to Joe Pehrson

Hi Joe and list members.

I was out of reach of computers for a week, and returned to find quite a lot on my
plate here at the Tuning List. Despite the occasional hostilities and personal
attacks, I am still extremely grateful for the thought that some of you are giving to
the ideas my essay. It is important to me to respond to some of you, but it will
take me a few days to get it all out, because of limited time and internet access, so
I hope you'll bear with me.

In response to your message number 38366, here goes:

>By the way, I always hate it when people portentously (and rather
>pompously) insist on labeling music the true this and that. How is
>that, indeed, any different from the True Believer's assertionsof Just Intonation??

>In this carnage, Julia manages to claim that Penderecki, Xenakis,
>Ligeti and Bartok are not using "real, true" microtonality.
>Penderecki, Xenakis and Ligeti because the usage is part of some
>larger structure that does not feature specific intervals, and Bartok
>because the usage is "elaborative." Now, please, who is the
>judge of all this?? Julia Werntz, I guess. Come on. Penderecki and
>Xenakis use wild non-twelvulated microtonality (who's ever heard
>of "microtonalism") and, in particular, Xenakis created this
>music from GLISSANDI, the ULTIMATE microtonal sound!!!! What BS.

>And, on the other hand, who is really to say that Bartok, who
>emulates FOLK MUSIC in his work is not using microtonality? Come
>on. Folk music is microtonal! It's not 12-equal, what is it??

When I used phrases such as "true microtonality" or "genuine microtonality" in
this part of the essay I was not using them to mean "virtuous" or "good", but to
mean "actual," and I described why I was making such a distinction. There was no
*value* judgement about the music, or its use of microtones, no carnage, only an
attempt to clarify what a composer is really, "truly" going after. I felt this was
clear, though I admit there isn't too much soft padding in the language of the essay.

List members certainly must have their own disagreements over this and other
terms. In the essay I exclude certain music which uses "other" pitches from the
term "microtonality" for reasons which seem semantic, but which do enable a
clearer vision of the underlying premise of the type of microtonality I go on to
describe in detail in Part 2. We who have been raised with 12-note ET have as our
point of reference the ET semitone - "half" of an ET "tone." "Microtones" (or
"microintervals") in this context, then, would be intervals smaller than a semitone,
and for clarity's sake I point out that if a composer is not using these
microintervals in such a way that they can be distintcly heard, and be functional in
the voice-leading, as in some works by Xenakis, then it is something other than
microtonality. (But I never say they shouldn't be doing it!) I might call the field in
which many of you specialize "tuning." Which is what many of you call it, and is the
name of your list.

As for Bartok and folk music: I frequently want to correct people when they say
certain folk music is microtonal. (Though I don't ususally bother.) Some folk music
uses different pitches, and this is often extremely exciting and inspiring to hear, at
least for me, and some types of folk music also involve a lot of pitch bending,
which is also magical. I just don't think "microtones" is exactly the right word for it.
(Though I admit sometimes when listening to Greek folk or liturgical music, or
classical Turkish music, with my Greek husband I 'll say "Mmm...Listen to those
micro's!")

That said, independently of the purpose of this particular part of my essay, I'm
really not attatched to this, or any, term, and feel no need to own it. (In fact,
socially, sometimes it's a drag. How many times have I felt a sense of absurdity
when answering the question, esp. from non-musicians, "And what kind of music do
you write?" with "Um... microtonal...")

For the record, I think some of the music of Xenakis, Penderecki and Ligeti is
extremely powerful. I just don't consider the examples I cite to be microtonality in
the sense I described above. (Nor would they, I think...) And I enjoy a lot of
Bartok's music as well.

>The assumption is that any composer trying for just intonation
>effects in his/her music is going to write, by necessity, a kind of
>puerile triadic pabulum. Now, what is that assumption based upon?
>According to Julia, it's due to the fact that just intonation
>composers would only use a very limited palette, since any larger-
>integer ratios would not be acceptably free from beating for use by
>the initiated. So, in this scenario, where do we place a composer
>like La Monte Young, who uses upper-limit JI? Where do we really
>place Lou Harrison, one of the greatest composers of our time (value
>judgment) with all the multiplicity of approaches he's shown over
>the years. Where do we place Ben Johnston, with the intricate
>complexity and upper-relations of his splendid and AUDIBLE, AUDIBLE,
>AUDIBLE music with higher-limit partials?? No, this makes absolutely
>no sense whatsoever.

