Re: [tuning] Re: Lucca / Frescobaldi / Zarlino (Lucca Organ); misc.

Margo:

Your response to Ibo Ortgies makes a lot of sense to me. I will also happily
cede my half-hearted alternative FAQ on keyboards with 12 pitches to your more
scholarly effort.

Joseph:

Yes, I do believe that the tuning of the subsemitones was not fixed beforehand.
There is a similar phenomena in Javanese music, where altered tones, _miring_,
are used in slendro. Some musicians describe them as borrowed from a parallel
pelog scale, or in terms of western minor, but most players don't speak of them
in fixed terms, they just sing or play them. The coincidence with a parallel
pelog or minor scale is a happy one, and may be useful, but it's not the origin
of the tones.

Etc:

I would like to add just one point about reading Zarlino, or about reading any
theorist, for that matter. Claims to have invented or discovered something in
music theory, for example Zarlino describing his 1/4 comma MT as "new", appear
all too frequently in the theoretical literature. It is tremendously difficult
to verify such claims, other than to note that it appears to be the first
written record or first uncontroversial record, etc., and to evaluate conpeting
claims with great discretion.

If the full-time theorists on the list will oblige me for a moment, theorists
are often the musical world's equivalent of snake oil salesmen (please excuse me
if I keep the following in gender specific terms: "snake oil salesperson" just
doesn't carry the same sting). Reading Zarlino has often struck me as not unlike
listening to a virtuoso pitchman on a roll. Theorists make their living by
offering practical tools to people who want to make music. Ultimately logic,
practicality, and aesthetic quality will have out over mystification and undue
complication, and questions of precendence will be less meaningful than evidence
of quality. However, the theorist seems inevitably to have the need to dress his
wares with claims of priority and the cloak of a mysterious complexity, that can
only be unravelled by him. For only then can he make his audience curious enough
to put out enough money to buy his book or enroll in his conservatory.

So, to all, when encountering music theorists, _caveat emptor_, and be warned
that for every Ptolemy or Ervin Wilson, doing honest, solid work with modesty
and generosity, there is also a Schillinger or Russell ready to sell you a piece
of work with tremendous style but questionable utility.

Daniel Wolf

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

/tuning/topicId_19882.html#19882

> Margo:
>
> Your response to Ibo Ortgies makes a lot of sense to me. I will
also happily cede my half-hearted alternative FAQ on keyboards with
12
pitches to your more scholarly effort.
>
> Joseph:
>
> Yes, I do believe that the tuning of the subsemitones was not fixed
beforehand. There is a similar phenomena in Javanese music, where
altered tones, _miring_, are used in slendro. Some musicians describe
them as borrowed from a parallel pelog scale, or in terms of western
minor, but most players don't speak of them in fixed terms, they just
sing or play them. The coincidence with a parallel pelog or minor
scale is a happy one, and may be useful, but it's not the origin of
the tones.

Thank you, Daniel, for your response. It is clear that Margo
Schulter's article on this subject is really the "ne plus ultra..."
on the topic... I'm glad Robert Walker has already added it to the
FAQ.

I "take back" ANY reservations I had at one point about the FAQ. I
have been learning so much in discussing these topics that it is
turning out, already, to be extremely valuable!!!

Regarding the clausula endings, etc., it seemed from the Schulter
article to be somewhat of a "chicken and the egg" phenominon. The
advent of the keyboards using "extended" chains of fifths and the
"semitonal" motion seems to be happening concurrently...

Perhaps it is impossible, or even irrelevant to try to determine
"which came first..." (??)

Ms. Schulter makes it clear, though, that these linear PRACTICES
certainly "reinforced" any keyboards or tuning systems that used
"additional" fifths to the original eight....

I would like to thank both of your for contributing to our (well,
certainly MY) education on this fundamental topic.

And, surely, it *IS* fundamental... Maybe so "fundamental" as to be
"unsettling..." (??)

Is that why this is rarely taught in school?? I remember taking at
least TWO courses in Medieval music that never touched on these
details (!!)

_________ _______ ______ ____
Joseph Pehrson