Miscellaneous replies to TD #934

Harry Partch reproduces a letter of Fox-Strangways in which a 23-note
per octave harmonium for Indian music is mentioned and also decried
as being too expensive. I've seen small harmoniums (shruti-boxes?) with
a hand-operated bellows and 12-tone keyboards in Indian import shops
and performance. Perhaps a microtonal version could be cheaply produced.

I found it difficult to extract a coherent scale from the Gudjieff
excerpt. One can see the chromatic scale there and perhaps 14 sympathetic
strings or an octave of 26 tones. The names seem to be a mixture of
Greek and Armenian, at least I see a few number roots in both languages,
though my knowledge of Armenian is virtually nil. Gurdjieff, as I recall,
was born in Russia of Greek parents and directed an Oriental dance troupe
in Moscow for which he wrote the music. Hence he might well have been
acquainted with Near Eastern music, which is largely based on Iranian
styles. BTW, the Armenian vocabulary has been greatly influenced by
Iranian languages too.

In any case, scales of roughly 24 tones in Pythagorean, some sort of
JI, or near ET are known in the Near East. D'Erlanger discusses them in
some detail in the later volumes of La Musique Arabe. I'm not clear
whether Persian and Turkish music is basically 12 tones of Pythagorean
with commatic and double-commatic inflections or not. The effect is
quarter-tonal in many instances.

As for contemporary Greek Orthodox or Byzantine liturgical scales,
I consulted several somewhat contradictory sources for my book on
tetrachords. The sources are these:

Xenakis, Iannis. 1971. "Towards a Metamusic." in Cybernetics, Art
and Ideas. Jasia Reichardt, ed. New York Graphic Society Ltd.
Greenwich, CT. Another translation of this article appears in
Xenakis, Iannis. 1971. Formalized Music, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, IA, USA.

Tiby, Ottavio. 1938. La Musica Byzantina. Fratelli Bocia Editori.
Milan, Italy.

Savas, Savas I. 1965. Byzantine Music in Theory and Practice, Hercules
Press. Boston

Athanasopoulos, Georgios D. 1950. Theoria tes Byzantines Mousikes,
Patras, Greece. (excerpts in another article.)

Xenakis uses Aristoxenos's/Cleonides's cypher notation of
30 parts to the 4th to come up with scales in JI. He discusses
the Trochos and other chains of tetrachords and pentachords as
well as heptatonic scales, modulations,etc.

Savas's and Athanasopoulos's scales use the same system, but if
anything, their resemble some contemporary Islamic scales as much
as Aristoxenos's genera. I found Sava's book quite confusingly
written in some places and I used Athathanasopoulos only for some
unusual tetrachords. Tiby uses an oldar 28 parts to the 4th, 68 to the
octave system.

--John


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