Re: retuning; distortion vs interpretation

I've been giving quite alot of thought the past few days regarding the
differences between distortion vs interpretation, as brought up by Jacky in
posts about retuned versions of other composers' pieces.

Long before I was aware of JI, I became aware, as a slide guitarist and
sometime fiddler, that the delta blues and Appalachian fiddle music that I
was immersed in learning to play did not at all conform to 12 ET. I worked
on adapting my intonation according to what I was hearing, and later, when
encountering the concepts of JI, had the proverbial light bulb go on. It
continues to fascinate me that supposedly unschooled 'folk' musicians of
various cultures have universally adopted a very natural form of intonation
to create their musics.

For many years, it had been a pet peeve of mine to hear slide players
working hard to match their slide notes to ET fretted notes, the deeper I
get into JI and microtonality, the more annoyed I now become when I hear
this being done. I was recently listening to a borrowed instructional video
of a very respected acoustic slide player, and had to turn it off, as he was
playing his bottlenecked thirds and sevenths in 12ET. Arghh.

More and more I consider these examples to be distortion as opposed to
interpretation. I'm hearing way too many folk recordings by modern groups
whose interpretation is clean up folk music to western music standards. To
my way of thinking, this tends to dumb down the music, the best folk music
is not afraid to be edgy and raw. Interestingly, it's not that I think that
every instrument playing this music needs to be tuned strictly JI, I love
the tension created by the juxtaposition between JI thirds and sevenths in a
voice, slide guitar or fiddle against the fixed 12 ET pitch of the guitar,
banjo or piano.

BTW, I offer my definition of folk to describe either traditional dance
music and/or songs of a particular culture, as opposed to the common
perception of folk these days as a singer/songwriter playing guitar.

Thanks for listening to my thoughts on this cold, windy day in New
Hampshire.

Seth

--
Seth Austen

http://www.sethausten.com
email; seth@sethausten.com

"Music is far, far older than our species. It is tens of millions of years
old, and the fact that animals as wildly divergent as whales, humans and
birds come out with similar laws for what they compose suggests to me that
there are a finite number of musical sounds that will entertain the
vertebrate brain."

Roger Payne, president of Ocean Alliance, quoted in NY Times