Cross cultural?

Johnny Reinhard claims a 'cross-cultural' basis for his work. At the same=

time he advocates using a cent notation. A cent notation may indeed be an=

efficient one for getting players trained in 12tet to retune - indeed, I
have used it myself for this purpose - but I doubt that it would be of
much use to musicians from other traditions. =


(Some time ago I posted my sense that a notation conveying the actual
frequency ratios required by the composer was advantageous for music wher=
e
a just intonation was desired. Of course, managing to have both sorts of
notation would be desireable as long as the score is not illegibly
crowded.) =


An example: This summer, I worked quite a bit with Ki Suhardi in
Yogyakarta. He is the retired leader of the gamelan at RRI Yogya and at t=
he
Pura Paku Alam, and at present is a highly regarded private teacher. Pak=

Hardi is probably _the_ musician who has thought most deeply about tuning=

in Java. (His old _gender_ looks like a slice of Swiss cheese from having=

undergone so many retunings, and his new _gender_ is rapidly being sanded=

into similar shape). I could talk quite easily with him about intervals
being ''pleng'' (from his point of view, without beats) or not, but to ma=
ke
comparisons in terms of Western scale intervals, whether expressed in ter=
ms
of solfege or with the help of a digital tuner, was all but useless. The
problem was that reference to a 12tet scale within a just octave was, for=

Pak Hardi, an unnecessary abstraction, while dealing with a few basic
intervals (in western terms, octaves and fifths) in terms of their being
narrow, _pleng_, or wide, expressing the narrowness or width in terms of
beat rates, was both sufficient and exact. The players (rebab, singers,
suling, siter) who actually tune themselves during a performance, and oft=
en
''on the fly'' with a gamelan that they have not heard previously, have t=
o
work without reference to some ideal scale but in strictly relative terms=
=2E
Beyond this, I am afraid that my attempts to talk to Pak Hardi in terms o=
f
western intervals were taken as disrespectful - indeed, why should I have=

insisted on such terms when the local terms were adequate and appropriate=
? =



I suspect that a better cross-cultural model is to meet with musicians fr=
om
other musical cultures and find out how they work with tuning, how they
think and talk about it (if at all), and then try to find some common
ground for working. While a 1200 cent scale does have the scientific aura=

of cultural neutrality, it is not neccessarily going to be understood as
neutral by real musicians brought up in other tunings. In the case of Pak=

Hardi, I found that I talked with him about tuning in much the same way a=
s
I talk to piano tuners who set the temperament by ear - in terms of beats=
,
not cents, and not in terms of the abstract scale, but specific intervals=
=2E

=


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