New to list

hello. My name is Jesse Gay. I am a senior @ reed college. I am doing a
music perception thesis comparing JI vs ET perception.
In the last Digest, I noticed the message about tapes. Would it be
possible for me to get a copy? Obviously, I'll pay whatver the expected
cost is.

Thanks,
Jesse


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From: "Jonathan M. Szanto"
Subject: What Is Microtonal Music?
PostedDate: 08-10-97 10:34:37
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To the cause of intellectual rigor, or phenomenologically, to the things
themselves!

Out-of-tune amateurity, or pure pitch error, is something I experince with
kids. In the world of professional music, musicians are admirable in
their abilities to shape pitch. In my corner of the world we work with
many different tunings and may have more athletic ears than most.

My "yardstick" and the one I encourage is 1200ET. Wilful misunderstanding
aside, what I hope to express is that there is more exactitude this way
than with any other model I know. Between any 2 points on a 1200 point
line there is a musical interval which can be made sensible through
repetition.

I have no cultural bias as to which intervals are microtonal and which are
not. And I realize it is quite a leap of the imagination to bracket your
existence with 12ET and see things in more of a unified theory of
intervals.

For detail, Jon Szanto and others can ask for a copy of Phenomenology and
Its Application to Microtonal Music, or borrow it from a friend. E-mail
is not the easiest medium for such a topic.

The AFMM is what it is: a forum for non-12ET musics from a myriad of both
tunings and styles. And yes, I do consider 12ET microtonal. I hope that
Jon can handle that this is my philosophy -- shared by other prominent
microtonalists -- and can finally get some sleep. :)


Johnny Reinhard
Director
American Festival of Microtonal Music
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/

p.s. Jon, what does the drummer of Pink Floyd have to do with the repeated
5/4 major thirds on _The Final Cut_?


SMTPOriginator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
From: "Fred Kohler"
Subject: Re: E-Mu Morpheus
PostedDate: 08-10-97 17:34:01
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Jon Szanto writes:

> Sooooooooooooooooooooo: what is microtonal music? Maybe it's all been about
> chasing our tail, and could have easily been boiled down to "non-12TET
> musics". I just don't think *everything* is microtonal. It has to be more
> than a casual happenstance, at least on some level.

If I may jump in here, I'd like to postulate that it's all relative. I'm
generally an non-relativistic kinda guy, at least philosophically. You've
seen that demonstrated by my JI fascism. ;-)

But here, I think it really is a matter of perspective. Hypothetically, how
would my European 11th-century forbears hear a 12-tET piece? Would the pitch
relationships sound extraordinary to them? I bet they would. Probably
downright out-of-tune. How about people who grow up with 7-tET or Pelog; do
they hear their own culture's tuning as microtonal? I do. But I bet they
don't. On the other hand, when I hear Candlebox (rock band), I hear the
guitars as 12-tET and thus non-microtonal, but the lead singer, who is
intentionally all over the place pitch-wise (for emotive purposes) as
clearly, deliciously microtonal, both by comparison with his accompaniment
and with my ears' expectations.

It seems logical in a sense, but still a bit restrictive to me, to limit the
term to intervals smaller than a particular size. That doesn't seem to make
for a very musically-useful definition since lots of music uses larger
intervals that are none-the-less different from what some might expect by
small-but-significant amounts. E.g., 7/6 might be used with intervals that
are all more than 50 cents away from it, but it is less than 50 cents away
from what many ears expect of a "minor third."

So microtonal music may be, to a given listener, any music whose
compositional/performance model includes pitch relationships that the
listener finds to be beyond his own range of perceived normalcy. I say
"compositional/performance model" to exclude performed pitches that miss the
performer's intended mark. How's 'at?

Well, what happens when I get used to, say, 13-limit JI to the point that it
sounds normal to me? Or what if I got used to a tuning that contained
intervals smaller than 50 cents? O. K., I still know that most of my
audience will hear it as microtonal. It's the listener, not the composer,
who defines microtonality.

David J. Finnamore


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From: DFinnamore@aol.com
Subject: Re: Morpheus and microtonal
PostedDate: 08-10-97 18:55:07
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David J. Finnamore writes:
>It seems logical in a sense, but still a bit restrictive to me, to limit the
>term to intervals smaller than a particular size. That doesn't seem to make
>for a very musically-useful definition since lots of music uses larger
>intervals that are none-the-less different from what some might expect by
>small-but-significant amounts....

>So microtonal music may be, to a given listener, any music whose
>compositional/performance model includes pitch relationships that the
>listener finds to be beyond his own range of perceived normalcy.

Perhaps you and Daniel or others on the list are at semantic cross-purposes
here. I won't speak for Dan, but I consider music that uses intervals
smaller than a semitone to be microtonal not because they sound strange,
but because that's what the word's etymological basis is. Personally, I do
NOT consider slendro, Iranian music with 3/4 tones, 7TET, or mbira music to
be microtonal. I DO consider Carrillo and Partch to be microtonal (most of
the time).

If you are looking for a word that refers to the "strangeness" of the
sound, perhaps a better term would be "xenharmonic" (xen = foreign).
Personally, I've never grown attached to that neologism because of that
connotation, which, as you point out, is culturally and personally
relative. I happen to like Ken Wauchope's term "allotonal," meaning
"alternate" tuning, but it doesn't seem to have caught on.

One cannot deny Johnny's point that definitions change over time, but I
don't think it's likely that his extreme broadening (which, if I'm reading
right, is microtonal = pitch-based) will catch on. People intuitively take
"micro" to mean "very small" because it's used that way in so many words. I
think it is useful to have a word that refers to music with small
intervals, just like it's useful to have terms like "just intonation,"
"equal temperament," or "pitch-based."

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)607-7600 (fax) ^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


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