TUNING digest 834

Re: Haba

The quartet in 31-tone - the only Haba score I�ve ever found available
commercially as a pocket score - was written in response to a Fokker
request. (As I understand it, there was no cash commission involved; Haba
was already on pension in the CSSR, & he would have been taxed at 100
percent anyways). His description of the work as in fifth tones is indeed
confusing, especially for players trying to rehearse the work with whole
tones divided in five parts. I have played a bit of it on my Rayna synth &
it sounds a bit like free-hand drawing against a 31tone grid, as he takes
no particular use of the good 31tone approximations of just intervals. Of
course, Haba�s trademark was athematicism, and his theoretical works are
essentially catalogs of interval and chords without any attempt to
characterize his materials in terms of relative consonance or dissonance.
(The Boston-area 72-toners (Manieri, Van Duyne etc.) seem to be working in
a similar vein).

I think that this "deficit" (the words of Georg Friedrich Haas) in Haba�s
theoretical work is overcome to some degree in the work of Ivan
Wyschnegradsky (I recommend Barbara Barthelmes�s "Raum und Klang: Das
musikalisches und theoretische Schaffen Ivan Wyschnegradsky" 1995, Wolke
Verlag, as an overview; the series MusikKonzepte also has two Volumes on
Skryabin and the "Skryabinists"), and implicitly in the compositions of
Julian Carillo, which tend to approximations of just materials as
resolutions. The more impressive theoretical contributions remain those of
Fokker and the still too-little-known Novarro (when is someone going to do
a translation of Novarro?).

Daniel Wolf,
Ludwig-Landmann-Str 84B
60488 Frankfurt, GERMANY


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