Post from McLaren/HP

From: mclaren
Subject: Authenticity and Partch recordings
--
In the British Harry Partch Society right now
there's a debate raging about just how "authentic"
recordings of Harry Partch's music should be.
That's of some interest to this forum, because
members of this forum are directly affected.
Dean Drummond won't let Johnny Reinhard
borrow or rent any of Partch's instruments
because Johnny used a DX-7 in a recording of
Partch's music instead of a chromelodeon.
Let me point out something, people--
This kind of attitude is going to kill Partch's
music dead as a steamrollered cockroach.
What we need are *more* performances of
partch, not *fewer* performances. Dean
Drummond and company need to wake up
and smell the latte. Johnny Reinhard should
have access to every instrument Drummond
has.
Now, 1 of the performances about which members
of the British Harry Partch Society had
questions was a recording done by Ted
Mook and a professional singer. This is the
first CD appearance of Partch's Li Po Songs,
and the first new recording in more than
half a century (to my knowledge).
I think it's fantastic that someone had the
time, the energy, and the dedication to record
Partch's Li Po Songs.
So what if the recording doesn't sound like Harry
Partch?
Harry himself pointed out that he was far from
an ideal vocalist. In places Harry's pitch wanders
as much as 20 to 30 cents from the target notes,
as Ted Mook has pointed out. Partch was under
pressure when he made his recording, he didn't
have adequate time or opportunity to rehearse
and certainly didn't have access to the enormously
helpful digital pitch references we have today.
In short, Partch did the best he could at performing
his Li Po Songs on that old 78 rpm record, but
Partch just wasn't a professional singer.
Ted Mook's project uses a professional singer,
and to my mind the results are neither better nor
worse than the original Partch recordings--they are
*different.*
So?
What's the problem?
Why shouldn't we have a bunch of *different* versions
of Partch's music?
Where's the harm in that, provided the pitches are
correct?
As long as the pitches are scrupulously retained and
Harry's music isn't edited, expanded or (ye gods!)
translated into 12-TET or some such abomination...
Why *not* rearrange Harry's music for other
instruments?
In particular, certain members of the British Harry
Partch Society have been up in arms about the
recent Kronos Quartet arrangement of Partch's
"Barstow" intoned by Ben Johnston.
This is just incomprehensible to me.
What in the world is wrong with arranging Partch's
music for different instruments? After all, Dean
Drummond did exactly that when he arranged
Partch's "Two Studies On Ancient Greek Scales"
for flute and zoomoozaphone. To these old ears,
the results sounded wonderful.
For that matter, another arrangement of those
same pieces was done for just intonation guitar,
this time by John Schneider. You can hear it
on the CD "Just West Coast."
It sounded just fine.
If *these* arrangements of Partch's music
weren't a problem, why should the Kronos
Quartet's arrangement be a big deal?
The other issue here is that if we demand that
*all* performances of Partch's music be
done *only* on original Partch instruments,
then that's going to limit the performances
of Partch's music to just about nothing.
I mean, c'mon, people! Dean Drummond adn
Danlee Mitchell are the only two people on
the planet who have Partch's instruments
in their possession. So that means that
only two (count 'em, 2) people on the planet
can give concerts of Partch's music if we
insist on absolute fanatical authenticity
and *never* allow Partch's muisc to be
arranged for other instruments.
In particular, I see no problem at all with
the idea of using synthesizers for some of
Partch's music--as long as the synthesizers
produce creditable imitations of Partch's
instrumental timbres, and as long as the
synths are tuned to Partch's scale, and as
long as the parts are played correctly.
To insist that *only* instruments produced
by Partch himself be used in performances
would be to lock Partch's music away from
the public.
In my judgment, it's infinitely better for *lots*
of people to hear synth versions of Partch's
music, or string quartet versions of his
music, or a zoomoozaphone-and-flute version
of Partch's music, than for only a tiny few
people who live in upstate New York to hear
the Absolutely Authentic Real Thing.
Ideally, of course, there would be many copies of
Partch's instruments, plenty of Partch-trained
instrumentalists, and so on. But we live in the
real world.
Given real-world constraints, isn't it better to
hear *more* of Partch's music in *more* venues,
than less?
--mclaren



