Re: [tuning] the oldest musical score

Please pardon me for murdering this thread. I should not snip for e-groups. By the time I
stop snipping, the whole reply has been butchered beyond recognition.

Joe Monzo wrote:

The USA universities (state u's also) have a service called Interlibrary Loan. They will go as
far as the library of Congress to get any book you request. So that means you have at your
disposable any book that is given permission by the author to read.

Can you tell me a little about your research? I am soon publishing a book on "chessboard
mnemonics" (ars memoria) that surprisingly has applications to 12 tone rows and therefore any
other system of musical notation. It's based on the Pythagorean lambda and the Book of Changes
mostly.

>
>
> The Sumerians may have even figured out how to tune *12-tET*
> as long ago as c. 2500-2000 BC! But I still have much more
> research to do before being able to present a good case for this.
>
> There is absolute proof that they knew how to arrive at
> arbitrarily close approximations of the square-root of 2
> (tablet YBC 7289), which could have been of use in calculating
> 12-tET.
>
> And there is also proof that they limited their cycle of
> modes to 12. This may be a clue that the scale was tempered,
> because assuming Pythagorean tuning, the 12th raising or lowering
> of the tritone would give a scale identical to the starting one,
> except that it would be a semitone higher or lower (respectively)
> than the original. Tempering the scale would remove that
> problem. The CBS 10996 tablet also seems to give a tuning
> procedure which provides a way of checking intervals in more
> than one way, perhaps to assist in tempering by ear.
>
> Ernest McClain (first in _The Myth of Invariance_, and in more
> depth in _The Pythagorean Plato_) makes a case for the Greeks
> having calculated 12-tET, and of course I think it can be shown
> that, just as the Babylonians took over the Sumerian culture
> as their own, much of the Greek music-theory, science, math,
> mythology, etc., was taken from the Babylonians and thus goes
> back to Sumerian roots.
>
> I've been doing a lot of research into the Bible too, and can
> see that a lot of ancient Hebrew writings are also based on
> Sumerian originals. I have a *lot* more to say about this,
> but it's off-topic... But anyway, Dr. Ewald Metzler, who
> purports to have reconstructed the original tablets of the
> 10 Commandments, also sees evidence of ancient Hebrew music-
> theory in its dimensions:
>
> http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7353/dr_ed09e.htm
>
> And see the footnote to this message I posted here, concerning
> the possibility of Sumerian 12-tET:
>
> http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/11107
>
> As for this Hurrian hymn being the oldest existing musical score,
> I don't think it is. The CBS 10996 tablet is older, and I believe
> that *it* is the oldest score. More on that below...
>
> I need some help from someone out there to finish this project:
> is there any way to transform a Finale .MUS file into a regular
> graphic (.gif, .jpg, etc.)? If not, since I don't have a scanner,
> could someone who has Finale and a scanner print out my .MUS files
> and create graphics from the hard-copy and send them to me? Thanks!
>
> I will have *much*, much more to come on this during the rest of
> this year. The post on which I was working follows below:
>
> ------- post drafted a month ago, never submitted: ------
>
> Hey folks, big news (to me, at least):
>
> In my quest to unravel the history of tuning and music-theory,
> I'm convinced that I've correctly deciphered the fundamental
> basics of Sumerian music-theory, and thus have traced my
> history back to its ultimate beginning.
>
> Because the Sumerians were the first culture to invent
> writing itself (c. 3200 BC), we will not find a written

I do not mean to be hostile or sarcastic. I just have this joke in my mind and I want to tell
you folks cause it sounds funny to me. So here it goes:

Researchers have discovered that the planets are also arranged diatonically and suggests that
the universe discovered diatonic harmony billions of years before Pythagorus and the
Sumerians. Furthermore, in the synergetic geometry of Buckminster Fuller, it is shown that
even quantum wave and therfore also mental processes are arranged according to Bode's Law of
musical intervals. It might be the case that the first thing that The Uncreated Perfect One
does to create a universe is to play a guitar or piano or some sort of diatonic instrument.
The rest of creation is just peals of bells.

I do not mean to offend your very serious research. The joke just sounds really funny to me.
I myself am doing research to reconstruct the lost "wing" of Chinese classics, The Book of
Music. If you are interested in taking your scholarship beyond Sumeria, the I Ching is much
older than Phoenician letters and the system suggests Bode's Law of diatonic structure. Bode's
Law is a constant of physics and reappears at every level of their mathematical abstractions.
I have discovered a holographic function to the I Ching that I can e-mail you if you want to go
that far back into history. The I Ching suggests a 16 tone scale. 16 tones are very
convenient because of their easy divisibility. Except they sound horrible, so the holographic
I Ching gave way to the more diatonic binary I Ching (today's standard book of changes).
It's much too much work for me. If you are interested I can hand over the material to
you and see what you can do with it. Or you can wait for my book which will reproduce all the
material I am hinting at. Schoenberg's tone row theory is going to be the key to
reconstructing the lost book of music of the chinese classics.

