La Musique Arabe

Saw the posting on La Musique Arabe, and since I studied French for many
years and read it like a native, have skimmed through most of it.

The editors tend to be Pythagoreans, and are in general not too open to
the idea of equal temperament, whether of 19, 12 or some other number of
degrees. There are a few very interesting passages on the Arab use of
the 1/3 tone, which apparently they borrowed from the Greeks (like much
else).

If Mr Moniodis has some particular questions which seem to him
critical to his researches, perhaps I could comment on their
general sense. La Musique Arabe is of course a veritable treasure trove
of info on arab music, but in my opinion neither the
pythagorean intonation that dominated the older arab music, nor
the 24-tone equal temperament which has been prominent since the last
century, are of much interest.

I am pretty much exclusively interested in the 19-tone equal, on which I
have accumulated quite a bit of material. In my experience the human ear
cannot reliably distinguish intervals closer than those of the 19-tone
equal, so the endless debates about minute distinctions between musical
ratios, or about equal temperaments with more than 19 tones in the
octave, seem to me rather beside the point. The 22-tone equal is at the
extreme limit of human auditory acuity in melody, but this is a
worthless temperament, for it is non-cyclic.


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