------------------------------

Topic No. 6

Date: Fri, 12 Jul 96 16:47:45 PDT
From: Allen
To: Folks
Subject: Performing Harry
Message-ID: <199607122357.QAA04009@eartha.mills.edu>

Folks:

I agree whole-heartedly with Brian about access to Harry's music and
commented about that in a recent post about Kronos' recording. Some years ago
I began an "electronic" orchestration of the same work with Partch tuned MIDI
instruments and my own voices which emmulated Harry's timbres. About half way
through I thought I might get the blessing of Danlee Mitchell and rang him
up. His comments were that I was ignoring the "corporeal" visions Harry
had about performances- although I didn't agree with this in the case of
Barstow (I think I might agree in the case of some of the big pieces) I did
Danlee and Harry's memory the courtesy of terminating the project. After
hearing Ted Mook's recording and Ben's Barstow transcriptions- now let's see
if I can find those old files!!!!

Cheers-
Allen

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------------------------------

Topic No. 7

Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 23:15:29 -0400
From: Mmcky@aol.com
To: tuning
Subject: Calculating the time it takes patterns to repeat in chords
Message-ID: <960712231529_433213215@emout18.mail.aol.com>

I want to thank Paul for comments on LCM.

His posts helped me to arrive at my present belief
that chords need to be normalized before their
LCMs represent the time it takes the pattern they make to
repeat.

Now that I have begun to get over the shock of getting a job
and moving to San Jose, I have some small amount of time
to devote to music again.

I have done the following computations for some chords with
low LCMs. Because of having to do this in ASCII, I have
resorted to putting numbers at the head of the columns of
the table. Below is the information on what the columns
of numbers mean.

1-3 Chord Periods Ratios
4 Normalization constant
The LCM of all periods in all chords divided by
the largest period in the chord
5-7 Normalized Chord Periods
8 Normalized Chord LCM
9 Un-normalized Chord LCM
10-12 Chord Frequency Ratios

Here is the table.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

20 15 12 252 5040 3780 3024 15120 60 3 4 5
15 12 10 336 5040 4032 3360 20160 60 4 5 6
21 14 12 240 5040 3360 2880 20160 84 4 6 7
35 28 20 144 5040 4032 2880 20160 140 4 5 7
18 15 10 280 5040 4200 2800 25200 90 5 6 9
24 20 15 210 5040 4200 3150 25200 120 5 6 8
12 9 8 420 5040 3780 3360 30240 72 6 8 9
15 10 9 336 5040 3360 3024 30240 90 6 9 10
21 18 14 240 5040 4320 3360 30240 126 6 7 9
28 24 21 180 5040 4320 3780 30240 168 6 7 8
24 21 14 210 5040 4410 2940 35280 168 7 8 12
9 8 6 560 5040 4480 3360 40320 72 8 9 12
15 10 8 336 5040 3360 2688 40320 120 8 12 15
15 12 8 336 5040 4032 2688 40320 120 8 10 15
10 9 6 504 5040 4536 3024 45360 90 9 10 15
16 12 9 315 5040 3780 2835 45360 144 9 12 16
20 18 12 252 5040 4536 3024 45360 180 9 10 15
20 18 15 252 5040 4536 3780 45360 180 9 10 12
20 18 15 252 5040 4536 3780 45360 180 9 10 12
6 5 4 840 5040 4200 3360 50400 60 10 12 15
9 6 5 560 5040 3360 2800 50400 90 10 15 18
12 10 8 420 5040 4200 3360 50400 120 10 12 15
18 15 12 280 5040 4200 3360 50400 180 10 12 15
5 4 3 1008 5040 4032 3024 60480 60 12 15 20
7 6 4 720 5040 4320 2880 60480 84 12 14 21
15 12 9 336 5040 4032 3024 60480 180 12 15 20
9 7 6 560 5040 3920 3360 70560 126 14 18 21
12 8 7 420 5040 3360 2940 70560 168 14 21 24
8 6 5 630 5040 3780 3150 75600 120 15 20 24
12 10 9 420 5040 4200 3780 75600 180 15 18 20
7 5 4 720 5040 3600 2880 100800 140 20 28 35
8 7 6 630 5040 4410 3780 105840 168 21 24 28

5040 LCM of all Chord Periods

If anyone see anything wrong with the reasoning represented
here, I would appreciate it if they would let me know.