But I never, ever, wrote or implied that "any composer trying for just intonation
effects in his/her music is going to write, by necessity, a kind of
puerile triadic pabulum." I wrote "...just intontion, if truly adhered to in order to
maintain the indisputably simple consonant language harmonic language that is the
credo (i.e. using the ratios 2/1, 3/2 and 5/4, and maybe 7/4), also limits the
composer stylistically to a sparse, triadic idiom." And I outline why I believe why
the practice of "upper limit JI," as you call it, seems to run against the fundamental
premise which is the raison d'etre of JI, at least as it is most often and most
publicly stated. And I did mention Lou Harrison and Ben Johnston...

>All these artificial divisions and determinations are really what I
>feel is absolutely the worst part of Julia's essay. I feel there
>is a need to "create copy" by setting up various "straw
>people" and dumping on them.

>Why is all this necessary?

There were two reasons why I wrote Part 1. One practical reason was a perceived
necessity to distinguish between the vastly different types of music which,
confusingly, fall under the same name - microtonality - in order to pave the way
for comprehension of Part 2. Many people have told me this was informative, so I
feel satistfied that I was somewhat successful on this count.

The other, more personal, reason was a need to defend "all non-just musicians of
the world" (and of course, more relevently, practitioners of non-just microtonality,
as well as 12-note ET) against the arguments which are so publicly and convincingly
made, and which are so popular these days. I consider the "rest of us" to be using
what Margo called "found objects" for our art - objects that have been passed on
to us by our respective traditions, regardless of whether one has a highly
developed intellectual understanding of these objects (e.g. someone like Milton
Babbitt) or is a musically illiterate but gifted musician. I felt I needed to defend this
practice in general, and to bring to light the broader implications of statements
made by many prominent JI advocates. The fact that not all of you buy these
arguments (e.g. equal temperament being the musical equivalent to consuming
large amounts of red meat and processed foods and watching violent action films,
to paraphrase the published statement of a very well known practitioner), does not
mean that these arguments do not need to be publicly, prominently challenged.
That "straw man" is not of my creation!

>Regardless, curiously enough, the most interesting thing about
>Julia's article is her musical examples! Her music really
>doesn't look as "academic" as one might surmise by her
>repeated insistence of the avoidance of any low-integer ratio
>harmonic relationships, by serialism or whatever. Actually, the
>short examples of her work seem rather tonal but in the sense of a
l>inear deviation from a tone. This process is also seen in the work
>of her teacher Joe Maneri and in his music, also illustrated, it also
>seems somewhat "anti academic." Why is this?? Because to my
>mind, even though Julia is constantly changing 72-tET pitches in this
>music, she still keeps pretty much linearly to her starting place!
>That establishes a tonal center, in the sense of the presence of a
>frequency range of tones, and it's something for the ear to grasp
>onto!

These last few sentences are extremely interesting for me to read, though I feel
suddenly self-indulgent engaging with such fascination in your remarks on my own
(and Maneri's) music... There would be so much to say about this last point. I had
written an entire extra section about this, about "pitch regions" (as opposed to
single pitches) being established by spanning in localized sections a range of, say, a
quarter-tone or third-tone (in a way that somehow vaguely parallels root
movement in diatonic music). But it was too new to me in my own music to write
conherently about it, so I omitted it. Besides, sometimes I do lean on certain
individual pitches, as well.

I am curious, though: what do you mean by academic? Why do you equate
"anti-academic" with "establishes a tonal center" and "something for the ear to
grasp onto"?

Of course I'm glad not to have my music called "academic," since "academic music"
to *me* means music that has been written to prove something, ususally how
smart the composer is. (And, to be unexpectedly candid for a moment, it is most
often *love* that motivates me when I compose. Not to mention that "smart" is
often far from what I feel when I'm composing.) Music written with that kind of
academic intent is easily identifiable and is tedious. But my antennae do go up when
I hear that word, since it is frequently used also to "throw the baby out with the
bath water," by people who cannot accept the music of, say a Babbitt, or a
Ferneyhough, etc. (As some of you fear I am throwing the more innovative JI
composers out with the bathwater.) I believe that some very beautiful and/or
exciting music has been written in a complex way by very smart people. I like to
feel the gut of the composer in the music, and there are a few musicians whose
guts, whose souls, manifest themselves to a heightened degree via their very busy
minds. (Furthermore, I've heard plenty of academic tonal music. I even wrote
some, in my "tonal writing" course at Brandeis.)

