For Joe Pehrson and John deLaubenfels -- on history

Hello, there, Joe Pehrson, and thank you for your response to my
article, which encourages me to emphasize my agreement with an
important point you make about early European music, and also to
comment on the adaptive tuning interpretations of later music by John
deLaubenfels, and on the definition of "early music" itself.

First, some of your comments may suggest to me that we may share a
tendency to be interested in new interpretations or offshoots of
"familiar" music. For me, European medieval and Renaissance music has
been my main "Top 40" for well over 30 years -- or just about 35
years, since it was the fall of 1966 that a high school course in
music appreciation, actually European music history, made me fall in
love first with the 16th century, then with medieval styles.

Thus a 14th-century cadence for me is like "V7-I" for someone trained
mainly in the 18th-19th century European tradition. Maybe it's human
to look for new angles on the familiar, intonational or otherwise.

However, I want strongly to affirm that _really_ "straight" medieval
performances, or performances along historical lines as best as we can
discern them, are still an emerging art, and a most precious one.

About 30 years ago, for example, one musicologist wrote that he had
not heard ensembles performing medieval repertory in Pythagorean,
because they didn't want to be considered "out of tune"!

Over the last decade or a bit more, Pythagorean intonation for
13th-14th century repertory, _and_ meantone or some kind of
approximate 5-limit JI for the Renaissance, have been gaining in
appreciation; but it's still an ongoing process.

There's still that tantalizing, question, also: in a "straight" view,
what kind of "microintervals" might have been used in Italian
14th-century polyphony? One historical ensemble, Mala Punica, is known
for its use of these intervals, and one could cite an historical basis
for at least _considering_ such practices from Marchettus of Padua in
the early 14th century to Johannes Ciconia around its end, who remarks
that there are concepts such as thirdtones or quartertones.

We could also consider possible cross-cultural influences, for example
from Near Eastern tuning systems; certainly many of the instruments
came via that route, and some 14th-century Italian instrumental pieces
suggest such influences. A place like Cyprus around 1400, where the
French court produced some complex polyphony typical of this
"Manneristic" epoch, might raise open intonational questions.

For me, there is something of a distinction between performing
historical music of this era, and composing or improvising new music
in similar styles.

For the historical repertory, if I do something clearly
"nonhistorical," I want to give a disclaimer, so that people can
appreciate at least arguably "authentic" period practice and also my
likely deviations from it. Each has its place.

For my own music, I feel to take whatever direction seems best, for
example using regular temperaments with fifths wider than pure, or
using tunings like 20-tET or 13-tET not exactly either historical, or
"conventional" even by _neo_-Gothic standards.

My concern is that people not assume that 20-tET is a "medieval"
tuning system, or that something like 24-note Pythagorean or a similar
tuning with the two 12-note chains a 64:63 apart is representative of
14th-century practice.

There is a somewhat unclear line here: how about using a
Pythagorean-based tuning system with pure ratios of 2-3-7-9 to
_simulate_ on keyboard what flexible intonation just _might_ have been
like in some epochs and places during the 14th century?

The hypothesis of mostly Pythagorean-like intonation, but with some
cadential sixth sonorities tuned around 7:9:12 (around 0-435-933
cents), _could_ approximate what some 14th-century ensemble somewhere
may have done. WIthout tapes or CD's from that era, it's a more or
less educated guess, likely influenced in part by how much one likes a
7:9:12 sonority.

Of course, liking 7:9:12 has its own intonational politics, so to
speak. It's a kind of declaration, or fashion statement, that there's
more ways than one to "optimize the thirds" from a "small-integer JI"
perspective, and also maybe implies that one loves the kind of cadence
that this sonority often implies in a 14th-century setting.

At some point, however, we get outside of "historically plausible
practice," and into new music based on traditional ingredients. The
line may sometimes be hard to draw, but it's there.

I'm enthusiastically in favor of creativity on both sides of the line,
but I am concerned that intonationally and otherwise musically
"authentic" performances of the historical repertory be available, and
also that other things are identified as other things -- including the
ones that I delight in coming up with.

Now for the definition of "early music" in the Western European
tradition, and also a view of the justly famed adaptive tunings of
John deLaubenfels.

In the early 14th century, _Ars Antiqua_ or the "Old Art" meant mainly
the 13th century, and sometimes especially its later portion, in
contrast to the modern _Ars Nova_ or "New Art." That might be
comparable today to defining "Early Music" as the Beatles, or maybe
Bartok and Stravinsky.

In the mid-16th century, similarly, it would seem that "older music"
might mean the Franco-Flemish style of the later 15th and early 16th
century, for example Ockeghem or Josquin -- here I'm considering
someone like Zarlino, for whom Adrian Willaert was the "modern"
model.

