Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup mills-tuning-list water music

>A piece of mine for just-tuned piano was first performed on September 28,
>and when a piano could not be tuned

Just out of curiosity, why couldn't the piano be tuned? Was the tuner or
the piano's owners unwilling? Or were there physical reasons why it could
not be done?

>theorist
>Paul Wilson, who claimed that tonal music such as this doesn't work in
>JI as well as in 12TET. Basically, he is saying that the 4:5:6:7 chord
>is too stable to provide directed tonal motion to a consonance, and that
>moving from complicated (higher-number) sonorities to simpler sonorities
>is not interesting enough in itself to sustain a piece of music.

This sounds like someone who hasn't had a lot of experience with JI and who
has a very narrow view of what tonal music is, how motion can be defined,
and how interest in music can be created. It sounds like he claims that one
can't have a dissonance in JI, which is not true, at least to my own
definition of dissonance. By the same token, one could say that it is
impossible to have a consonance in 12TET (which does have some truth to it,
though your theorist might disagree). To me, tonal music does not
necessarily imply harmonic progression towards a goal - that's just what
European common-practice music was. Nor does a composer have to employ
harmonic progression towards a goal to create interest in a tonal
composition. There are often theorists who say that this or that kind of
music "can't work," when I think they are finding justifications for their
own personal preferences rather than arriving at universal rules

>Is just-intonation, as Ben Johnston says, indeed adaptable to any style of
>music?

I don't think it's suited for atonal music. I think it reinforces tonality
by its very nature, though I am using the term tonality in much more
general sense than the "tonal music" of the common-practice period. Lou
Harrison says that Schoenberg's great genius was in the realization that
12TET leads to atonality by its very nature.

>Can a composer write JI music that provides tonal motion rather than just
>common-tone modulation? Can this be done with a mere 12 notes or less?

I don't really understand how "tonal motion" and "common-tone modulation"
are considered opposite directions, but I certainly think that JI can
support tonal motion. One need only to listen to much of the JI written to
hear that. Modulation, of course, is very limited in JI, but only if you
want all of your keys to sound the same. If you take the changed quality of
the different keys as a new resource, you can turn this to your advantage.
Of course the more tones per octave the more possibilities. (I chuckle a
bit at the "mere 12 notes" as I have been writing a lot of pentatonic music
lately -- now that's a difficult compositional exercise!)

>If the answer to these is "no", for what style is JI best suited?

If you listen to some of the compositions being done today, as demonstrated
on the Just Intonation Network's samplers, you will hear an enormous
variety of styles, though all within what I would call a tonal framework.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^ 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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The history of music is full of people trying to absolutize relative
measures. There's no doubt that the 4:5:6:7 version of a dominant seventh chord
is more dissonant than a 4:5:6 major triad. Is the reduction of tension from
that JI progression enough less than its nearest 12TET equivalent to make it
unusable? I have not found that to be the case at all, but there's no absolute
threshold here.

To me though, that sort of a matter-of-degree question ultimately has only
limited value. For example, in sustained chords, there is definite musical
meaning to the cleanliness of beatless JI harmonies. But when you really get
down to it, just how big a deal is that? And how often are chords sustained
long enough, and rendered at high enough precision, and in harmonic enough
timbres to tell the result from, say, quarter-comma meantone?

Don't get me wrong; of course the precise character of how a new tuning
renders existing resources is certainly important. But it's not as important,
in my view, as what all-new resources it offers.

From a harmonic perspective, I find it pretty obvious from my recent work
that subminor, neutral, and supramajor thirds provide very powerful new musical
possibilities. From a hybrid melodic-harmonic perspective, I find that
wandering tonics provide a surprising nontraditional effect. From a melodic
perspective, it's pretty obvious that microtonal melodic steps give sensations
from ominous to humorous to irritating. Certainly they have very big effects on
counterpoint as well.

But getting away from the mechanics, you pointed out that these new effects
were not readily accepted in this case. Perhaps the most common reason why our
audiences wouldn't understand these new effects is that we don't either!
Millions of peole have spent thousands of years figuring out what to do with
what we now call traditional resources. Just how realistic is it to think that
a handful of people - many of whom are not professional musicians - can find
equally powerful ways to use these new resources in a few decades?

And, even if we can, is the idea that these new musical sensations are not
always understood really all that surprising? Ultimately the musical experience
is much deeper when we use these new possibilities, but people have a natural
tendency to panic when faced with the unusual.

As I pointed out shortly after I joined the tuning list - wow, nearly two
years ago it seems! - xenharmonic composers have to be triathletes. Most of us
on the tuning list will listen to microtonal music for that reason alone, but
that's not true of audiences in general. Our music has to be appealing for all
of the usual reasons as well as showcasing new and unusual reasons to be
appealing.

Many have pointed out that being a 20th century composer is difficult because
music of the huge variety of styles is so readily and simultaneously available
on radio and CDs. With so many types to cast it to, it's easier for people to
think of it as "kind of like this composer or that composition", rather than
something interesting in its own right. Xenharmonic ideas can help a lot in
that regard, because they can make our music sound totally different from the
start.

But then we run into the other problem that this wide availability of music
causes: Overload. People hear so damned much music all around them, that we're
down to trying to DISCARD music, rather than mining a rare gem of song from a
lute-wielding troubadour wandering through your village. Our music has to
brilliant and appealing for reasons other than the unusual tuning, and that's
just terribly difficult to do. Fun and rewarding, yes, but unequivocally
difficult.

Still there certainly are plenty of success stories, so take heart in them
too. We all can learn a lot from the ultimate successes Harry Partch, Ivor
Darreg, Other Music, Ben Johnston, and many others. And perhaps more
impressively, the live performers among us. Johnny Reinhard and his troops have
produced many years of microtonal concerts, most very well accepted. And more
recently it seems like hardly a week goes by without Neil Haverstick reporting a
case of audiences enjoying the heck out of his gigs.

So, to oversummarize, we're taking on a difficult task here, so success
depends on focusing on the right aspects of the task, and presenting the focused
image in a way that audiences can relate.

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water music

🔗bil@ccrma.stanford.edu (Bill Schottstaedt)

🔗alves@osiris.ac.hmc.edu (Bill Alves)

🔗Gary Morrison <71670.2576@...>