
Jonathan M. Szanto | If spirits can live online . . . . . . . . .
Backbeats & Interrupts | . . . then Harry lives in Corporeal Meadows
jszanto@adnc.com | http://www.adnc.com/web/jszanto/welcome.html
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Please understand this as a salve to understanding. 1200 points on a
line representing an octave is a continuum. Would 1300 or 2000 points
make a discernable difference? I think 1200 is just past the threshold
of pitch accuity for human beings.

In essence this is the digital equivalent to CDs and DATs. So much pitch
information is available as to appear infinite. Nice proportion, I think.

Ben Johnson once wrote a piece for me for bassoon and tuba. We spent so
much time deciphering the notation into cents that valuable rehearsal
time was lost. The piece was performed beautifully in tune, but perhaps
at a third too slow, or more.

I do not speak of "conflicts" in the notation, but "conflicting
directions" of mathematical calculations. For a player to have to think
up and then down, and maybe up again puts the music in a laboratory
setting for analysis. Finding fingerings take time, rewriting the part
takes time, and playing with new fingerings takes time, over and above a
conventional 12ET piece. In AFMM concerts we do it all the time. The
above story is a special case.

If players can't feel the new intervals there is something much more
seriously wrong than the notation used. Gardner Read has fully
catalogued the plethora of pitch alterations in use. (20th Century
Microtonal Notation, Greenwood Press 1990.)

To Gary M.,

What if I asked you to paint with only certain colors in any one
particular painted work. Isn't knowledgeable choice the ultimate path of
music making. Isn't a system a control placed upon one's perspective,
one's final fronteir, one's potential. Lou Harrison once told me that
when he taught at Mills which was all-female he would never use the words
"tuning system" in the title of a class: no one would show up. And yet,
by all means compose using material that you are comfortable with,
whether it be 88ET or Extended Just Intonation.

Notation that is less a personalized mythology of meanings of
relationships, and more a comparative of all that is available will
further the cause of microtonal music significantly.

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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