TUNING digest 1377: microtonal music in films

on Mon, 6 Apr 1998 17:06:33, Bill Alves wrote:

>The pieces by Gyorgy Ligeti in 2001 include Lux Aeterna
> Atmospheres and the Requiem . Though Ligeti
> has been known to use non-12tet notes, as far as I
>remember (I don't have the scores handy), these pieces used 12tet
>pitches, mostly in clusters. They are classics of the 1960s
> school of textural or sound-mass composition.
>
>Penderecki has on occassion asked for quarter-tone clusters or
>microtonal melodic inflections in his works of the same period.
> Kubrick used some of Penderecki's pieces (as well as Ligeti's
> Lontano, if memory serves) in The Shining, though I don't
> recall if they were pieces that included microtones.

I think you're right that Kubrick used "Lontano" (I'm not positive,
though), and I have have the score -- it's very dense, but I
haven't seen any microtones in it; looks like it's all 12-eq clusters.

I'm pretty sure, however, that some of the Penderecki pieces
in "The Shining" *do* have microtones.

Joseph L. Monzo
monz@juno.com
4940 Rubicam St., Philadelphia, PA 19144-1809, USA
phone 215 849 6723

_____________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com
Or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]

Composing begins with form. The music is poured into the shape of the
form. Tuning is the way the form is fractured, perhaps comparable to a
set of stain glass windows. Microrhythms are as pertinent as
microintervals of pitch: rhythms are intervals of time. Forms do need to
be original. More than ever, staying in established convention is
sounding square. If it sounds like something else it is derivative, good
for the immediate short term but inadequate for the long term. IMHO.

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

On Wed, 8 Apr 1998, Nangaku wrote:

> Assuming we have a blank slate with respect to tuning, what would be the
> extent to which tuning is defined by the form of the music, and vice versa?
> When would we care what tuning a piece of music is played in? If we have a
> blank slate for tuning, I assume we also have a blank slate for rhythm or form
> or any possible combination of sound and silence which will appeal to the
> mind. What are the limits?
>

> Composing begins with form.

Not that it's relevant to this forum, but this
has never been the case for me. In my case,
it starts with an itch that gets magnified
by some curious sound. I've never known
a composer who started from a form, though
this may be standard procedure outside Lotus-Land.

Assuming we have a blank slate with respect to tuning, what would be the
extent to which tuning is defined by the form of the music, and vice versa?
When would we care what tuning a piece of music is played in? If we have a
blank slate for tuning, I assume we also have a blank slate for rhythm or form
or any possible combination of sound and silence which will appeal to the
mind. What are the limits?