>music that has at least some
>elements of lower-integer ratios is audible resounding music, that
>has a corporal aspect that actually rings in the body and emotions.
>This is the element that is lacking in extended academic serial
>composition, the music that hoards of listeners have rejected time
>and again, and has almost caused if not already caused the death of
>contemporary music among audiences, certainly in this country and to
>a large degree in Europe as well

Could you be more specific? Actually I've heard this type of argument so many
times I don't usually bother, but here we are, discussing things... Is what's wrong
with, say, Babbitt (to use agian a familiar example), that you think he doesn't tune
his thirds and sevenths properly, or that he doesn't have enough (even 12-note ET)
thirds and fifths in his music? Or if it's not Babbitt, could you give some examples
of composers (they ought to be quite numerous, for you to feel so strongly about
it), who, through their negligence of (in your ownwords) "lower-integer ratios"
have"almost caused if not already caused the death of contemporary music among
audiences, certainly in this country and to a large degree in Europe as well"? I
know I sound sarcastic, but really, I'm asking this question in all sincerity. (Besides,
you used the word "B.S." !)

By the way, do you really think: "she has not been gracious *at all* on this forum.
At the very *beginning* she was dismissive. It was a *preemptive* strike by
somebody who obviously doesn't want any criticism."? Do I have to pretend to
back down on certain points here and there in order to prove I can accept
criticism?

-Julia

--- In tuning@y..., "jwerntz2002" <juliawerntz@a...> wrote:
> Hi Joe and list members.
<snip>
>
> -Julia

Hi Julia. I have not been following the controversy closely, so I will not respond to any of your points. However, I would like to hear some of your music. Is there anywhere online I can listen?

John Starrett

--- In tuning@y..., "jwerntz2002" <juliawerntz@a...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#38491

> Hi Joe and list members.

***Hello Julia!

Well, I'm back in New York, but I'm going to stay "nice" this
time! :)

Despite the occasional hostilities and personal
> attacks, I am still extremely grateful for the thought that some of
you are giving to the ideas my essay.

***Well, I studied through it carefully twice, and would also like to
add that the musical *examples* are now on the Perspectives of New
Music Site!:

http://perspectivesofnewmusic.org/soundexx.html

(Don't worry about the XX at the end of this... whoops, sorry, Paul.
Paul wants me to limit my "sophomoric" er.. "humor..." :) )

>>
> When I used phrases such as "true microtonality" or "genuine
microtonality" in this part of the essay I was not using them to
mean "virtuous" or "good", but to mean "actual," and I described why
I was making such a distinction.

***Yes, of course, Julia! That much is clear. However, the
term "microtonality" has a history, and I'm not sure you can
really "redefine" it on a broad scale. As it stands, it *includes*
the usage of Bartok and Xenakis and many others. Maybe you need
another term: "Werntz-fully-implemented" microtonality or some
such. I'm not entirely joking!

> We who have been raised with 12-note ET have as our
> point of reference the ET semitone - "half" of an
ET "tone." "Microtones" (or "microintervals") in this context, then,
would be intervals smaller than a semitone,

***Well, Julia, this list has a *big* history of discussing this
*little* point about the *little.* I don't want to get into it right
now (whew!) but there is no unanimous consensus about this point...

> and for clarity's sake I point out that if a composer is not using
these microintervals in such a way that they can be distintcly heard,
and be functional in the voice-leading, as in some works by Xenakis,
then it is something other than microtonality. (But I never say they
shouldn't be doing it!)

***Yes, but again by the special "Werntz" definition, not by the
*established* definition. Anybody else on this group agree or
disagree?? Group??

> As for Bartok and folk music: I frequently want to correct people
when they say certain folk music is microtonal. (Though I don't
ususally bother.) Some folk music uses different pitches, and this is
often extremely exciting and inspiring to hear, at least for me, and
some types of folk music also involve a lot of pitch bending,
> which is also magical. I just don't think "microtones" is exactly
the right word for it.
> (Though I admit sometimes when listening to Greek folk or
liturgical music, or
> classical Turkish music, with my Greek husband I 'll
say "Mmm...Listen to those micro's!")
>

***Again, Julia, your points are very clear and pretty well taken,
but I'm not sure that one article/dissertation is going to be able to
change generally accepted notions of the term "microtonality..."

