Re: Willi Apel and medieval music (for Joseph Pehrson)

Hello, there, everyone, and please let me say to Joseph Pehrson that
your words regarding my rumored association with Willi Apel are at
once utterly unmerited on my part and yet a supreme compliment of
which I may strive to be worthy.

In fact, back around the beginning of 1967, in secondary school, I had
taken a one-semester survey of European music history and found myself
absolutely in love with Renaissance music, and also newly aware that I
could be moved to absolute delight by the sound of parallel fifths and
fourths -- a taste moving me in a medieval direction also, of course.

The plan had been for me to sing in the school choir that semester,
which did do some Renaissance music. However, it rapidly developed
that despite my apparent success at a brief audition, I did not have
the pitch accuracy needed for the ensemble.

The instructor at this point had a most pleasing resolution: I might
use the hour for an independent study of such topics as the transition
from medieval to Renaissance style (e.g. Dufay). While disappointed in
my lack of vocal pitch control (I had hoped to join a madrigal
ensemble also), I was delighted at this proposal, and began a kind of
tutorial focused on the study of such material as Grout's music
history text -- and also Willi Apel.

Both the _Harvard Dictionary of Music_ and the _Historical Anthology
of Music_ became my scholarly food and drink, and I rapidly found
myself immersed in Perotin and the Notre Dame School, Machaut, and the
mysteries of the late 14th century.

About three years later, while in college, Apel's _French Secular
Music of the Late Fourteenth Century_ became another central
influence.

Thus your remark, Joseph, is indeed a high compliment which reflects
one of the great germinal influences of my medieval musical studies
(the general music history course and the tutorial-style study I have
mentioned summing up my academic credentials), but I would emphasize
that reading Willi Apel has been my only connection with this premier
historian and theorist. Indeed, I was 16 years old when my study of
his writings began in 1967 -- many of them going back a considerable
number of years before that.

One very special influence of Willi Apel on me has been his discussion
of medieval sonorities which might be described, in Tuning List terms,
as having ratios such as 6:8:9, 9:12:16, and 4:6:9. Apel describes
them as "concordant dissonances" or the like, a term more generally
used by medieval theorists to describe the diverse and yet harmonious
sounds of a "concourse" of polyphony.

Having already become intrigued by these combinations, about two
decades ago I made a survey of world musics and concluded that such
mixtures of fifths, fourths, and major seconds or ninths or minor
sevenths are common in many cultures. From Paul Erlich's perspective,
I might now add, they might represent "attractors" of low harmonic
entropy.

I was especially thrilled to find medieval theorists advocating the
use of such three-voice combinations -- especially Jacobus of Liege,
whose views on rhythm had been quoted extensively and ably by Apel in
his _Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900-1600_, but much of whose
complete _Speculum musicae_ ("Mirror of Music") had only become
available in the published edition of Roger Bragard during the 1960's
and 1970's.

Curiously, during those long years, my intonational experience of this
music (or at least my own playing of it, or improvising in similar
styles) was on keyboard instruments presumably in 12-tone equal
temperament (12-tET). I became interested in the authentic Pythagorean
tuning, and once was obliged by a harpist friend who did tune in pure
fifths (a tuning which sounded pleasing to me in a quite natural way),
but it was not until 1998 that I obtained a used Yahama TX-802 and
could enjoy this tuning as a routine part of my musical experience.

With due circumspection, please let me say that being associated in
any way with the great Willi Apel is to me a consummate moment, and
may I strive to be worthy of it even while clarifying the actual
history.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "M. Schulter" <MSCHULTER@V...> wrote:

http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/16463

Many thanks to Margo Schulter for clarifying her relationship to the
great works of Willi Apel...

However, I still believe an appropriate "appellation" for Ms.
Schulter would be the "Tuning List Apel."

_________ ___ __
Joseph Pehrson