The Tempered....Flute?

>Unfortunately, current instruments do not aid (as well as they might)
>the advancement of the microtonal imagination: we work with
>conventional designs because they are (in acoustic instrumental
>terms) the best we have, and because we play them. But, in a sense,
>the design of current instruments hinders the development of that
>conciousness, since they demand a degree of technique which will be
>unnecessary with new and specifically designed instruments for a
>given system (or systems).

1. I feel that the field of instrument design is pretty stagnant. Not that
it's ever been better in the past -- who cares? -- but compared to what it
could be.

2. HOWEVER! Certain people seem to be making the assumption that certain
woodwind and brass instruments are designed to play in 12 equal. This is
not the case. (If they were, the designer's didn't do so hot).

3. There's also been talk that the virtuosi of these instruments can play
them in alternate tunings, but who wants to pay for one or spend years
becoming one?

4. In truth, it takes a helluva player to play them in 12 equal. And it
also takes a fixed-pitch instrument for them to play along with. And even
then they most often don't play in 12 equal, and why would they want to?
Temperament only makes sense (if we're talking about paradigms) on
fixed-pitched instruments-> that's how and why it was invented.

5. It is harder to play free-pitch instruments in equal temperaments than it
is in Just Intonation, as an amazingly true general rule. And there's not
many cases when you'd want an instrument designed to play temperaments.
That's not to say they shouldn't exist. But certainly not as an improvement
over what we've got.

6. It's just plain hard to control the intonation of woodwinds and brass at
all. "Good Intonation" is the holy grail of conservatory training.

7. So why are we stuck in 12? BECAUSE OUR FIXED-PITCH INSTRUMENTS ARE STUCK
IN 12. If there was a keyboard that played in JI, certain people would be
amazed at the overgrowth of ensembles playing in JI.

8. Wait! According to the above, we ought to already have a number
ensembles playing in JI, as long as they were made of free-pitched
instruments and had good players at the helms!

9. We do. But it's crappy JI. A good fixed-pitch instrument tuned to JI
could get 'em to play stuff they would never play otherwise.

10. So build me a good keyboard!

Carl


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From: Carl Lumma
Subject: Xenharmonic?
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>It has to do with the idea that there ought to be a new paradigm, a new
>"main thing" in music at all.

I agree that there should be no one "main" tuning. Each tuning ought to
stand for its own merits, and drawbacks of course.

As for new paradigms though, I think the fact that each tuning presents
new paradigms of composition to be very interesting. But perhaps that
depends on what you mean by paradigm. I take the term to mean a set of
bounds that you put yourself into.

As I've suggested before on the list, I think that systematic
limitations can be valuable rather than detrimental to composers. For one
thing, if you find limits on the available solutions stiffling, then
systematic limitations at least have the advantage of also limiting the
problems you could run into!

But more importantly, having a limited scope of solutions doesn't
restrict, but enhances, creativity. The fact, for example, that 9TET,
Pierce-Bohlen, 88CET, and many other tunings with a fairly large step size,
provide no means of realizing diatonic melody strikes me as a valuable
compositional paradigm to work under. You have no choice but to break away
from a diatonic mindset completely! Limitations force you to use
creativity to find a different solution, or a different problem.

Also, many times when I'm forced to experiment, I accidentally chance
upon something that's even better than what I had in mind in the first
place.

So I think that pushing a button to get any arbitrary thing you want is
boring.

The other advantage of composing within a paradigm, is that it can make
the results easier for your audiences to follow. They may not hear a
diatonic scale for example, but if your melodies outline some
nontraditional scale pattern, they'll get a firm grasp of that
nontraditional pattern. Avoiding patterns altogether will produce the
effect of randomness. True, chaos could be a meaningful idea to portray
under some circumstances, but there's also certainly a lot to be said for
giving your audience a crystal-clear image of something unusual and
unexpected.


SMTPOriginator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
From: Johnny Reinhard
Subject: Re: Woodwinds and Systems
PostedDate: 19-11-97 14:12:19
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