RE: 30 years of gibberish

Brian, quoting John Backus:
"Eimert himself thus appears to be somewhat
deficient in the acoustical knowledge now required
of the composer. Since he does not seem to have a
clear idea himself of the meaning of the terms he
is trying to define, it is not surprising that his
definitions are inadequate... The remainder of [Eimert's]
article is for the most part impossible to follow,
but since we now see that this is not due to our
ignorance of the supposedly necessary acoustical
background, we need not concern ourselves further
with it."

I was coincidentally just reading in Herbert Eimert's book
"Grundlagen der musikalischen Reihentechnik", and must say it
is clear and understandable, but then it doesn't contain acoustical
definitions. Not at all jargon and technical-sounding yet
meaningless pseudo-mathematical gibberish. And not 12 and only 12.
A good part of it is treatment of manipulation of tone sequences,
but it also contains ideas for transformations of pitch, duration,
intervals, note figures, etc.
There is an interesting passage on page 16.

"Scho"nberg nennt das temperierte System einen auf unbestimmte Frist
geschlossenen Waffenstillstand. So aufschlussreich ist, was die
Tonbestimmungstheoretiker von Drobisch und Helmholtz bis zu Yasser,
Handschin, Fokker und Blaukopf zu ihrem komplizierten Gegenstand
vorgebracht haben, so wenig belangvoll ist das, was sie an Mitteln
und Methoden zur Auftauung unseres `eingefrorenen' temperierten
Systems zu empfehlen wissen. Das von ihnen angebotene Skalenmaterial
ist praktisch nicht brauchbar. Denn weit weniger als eine Sache des
Materials, sagt Scho"nberg in der Anmerkung zu seiner
Skalenbetrachtung, `ist es eine geistige, und hierzu muss der Geist
bereit sein'. Im Augenblick, da der Herrschaftsanspruch von
Tonho"hen und Intervallen in Frage gestellt, das Empfinden fu"r sie
merklich nivelliert ist und sich einem Zustand na"hert, den G.
Ligeti als `Permeabilita"t' (Durchla"ssigkeit) beschreibt, bleiben
Ero"rterungen u"ber differenzierte mathematische oder exotische
Skalen im Theoretischen stecken."

That seems rather true, except that said about the practical
uselessness of offered scale material, which is not true nowadays,
and also hasn't been. I also wonder what Ligeti exactly meant with
permeability.
Eimert's compositions are not dry as dust as many serial
compositions of other composers and I can recommend to anyone the
tape composition "Epitaph fu"r Aikichi Kuboyama" fu"r Sprecher und
Sprachkla"nge for instance.

Herbert Eimert: Grundlagen der musikalischen Reihentechnik.
Bu"cher der Reihe Information u"ber serielle Musik.
Universal Edition A.G., Wien, 1964.

Manuel Op de Coul coul@ezh.nl

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