listenning recomendations, this'n'that

In some very clever disk cleaning mistakes, I just deleted
all the messages I was responding to. Oh well...

I would like some recomendations on recordings of Monteverdi
(and/or his contemporaries) which would really show off the
pre-tonality-five-limit (mannerist?) style. Of course,
authentic instruments and tunings are a big plus.

There was talk of Verlacht Nacht by Shoenberg. That
composition is a treat for sure. I would like
recomendations for other composers/compositions/
recordings that are in that 'Romantic off the cliff' veign
particularly late Mahler and Liszt, which came up in that
thread. Personally, I have no disagreement with the problem
the early 12-tone school faced, and believe that good music
did come from their solutions. My 50,000 foot vision of
the thing is that the tools at hand became smaller
and more refined [the major/minor system + adoption of
12tet] and collided with the natural tendency of artists
to 'push' the limits of their materials. There WAS a
school that may have pushed the tonal language one step
further, and that was the tin-pan alley songwriters, but
generally, the tonal tradition reached a cul-de-sac.

I'm not sure that all the serialists are best represented by
tuning in 12tet. Bergs Violin Concerto for instance is on the
edge of, if not tonal then tuneable, musics. Weberns
composition space spends a lot of time in and around diminished
chord harmonys and melodies. It may be interesting to see
whether casting it into a 5:6:7:9 system, or 1/7:1/6:1/5:1/4
makes the 'concords and discords' jump out more.

[and did I understand that from a harmonic entropy, these
get the same rating?]

Adaptive tuning of these pieces could and should be attempted,
but I think it would need a multi-pass algorithm to determine
which simultanietys should be vertically concordant or
horizontally concordant (horizontally concordant being
preserving melodic consistency at the expense of vertical
abrasiveness). Certainly in the early serialists I've listened
to, you would need to look at dynamics, register, orchestration
etc to determine which simultanietys should of 'repose' (implying
less beating tuning) and which are more energetic.

Bob Valentine

--- In tuning@egroups.com, Robert C Valentine <BVAL@I...> wrote:
>

>
> I'm not sure that all the serialists are best represented by
> tuning in 12tet. Bergs Violin Concerto for instance is on the
> edge of, if not tonal then tuneable, musics.

This *would* be an excellent retuning choice...
__________ ___ __ __ _
Joseph Pehrson