Schoenberg rumor

>Also note that Schoenberg never became proficient at the piano
or any other fixed-tuning instrument; he was and always remained
a fretless-string player (mainly violin and cello), which I

There was a rumor going around music school that Schoenberg didn't want his
notation to be enharmonic (F# is sharper than Gb). As a keyboarder I didn't
much care but the fretless folks were constantly talking about it. Is it
just a rumor or is there something to it?

Intersectingly, teachers would stomp on the discussions as soon as they
caught wind. What's up with that? Are microtonalists being repressed?

regards,
andy

--- In tuning@egroups.com, AMiltonF@a... wrote:

http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/17227

>
> Intersectingly, teachers would stomp on the discussions as soon as
they caught wind. What's up with that? Are microtonalists being
repressed?
>
> regards,
> andy

Hello Andy...

As I have mentioned before, I managed to go through years in pretty
good music schools and nobody EVER even bothered to mention the
origin of enharmonics to me at all! I had no idea why there were two
note names for "black keys..." Such a basic concept was never
explained, so I guess that pretty much answers your question with an
unfortunate, "yes"...
______ ____ __ _
Joseph Pehrson

--- In tuning@egroups.com, AMiltonF@a... wrote:

http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/17227

> There was a rumor going around music school that Schoenberg
> didn't want his notation to be enharmonic (F# is sharper than
> Gb). As a keyboarder I didn't much care but the fretless folks
> were constantly talking about it. Is it just a rumor or is
> there something to it?

As has been documented here (check the archives: Daniel Wolf
and I both wrote about this more than once), and as I state in
my response to Jacky's question, Schoenberg *after 1912 or so*
insisted that his music be performend with instruments tuned
scrupulously to 12-tET.

Ben Johnston told me a story about a rehearsal Peter Yates
attended with the Kolish Quartet (Schoenberg's "own" quartet)
where Schoenberg spent hours tuning the piano to 12-tET and
coaching the fretless string players to be in tune with it.

So to answer your question, post-c.1912 Schoenberg would have
wanted enharmonics like F#/Gb to be the same pitch.

But *before* that, he did consider and experiment with microtones,
and I simply think the fact that all of his experience as a
performer was on fretless strings undoubtedly sensitized his
hearing so that he was aware of microtonal subtleties.

>
> Intersectingly, teachers would stomp on the discussions as soon
> as they caught wind. What's up with that? Are microtonalists
> being repressed?

I went to Manhattan School of Music, which IMO was a terrific
conservatory (and I'm sure still is) for two years. After
dropping out, whenever I went back to New York and visited
and answered my former teachers's questions about "what are you
doing now" with info on my microtonal work, they invariably
asked me: "why are you wasting your time with that?".

I turned out that after finally understanding what I read in
Partch's book, I realized that I had gone thru a similar
experience as he, in that I couldn't compose 12-tone serial
music because I kept "feeling" the insistent presence of
tonality. The resulting composer's block only went away
after I began exploring just-intonation. But the scary part
about it was that I was never even aware that my problem was
based on my ignorance of microtonality - there was never a
mention of tuning during my schooling.

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

Andy wrote,

> Intersectingly, teachers would stomp on the discussions as soon as they
> caught wind. What's up with that? Are microtonalists being repressed?

You bet. Teachers fear an expansion of the realm in which the subject of
"music" exists, for fear it will come to include matters of which they have
no knowledge -- and thus have to take the role of student rather than
teacher.

>So to answer your question, post-c.1912 Schoenberg would have
wanted enharmonics like F#/Gb to be the same pitch.

>But *before* that, he did consider and experiment with microtones,
and I simply think the fact that all of his experience as a
performer was on fretless strings undoubtedly sensitized his

Aha! So there might be something to the rumor then, and most likely the
teachers stomping on the rumor were thinking post 1912. Thanks Joe.

>whenever I went back to New York and visited
and answered my former teachers's questions about "what are you
doing now" with info on my microtonal work, they invariably
asked me: "why are you wasting your time with that?".

.......and if they lived in 1490 they would be the ones saying to Chris, "The
earth is flat!"

NOT the cracked out Domino's Pizza monkey....
Andy