(I don't even like the term "fully-implemented" since that seems to
cast a pejorative on the other types. I'm fully serious when I say
it should be called "Werntz-implemented" or "intervallically
implemented" microtonality... *something...* but the basic term can't
be altered by one paper, I don't believe...)

> That said, independently of the purpose of this particular part of
my essay, I'm really not attatched to this, or any, term, and feel
no need to own it. (In fact, socially, sometimes it's a drag. How
many times have I felt a sense of absurdity when answering the
question, esp. from non-musicians, "And what kind of music do
> you write?" with "Um... microtonal...")
>

***Quite frankly, like Paul, I believe you should drop the first part
in future explications. Or, if you include it, just state that this
certain *kind* of microtonality is your *preference* for this and
that reason. Dismissing the other types may *not* be the best
approach...

(I *finally* understood, considering the above, why Paul Erlich
wanted the continuation of this discussion on *metatuning...* It
takes me a while, sometimes... :) )

> For the record, I think some of the music of Xenakis, Penderecki
and Ligeti is extremely powerful. I just don't consider the examples
I cite to be microtonality in the sense I described above.

***Indeed, not...

> But I never, ever, wrote or implied that "any composer trying for
just intonation
> effects in his/her music is going to write, by necessity, a kind of
> puerile triadic pabulum." I wrote "...just intontion, if truly
adhered to in order to
> maintain the indisputably simple consonant language harmonic
language that is the
> credo (i.e. using the ratios 2/1, 3/2 and 5/4, and maybe 7/4), also
limits the
> composer stylistically to a sparse, triadic idiom."

***Ok, so it won't be puerile pabulum, just "limited palette
puerility..." :)

And I outline why I believe why
> the practice of "upper limit JI," as you call it, seems to run
against the fundamental premise which is the raison d'etre of JI,

***Dunno. That could be debated and *has* indeed, on this list...
(probably ad nauseum)

>
> There were two reasons why I wrote Part 1. One practical reason was
a perceived
> necessity to distinguish between the vastly different types of
music which,
> confusingly, fall under the same name - microtonality - in order to
pave the way
> for comprehension of Part 2. Many people have told me this was
informative, so I
> feel satistfied that I was somewhat successful on this count.

***If you will beg my pardon for indulgence, I would "scrub" Part 1
and really "go for" Part II. That's the really significant part,
anyway, and you won't raise so many hackles...

Maybe you can outline the three types of "microtonality" and then
simply state that you prefer your own particular "brand" and that of
Maneri's for such and such a reason... not trying to redefine the
term *microtonality* and say that only one method is the "fully
implemented" one...deserving of that term. Just a thought, presented
in, hopefully, a pleasant manner.

>
> The other, more personal, reason was a need to defend "all non-just
musicians of the world" (and of course, more relevently,
practitioners of non-just microtonality, as well as 12-note ET)
against the arguments which are so publicly and convincingly
> made, and which are so popular these days.

***Well, JI is popular, but lots of other things are popular, too,
and there is far from unanimity on this topic on even *this* list. I
think you will "get more flies with sugar" as they say. More people
would be "won over" to your viewpoint if you simply present it rather
than *contrasting* it with the JI practicioners... I really believe
this. It's part of what Paul E. calls "accentuating the positive"
and I believe he's right there...

> I am curious, though: what do you mean by academic? Why do you
equate "anti-academic" with "establishes a tonal center"
and "something for the ear to grasp onto"?
>

***Yes, Julia, you are right here, and with people like Harry Partch
and, today, Steve Mackey teaching at major colleges, it has no
meaning. I think, as you define it below, we mean more "theoretical"
music designed more to demonstrate a point than for *listening...*

> Of course I'm glad not to have my music called "academic,"
since "academic music"
> to *me* means music that has been written to prove something,
ususally how
> smart the composer is.

