Getting Johnston and Tenney off the Lattice / Keyboards

I think that one historical point should be corrected. Ben Johnston does
not have priority in presenting his tunings as lattices. There is a long
German tradition of presenting tonal functions in terms of positions on
lattices of 2 or more dimensions. Even Schoenberg, coming from the Austrian
scale-step function theory, uses lattices in his _Structural Functions of
Harmony_. These lattices are identified immediately with Just Intonation
and later mapped onto the temperament at hand. Moreover, it is not uncommon
to see the rows in the lattices shifted so that Major triads are
upward-pointing triangles, and minor triads point downward. (One of Martin
Vogel*s students has written a dissertation documenting some 130 years of
lattices illustrating tonal functions).

One of the reasons that Jim Tenney�s Darmstadt lectures were met with such
reserve four years ago is that his excited presentation of his tonal
lattice was like an elementary - and old fashioned - harmony lesson to much
of his audience. This was a shame, because Jim has raised some interesting
aesthetic issues and drawn exciting compositional implications from his
research.

On a different theme, I had some conversations with Scott Hackleman in
April about the possibility of his building 17, 19- or 22- tone keyboards
along the line of his famed clavichord, but used to trigger midi-keys.
Whether this would be a simple on/off arrangement or touch sensitive was
left open in our discussion. I was interested in this possibility because
it seems that around 19 tones is nearly ideal, provided one had the
capacity through software to modulate, and the Hackleman-Wilson keys are
wonderful to play, with the feel of something real under the fingers. The
question I have not been able to answer concerns the possibility of
dismantling one or two cheap midi keyboards and attaching their switches to
the Hackleman keys. Has anyone ever ventured such a project? I have not got
a midi keyboard here to tear apart...

Daniel Wolf

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