Re: [tuning] Back on-line in Budapest; Xenharmonikon; Just Intonation

Hello:

(1) I'm back after a forced hiatus from the list due to the high cost of
email in a "re-developing" country. I hope that I won't have to leave
again, but also wish to remind the list that there are legitimate reasons
why electronic communications costs are high in places like Hungary and
people do pay a premium for bandwidth.

(2) Paul Erlich wrote:

Why is it that all the major research libraries subscribe to 1/1 (the
Journal of the Just Intonation Network) but virtually none subscribe to
Xenharmonikon? (I have a personal interest in this question because I
believe that my article in Xenharmonikon 17 addresses an issue common in the
current journals, namely, generalizing diatonicity, but I fear that it will
not get the attention that I believe it deserves from academia. Not to
mention the attention that Wilson's many papers deserve.)

At the beginning, XH was published as an "informal journal", a vehicle for
communication within a community of scholars and musicians. Early issues of
Xenharmonikon were available from University Microfilms, now all issues are
available in print on demand format from Frog Peak. At the time that I
edited XH, only Wesleyan University and the Music Library at U.C.Berkeley
subscribed. At one point and at my own expense, I sent out sample issues to
some one hundred University or research libraries. None requested
subsciptions although XH had already received a number of prominent
citations.

I've come to the conclusion that a photocopied journal produced by scholars
largely employed outside of academe, on a topic that had not yet become
either acceptable or even hot for academic research simply could not gain
entree into scholarly libraries. In spite of this, I have seldom encountered
on body of writing on music theory that was so often read in such detail by
a readership both serious and diverse. In the meantime, intonation and
tuning system theory have become acceptable subjects in even journals which
previously were actively dismissive of our work.

(3) I look forward to perusing the archives for the thread on defining "Just
Intonation". Without benefit of this entire discussion, I will jump in and
offer my thought that the qualities, extent, and limits of JI, pending some
overwhelming general restrictions with regard to tonal perception, have to
be understood as _not yet defined_. I believe that that definition has to
be articulated compositionally, that is, within the context of real musical
examples. I have no great confidence in the use of research based on
normative models to answer this question, if simply because it is my
experience, and my music-historical understanding, that compositional
invention has continuously tested the barriers of what we are able to hear
as music, and by implication, as music in JI.

Leaving aside for the moment the catastrophic effects on human hearing due
to the noises of an over-amplified world, my assumption remains that we will
continue to hear more possibilities rather than fewer as musical, and that
applies to the intervals of JI as well. My experiences with comparing the
subjective consonance of intervals (where I came 'round to hearing, all else
being equal, the denominator of a ratio as most determinative) suggested
strongly that register, for example, can be used compositionally to project
previously exotic ratios in parseable ways.

Daniel Wolf
Budapest & Morro Bay
djwolf1@matavnet.hu
http://home.snafu.de/djwolf/

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "Daniel Wolf" <djwolf1@m...> wrote:

> At the time that I edited XH, only Wesleyan University and the
> Music Library at U.C.Berkeley subscribed. At one point and at my
> own expense, I sent out sample issues to some one hundred
> University or research libraries. None requested subsciptions
> although XH had already received a number of prominent citations.

Like everyone else, I've found it hard in the past to locate copies
of XH. But just today I got the head librarian at the music research
library here, which is generally a very good one, to promise to order
a subscription and a full set of back issues a.s.a.p. Maybe
librarians tend to take more notice from people from within their
institutions - let me encourage anyone with ties to a music research
library to request that XH be added to the collection.

Is it possible (or perhaps it's already done) to get abstracts sent
to the RILM database so that literature searches will return hits on
XH articles?

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "Jon Wild" <wild@f...> wrote:

http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/16586

> Like everyone else, I've found it hard in the past to locate copies
> of XH. But just today I got the head librarian at the music
research
> library here, which is generally a very good one, to promise to
order a subscription and a full set of back issues a.s.a.p. Maybe
> librarians tend to take more notice from people from within their
> institutions - let me encourage anyone with ties to a music
research
> library to request that XH be added to the collection.
>

Well, there is no excuse for ignorance... but, I must confess that
before joining this list I had heard of 1/1 and was a subscriber, but
had never even HEARD of Xenharmonicon! Is it possible that 1/1 did a
better job of advertising?? Maybe some of the cited "discrimination"
of Xenharmonicon is just simple ignorance (??)

Oh... while I'm on this topic. I would like to "weigh in" with what
I believe is a slight caveat to using general dictionary sources to
describe specific tuning terms which are evolving in the "tuning
community." We have a bunch of "specialists" here on this list, and,
yet, we can't come to a lexacographic concensus. How can we expect a
general dictionary, even an authoritative one, to do similarly??

I, personally, would put more credence in the definition of tuning
terms as they might appear in a specialized source, such as 1/1 or
Xenharmonicon... These are evolving terms in action. We might only
expect the "general" dictionaries to keep up later... (??)
__________ ___ __
Joseph Pehrson

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "Joseph Pehrson" <pehrson@p...> wrote:
>
> I, personally, would put more credence in the definition of tuning
> terms as they might appear in a specialized source, such as 1/1 or
> Xenharmonicon... These are evolving terms in action. We might
only
> expect the "general" dictionaries to keep up later... (??)
> __________ ___ __
> Joseph Pehrson

HERE! HERE!

Joseph rings the bells of Truth and Reason!

Jacky Ligon