Lumma, Erlich, Schulter

I'll try to answer with as little citation as possible.

Mr. Lumma asked about what I meant by musical cognition being a greater
resource than the ear. At its simplest, it is that we can know far more
about sounds than would be expected given the limitations of the cochlear=

system. First, much as taste is a complex of taste, scent, texture and
image, we have meaningful input to hearing from other senses, particularl=
y
the sense of touch. Both Beethoven and La Monte Young suffered catastroph=
ic
hearing losses, and the sense of touch in many ways compensated for this
loss, perhaps even augmenting it in ways that lead to unexpected
experiments. Harry Partch wanted the sounds of his Marimba Eroica to be
experienced through the whole body, not just by the ears. A large Javanes=
e
gong will be similarly experienced. The recent works of Young and Lucier
(and my own installations, if I may) demonstrate that the physical
locations of standing waves can be a powerful perceptive force for
relationship which appear to beyond the limits of audible discrimination.=

Particularly in the case of Young's ecstatic big band piece, I find it
impossible to decide whether this kind of perception is going on at a
precognitive or a cognitive level. =


Which brings me to my second point: While Mr. Lumma locates what he calls=

'acoustic pleasure' in the cochlear system, I tend instead to go with tho=
se
who say that the central organ of pleasure is the brain. Although, as the=

example of Young's big band piece shows, it may be difficult to
discriminate exactly where the pleasure is located, it does demonstrate
that a kind of listening is going on which is beyond the design limitatio=
ns
which evolution left in our ears. When Mr. Erlich says "I prefer to build=

cognition upon, rather than reject, the biases of the psychological
system", I believe that he is confusing the cochlear apparatus with
psychology and introducing a division between cognition and psychology th=
at
is not clear. =


Which brings me to a third point: Because of these demonstrable ways of
breaking through limitations, the fact that listening is highly sensitize=
d
by experience and training, and my own aesthetic interest that intonation=

can be a resource for doing more than enhancing traditional tonal pattern=
s,
I am lead always to be extremely skeptical when encountering black and
white or precisely quantified statements about musical intervals. For
example, when Mr. Lumma says:


I am more than a bit thrown back. If you have any short term pitch memory=
,
you can train yourself to listen for melodic commas and they become glari=
ng
features in a performance. The quantification of 'acoustic pleasure
tolerance' here, on the other hand, begs for qualification -- in what
registers?, with what durations?, with what instruments? etc..

Some small items: My response to both Babbitt and Balzano was not to
compositions of either (Balzano does not compose himself) but rather to
their musicianship. Babbitt has probably the best pitch memory I have eve=
r
encountered and Balzano is a close second. At a presentation in Santa Cru=
z
in the early eighties, Balzano was whistling little tunes in 20tet that h=
e
had learned after listening to a mass of random tones. When Mr. Erlich
wrote: "but it must have taken them some compositional ingenuity to avoid=

the tonal implications of simple intervals in order to make these other
features reign", I agree entirely, and indeed, throughout most of his
career Babbitt has avoided the appearance of tonal passages in his
surfaces, although his late works play with tonal relationships in ways
which project (as they say in Princeton) the underlying intervallic
structures. I don't dispute that Babbitt's music is unlikely ever to find=
a
wide audience, or that even a large part of the tiny audience that does
listen to the music is able to parse these features, but saturation of th=
e
music by these structures leads to a overall coherence that is more widel=
y
appreciable. (It's not my line of work, exactly, but I imagine that
Babbitt-like projection techniques could be usefully applied in CPS
environments.

Mr. Erlich wrote:


The history of tunings is vague in many regards, and one of them is to
which degree musicians have been actively envolved in 'choosing' their
intonation, another is whether compositional innovation took place before=
a
tuning was invented or vice versa. While the simplest five-limit tonal
progressions in the central keys will sound better in meantone than in
12tet, tonal music that takes advantage of symmetry relations in 12tet --=

e.g. augmented, diminished, whole-tone, and augmented sixth relations --=

is probably better off in 12tet than mapped to a meantone, although a 12
member meantone substitute -- as a MOS -- will share many group propertie=
s.
(This is striking when one compares the ornamented, _melodic_, and
preseumably meantone chromaticism of Haydn and Mozart, which the harmonic=

chromaticism of later generations.) I will have to read Clough more close=
ly
to defend him, but knowing Balzano's in more detail, I suspect that these=

properties could be considered to be as true for 12tet as for a 12-tone M=
OS
subset of 19 or 31. =

Mr. Erlich and I will have to remain in disagreement about 22tet. Althoug=
h
I find out structure very useful for keyboarding instruments in JI (my
first tubulong, in 1977, had a 22-tone 5 limit tuning and was expandable =
to
29 tones with a 7 limit and 41 tones with an 11 limit; I also spent sever=
al
months in the seventies playing around with one of Ivor Darreg's 22tet
quitars), I find the representations of fifths and thirds in 22tet just t=
oo
rough to use with any sustained instruments or synthesis. I suppose that
this is just a case where we end up on opposite sides from our usual
arguments.

Finally, it is difficult to add to Ms. Schulter's posting except that Not=
re
Dame polyphony which she discusses might also be characterized as not
having been designed to be heard as independent melodies but rather as a
massed sonority, in which nearly every vertical combination of tones may =
be
used excepting at cadences. This is extremely close to the Javanese notio=
n
of _seleh_(target pitches), which are played by the entire ensemble in
unison or with keyboard-distance fifths or octave and in between which
nearly every combination of tones is possible provided that the individua=
l
lines lead melodically to _seleh_. The effect is of a music that is
constantly moving between shadowy and clear sonorities, much as figures o=
n
the shadow puppet screan suddenly appear in focus. =


=

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End of TUNING Digest 1589
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