Theremax at the Lyric

I played theremax for a small but appreciative crowd last night at the Lyric
Cafe in downtown Gainesville. The first segment of the program was devoted
to various "special effects", which generated a lot of interest, right away.
After a round of aplause, I then began playing phrases from various melodies
rhat I have heard over the course of my life, including classical, oriental,
popular american and traditional Hawaiian and Italian melodies, in between
improvised episodes that explored the higher numbered segments of the
harmonic and subharmonic series. For a while, I was allowed to play some
quiet, sensitive stuff, but what they seemed to like most was when I made
really loud building-shaking bass sounds that resembled body noises. In any
case, the entire performance was in just intonation and the audience loved it.



Best wishes,

Denny Genovese
Director

Southeast Just Intonation Center sejic@afn.org
World Harmony Project Inc.
PO Box 15464 http://www.afn.org/~sejic
Gainesville, FL 32604 USA



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From: mr88cet@texas.net
Subject: S. Commas and Quartertones
PostedDate: 15-08-97 15:58:32
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Gary Morrison wrote:

> Then again, I agree with you [Paul Rapoport] that "quartertone"
> should be limited to specific pitch distance of 50 cents.

This is not what Paul seemed to be saying: he left the size of the tone
open, but required that the quarter tones be genuine fourth roots. As
I've said before, I can't agree with either: the interval of a
"quartertone" is sometimes correlated with a frequency ratio of
2^(1/24)/1, as in Vischnegradskij, but is more often left unspecified,
as with "semitone" and "tone". Like the latter it is a term belonging to
the phenomenal domain of pitch relations, rather than the acoustic
domain of frequency ratios (which is where the syntonic comma belongs,
as you appear to agree). There is no universal one-to-one mapping from
the domain of pitch relations to the range of frequency ratios;
sometimes such a mapping is specified (e.g. Ben Johnston) or implicit
(Vishnegradskij), sometimes the mapping is one-to-two (as in the tunings
c.1400 which incorporate both Pythagorean and quasi-just imperfect
consonances), but by far most often, the mapping from pitch relations to
frequency ratios is simply left open -- no single tuning system is
required for the realisation of a given score. Quarter-tone notation is
used freely and flexibly by many composers of non-keyboard based
instrumental music today, and their notation shares the functional
distinctions of semitone notation (i.e. signs for both 1/4-tone sharp
and 3/4-tone flat are employed, and likewise 1/4-tone flat and 3/4-tone
sharp). Are we to say that all string-quartet composers, from Barto'k to
Ferneyhough, who have used quartertone notation were demanding a strict
12TET environment for their quartertones? Any case you construct for
mapping quartertones to 50 cents will also map semitones to 100 cents
and so on, but the term "semitone" has generally been used without any
such specification in mind -- indeed it was used freely by many
mediaeval theorists who explicitly discounted the bisection of the tone;
for them, semitone, was an umbrella term for limmas and apotomes.

Jonathan Walker



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From: non12@deltanet.com
Subject: Info sought on recordings
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>This is not what Paul seemed to be saying: he left the size of the tone
>open, but required that the quarter tones be genuine fourth roots.

Meaning that it could be a quarter of a 9:8, for example?

I personally see a lot of value in there being a well-understood,
compact term for intervals of 50 and 100 cents. They have such important
historical significance. Quartertone and semitone seem like ideal
candidates.



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From: PErlich@Acadian-Asset.com
Subject: Reply to Graham Breed
PostedDate: 19-08-97 19:37:52
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