spectral composers/pimping for Modernism :-)

While Brian McLaren provided you with some description of his
interests with regard to the French "spectral" school [I'd tend to
add some of Jean-Baptiste Barriere's electroacoustic work as well
as Kaija Saariaho's in this regard], he neglected or was unable to
provide you with the necessary info that might make it possible for
you to head down to Tower or your local University library [if you're
one of those horrible persons who consorts with Satan ;-) ] or
wherever. In this case, Brian and I share some similar interests in
terms of their work; I wandered over to the rack and plucked a couple
of discs [maybe I'll run some of the Hurel this Sunday - hmmm....]
which
you might wish to look for:

For Murail:
Murail:Time and Again, Gondwana, Desintegrations (Salabert SCD8902)
L'Attente/Baroque Mystique (Accord 204672)
Allegories/Vues Aeriennes (Accord 200842)

P. Hurel (Ades 204562) - Includes Six Miniatures en Trompe, Lecon

Denis Cohen (Ades 203652) - Includes Transmutations, Jeux, Sogna Deda

I might also suggest the Magnus Lindberg disc from the same series
(Ades 203582). While Lindberg's sense of colour certainly benefits
from his tenure in Paris in the midst of Murail and Cohen et. al., he may
be tainted in Mr. McLaren's view by his association with the New Complexity.
What interests me about the work on this disc is that it's recent and reflects
(I think) a move away from some features of tNC and toward some of the
spectral effects that Brian praises in Hurel and Cohen. The essential
restlessness
of the work remains, and might be enough to interfere with your listening
experience if you're afflicted with this particular strain of auditory
prejudice.

With regards,
Gregory

P.S. In the midst of Brian's last message (you know the one), he managed to add
one little message which seems to have been pretty amusing to those of you who
know me - the implication that I'm somehow involved in the wholesale support
of High European Modernism as a zero-sum game. Those of you who might wish to
view the extent of my ah...Modernist crimes as a radio programmer are welcome
to point your web browsers at

http://www.msn.fullfeed.com/~gtaylor/RTQE.html

and peruse the full measure of my heinous crimes - at least the 1996 measure.
I just didn't feel like reformatting the previous 8 or so years. If you could
imagine your own work in the midst of the listings you discover there [which,
had in included more than the year to date, have included several names you'd
no doubt recognize - Alves, Curtin, Lyon, et. al], get in touch; in principle,
the only work that I've told my audience I won't play is my own.

_
I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one,
paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only
maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard
Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI



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Brian,

>Paul Erlich stated in Tuning Digest 718 that subharmonics are
>not present in the spectra of acoustic instruments.

Perhaps the double space reveals the fact that Brian you the word "normally"
between "not" and "present." Didn't I qualify this to say that apparant
subharmonics can result when a note is itself a harmonic, i.e., all notes on
brass instruments? You're right though, I haven't done any actual fourier
analysis of musical instruments. I've done lost of fourier analysis, though,
like transforming from position space to momentum space on quantum mechanics
exams. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle results from the fact that the
fourier transform of a Gaussian is a Gaussian.

As for factual errors, your post on meantone tuning was full of 'em. One
Tuning Digest consisted entirely of my slam of that post. Care to reply?

If I am expected to get your CPS/SCALA joke, surely it is not unreasonable
for me to expect you to take my critical comments with a sense of humor, or
for someone else to compare you with their antisemitic uncle without fearing
a libel charge.

Peace, Love, and Music,
Paul


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Paul E. said:
> Didn't I qualify this to say that apparant
> subharmonics can result when a note is itself a harmonic, i.e., all notes on
> brass instruments? You're right though, I haven't done any actual fourier
> analysis of musical instruments.

Uhmmm... Perhaps mean "undertones" rather than subharmonics? If the "note
is itself a harmonic", then the statement is inherently true by definition,
since harmonics of subharmonics are subharmonics of harmonics.

But anyway, I can't recall if I mentioned this before, but it's worth
pointing out that it's conceptually possible to get a nonsubharmonic undertone,
such as when a third-harmonic tone on a flute (for example), also sounds a quiet
second-harmonic undertone.

As I was fine-tuning the pitch-detection part of my harmonic analysis
program, it was latching onto subharmonics frequently at first. Some of them I
found to be a result of what I suppose could be lumped into the category of
phase-jitter, or a generalization of the ol' Nyquist problem. When a multiple
of the period of the tone was close enough to an integer number of samples and
the period itself was not, the math created what I guess could be called a
"numerical illusion" of a nonexistent undertone.

But without a doubt, many of them were very obviously and audibly real. In
many cases, they were even easily visible on the oscilloscopic waveform. I
can't recall for certain whether any of the nonsubharmonic cases were ever found
to be real, but from what I recall of the exercise, I'd be more surprised if not
than if so.

And also, the real undertones were present in far more tones across the pitch
ranges of the gamut of orchestral instruments, than they were not present in.


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Brain wrote,
>As I've pointed out before (and as Paul Erlich's
>experiments with his roomate demonstrate), listeners
>hear the whole-tone portion of a 19-TET diatonic
>scale as very reasonable and familiar-sounding, but
>the 2/19 of on octave "semitones" (a misnomer, since
>this term presupposes that whole tones are
>divided into 2 parts whereas in 19-TET they are
>divided into 3 parts) always make folks squirm.
>They sound...weird. "Out-of-tune" is the typical
>description.
>The solution, in my experience, is to fracture the
>mislabelled "semitone" intervals in the 19-TET
>approximation of the 12-TET diatonic scale into
>1/19s of a tone.

Ivor Darreg exploits this idea in his 19-TET Guitar Player magazine guitar
piece. It's a way of distracting the listener away from the "out-of-tune"
2/19-oct semitones with something totally unfamiliar. I suppose every
musical advance is tempered - no pun intended - by the habits and
expectations of the prevalent musical culture. But meantone tuning with its
large semitones was THE diatonic tuning for centuries, and human ears were
constructed the same way back then. It doesn't take much listening to accept
meantone as "in tune," and hear 12-TET as "out-of-tune." So I don't care
what my roommate thinks, I'm going to use large semitones anyway, and he'll
have to learn to like them! This approach might not fly too well in the real
world, and so we find the Southern California Microtonal Group and Ivor
Darreg and Neil Haverstick using lots of 1/19-oct steps. Out of this may
come a style that is very beautiful and highly developed, and could not have
been anticipated on the basis of pure theory alone. Theorists will
inevitably come along and try to prove that it had to be that way, but no,
of course it didn't have to be that way, it wasn't that way for Costeley, or
for me sitting in my room.

An interesting note is that Yasser though with 19-tone tuning would come a
fracturing of the larger steps of the diatonic scale. McLaren is describing
the exact opposite of this prediction.