Marion

It may be that I am attempting to make a square circle, but I was sure that
if anyone could help me with the "perfect" tuning for the harmonica, they
would probably be a subscriber to this list. Several suggestions have been
made - all of them a compromise of some sort, but perhaps different
compromises suit different circumstances. My thanks for all of those who
have toaken th time to think about the subject.

The 10-hole single reed diatonic harmonica (known as Richter, after its
designer) has twenty reeds - a blow reed and a draw reed to each hole. The
blow reeds form the series of notes:

C E G C E G C E G C E G

The draw reeds are arranged to give s full diatonic scale in the mid-range
of the harp, but omit and/or duplicate certain notes to give a C and a G
chord in the lower octave for accompaniment and to keep the C major triad as
blow notes.

D G B D F A B D F A

Traditionally, the chord ws tuned as a just G dominant 9th (the F being a
septimal seventh above the G. This sounds great in the G domintant chord,
but very flat in melodies. To compromise, it was later tuned as a
Pythagorean seventh above the G. This sounded nicer when the DFA triad was
played, but the F-A interval was a rather rough sounding Pyth M3rd; so if
you used these two notes to suggest a subdominant chord, some unpleasant
combination tones were produced. More recently, because the issue of being
in tune with other musicians was raised so often (harmonica players
wondering why their instruments were "flat" intstead of wondering why the
other instruments were in the compromise of 12TET!), there has been a
tendency to tune the F even sharper, in some cases getting close to a just
Dm chord, but this mkes the G7 almost unbearable. In many cases, the Es and
Bs were also tuned a bit higher (midway between just and 12TET). There are
other commonly used tunings (I have a collection of about 100, but most of
these are far from "commonly used"), based on modal rearrangemnts of this
set. For example, the harmonica minor. The blow notes are a repeaing Cm
triad and the draw notes are tuned:

D G B D F Ab B D F Ab

Traditionally, this series was tuned as 8/10/12/14/17 - again some of the
individual intervals sound a little rough, but as this harp is hardly ever
played in anything other than Cm, that's not much of a problem. Blues and
country-style players usually use a C harp to play in the key of G (cross
harp), oso to get a major scale out of this position (as the modes are caled
in harp-speak), the "country tuning" was developed, which is the same as the
standard Richter, but raises the F to F#. This presents not problems with
intonation (the F# is a perfect 5th above the B, a pure M3rd above the D, a
pure m3rd below the A, etc.) Also, there is the natural minor (again based
on the C harp, but the natural minor scale starts from the G). The blow
notes are a Cm triad and the draw notes thus:

D G Bb D F A Bb D F A.

Again, this tunes justly with no real problems - it's one of my favorites
because of the perfect 4ths and 5ths you can doublestop (and how well it
lends itself to BbM as well as Gm). The chromatic beast I have described
earlier - as I have pointed out, it's problem is the Dm6 chord produced by
the draw notes. The usual way around this is 12TET.

Phew! There you have it - the history of the harmonica's tuning. Various
other approaches have been tried (including so-called "spiral" tunings,
which spreads the scale out into a 13th chord, for example the blow notes
could be:

C E G B D F A C E G

and the draw notes:

D F A C E G B D F A

This seems to lend itself rather well to various meantone ideas.) Other
designs have used something like a slide chromatic to produce a "perfect"
diatonic (as one of you suggested), but these have not met with much success.

I hope this is of interest to someone out there!


Pat Missin.

"...my music's a lot better than it sounds!" (with apologies to Mark Twain)
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