tape swap

Great job to Denis for the tape swap...this proves that there are a
lot of talented folks on the forum, and a wide range of musical ideas and
concepts. I really do enjoy the surprises that occur while listening to
non 12 et music...I truly feel that this is a necessary direction for
western music to go to avoid becoming stale and stinky...which it is. I
would have liked to hear something from Johhny and Mayumi Reinhard, the
Catler Bros, John Schneider, and a few more, as well as more acoustic
instruments...but, this was a wonderful idea. Perhaps a tuning@eartha CD?
T shirts, posters, etc? Why not...I believe the talent base is
here...Hstick


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From: Johnny Reinhard
Subject: Re: stray thoughts
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Johnny Reinhard mused:

>If I played Mary Had A Little Lamb a quartertone sharp from convention's
>A=440, then each and every tone I advanced would be a microtone. By
>virtue of the tortured fingerings in sometimes embarrassing postures,
>these lambs were microtones. Why is it no one listening to my
>Mary... rendition on the bassoon would notice and remain
>convinced that there were absolutely no "microtones" at play (the
>rare perfect pitchers aside).

(You mean that they *would* remain so convinced, right?)

Because there aren't any microtones at play. A=440 is far from a
universal convention. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the
international pitch standard is still 435, and most major orchestras play
higher, upwards of 448. (The string players think they sound better
there - it drives the wind players nuts.) Early music players tune to
A=415 ... or 392 ... or 460 ... because 250 years ago reference pitches
varied considerably, with choirs and chamber ensembles often having
different (by a third or more) reference pitches at the same time and
place! Even if you didn't travel, you had to be good at transposition,
and there are Bach cantatas where the recorder parts are written in a
different key so the instruments would end up playing at the same pitch.
Perfect pitch may be more curse than gift!

Is this not why folks on this list use ratios and cents to describe
intervals from an arbitrary reference, notated 1/1?

So no matter what your reference pitch, if all the intervals in your
performance are powers of the twelfth root of 2, you're playing in 12TET.
Thus a "microtone", whatever it is, is an interval, not a pitch.


>A tone can be an interval of major and minor size, of numerous
variations,
>actually. It is also the blend of harmonicities and inharmonicities
>of a plethora of amplitudes which all make up the klangfarben of vivid
>color in musical tone.

Well, this is throwing in a completely different definition of the word
"tone", meaning "timbre"....


>Could a microtone be an interval that bridges to another microtone, or
>not? Must its pedigree be the remainder of real time arithmetical
>calculations ....

I suspect that the problem with the word "microtone" is that it has been
applied to tunings far removed from the context of its invention. Didn't
the word come out of early 20th-century experiments with 24TET, 96TET,
and other tunings that were derived by subdividing 12TET? Its meaning
seems clear in that context.

Now it gets applied to things like 7TET, the intervals of which are
barely smaller than a tone, far from "micro". It seems to be no more
specific than a cue word to indicate a non-12TET interval. In that
sense, sure, an interval between two microtones is another microtone,
however wide, as long as it is not 2^(n/12). But this strips the word of
almost all meaning.


>"Microtonal" is the personal sensibility one achieves when making the
>acquaintence of a progressive number of powerful sound
>angles...skipping stones on the sound continuum one moment,
>placing stones to cross a river in the next, knocking on
>familiar doors all along the way.

Hmm - "microtonal" essentially meaning "unfamiliar" - a good place for
the word "xenharmonic". Would someone brought up listening to Indian
music get the same sensation on hearing 12TET?

How far away must one get from the familiar doors to produce the
microtonal sensation? If you played "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in
Pythagorian tuning, who would consider that microtonal?

The predominance of the equal-tempered piano and fretted guitar has
evidently led many to overlook that, to this day, good musicians who can
produce arbitrary pitches do not consider C# and Db to be the same pitch.
(They may say otherwise, but one must judge from their performance!) Is
the music they produce microtonal?

The exclusion of music thought to be 12TET by the speaker or writer but
never actually *performed* in 12TET strips "microtone" and "microtonal"
of the rest of their meaning.


I think it would be best to restrict the word "microtone" to "an interval
significantly smaller than a 12TET semitone", and "microtonal" to "making
explicit use of microtones". Then we need other words to describe the
scope of the AFMM. Since I'm not sure what exactly is excluded, I'm not
sure what to suggest. ("The American Festival of Nonquasiequidodecatonic
Music" - ruling out "sort-of-12TET" music ???)


Musing further,

Gordon Collins
gordon_collins@jhuapl.edu


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From: Aline Surman
Subject: Microstock 3 and various
PostedDate: 18-10-97 00:10:15
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Mr. Collins may or may not be right that A=435 is a standard, as compared
to my suggested A=440. Historically, it was the music union that insisted
in the U.S. to use A=440 because it was deemed unfair to players that
couldn't match provincial standards.

In NYC it is A=440, while Boston is a point higher. Finland is lower in
pitch while France can go higher than Boston. However, the instruments
(e.g. bassoon which is not really tuneable) are at A=440 as made in
Germany.

I do not have absolute pitch, which has been explained in Science magazine
as a gene. All in all, perfect pitch is not the coveted blessing many
think it is. I had great success recently with a performance of my
"Inevitable" for bassoon, clarinet, bass clarinet, and cello. Both the
cellist and clarinetist have "microtonally-trained" perfect pitch. For
instance, any microtone I played could be instantaneously matched by
either cellist David Eggar and clarinetist Michiyo Suzuki (who recently
played the Newband King Oedipus piece of Partch's).

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


SMTPOriginator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
From: Greg Schiemer
Subject: Scala EXAMPLE with MIDI Csound
PostedDate: 19-10-97 00:04:44
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