Yet another non-posting reader

I have been a "non-posting reader" for the past two years until
this past October when, in the course of changing to another server I
lost contact. Johnny Reinhard told me that he was encouraging lurkers
to decloak. Curiosity got the better of me and I quickly rejoined. I'll
introduce myself and I'll try to state why I like this forum.

I'm a composer/pianist and Professor of Music at a college very
near to New York City. I teach theory and composition on both undergrad
and graduate levels, some music one for the non-musician, piano, MIDI
studio skills and all kinds of electives when they come around. All of
my composing has been in 12-ET but quite diverse, both tonal and atonal.
It was Stefan Wolpe who challenged me 35 years ago to question
everything and to be wary of conventions, especially those of standard
notation. Early on I loved to extend the sounds of the piano with
inside-of-the-piano exploits and keyboard manipulations that would
elicit harmonic resonance.

In 1967 I began a three year stint at the Columbia-Princeton
electronic Music Center while living on Manhattan's upper West side. I
am indebted to Mario Davidovsky and others for some insightful
training. Here, in this presynthesizer studio where most compositions
were created with 3 or 4 stereo reel-to-reel tape recorders, hand
splicing tape like it was movie film, pitch would drift as the vacuum
tubes warmed up and precise time synchronization was all but impossible
to achieve. And so I created a number of spacey things, developing a
taste for elusive pitch and floating musical sound shapes that were
disassociated from meter.

I also had my first hands-on experience with computer music
around this time. There were no video monitors yet. It was punch carding
in the basement of the Columbia U computer building, waiting for your
stack to run upstairs, and if successful (a rare event) the digital tape
they'd hand you would have to be sent to Westchester (some 40 miles
away) to be converted into analog, a two or three day delay. I decided
to drop out for a decade or so after one semester of this. It was the
hardest imaginable way to make music. I did learn o appreciate those
hardy souls who did the pioneering and made it work. In that decade
before the PC, in addition to lots of 12-ET composing I did some writing
for percussion ensemble, a lot of free improv related to the study of
music therapy and several summers of vocal improv along the lines of the
Harmonic Choir. All of these musical experiences expanded my sense of
sonic resources.

The rest is "modern times". Early in the '80's I embraced the PC
starting with Radio Shack's Color Computer and IBM's PC Junior and
became reasonably adept at the practical technologies that are around,
namely desktop publishing, MIDI and high quality home studio recording.
A short course with Johnny Reinhard some seven years ago quickly turned
me onto this world of the xenharmonic. Soon thereafter I took a semester
in the physics of sound at a nearby university and a lot of the math
that surrounds acoustics and sound engineering started to make sense.

And so I hang around this forum to enjoy the poetry of
engineering ( sometimes, understanding something), the world view that
permeates xenharmonic thinking; recommendations in regard to CD's,
software and books and what feels like a glimpse into what Johnny calls
"the beginning of the future."

Visit my home page if you'd like to get better acquainted.
There's nothing xenharmonic there yet but I'm working on it.

Howard Rovics
rovics@nai.net
http://w3.nai.net/~rovics.

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>If we flip to the last four bars of the first movement of
>JS Bach's Italian Concerto,we are presented with a big fat I(6/4) chord
>on the downbeat. Question: do you hear this simultaneity as
>a consonance or a dissonance? I can only speak for myself;
>I hear it as a flaming dissonance which Bach briefly savors
>by abruptly slowing the rhythm after 12 bars of steady 16th notes.

I'm afraid that I do not hear it as a dissonance. There are several
historical reasons why the fourth was treated as a dissonance, but I think
one is that the systems of common-practice counterpoint used "dissonance"
interchangeably with "tension." Certainly this is not the case, and
something Babbitt I think fails to represent accurately in his zeal to
expose the arbitrary nature of common-practice counterpoint rules.

Can you have tension in tonal music without dissonance? Clearly so.
Dunstable and some other early 15th century composers wrote very beautiful
music with few or no dissonances, yet the music seems to me to have tension
and release about it.

Because the fifth of the chord is on the bottom, the 6/4 chord is not as
stable as the 5/3. Some theorists say this is because the 3rd harmonic of
the lowest note forms a dissonance with the other two notes of the triad.
There may be something to that, but of course Bach never thought of it that
way. It is easier to think of it as 6/4 "resolving" to 5/3, the same way
5/4 would resolve to 5/3.

In the second example, commonly a suspension, the fourth is not the
dissonance -- the dissonance is the second between the upper two voices.
However, because of the historical preoccupation with judging intervals
always in reference to the lowest sounding voice, it was simpler to call
the fourth a dissonance.

