TUNING digest 804

On Sun, 11 Aug 1996, Neil H wrote:

> Anyway, I think improvisation is a subject that has rarely been touched
> on in this forum...so, it makes me wonder about Partch's compositional
> style...how did he compose his works? Did he sit around messing with his
> instruments and seeing what happened, or did he work things out in his
> head first, and then write down those ideas? Did he write fast, slow,
> did he make a lot of corrections, did he agonize over a few notes (as
> Miles said Gil Evans would do), or did he think the idea had precedence
> over a certain way of expressing that idea? In that regard, I read in
> the liner notes to a Bach Lute album that Bach (or others in that period)
> would sometimes write things that were idiomatically incorrect for the
> Lute, but he knew that the lutenist would take care of it, and adapt it
> for his own axe...they were expected to be able to do this...thus, a few
> notes here and there were not the issue...the performer was now actually
> INVOLVED in the compositional process in a way that is conspicuously
> absent from many players of the European orchestral repertoire.
>
That's indeed an interesting question, perhaps someone better acquainted
with HP could answer the other details. As far as tuning is concerned,
Johnston recounted that he composed alone, and not in his head--he would
sit at the instruments and plunk around until an idea came that was not
only musically adequate, but idiomatic for the instrument. I understand
that Glenn Hackbarth wrote a dissertation on Daphne of the Dunes, which
concludes that instrumental performance ease outweighed JI theory, one
which I think is well justified i most works; perhpas Oedipus, The
Letter, and some of the Intrusions are the exceptions in which just
intonation is the dominant force in composition. Also notable is that
the kitharas and HCs, as time progressed, were tuned less for ease of
producing just-intervals and more for expressionistic reasons.

-Adam

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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 11:14:54 -0700
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