The Academy of Ancient Music in 18th-century England specialized in
the 16th century, with great enthusiasm for composers such as Marenzio
and Gesualdo. Let's call this about 150-200 years of distance in time.

When I was getting started in the late 1960's, "Early Music" might
mean "up through Bach," while "really early" suggested something like
a modal/tonal distinction, putting us at least before the later 17th
century.

Now, in some circles, "Early Music" seems to mean "something other
than 'business as usual,'" which I guess could mean anything from
Beethoven done in an unequal well-temperament or the like, to an
authentic early 20th-century performance of quartertone music on
piano.

Anyway, as I was observing with medieval music, just what might be
"authentic" for the 18th century might also be debated, especially if
"unconventional" 18th-century views are admitted.

Thus Leonhard Euler's view that 4:5:6:7 is a desirable tuning of a
dominant seventh chord, and one to which artificial instruments (by
which I mean simply instruments other than human voices) might be
adopted, could serve as an historical basis for your 7-limit
interpretations, John.

This isn't to say that Euler in 1764 is presenting a prevalent,
generally accepted, or commonly implemented opinion, only that he does
take the dominant seventh chord as inviting a more "consonant" tuning,
a tuning for which performers might strive.

There is a certain distinction, Joe, which I might also make: when the
standard or orthodox "historical" interpretations are
well-established, then some more unconventional readings are
especially welcome, and here the chance may be minimal that people
would confuse the new interpretation with the "historically correct"
one.

When the historical range of documented or plausibly inferred period
interpretations is less well-known, then getting out "straight"
performances may take one top priority, along with "unconventional"
interpretations which I'd want to identify as in that category.

Here the music itself is "new" for many listeners, so the freshness of
the "authentic" intonational colors (maybe over a certain range of
interpretations) is indeed something to relish, as you rightly say.

This shouldn't inhibit new music in similar styles, which can also
build interest in the original historical repertories; if I sought to
delay doing any neo-Gothic music until the Gothic style itself were
well-known, that might mean waiting quite awhile (despite the dramatic
expansion of performances and recordings relative to 40 years ago).

Nor should it exclude new interpretations of the original repertories;
but I must admit that in performing this music, I'd want to have quite
an emphasis on fairly "straight" Pythagorean interpretations before
getting into a great deal of the more offbeat readings. Yes, I might
use a cadential 7:9:12 sonority here and there, but would mainly want
people to discover the beauty of the usual 64:81:108 version (a
rounded 0-408-906 cents) with its "classic" medieval balance and
excitement.

John, your situation is a bit different: the typical listener, I'd
guess, has often heard what you're doing in "standard"
interpretations, so there's maximum opportunity for diversity with a
minimum risk of confusion.

Of course, in some cases, your interpretations might be _closer_ to
period practice than what people are used to in a setting where 12-tET
is often taken as the historical default for music suggesting meantone
or some unequal temperament.

One approach here might be to mix performances in fixed
well-temperaments (the "historically authentic" side) with those in
adaptive tunings of various kinds: a great educational project to let
people hear period tunings _and_ new ones.

Thanks to both of your for sharing ideas, and music, inviting comments
from many directions.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net

Thanks for this thoughtful post, Margo. I very much agree that all
interpretations of music should be carefully labeled. When I joined
this list in early 1999, after having been playing with real-time
adaptive tuning for several years in isolation, I was stunned to find
that 4:5:6:7 dominant 7th chords are, shall we say, controversial. Of
course, I didn't stop using them in my favorite treatments, but I hope
it is clear they're my own, unhistorical, interpretations.

Even adaptive 5-limit tunings of keyboard works cannot be justified on
a historical basis.

>Thus Leonhard Euler's view that 4:5:6:7 is a desirable tuning of a
>dominant seventh chord, and one to which artificial instruments (by
>which I mean simply instruments other than human voices) might be
>adopted, could serve as an historical basis for your 7-limit
>interpretations, John.

>This isn't to say that Euler in 1764 is presenting a prevalent,
>generally accepted, or commonly implemented opinion, only that he does
>take the dominant seventh chord as inviting a more "consonant" tuning,
>a tuning for which performers might strive.

If I had to pick one person as an ally, it might well be him; he's one
of the real geniuses of history. Still, even if he had spoken out
vehemently _against_ 4:5:6:7, I'd still do what I do. Do you know if
Euler ever got a chance to _hear_ the sounds he advocated?

>John, your situation is a bit different: the typical listener, I'd
>guess, has often heard what you're doing in "standard"
>interpretations, so there's maximum opportunity for diversity with a
>minimum risk of confusion.

I agree. Of course it is still my responsibility to label carefully.

>Of course, in some cases, your interpretations might be _closer_ to
>period practice than what people are used to in a setting where 12-tET
>is often taken as the historical default for music suggesting meantone
>or some unequal temperament.

