Why septimal harmony works

Gregg Gibson wrote:

(those who choose to
wage the war to make 7:4 consonant I advise to do some reading,
thinking, and listening; even if they manage the feat, they will find
themselves involved in the thankless task of attempting to erect a
system of tonal relations outside the senario, and based on very weak
consonance at best)

I made the rather petulant remark before that stupid people can't
write 7-limit harmony. What I meant is that, to get it to work,
you really need to examine the chord ratios, using lattice
coordinates or otherwise. Most people aren't going to go to all
that trouble just to use some fancy chords. If extended just
intonation were taught as thoroughly as tonality, though, you
could use standard chord progressions and it wouldn't be that
difficult. It's just us pioneers who have to work it all out the
hard way.

The problem of syntonic commas really disappears when you move
beyond 5-limit consonance. With a 5-limit chord progression,
you're usually going to end up with a 5/1 from the tonic
meeting a 1/5 from the tonic, ignoring the other primes. If
you allow factors of 25 in your chords, or use chords that
have no 5's in like 4:6:9 or 4:6:7 -- neither of which are
well approximated in 19 equal -- everything works out fine.

Everyone other than Gregg who has written on septimal intervals
and chords seems to be hearing what I hear. This is reassuring,
as it would be most unfortunate if I were to write music that
sounded more dissonant to my audience than it does to me.


SMTPOriginator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
From: gbreed@cix.compulink.co.uk (Graham Breed)
Subject: Re: More on Just Intonation 2
PostedDate: 25-12-97 14:29:03
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