Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning microtonality in Griffiths's book

[Paul Erlich, TD 207.16]
>
> Johnny Reinhard wrote,
>
>> Mr. Griffiths is decidedly
>> anti-microtonal based on his previous writings in The New Yorker
>
> Apparently, the most common textbooks on 20th century music
> are the one (or two) by Paul Griffiths and the one by Robert
> Morgan. The two differ widely in their coverage of microtonal
> music; while the former contains none (if I recall correctly),
> the latter goes into enough depth that even Blackwood gets a
> paragraph.

I'm not familiar with Morgan's book (citation please?), but
I have Griffiths, 1981, _Modern Music: the avant-garde since 1945_.

He does indeed discuss microtonality a bit, altho not in enough
detail to offer any real intonational insight, but I still find
it very interesting, because these are composers who are not
often discussed in microtonal forums (fora?).

In fact, I had intended a few weeks ago, during the 'serialism'
discussion, to bring up his mention of Pousseur's and Boulez's
microtonal pieces, but I was busy working on my _Spider_ piece.
So at least my re-reading of Griffiths is still fresh in my mind.

Here are a few selections:

[Griffiths, p 171]
>
> The experimental tradition (not so much a contradiction in terms
> as perhaps it should be) goes back to the music produced by Cage
> and his associates in the early 1950s, and perhaps still further
> to the work of other American composers who were unencumbered by
> European notions of what a musical composition should be: Cowell,
> Partch and Ives.

[Griffiths, p 176]
>
> [La Monte Young's] scrupulous selection of frequency structures
> with reference to their supposed moods, for example, bears
> comparison with an Indian musician's attitude to the raga.
> However, his insistence on just intonation suggests a link with
> Partch, and his readiness to confine himself to a narrow range of
> possibilities makes him a central figure among contemporary
> American and English minimalists, many of whom have been
> influenced by him.

That's all Griffiths has to say about Partch. I know Paul Erlich
is a Partch fan, so perhaps that's why he didn't recall Griffiths's
other references to microtonal compositions. Here they are:

[Griffiths, p 46]
>
> Exactly what the future might hold was suggested by Boulez in
> his notorious obituary 'Schoenberg is Dead', in which, after
> again roundly condemning the late master's defunct forms and
> other evidence of backsliding, he went on to propose that:
>
> [Boulez]
>> Perhaps we could enlarge the field of 12-tone composition to
>> include other intervals than the semitone: micro-intervals,
>> irregular intervals, complex sounds.
>
> This was an area in which exploration had already begun. The
> mention of 'complex sounds' is a reference to the concept of
> 'aggregates' developed by Cage (tho not, of course, used by him
> in a serial manner), while Boulez himself had applied serial
> procedures to quarter-tones in _Le visage nuptial_ and had
> communicated his interest to Henri Pousseur, who reacted to
> his influence first with the Webernian _Trois chants sacres_
> for soprano and string trio (1951) and then with _Prospections_
> for 3 pianos tuned at sixth-tone distances (1952). But the most
> pervasively influential thought was that which came next in
> Boulez's article: [total serialism].

[Griffiths, p 198]
>
> And the third _Improvisation sur Mallarme_ [by Boulez] clearly
> shows both aspects of his borrowing for the East: the material
> in its long sustained sounds, its heterophonies for homogenous
> percussive groupings (2 xylophones, 3 harps, etc.) and its
> immense opening soprano melisma delicately inflected with
> quarter-tones; the formal in its provision of alternatives
> and its loosening of temporal coordination among overlapping
> blocks.

