RE: [tuning] Curt Sachs excerpts

Curt Sachs wrote,

>More curious is the tenacity with which the bagpipe has clung to its
>distinctly Arabian scale with whole tones and three-quarter tones in the
>midst of a world of diatonic scales. Wherever the old Oriental
>instrument appears on its journey to Scotland--in the Mediterranean,
>Spain, or Brittany--the foreign scale is preserved; and it is quite an
>experience to watch the guards march into Buckingham Palace, the band
>playing "correctly" and the bagpipes "in Arabic."

That's great! I had no idea the bagpipe originated in the East.

>no instrument
>travels without its music

If one can make the leap from the African ancestors of the banjo to the
electric guitar, the blues provides another example of this.

>while Western
>rhythm, its counterpart infinitely subtle in the East

To say nothing of Africa!

>had degenerated
>into a system that did little more than mark binary or tenary accent
>groups.

>In his own words, "The final conclusion is that the Musical Scales is
>not one, not 'natural,' nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the
>constitution of musical sound so beautifully worked out by Helmholtz,
>but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious."

Absolutely. Only in the harmony-driven styles of the West and the
drone-oriented styles of South Asia do the simple ratios have much
importance. In most cultures, at best a rough approximation of octaves,
fifths, and fourths can be expected -- which leads naturally to the
prevalence of pentatonic and heptatonic scales, though of widely varying
details.

Rick !
Due to its volume and timbre, difference tones are strong on such instruments. Changing
the tuning to a just diatonic would ruin the "momentum" these tones generate. It is a shame
that the so much of the Celtic music has degenerated into 12 et. but then again it was a
highly surpressed music. I wonder how much of the history of this music is in Groves?
Especially from spain.

Rick Tagawa wrote:

> I was just reading Curt Sachs' "Some Aspects of Musicology" and I
> thought I should share a few excerpts with the group. There are some
> very curious statements which I'm not repeating but he makes a few
> important observations.
>
> More curious is the tenacity with which the bagpipe has clung to its
> distinctly Arabian scale with whole tones and three-quarter tones in the
> midst of a world of diatonic scales. Wherever the old Oriental
> instrument appears on its journey to Scotland--in the Mediterranean,
> Spain, or Brittany--the foreign scale is preserved; and it is quite an
> experience to watch the guards march into Buckingham Palace, the band
> playing "correctly" and the bagpipes "in Arabic."
> Oriental influence in the Middle Ages was evidently not limited to the
> instruments, and not even to their particular scales, no instrument
> travels without its music. . . . [Sachs, Curt "The Lore of Non-Western
> Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology," Three Essays by . . . Arthur
> Mendel, Curt Sachs, and Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New
> York, 1957, pp25-6]
>
> . . . Our notes deceive us: performance style, which they cannot
> express, counts for more than the bald arrangement of steps that they
> set forth. How dare we suppose that the Christian Spaniards and
> Proven�als sheared the Moorish melodies of all their characteristic
> traits! Incidentally, one picture, and a very late one, provides a
> strange confirmation: in the famous altarpiece of Ghent (c. 1425, that
> is, in the time of Dufay), van Eyck painted the singing angels grouped
> around St. Cecilia with, above the nose, the quite un-European but
> typically Oriental creases which result from nasal singing and which we
> find so often five thousand years ago in the portraits of Egyptian
> singers and in the living Orient of today. (Commerical photos of the
> altar seldom show this detail.) [Sachs, Curt "The Lore of Non-Western
> Music" in Some Aspects of Musicology," Three Essays by . . . Arthur
> Mendel, Curt Sachs, and Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New
> York, 1957, p26]
>
> Feeling the impact of Oriental music, a few persons began to realize
> that Western music was not unlimited. It dawned upon some
> musicologists, perhaps for the first time, that our great achievements
> in harmony, polyphony, and orchestration had involved sacrifices in
> other fields; that Europe had compressed into the conventional major and
> minor the incredible richness of melodic types and modes that still
> flourished in the East; that the West's even, unalterable semitones,
> forced into a uniform "equal temperament," had supplanted a wealth of
> variable tunings. Under the strait jacket of harmonic motion our melody
> had become a poor device connecting related chords, while Western
> rhythm, its counterpart infinitely subtle in the East, had degenerated
> into a system that did little more than mark binary or tenary accent
> groups. [Sachs, Curt "The Lore of Non-Western Music" in Some Aspects of
> Musicology," Three Essays by . . . Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, and
> Carroll C. Pratt, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1957, p30]
>
> The epoch-making publication of this method took place in Ellis'
> "Tonometrical Observations on some Existing Non-Harmonic Scales," a
> paper first printed in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (1884) and
> reprinted in the following year in the Journal of the Society of Arts
> under the simplified title "On the Musical Scales of Various Nations."
> In his own words, "The final conclusion is that the Musical Scales is
> not one, not 'natural,' nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the
> constitution of musical sound so beautifully worked out by Helmholtz,
> but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious." [p43]

-- Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria island
www.anaphoria.com