Yes; for example, the keyboard and flute pieces by CPE Bach and JC Bach
that Robert Walker put me onto, become adaptively tuned in a very
meantone-like way, and might sound more "normal" to people of that time,
than would the 12-tET performances that are more common today. I would
bet money on that assertion, if fact, if only it could be tested!

>One approach here might be to mix performances in fixed
>well-temperaments (the "historically authentic" side) with those in
>adaptive tunings of various kinds: a great educational project to let
>people hear period tunings _and_ new ones.

Agreed. When I make CD's of my treatments, I often include each work
twice, once in 12-tET and once in some sort of adaptive tuning.
Substituting well-temperament for 12-tET would certainly be an option.
Or, when appropriate, fixed meantone vs. adaptive tuning.

Naturally I want to encourage you, Margo, to pursue the tuning
variations, such as 7:9:12, that you have found to be interesting, if
not completely historical. As you rightly point out, the authentic and
the new complement each other nicely.

So when is a CD of some of your work coming out? ;-)

JdL

Margo to John:
>Of course, in some cases, your interpretations might be _closer_ to
>period practice than what people are used to in a setting where 12-
tET
>is often taken as the historical default for music suggesting
meantone
>or some unequal temperament.

John:
Yes; for example, the keyboard and flute pieces by CPE Bach and JC
Bach
that Robert Walker put me onto, become adaptively tuned in a very
meantone-like way, and might sound more "normal" to people of that
time,
than would the 12-tET performances that are more common today. I
would
bet money on that assertion, in fact, if only it could be tested!

Bob Wendell:
As many in this list are probably already aware, I very much agree
with this idea of a certain flexibility in what we consider
"authentic" or "historically informed" performance. I much prefer the
latter term, since there is implied in it a certain honesty and
admission of less than complete certainty as to what "authetic" might
actually be.

Taking the written evidence from a few great musicians of the times
and deciding that it represents a "gospel" of the common practice of
the day is something I wouldn't consider terribly reliable. We can
take cues from it, but it seems to me we need to consider certain
global features implicit in the evidence more seriously, rather than
every "jot and tittle" of written text.

For example, why is it not perfectly valid to note that the tuning
systems and writings about them after meantones began to dominate
reflect a clear preoccupation with the purity of harmonic intervals?
Just looking at the temperaments in themselves is, in my view, a very
narrow angle vision of what might have actually been going on.

As opposed to current commom practice, keyboard musicians tuned their
own instruments frequently, often before every performance and even
during performance when the music demanded a new key a fifth or so
further in either direction from the playable keys of the moment.
This indicates an important general characteristic of those musical
cultures. They were continually exposed to finer, microtonal pitch
discrepancies that common practice musicians of today never have to
confront.

To me this indicates a cultural abundance of intonationally very
sensitive, well-trained ears on a wide scale. This in turn would
likely imply that flexibly pitched instrumentalists and singers also
shared such senstivity. Once musically talented ears have been
exposed to the joys of pure harmonic intervals (i.e., JI intervals),
my experience indicates strongly that they tend to favor them
intuitively.

This in turn might imply that adaptive JI was a norm among singers
and other flexibly-pitched performers in these periods. I like to
view meantone temperaments as adaptive JI "frozen" for keyboard use.
To turn around and take writings from period musicians concerning
their views on keyboard temperaments and apply that as the "gospel
according to nostro Signor Fetuccini" or whomever regarding the
common practice of the singers and instrumentalists of the day is, I
think, at the very least myopic and at worst totally "bass-ackwards"
as we used to say in Tennessee.

From: mschulter <MSCHULTER@V...>
Date: Thu Oct 25, 2001 2:59 am
Subject: For Joe Pehrson and John deLaubenfels -- on history

Margo:
There is a somewhat unclear line here: how about using a
Pythagorean-based tuning system with pure ratios of 2-3-7-9 to
_simulate_ on keyboard what flexible intonation just _might_ have been
like in some epochs and places during the 14th century?

The hypothesis of mostly Pythagorean-like intonation, but with some
cadential sixth sonorities tuned around 7:9:12 (around 0-435-933
cents), _could_ approximate what some 14th-century ensemble somewhere
may have done. WIthout tapes or CD's from that era, it's a more or
less educated guess, likely influenced in part by how much one likes a
7:9:12 sonority.

Of course, liking 7:9:12 has its own intonational politics, so to
speak. It's a kind of declaration, or fashion statement, that there's
more ways than one to "optimize the thirds" from a "small-integer JI"
perspective, and also maybe implies that one loves the kind of cadence
that this sonority often implies in a 14th-century setting.

At some point, however, we get outside of "historically plausible
practice," and into new music based on traditional ingredients. The
line may sometimes be hard to draw, but it's there.

