Re: [tuning] Death of Hovhaness, Wed. June 21, 2000

At a panel discussion at the Cabrillo Festival, after hearing Lou Harrison
sing the praises of just intonation, Hovhaness said simply that his
non-keyboard music was, in fact, in just intonation. I guess what he meant
was that he wanted players to realize his scores in a pure, beatless tuning,
but that he wasn't himself interested in specifying that tuning any further.

He does not seem to have written all that much keyboard music as a
percentage of his massive total output. Of the recordings I own, maybe 1/4
is piano music and I have nothing for other keyboards. Much of Hovhaness'
music does sound as though it would be awesome in just intonation, but as a
practical matter it is nearly always played in 12-tet. It was also said that
he tended to write music that was easy to play. I suspect JI is not easy to
play even on instruments with continuously adjustable pitch like the violin.
Only the human voice gravitates easily to JI.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel Wolf [mailto:djwolf@snafu.de]
> Sent: Saturday, June 24, 2000 12:25 PM
> To: tuning@egroups.com
> Subject: Re: [tuning] Death of Hovhaness, Wed. June 21, 2000
>
>
> At a panel discussion at the Cabrillo Festival, after hearing Lou Harrison
> sing the praises of just intonation, Hovhaness said simply that his
> non-keyboard music was, in fact, in just intonation. I guess what he meant
> was that he wanted players to realize his scores in a pure,
> beatless tuning,
> but that he wasn't himself interested in specifying that tuning
> any further.
>
>
>
>
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