Tuning at Boston Early Music Festival

The Boston Early Music Festival is next week (instrument exhibition the
11th through 14th) and I recommend it as a place to experience historical
tunings.

I personally will be tuning clavichords (and maybe a clavicytherium and
virginals or two) for builders Jack Peters of Seattle and Thomas Gluck of
Vienna: early little clavichords in Pythagorean tuning, Tosi clavichord in
Meantone, Huberts in a well-temperament to be named later (when Thomas
tells me) and Tannenberg at equal.

Is anyone else on the list doing anything there we should know about?

Judith Conrad, Clavichord Player (jconrad@sunspot.tiac.net)
Director of Fall River Fipple Fluters
Church Musician at First Congregational Church, Bristol, R. I.
Piano and Harpsichord Tuner-Technician

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>I've been a lurker for quite some time on this list, and am somewhat
>puzzled by this reference to a Tibetan tuning utilizing 12 notes. I've
>previously worked with Tibetan folk musicians, and their
>compositions/folksongs are most definitely pentatonic.

I'm only speculating, but perhaps the distinction here is between the
array of all available pitches and the pitches used within a given
composition or other set of circumstances. In analogy, very little of
Western music is dodecaphonic, but the vast majority of it derives from a
total of 12 pitches.

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I suspect the Tibetan Tuning on the synthesizer is indeed about as Tibetan as
Mongolian BBQ is Mongolian, as hypothesized. I suspect the Tibetan Singing
Bowl phenomenon is the link. I'm pretty sure those bowls were originally used
as offering bowls on shrines. I don't think there's any traditional Tibetan
musical use of such bowls.

I'm not so sure about Tibetan music being pentatonic though. I have roughly
zero musical training, but I did get taught some traditional Tibetan ritual
music. The only instrument I know of with any kind of real scale is the
gyaling, which is a kind of shawm, kind of like a bag-pipe except the bag is
one's mouth. I sure don't know how they're tuned. But I spend lots of time
playing semi-mindless pentatonic "melodies" on my guitar, and the gyaling
doesn't really seem to work like that at all.

Jim

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On May 14, 1988 at the MicroFest I Symposium at New York University, David
Rothenberg gave a presentation entitled Timbre as Scalar Material.

The gist I got out of this presentation was that the wide glissando-like
melodies used by Tibetans were not improvised at all, but fully composed.
The distinction here is that even the melodic shapes can be explicitly
composed and that scalar tones might seem as jumping stones across a
river. According to David Rothenberg's theory, the Tibetans prefer to
wade through the river, avoiding the stones altogether.

David Rothenberg (tel. 212-662-8506) presented musical examples and
detailed his thesis, introduced above. Other presenters were Jules
Siegel: Confessions of a Just Intonation Fascist; Henry Lowengard:
Computer Applications; and Timothy Hill: Hoomi Overtone Singing.

There was a wonderful panel discussion entitled "On the Integrity of
Microtones in American Music" with Odetta, Deborah Blincoe, John Forrest,
Reggie Workman, and yours truly.


Johnny Reinhard
American Festival of Microtonal Music - MicroMay '97 (May 16, 21-23)
318 East 70th Street, Suite 5FW
New York, New York 10021 USA
(212)517-3550/fax (212) 517-5495
reinhard@idt.net
http://www.echonyc.com/~jhhl/AFMM/

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