Bob Wendell:
I like the idea of experimenting with possibilities, hypotheses about
possible intonational scenarios in the flexibly-pitched world of
music. Two stories (real, though) come to mind.

One is that some ancient instruments no longer exist even as relics,
so they have been recreated from drawings, written descriptions,
statuary from medieval times, and current knowledge concerning how
other, related stringed instruments were built and about the science
of their acoustic functioning. Armed with this combination of
informational sources, modern replicas were built that are at worst
very close to authentic.

But no one knew exactly how they were played. Some general sense of
that was gained from surviving texts, drawings and statuary. The rest
came from musicians experienced with related instruments using their
natural musical instincts to figure out what worked musically within
the context of what is known about period styles.

In a word, the instruments taught their players how to play them and
very interesting instrumental capabilities came to light that no one
had predicted would. However, there was a high degree of confidence
that the ancient musicians who had once played them would have
inevitably evolved the same techniques just from simple exposure over
time to the instruments' characeristics.

Another story comes from archeology and has only a metaphorical
relationship to the first story. Some archeologists at the University
of Pennsylvania had been studying for some time the highly successful
agricultural techniques of the Incas and other South American
indigenous populations. They had some rough ideas about some of the
general features of this agriculture and some tools from their digs.

One of the professors had the idea of simply handing over modern
replicas of the tools discovered to the modern descendants of their
original users and turning them loose in a vague, general
reproduction of the agricultural patterns they suspected might have
existed and let them work it out from there.

What they discovered was amazing. Using these tools to sculpt the
earth, a highly sophisticated method of agriculture evolved that was
sustainable and used environmental factors with astounding efficiency
to aid in crop production. The discoveries that came out of this
included the use of natural algae that grew in between raised squares
of planted earth to fertilize the crops. Multiple irrigation,
fertilization, and harvesting problems were elegantly resolved with
the method, which has become a model for agricultural methods in
other appropriate geographical areas.

The point of saying all this is that there is more to understanding
what "authentic" really is than reading what some few people wrote
about it. Paper is flat and reality is multi-dimensional. Human
awareness and its intuitive interactions with these dimensions is
even more so. We artists especially should be able to understand this
and apply it to our own domains.

I used these stories to make these points because I have advanced
this argument before, but using less concrete means of communication
with rather disappointlingly limited success. I wanted to take this
opportunity to clarify earliers posts a bit. I hope I've been at
least mildly successful.

--- In tuning@y..., BobWendell@t... wrote:

> I used these stories to make these points because I have advanced
> this argument before, but using less concrete means of
communication
> with rather disappointlingly limited success. I wanted to take this
> opportunity to clarify earliers posts a bit. I hope I've been at
> least mildly successful.

Well, Bob, to the extent this may be in reference to some
disagreements we may have had in the past, I'd have to tell you that
my judgments are a holistic and synergistic blend of the historical
evidence and my own aesthetic experiences (I'd rather substitute a
word closer to "life" with all that that entails) with the relevant
style of music, rather than just being a flat, deaf, dumb appeal to
something someone may have written down centuries ago. In fact, if I
had no knowledge of the history whatsoever, I do believe my aesthetic
reaction (again, too limiting a word) would be quite the same, though
understanding a bit about the evolution of Western music does, I
believe, allow one to sometimes partake in a "higher-dimensional"
perspective on certain issues which a frozen-in-time mentality might
miss out on.

Looking forward to your reaction to "Sethares strikes back",
Paul

--- In tuning@y..., mschulter <MSCHULTER@V...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_29530.html#29530
>
>
> However, I want strongly to affirm that _really_ "straight" medieval
> performances, or performances along historical lines as best as we
can discern them, are still an emerging art, and a most precious one.
>
> About 30 years ago, for example, one musicologist wrote that he had
> not heard ensembles performing medieval repertory in Pythagorean,
> because they didn't want to be considered "out of tune"!
>
> Over the last decade or a bit more, Pythagorean intonation for
> 13th-14th century repertory, _and_ meantone or some kind of
> approximate 5-limit JI for the Renaissance, have been gaining in
> appreciation; but it's still an ongoing process.
>

Thank you so very much, Margo, for this valuable insight! I guess
I'm really not involved enough in Early Music performance practices
to appreciate this "evolution" fully...

It's hard to believe that ensembles are still playing Medieval and
Renaissance music in 12-tET, but that seems to be what you are
implying... I guess it really isn't all *that* surprising, the more
I think of it: I managed to take several courses in both Medieval
and Renaissance music back in the mid-1970's, early '80s
and "alternate" tuning to 12-tET was never discussed *once* as we
analyzed all the scores from those periods, so that could be a good
indication! :)

________ ________ ______
Joseph Pehrson