Xenharmonikon 17

Having gone rather closely through B. MacLaren's 'A Brief History of
Microtonality in the Twentieth Century' in XH17 pp. 57-110, I regret
to say that it reads as a disappointing endproduct to such evidently
large labors.

Above and beyond the neo-Darreg writing style, and the annoyingly
constant identification of this or that as the 'first' of its kind,
there are some serious omissions and errors that need to be corrected.
The following are selected, more or less randomly, from my notes:

Omissions: From presumably ideological aversion, the important microtonal
works of early Boulez, Cage (_Atlas Eclipticalis_; _Cheap Imitation for
violin solo_; _Music for..._; most of the late 'number' pieces), Nono
(the String Quartet), Ligeti (Ramifications, the Horn Trio, Passacaglia
Ungharese), Kurtag, Stockhausen (Stimmung, Sternklang, several sections of
Licht), Couper, Slonimsky, Scelsi, Kondo, Ferneyhough, Bainquart,
Radulescu, Saariaho, Haas, Volans, and all the younger 'complex' and
'spectral' composers. Landmark theoretical writings by Evangelisti,
Mahnkopf, Spahlinger are ignored altogether.


Errors: David Cope took up instrument building in the 80's, not the 70's,
while Tenney's _Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow_ is a work of the 70's
not the '80s. The identification of Douglas Leedy as a 'microtonal
bibliographer and meantone enthusiast' completely ignores his compositional
achievements; on the other hand, the identification of Martin Vogel as 'the
pre-eminent German microtonalist' will be news to the German musical scene
and as a composer 'with a large number of just intonation compositions to
his credit' will be news to Prof. Vogel himself, who has only made
arrangements in Just intonation of works by others. The composer Georg
Hajdu did invite several collegues to compose in 17-tone temperament, but
beyond this project it is inaccurate to speak of a '17-tone community'. And
totally puzzling was the sentence: 'Also during this period Morton Feldman
produced a number of quasi-improvisatory pieces using Pythagorean tunings'
(Feldman's graph and 'Durations' pieces date from the fifties and sixties;
Paul Zukofsky has indicated that Feldman wanted his enharmonic notation to
be interpreted, if articulated at all in intonational terms, as something
closer to meantone).

Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt