xenharmonic mahler

Monz,

thanks for the info on "the chord."

Honestly, although I'd be very interested to hear your re-tunings of it,
to me, that chord doesn't scream "re-tune me."

What I was talking about are passages like msrs. 20-21. That first horn
descent (C#-b-A#-A, in the context of the accompanying harmony of course)
sounds so deliciously "wrong", I get pretty much the same feeling
from it that I do from Dan S's 3rd/4th " . .beautiful . . " in At a Day
Job. Compare it (msr 20) to the transformation of the phrase-let in msr
21. (F-E-D-C) Here, it sounds far more "normal" or "palatable." I
guess I was saying that the fact that Mahler achieved that "wrongness" or
"xenharmonicness" in msr 20, still within 12t-ET is what was amazing.

As for the big chord----well, I'm just a beginner at this tuning stuff,
so I look forward to being dissed, :) , but, I've noticed in my
experimentation so far that the things that sound the most striking,
"re-tuned," are usually the things that bore me in 12t-ET. for obvious
examples, the dominant 7th chord, stacked 4th sets, (ie "027" in set
theory nomenclature), and even the diatonic scale. for instance in the
Mahler, something I'd really like to hear "re-tuned" might be that
unearthly quasi-cadential "pre-dominant" sequence at msrs. 265-7, near the
end of the movement.

On the other hand, the sonorities that excite me in 12t-ET, such as
"014589" sets, and subsets, the "big chord" of Mahler's, or perhaps one
of Morton Feldman's sexy piano sonorities; I find that they're not really
any more exciting, in fact often just plain weaker, when
"xenharmonicized."

Well, I still have a lot of exploration to do, and I'll probably shoot
myself in a year for having written this, but, hey, maybe it'll get some
heated discussion going.

there's never enough of that on this list. . . .

heh heh.

----sorry those of you who don't happen to have a Mahler 10 score. If
there's enough interest, I can put some excerpts, and maybe an mp3 or two,
up. . . . .

***From: Christopher Bailey******************

http://music.columbia.edu/~chris

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