Re: Non 12 serialism & microtonal Webern

Well, there is my "Variations" in 13 tone BP.

http://www.kees.cc/music/webvar0.html

Although this started out as a joke, (if you don't get it, do a web search
with "variations on a theme by Anton Webern"), that doesn't mean that I
didn't take it as a serious composition exercise, including "crab canon in
retrograde inversion".

An interesting problem I had to solve was the role of the minor second in
Webern's work. This interval played such an important role because of the
combined characteristics of harmonically being high up in the overtone
series (15:16), and as the basic step in the 12 tone scale.

The harmonically (lattice) equivalent in the BP scale would be 27:35, but
this is 3 steps. The 1 step is 25:27, the equivalent of the major second
8:9. So to do a 'Webernian' counterpoint I wanted to make a 13 tone row with
two equivalent inflection points for both these intervals. And then there is
of course the radically different symmetricity properties of a 13 tone row
compared with a 12 tone row.

-----------------

When the term serialism pops up in these discussions, I always realize that
my view on what serialism is, differs considerably with the general
concensus. This can be traced back to my former teacher, Gottfried Michael
Koenig. Before he came to the Netherlands he was active in that hell hole of
serialism, the Cologne Electronic Studio (collaborating with Stockhausen).
By the time I met him, he had taken serialism much further, in a general
constructive sense. Serialism for me became much more investigating all the
consequences of taking musical parameters as mathematical entities in
general, not just organizing and manipulating them in rows. Also the duality
of determinism-stochasticity was a central issue. In these regards
everything I do, in music or graphics, is always serial.

By the way, my regard for Koenig is something I share with Ligeti who I can
quote: 'I could not have written Atmospheres, however, without my
experiences in the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne or without the
friendship of Gottfried Michael Koenig. From him I learned not just studio
technique, but also what was for me a totally new "constructive" musical way
of thinking.'

I remeber that Koenig used 60 EDO in some of his works, but strictly for the
combinatorial property of having a maximum number of divisors.

Kees
www.kees.cc

PS
Monz, I love your Vienna page. I'm looking forward to your MIDI rendering of
the Gurrelieder. Can you have that done by next week ? :-)

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "Kees van Prooijen" <kees@d...> wrote:

> http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/16094
>
> PS
> Monz, I love your Vienna page. I'm looking forward to your
> MIDI rendering of the Gurrelieder. Can you have that done
> by next week ? :-)

Thanks, Kees. As a matter of fact, the _Gurrelieder_ is *the*
Schoenberg piece that I've been wanting to sequence for years!

The biggest problem (literally): the full orchestral score is
really expensive, and the paper size is so huge that even when
I've found the score in a library, I can't fit it on any copier.
But U. of Penn here in Philly does have it, so maybe I can get
at least a bit of it. Of course, I don't have my own computer
here, so I don't have access to any MIDI software now either...
but yes, eventually, there will definitely be a _Gurrelieder_
file added to my webpage!

(I'm *really* upset that I screwed up _Pelleas und Melisande_,
right after I spent an entire weekend working on it! - it was
really sounding good, and I had gotten the file to a logical
break-point in the piece so that it didn't end as abruptly as
it used to. I hope I haven't lost the file altogether, but again,
won't know until I get back home and boot up my own PC.)

-monz
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
'All roads lead to n^0'

You could start with Alban Berg's piano score. I don't know how available
that is though.

Kees

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Monz [mailto:MONZ@JUNO.COM]
> Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 10:49 AM
> To: tuning@egroups.com
> Subject: [tuning] Re: Non 12 serialism & microtonal Webern
>
>
> The biggest problem (literally): the full orchestral score is
> really expensive, and the paper size is so huge that even when
> I've found the score in a library, I can't fit it on any copier.
> But U. of Penn here in Philly does have it, so maybe I can get
> at least a bit of it. Of course, I don't have my own computer
> here, so I don't have access to any MIDI software now either...
> but yes, eventually, there will definitely be a _Gurrelieder_
> file added to my webpage!
>

I have that! But again, I and it are on opposite sides of the
continent right now...

-monz

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "Kees van Prooijen" <kees@d...> wrote:

> You could start with Alban Berg's piano score. I don't know
> how available that is though.
>
> Kees
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Monz [mailto:MONZ@J...]
> > Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 10:49 AM
> > To: tuning@egroups.com
> > Subject: [tuning] Re: Non 12 serialism & microtonal Webern
> >
> >
> > The biggest problem (literally): the full orchestral score is
> > really expensive, and the paper size is so huge that even when
> > I've found the score in a library, I can't fit it on any copier.
> > But U. of Penn here in Philly does have it, so maybe I can get
> > at least a bit of it. Of course, I don't have my own computer
> > here, so I don't have access to any MIDI software now either...
> > but yes, eventually, there will definitely be a _Gurrelieder_
> > file added to my webpage!
> >