Re: Mr. Modulation vs. Mr. Pure (or some such entangled baloney)

Dan
I am not taking the bait this time.
You already know that Just Intonation is pure tuning and that Eq Temp is a
compromise.
Temperments are yesterdays chicken salad.

"D. Stearns" wrote:

> From: "D. Stearns" <stearns@capecod.net>
>
> Just Intonation may be all one wants to hear...or all one
> wants to compose with...or all one wants to talk about... or
> it may not -- But I personally find the idea that 'pure'
> tuning = a 'purer' any*thing else to be offensive in the
> presumptuous propagandizing extreme.
>
> Dan
>
> *IPSO FACTO
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, or to change your subscription
> to digest, go to the ONElist web site, at http://www.onelist.com and
> select the Member Center link from the menu bar on the left.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> You do not need web access to participate. You may subscribe through
> email. Send an empty email to one of these addresses:
> tuning-subscribe@onelist.com - subscribe to the tuning list.
> tuning-unsubscribe@onelist.com - unsubscribe from the tuning list.
> tuning-digest@onelist.com - switch your subscription to digest mode.
> tuning-normal@onelist.com - switch your subscription to normal mode.

Patrick Pagano wrote:
>Dan
>I am not taking the bait this time.
>You already know that Just Intonation is pure tuning and that Eq Temp is a
>compromise.
>Temperments are yesterdays chicken salad.

"D. Stearns" wrote:

>> Just Intonation may be all one wants to hear...or all one
>> wants to compose with...or all one wants to talk about... or
>> it may not -- But I personally find the idea that 'pure'
>> tuning = a 'purer' any*thing else to be offensive in the
>> presumptuous propagandizing extreme.

Hello! My name is David, and I am new in this list. I am not an expert in
tuning theory, but I have some idea about it and try to put it in practice
when I play the violin and when I work with choirs.

To my mind, neither Just Intonation nor Eq Temp are the only solution. Every
music needs a different tuning.

A Palestrina vocal work, for example, sounds much better with just
intonation, because of its harmonic clarity and its diatonic construction.
But in19th Century works we can often find accords of dim. 7th (C#-E-G-Bb)
that play a very important role in the harmony because of their ambiguity,
and this polivalence is lost with just intonation.

A tuning is neither good, nor bad. It can only be more or less adequated to
certain kinds of music. Well, that's my oppinion.

P.S: Please, excuse my english.

[Pagano:]
> Temperments are yesterdays chicken salad.

Ha! that's a good one, Pat!

Temperaments are fun to play around with.

JI is fun to play around *in*.

(who says you can't use both?)

-Monzo

___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html
or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]

> > But I personally find the idea that 'pure'
> > tuning = a 'purer' any*thing else to be offensive in the
> > presumptuous propagandizing extreme.
> You already know that Just Intonation is pure tuning and that Eq Temp is a
> compromise.

What Dan may not be aware of is that many people use "pure" as a synonym
for "just [intonation]". That in the sense that if you were to look up "pure"
in a sufficiently unabridged dictionary, it would appear as an official
discipline-specific defintion.

I personally don't think that "pure" should be used as anything other than
a general-purpose adjective. To me it's judgemental enough a word that it
could lead to misunderstandings of this nature. To use a more extreme
example to illustrate the point, I wouldn't recommend "borrowing" into
tuning-specific terminology, words like "stupid" or "boring".

In English, we have the luxury of having the word _just_ in addition to
_pure_; although the word _just_ has powerful extra-musical associations of
their own, they are less controversial than those associated with _pure_.
In German, the only established term is _Rein_, meaning pure, or clean.
Unfortunately, German history gives this term a particularly ugly cast, one
which is unescapable in the writings of the theorist Martin Vogel, which
often have a nationalist tinge.

I have had a standing argument with Alvin Lucier over his use of the term
'pure wave' instead of 'sine wave'. Lucier (who famously said, in an
interview with Robert Ashley: "I llllike my mmmmmusic ccccclear, llllike
ggggin")likes to make the association between the purity of the sine waves
and a neo-classical clarity that he is seeking in his music; I find the
associations of the term 'pure' to be distracting.