Lost Post, Miscellany

This seems to have gotten lost in cyberspace along with one of
Brian's. So, here it is again.

Re Kraehenbuehl and Schmidt: K & B proposed a 12 out of 22 as the next=20
step in Western music and the 4:5:6:7 chord as the basic consonance.=20
Their procedure was to interpolate new notes into the larger intervals
of the older tuning. By this means, which they attribute to Prosdocimus
of Bellemandis, the pentatonic became the diatonic, the diatonic the
chromatic, etc.

See: Kraehenbuehl, David and Christopher Schmidt. "On the Development=20
of Musical Systems," =CAJournal of Music Theory: vol. 6 no. 1,
Spring 1962. pp. 32-65.

Alas, I've never seen the Ogolovets article.

BTW, Yasser lived and worked in Shanghai after leaving Russia during=20
the Revolution. I recommend his "Medieval Quartal Harmony: A Plea
for Restoration" (1938). It also appeared as a three part article in=20
the Musical Quarterly vol 23 (170-197) April 1937, (336-366) July, '37=20
and vol 24 (351-385) July 1938. He wrote about Chinese and Siberian music=
=20
(he spent some time in Siberia on his way to China). In NYC he became
very well-known as an organist and authority on Jewish music, which
he felt was largely pentatonic and should be harmonized with quartal
chords. I think ethnocentric is a somewhat oversimplified judgement,
though perhaps true to some extent. He seemed to feel that Thai music
in particular, was limited by its 7-tet intonation and that going
to 14 was no more of an advance than going to 24 would be for us.

BTW, Yasser did hear a piano in 19 and gave a lecture-demo with it.
I am unclear from what Yasser himself told me and/or from the description=
=20
in the annotated bibliography compiled by Albert Weisser exactly whether
this was two pianos in 19 or one "specially preprared" piano in 19.=20
Weisser states it was the latter. It was done in 1935 at "Steinway and
Sons in their New York studios." The talk was called "Supra-Diatonicsm
in Live Sound." This should satisfy critics who think that Yasser never
heard 19-tet. However, this experiment came 3 years after his book
was published and his theory was in its mature form. Yasser admitted
that it was hard to hear the 12+7 scale "as something inconstesibly
clear and convincing." (The quotes are from the bibliography and are
Yasser's words with or without minor paraphrasis.)=20

Re Hexachord: I've often wondered about the hexachord myself. Some=20
tunings of Wilson's hexany (i.e., the 1.3.5.9) approximate the hexachord,=
=20
but in general, I've found it difficult to generate new scales based=20
on it. Lou Harrison has composed with hexatonic scales.

Refield's scale: This scale has 3 minor triads on the 1/1, 4/3 and 3/2
and two major.Its modes are inversions of the Ptolemaic ones. I wasn't
proposing it as a tuning of the major scale, but pointing out that
Ptolemy's Intense Diatonic generates only half of the major-minor system.
For a more complete discussion of the chordal genesis of the modal
system, see Ellis's additions to Helmholtz. I think this is pretty much
theoretical post-hoc musicology, but it is interesting and suggested to
me at least, a way of harmonically generating scales.

Personally, I think the tritriadic genesis of the major and minor
scales to be post-hoc theorizing, but the fact that it is possible and
largely agrees with musical usage, is further evidence for the
"fitness" of the major and minor modes for tonal music. The challenge
is to find as convincing analogues and homologues for xenharmonic music.

--John


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I started trying to respond to Brian's condemnation of
algorithmic composition, but the more I type, the more
I delete. I don't think there's any great need to
pounce on composers for using words in a general way --
why not try to understand what problems they're dealing
with, rather than shouting about Science? For example,
in my own case, I got interested in algorithmic composition
because it gave me a way to break out of a personal rut --
a freer form of improvisation if you will, and it was
for ten years a time of complete exhileration. I would
run 50 or 100 algorithmic "takes" (mostly just tweaking
random number seeds), extract the stuff that caught my
ear, and goof around with that until a finished piece
of music emerged. 99% of the "work" was done by the
computer. I wrote the algorithms and chose the output
I liked, so I call myself the composer. The other source
of ideas was a similar kind of goofing around with

sounds (synthesized or recorded); in either case, there
was a conscious effort to make mistakes -- that is,
the most fruitful compositional paths, in my case,
were opened up when I just blindly charged into something
without having any idea what I was doing. After the fact,
I could make a sensible narrative to explain why that
path was a World-Historical Necessity. So, I think Brian's
attacks are counter-productive, assuming any composer
is listening -- my advice is, pay no attention to the
experts! Who cares what "experimental" means, or whether
the means were "valid" or whether an unaided human could have
done the same thing given 10 lifetimes? In composition,
it's the result that count.

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