Re: [tuning] Re: Schenker

>Another is Allen Forte, author of "Tonal Harmony in Concept and
>Practice", which I acquired some time ago. Here's a guy who uses the
>word "Harmony" in the TITLE of his book, yet has not ONE WORD about
>the harmonic series inside! Another thing I remember from a quick
>perusal is a pearl of wisdom, something like, "As to the question of how
>many major seconds there are, we have only to look at the piano
>keyboard to know that the answer is one."

Reminds me of a lecture I heard Joseph Strauss give about Henry Cowell. He
talked about Cowell's brilliant innovations, then added something like,
"Unfortunately, Cowell had the poor judgment to base everything on the
harmonic series, not a very fertile basis."

Joseph Pehrson wrote,

> NEVER ONCE did ANYBODY explain why we have two letter names for the
same accidental... G#,Ab, etc.

Ouch.

> Enharmonics were NEVER discussed, and until I came on this list
about a year ago I never knew they were once DIFFERENT PITCHES!!!!!!
It's incredible, really....!!!!!!

Look on the bright side though -- with all the interesting topics
afloat over at the AMC forum, "microtonality" has stirred up at least
as much interest as any other, if not more. People are interested, and
with the mass proliferation of the internet, I think the topic and the
info are more visible and readily available than ever before... these
days, if a conspiracy of your own interests doesn't take you there,
you just might bump into "enharmonic distinctions" anyhow...

Today looks pretty good; tomorrow looks even better!

d

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "D.Stearns" <STEARNS@C...> wrote:

http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/12900

> Look on the bright side though -- with all the interesting topics
> afloat over at the AMC forum, "microtonality" has stirred up at
least as much interest as any other, if not more.

It's been quite a bit more.... Generally there have only been about
5 messages on any given AMC "Forum" topic over there. With
microtonality there have been over 50!!

>People are interested, and with the mass proliferation of the
internet, I think the topic and the info are more visible and readily
available than ever before...
>

I agree that the Internet will be crucial -- "vertically and
horizontally." However, here the vectors are, literally, more
"global" than Schenker: horizontally by International communication
toward "world musics" and vertically by readily available research
into "history"......
____________ ____ __ __ _ _
Joseph Pehrson

John deLaubenfels wrote,

>I'll have to find the book - it's still in a box from the move - in
>order to answer your question. There are lots of other quotes to pull
>out; I remember him not only forbidding parallel fifths, but going on
>sentence after sentence to make sure the point was pounded home. As
>we've already discussed, that prohibition makes no sense to my ear.

It's a characteristic of the style of music you're interested in (judging
from your tuning experiments), and that's all Forte's book should be taken
as -- a set of rules that happen to codify (if for no other reason than
historical accident, though no doubt the harmonic series is partially
involved) the harmonic language of that music.