There is always a certain amount of arbitrariness in any musical system.
That's why it's art. However, music also has a basis in how we hear and the
physics of sound. Certainly some people, such as Hindemith, have oversold
this side of art in their misguided desire to make their style appear more
in keeping with "natural laws" and less artificial. (Brian has, on
occasion, and unfairly, I think, accused a wide range of JI composers of
this very error.)

Musical styles are created as a way of manipulating the physics and
perception of sound towards artistic ends. Babbitt's arguments against the
artificiality of the tonal system is ultimately pointless, I think, not to
mention the pot calling the kettle black.

Brian's vitriolic attack on Babbitt (besides beating a dead horse, as
someone else has pointed out), goes too far in his search for hyperbole. To
indict the man's musical education and knowledge in such strong terms
requires much more evidence than his lack of explicit differentiation
between sensory and musical perception of consonance and dissonance.

Perhaps it is because Brian sees Babbitt as one of the high priests of
academic music theory, which I don't think is really accurate anymore.
Certainly there are those people still around who enjoy nothing more than
pushing around numbers in sets ("Babbittry" was Greg Taylor's colorful
term), but, generally speaking, the heyday of that sort of thing is long
gone.

I will not deny that the popularity of this kind of theory among academics
was out of proportion with its historical importance, probably because of
the appeal of such a complex yet readily quantifiable type of analysis. Nor
will I try to claim that tuning issues are well-represented in the academic
press. However, Brian's own welcome bibliographies should serve as evidence
that there is no conscious Babbitt-led conspiracy against these issues.

On a related note: though I don't share many of John Cage's philosophical
viewpoints, I don't think it's fair to call him a charlatan. A charlatan is
someone with pretensions, someone who misrepresents what they are doing.
John Cage was upfront about exactly what he did and did not do. If you did
not want to call him a composer or what he did music, that was fine with
him.

And to see Cage as a high priest of academia is even further removed from
reality than in the case of Babbitt. I think that many academics did not
accept Cage for a long time. The reasons are obvious: How do you evaluate
chance music? How can you construct an objective theory about it? In that
sense, Cage was about as un-academic as they come, and I for one am
grateful for his breaking down some of the preconceptions and prejudices in
academia and the arts in general.

Bill

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^ Bill Alves email: alves@hmc.edu ^
^ Harvey Mudd College URL: http://www2.hmc.edu/~alves/ ^
^ 301 E. Twelfth St. (909)607-4170 (office) ^
^ Claremont CA 91711 USA (909)621-8360 (fax) ^
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I finally got around to Bill Alves's excellent response to my
Bach Italian Concerto post which I repost here as it definitely
bears re-reading.

I wrote:

>>If we flip to the last four bars of the first movement of
>>JS Bach's Italian Concerto,we are presented with a big fat I(6/4) chord
>>on the downbeat. Question: do you hear this simultaneity as
>>a consonance or a dissonance? I can only speak for myself;
>>I hear it as a flaming dissonance which Bach briefly savors
>>by abruptly slowing the rhythm after 12 bars of steady 16th notes.

Bill Alves wrote:

>I'm afraid that I do not hear it as a dissonance. There are several
>historical reasons why the fourth was treated as a dissonance, but I think
>one is that the systems of common-practice counterpoint used "dissonance"
>interchangeably with "tension." Certainly this is not the case, and
>something Babbitt I think fails to represent accurately in his zeal to
>expose the arbitrary nature of common-practice counterpoint rules.

>Can you have tension in tonal music without dissonance? Clearly so.
>Dunstable and some other early 15th century composers wrote very beautiful
>music with few or no dissonances, yet the music seems to me to have tension
>and release about it.

There are some important points here which I strongly second.
Although I believe we do hear the passage differently in subtle
ways, I suspect our structural hearing is similar with greater
differences in terminology than concept.

In particular we both agree that there needs to be greater
precision in using the word "dissonance" and that there needs
to be a very clear distinction between dissonance due to
the spectral, intervallic, and overtone complexity of a
given chord or time-slice, and tension (as Bill uses the term)
owing to contextual factors such as syntax, stylistic norms,
rhythm, density, etc.

The fourth is an especially interesting interval since it is treated as a
"switch-hitter" in traditional tonal music theory - it's not considered a
dissonance in a 6/3 (first inversion) triad, but is considered
a dissonance in certain contrapuntal contexts. In this case
I think Bill's description of it in the 4-3 suspension as a non-dissonance
is in conflict with the traditional contrapuntal labelling
(of course not all suspensions contain dissonance, eg 6-5s), but
is consistent with the more specialized, sonority-local use
of "dissonance" described above which seems to be more commonly
adopted in discussions of consonance and dissonance with
respect to tuning systems. The issue of "correctness" is of course
much less important than bringing us to closer understanding of
musical phenomena and Bill's remarks certainly add clarity and
perspective to both the specific Bach example and the more general
issue of treatment of fourths in tonal music.