[Griffiths, p 215]
>
> In addressing himself to his other great 20th-century predecessor
> [Schoenberg was the first one], Stravinsky, Pousseur has remarked
> that before that composer's harmony can be adequately described
>
> [Pousseur]
>> we will have to wait for the search for (if not the discovery of)
>> a much more general harmonic system which will allow us to
>> integrate the chromatic harmony of the Viennese as well as the
>> more consonant harmonies of our history, including all the
>> attempts of preserial music, and to open the way to envisioning
>> the integration of extra-European harmonies, as well as the
>> opening up (now partially reclosing) of possibilities which are
>> new by virtue of their very material (non-tempered scales,
>> relationships of "harmonic" containing primary factors greater
>> than 5; micro-intervals: all things whose exploration *does* to
>> my knowledge absolutely require the aid of *simple consonances*,
>
> this grand design of harmonic integration being sparked off by a
> consideration of _Agon_. Pousseur's _Racine 19_ for cello (1977)
> marks a step in the exploration of the new possibilities of which
> he writes, using as it does an equal-tempered scale of 19
> intervals to the octave; but his richest and most consistent
> attempts at general harmonic integration have come in _Die
> Erprobung [des Petrus Hebraicus (1974)]_ and in two homages to
> Stravinsky: _L'effacement du Prince Igor_ for orchestra and
> _Stravinsky au futur_ for voice, solo instrument, ensemble and
> electronics (both 1971). [Griffiths goes on to discuss these two
> works in some detail; apparently they are not microtonal]

[Griffiths, p 168]
>
> Another work by [Charles] Dodge, his _Extensions_ for trumpet and
> tape (1973), cleverly joins the live and recorded forces by using
> the same principle, that of equally dividing the pitch space, in
> both. Thus the free-flowing trumpet line emphasizes tritones,
> 3rds and 2nds, these being equal divisions of the octave, while
> the computer-generated tape scans across in wide glissandos,
> gradually accumulating further equal divisions of its own
> pitch space so that the original 16 regularly spaced tones have
> become 1024 by the end.

(Dodge, a very inventive composer with a great sense of humor
in his pieces, was one of my teachers, in fact, the only one
who was supportive of my explorations in microtonality.)

[Griffiths, p 78-79]
>
> The following spring [1953] he [Stockhausen] returned to Cologne,
> where Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer had begun experiments in
> electronic music at the radio station. There he found the
> equipment which enabled him to create the first sine-tone
> composition, his _Studie I_ (1953), in which each sound is
> constructed from up to six pure frequencies taken from a table
> based on the proportions 48 : 20 : 25 : 15 5/8 : 37 1/2 : 30,
> that sequence being derived from the frequency ratios in the
> interval succession of falling minor 10th (12:5), rising major
> 3rd (4:5), falling minor 6th (8:5), rising minor 10th (5:12),
> falling major 3rd (5:4). For example, the first sound of the
> piece contains the frequencies 1920 Hz, 800 Hz, 1000 Hz and
> 625 Hz, which, it will be observed, express the relations among
> the first four members of the proportion sequence. And the
> same sequence governs the rhythmic construction, so that, for
> example, the first sound occupies 1920 mm of tape (at a speed
> of 762 mm per second), the second 800 mm. Other six-unit series,
> made up of the whole numbers from one to six, determine the
> number of sine tones packaged into each sound, the intensities
> of the components, the dynamic curve applied to the sound and
> the durations of pauses. nothing could better illustrate
> Stockhausen's will to achieve a perfect image of unity.
>
> However, the sine tones obstinately failed to get into the
> hoped-for new timbres, and so in his next electronic composition,
> _Studie II_ (1954), he tried a different technique. The piece
> is again based on an artificial frequency gamut, this time a
> simpler one of 81 frequencies each related to the next by the
> ratio 1:5^(1/25) [i.e., '25th root of 5', the notation of which
> I can't reproduce in ASCII] (approximately 1:1.07); this is an
> octave-less scale with a constant interval between adjacent
> frequencies of slightly more than a semitone [more accurately,
> the ratio is ~1:1.0665 = ~111.453 cents, Griffiths's inaccuracy
> probably reflecting his general non-interest in microtonality].
> From the scale Stockhausen draws 193 'note mixtures', each
> containing five sine tones, and these constitute the work's
> repertory of sounds. But instead of simply superposing the sine
> tones, as he had in _Studie I_, Stockhausen spliced together each
> group of five, played the recording in resonant space, and then
> recorded the reverberation of the mixture. This brought more
> fusion than had the earlier procedure, but again the work's
> success in generating unified timbres is modest.

Joseph L. Monzo monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
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microtonality in Griffiths's book

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