My head is going to explode. I'm just a jazz-rock guitar player into numerology (tone rows).
This stuff hurts my head.

http://home.earthlink.net/~troubledoor

Troubledoor wrote:

> http://home.earthlink.net/~troubledoor

Your web link is screwy - is it supposed to be like that?

--
* D a v i d B e a r d s l e y
* 49/32 R a d i o "all microtonal, all the time"
* http://www.virtulink.com/immp/lookhere.htm

Chapter 7, Beyond Pluto, of the late Isaac Asimov's book, "Fact and Fancy" (Doubleday & Co., 1962) deals with the so-called law devised in 1766 by Johann Daniel Titius and later popularized by Johann Bode, starting in 1772. The number series, which approximates the relative distances from the sun of some of the planets, is: 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100, 196, 388, 772 (a potential, but as yet undiscovered tenth planet). This is derived by adding four to the series ), 3, 6, 12, 24, etc. He points out that with the discovery of Neptune, at a relative distance of 301 instead of 388, Bode's Law was relegated back to being "nothing more than an interesting piece of numerology", which was the way it had initially been received.
This number series doesn't seem to be related to the creation of a musical scale, but perhaps I'll see something more in the other replies to the original posting.

It's a tough one to criticize Bode's Law as a species of numerology because Pythagorus shows that musical intervals are mere numerological ratios. Goscelyn Godwin's "Cosmic Music" talks with great simplicity at how tidy everything from physics to music to religion gets organized if one were to use Bode's Law as the main analytical tool. This was the spirit of Schopenhauer's World Will as Music philosophy and is the basis of Theosophy, Judaism, Hinduism,etc.etc. Mental objects also obey Bode's Law. One's personal thoughts are always heard as a little whispering voice and these can also get quite loud. But they are subtle waves and are subject to quantum wave mechanics so we can't detect them yet with our particle nature
tools...computers are going to get to the quantum wave level of small transistors in the next few years so maybe we'll get to detect quantum wave thoughts. I'm pretty sure that they are going to find little Bode's Laws all over the thought space. This actually already happened with natural philosophy or alchemy, but their proofs are very well hidden due to the Spanish Inquistion tending to kill them for exposing the musical superstructure of creation. This is the sense of The Holy Bible's 7 diatonic days of creation. Today's Spanish Inquistion is the need to make textbooks to try to analyze everything into Bode's Law. It would take thousands of pages to prove that it's real and a lot of people would get mad at them.
It's a very touchy subject to accuse God of playing music while we were being created.
Worse still, it causes great pains to the body to hear in thought form what the soul can express by mere listening to the standard Bach and Mozart pieces. Arvo Part's "Miserere" is a better new representative of this cosmic vision of world order as music.
The books I get most of my Bode's Law stuff is "Music of the Spheres" by Guy Murchie and "A Fuller Explanation" by Amy C. Edmondson.

"John F. Sprague" wrote:

> Chapter 7, Beyond Pluto, of the late Isaac Asimov's book, "Fact and Fancy" (Doubleday & Co., 1962) deals with the so-called law devised in 1766 by Johann Daniel Titius and later popularized by Johann Bode, starting in 1772. The number series, which approximates the relative distances from the sun of some of the planets, is: 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100, 196, 388, 772 (a potential, but as yet undiscovered tenth planet). This is derived by adding four to the series ), 3, 6, 12, 24, etc. He points out that with the discovery of Neptune, at a relative distance of 301 instead of 388, Bode's Law was relegated back to being "nothing more than an interesting piece of numerology",

(The thought is a lot older than Titius. The Babylonians and Greeks had their 7 harp strings corresponding to the 7 planets for a long time.)

This is kind of pedantic. Neptune is just one planet. And we have to keep in mind that Pluto isn't even a planet. It's just an asteroid that fell into a Bode's Law orbit. I'm sure there are debris circling the Bode's Law orbits going all the way out to the edge of the universe. The universe is a giant harp string or what Buckminster Fuller calls a gravity tensor.

> which was the way it had initially been received.
> This number series doesn't seem to be related to the creation of a musical scale, but perhaps I'll see something more in the other replies to the original posting.
>

You've got the number for the planets in mean millions of miles it looks like. In geometrical form, all the numbers of any scale or magnitude of size always get reduced to the musical intervals. That was the essence of Einstein's Relativity Theory. That it is better to reduce everything to geometrical ideas. It's in the Guy Murchie book I mentioned above. You have to divide those rather big numbers into the ratios that produce them. Its always comes out to Pythagorus' ratios.

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--
Hello. I have designed a new piano that greatly facilitates
microtonal composition, 12-tone composition, as well as standard
diatonic harmonies. You can see it at my website (below). If you
can, can you also right-click on the image of the piano and then
save the file so that you will have a personal copy of it to give
to others? Thanks.

http://home.earthlink.net/~troubledoor