In that spirit, let me introduce one more way of viewing the fourth -
Heinrich Schenker's, which as I recall from "The Will of the Tone",
is based on an abstract view of the triad as the foundation of
both linear and harmonic motion. Schenker interprets the
overtone series as a "hint" to the artist who takes the triad
and discards the rest of the inconvenient (to his theory) overtones.
The triad and the facility to move in tonal space as defined
by the triad becomes the composer's "a priori". I can't recall
the example Schenker gives for tonal space, but the opening
melody for Bach's Brandenburg #3 is an excellent example:
despite neighboring notes everywhere, it is evident that the
melody is unambiguously outlining a tonic triad.

>From Schenker's point of view, a fourth might be heard as dissonant
owing to its melodic status as a passing tone in the interval
sequence 5-4-3, since the reference tonal space is 5-3, i.e. the
upper half of the triad outlined over the bass. It's difficult to discuss
hierarchies of tone without being tempted to say that some notes
are more "important" than others, which is subtly different from
saying that some notes have more structural weight, or different
syntactic function. So rather than call the fourth in the above
context "dissonant" it is perhaps better to call it
"unstable" in the same way that a sentence like
"I walked my ..." is unstable at the point I broke it off.

>Because the fifth of the chord is on the bottom, the 6/4 chord is not as
>stable as the 5/3. Some theorists say this is because the 3rd harmonic of
>the lowest note forms a dissonance with the other two notes of the triad.
>There may be something to that, but of course Bach never thought of it that
>way. It is easier to think of it as 6/4 "resolving" to 5/3, the same way
>5/4 would resolve to 5/3.

Agreed. I would add to this that in a tonal context, the I(6/4) chord takes on
considerable tension, since it does not in fact function as a I chord
at all (despite contain containing precisely the full set of pitches from the
tonic chord). Instead the driving feature of this chord is its bass note, degree V,
and the chord functions as a precursor to V. Therefore through purely syntactic function,
the chord, despite being consonant takes on a double instability: it is
a stand-in for the dominant - a tonally unstable region, but made even more unstable
by the fact that the dominant has not yet arrived but is imminent.

This to me is a beginning of an explanation as to how two sonorities,
one clearly more inherently dissonant than the other, can have their inherent dissonant
properties overridden by other contextual features of the music, such that the
less dissonant sonority takes on a high degree of tension in the music, and the
considerably more dissonant sonority takes on a less tense position.

As Bill concisely states:

>Musical styles are created as a way of manipulating the physics and
>perception of sound towards artistic ends.


It occurs to me that technical discussions of compositional deployment
of contrapuntal principles push the bandwidth boundaries of email groups.
Perhaps for that reason we haven't seen too many such discussions, although
I recall a few enlightening posts on the interaction between tunings and
voice leading by Gary Morrison quite awhile ago. Nonetheless, I'm a counterpoint
nut and would be very happy to see more such postings by other members.

Eric Lyon
eric@iamas.ac.jp
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~eric

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Without any number crunching, my spacing model - which was a result of
compositional, rather than analytic thinking - has used a **compacting**
function, where successions of chords **resolve** by seeking optimal
density.

For example, of the three chords 6/4, 5/3, 4/2 over a given tonic, the
first is not dense enough, the third is too dense, and the middle is just
right. Thus either the first or third chord will **resolve** to the second.
This function does vary with register (I have assumed with critical band
width), but in apparently all voicings available in the conventional vocal
ranges, the example works as given.

I have marked **resolve** with quotes, because this is clearly a local,
cultural feature. In my own work, something like **optimize spacing** might
be more correct, but I am not hung up on terminology.

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>Without any number crunching, my spacing model - which was a result of
>compositional, rather than analytic thinking - has used a **compacting**
>function, where successions of chords **resolve** by seeking optimal
>density.

Dan -

If you think it's appropriate for this list, I was wondering if you could
let us in on some more details about your compacting function. (Apologies
in advance if you've already written on this and I've missed it.) Thanks!

Bill

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^ Bill Alves email: alves@hmc.edu ^
^ Harvey Mudd College URL: http://www2.hmc.edu/~alves/ ^
^ 301 E. Twelfth St. (909)607-4170 (office) ^
^ Claremont CA 91711 USA (909)621-8360 (fax) ^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^




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