RE: Ivor/Blackwood

Neil Haverstick wrote,

>Blackwood is a world
>class pianist and composer . . . his compositions on "Microtonal" are surely
>well crafted and technically complex. Yet, I find myself listening to
>Ivor's "Detweleveulate" more often; I have no reason other than I like
>the feeling more.

That's the only reason you need! I guess I'm somewhat into well-crafted,
technically complex music, which is why I listen to bands like Yes and
King Crimson. But I can appreciate music that's more on the feeling
level of things, like Bob Dylan and the blues. About halfway through
Detwelveulate, though, I'm just bored, becuase I know that what's coming
next is some doodling in the same style but with even smaller intervals.
Maybe I should try Gary's suggestion and put the CD on shuffle.

>And, on the subject of Blackwood's 15 tone guitar
>etude; the sharp 5ths really bug me, especially because the piece itself
>is reflective of music ("Baroque") where the 5ths were much closer to
>pure. In fact, I've always wondered why Blackwood chose such a form for
>the 15 octave tuning; nothing wrong with 15, but it seems to be fighting
>the very style it's composed in.

I think he chose the form because he wanted to show how circle-of-fifths
sequences, which were common in Baroque music, close after five steps in
15tET. The same goes for his 21tET piece (seven fifths close the cycle
here), which is fashioned as a Baroque suite, but which the tuning makes
extremely sour.

I think the problem with Blackwood's use of 15tET is not so much the
sharp fifths but the fact that he is trying to use diatonic scales. The
melodic succesion of a 240-cent whole tone and a 160-cent whole tone,
which occurs in 15tET diatonic scales, I find positively ugly. Blackwood
himself agrees in his writings in PNM, although I suppose he wanted to
keep this ugliness in the compositions for illustrative purposes. Much
more interesting is the 10-tone symmetrical scale in 15tET that
Blackwood describes; his use of it in his compositions is hidden beneath
his diatonic language. Had he chosen to explore this scale in its own
right, I think he would have had a chance of being a real Xenharmonic
pioneer, instead of a skilled composer mainly trying to adapt old ideas
into new tunings. As I said, I do love the ending of the 19-tone piece,
because it doesn't sound like something that's been done before, but it
does sound like something, a true musical innovation rather than a trick
or gimmick, or one of those ideas that looks better on paper than it
sounds to the ear.