Re: Why 12 notes ... ?

Hello, there, everyone.

To Dan Wolf:

Please let me strongly urge you _not_ to deprive FAQ readers of the
benefits of your discussion of the "Why 12" question, including the
scholarship of Diether de la Motte, someone whose historical viewpoint and
engaging style I deeply respect and enjoy; you do a great service to this
List and the FAQ readership by making his writings so conveniently
accessible and better known to a trans-Atlantic audience. It's an honor to
have my views included _along_ with such material, each statement having
its own viewpoint and perspective.

How "Why 12?" might be answered from the perspective of the age of
Josquin around 1500 is an approach bringing into play lots of ideas:
octave-species, counterpoint, cadences and accidentals from the
perspective of that era, and so forth. As Thomas Morley said, there
are "more roads to the wood than one."

This FAQ needs a plurality of voices, and the "Why 12?" question is
maybe a bit like one of those madrigal texts or cantus firmus theme
for a Mass which musicians take delight in setting and then comparing
their settings, sometimes in the process creating anthologies which
have come down to us. Neither Ockeghem's _Petite camusette_ nor
Josquin's is a substitute for the other; and this FAQ question also
invites "settings" in different styles.

The topics you (and de la Motte) present are vital background for various
parts of the FAQ: Renaissance meantone, the 16th-century syntonic diatonic
JI systems, vocal intonations, modes, and so forth.

Of course, we could both take a look at our drafts to coordinate them,
but overlap might not be bad either: some things can be quite useful
to have said more than once, especially with alternative explanations
from different viewpoints (maybe some readers will follow one most
easily, other readers another). I certainly need to "debug" some items
and revise my draft anyway.

For example, there's what a programmer might consider analogous to a
"fencepost-counting problem": I say that "Eb-C#" is a "ten-note" chain
when its a ten-fifth (but 11 note!) chain.

Joseph Pehrson: Thank you for your encouragement, and I'd emphasize
how indebted we all are to Ervin Wilson for his MOS concept. If the
"Why 12?" question is an opportunity to introduce it and get the
reader curious, so much the better.

Your questions are invaluable, and I hope that I addressed the
accidental question a bit. Daniel Wolf maybe gave my own sense of this
pretty well: the extra notes are just "there," and I use them when it
seems right (or when the original version or an editor's suggestion
that I agree with indicates). Repeating the same passage with
different accidentals is something that happens in some tablatures,
and it can add pleasing variety at times.

People have said that the kind of performer's discretion in this music
is maybe like that in jazz: accidentals are a kind of dialogue between
composer and performer, with lots of room for taste and choice. Robert
Toft's book is one of the best and most detailed studies of this -- it
has lots of theory, and lots of practice.

Dan Stearns: First, thanks for your gracious words on the "What is
microtonality?" FAQ, which I was reflecting on today while testing out
some curious theoretical concepts about regular tunings. Your posts
and viewpoints -- not mention your scale-construction techniques and
concepts which can be highly contagious -- have added immensely to my
own views on this question, but something in your voice might much
enrich the FAQ.

As far as "out-of-tune," I'd say that there's no such thing as an
interval out of tune, only the right interval sounded at the wrong
time.

Similarly, a "tuning error" is a tuning variation in an other than
desired context.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net