***Yes! Good definition. Let's use that rather than "academic!"

> >music that has at least some
> >elements of lower-integer ratios is audible resounding music, that
> >has a corporal aspect that actually rings in the body and
emotions.
> >This is the element that is lacking in extended academic serial
> >composition, the music that hoards of listeners have rejected time
> >and again, and has almost caused if not already caused the death
of contemporary music among audiences, certainly in this country and
to a large degree in Europe as well
>

> Could you be more specific? Actually I've heard this type of
argument so many
> times I don't usually bother, but here we are, discussing things...
Is what's wrong
> with, say, Babbitt (to use agian a familiar example), that you
think he doesn't tune
> his thirds and sevenths properly, or that he doesn't have enough
(even 12-note ET)
> thirds and fifths in his music? Or if it's not Babbitt, could you
give some examples
> of composers (they ought to be quite numerous, for you to feel so
strongly about
> it), who, through their negligence of (in your ownwords) "lower-
integer ratios"
> have"almost caused if not already caused the death of contemporary
music among
> audiences, certainly in this country and to a large degree in
Europe as well"?

***Well, I wouldn't make many friends by naming off some of these
people... :) Personally, I *like* Babbitt's music, myself, but there
are many serial *imitators* that are less interesting. Many of these
composers are no longer writing strictly in that style, so there's
less of it around than, let's say, 10 or 15 years ago.

Name names?? I bet I could find *at least* one name out of about
every eight on traditional "contemporary music" programs of people
who could fall into that category...

But, again, I'd rather do that *privately...*

>
> By the way, do you really think: "she has not been gracious *at
all* on this forum. At the very *beginning* she was dismissive. It
was a *preemptive* strike by somebody who obviously doesn't want any
criticism."?

***This was hyperbolic on my part, and I believe I apologized for it
in an earlier post...

Thanks for the interesting discussion, Julia!

J. Pehrson

--- In tuning@y..., "jdstarrett" <jstarret@c...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#38494

> --- In tuning@y..., "jwerntz2002" <juliawerntz@a...> wrote:
> > Hi Joe and list members.
> <snip>
> >
> > -Julia
>
> Hi Julia. I have not been following the controversy closely, so I
will not respond to any of your points. However, I would like to hear
some of your music. Is there anywhere online I can listen?
>
> John Starrett

***Julia is in Greece (not elbow... the country) so probably won't
respond right away, but she did let me know privately that some of
her music *is* now online! It's part of the Perspectives Article
that is being discussed:

http://perspectivesofnewmusic.org/soundexx.html

The examples you want to hear are examples 10a, from her _String Trio
With Homage to Chopin_ and 10D, a continuation of the same trio...

(Gee, I sound like an *agent* :) )

JP

--- In tuning@y..., "jpehrson2" <jpehrson@r...> wrote:
> ***Julia is in Greece (not elbow... the country) so probably won't
> respond right away, but she did let me know privately that some of
> her music *is* now online! It's part of the Perspectives Article
> that is being discussed:
>
> http://perspectivesofnewmusic.org/soundexx.html

Yes, I hear these (Julia did respond privately) and I like these excerpts. Thanks for pointing them out.

John Starrett

In-Reply-To: <agaoh1+7fnp@eGroups.com>
jpehrson2 wrote:

> ***Well, I studied through it carefully twice, and would also like to
> add that the musical *examples* are now on the Perspectives of New
> Music Site!:
>
> http://perspectivesofnewmusic.org/soundexx.html
>
> (Don't worry about the XX at the end of this... whoops, sorry, Paul.
> Paul wants me to limit my "sophomoric" er.. "humor..." :) )

Then it's a good thing you didn't give the specific page:
<http://perspectivesofnewmusic.org/Werntzexx.html>.

Graham

--- In tuning@y..., graham@m... wrote:

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#38515

> In-Reply-To: <agaoh1+7fnp@e...>
> jpehrson2 wrote:
>
> > ***Well, I studied through it carefully twice, and would also
like to
> > add that the musical *examples* are now on the Perspectives of
New
> > Music Site!:
> >
> > http://perspectivesofnewmusic.org/soundexx.html
> >
> > (Don't worry about the XX at the end of this... whoops, sorry,
Paul.
> > Paul wants me to limit my "sophomoric" er.. "humor..." :) )
>
> Then it's a good thing you didn't give the specific page:
> <http://perspectivesofnewmusic.org/Werntzexx.html>.
>
>
> Graham

***Graham, you're a "card..." Paul wants us to stop this...

Joseph

Hi Joe.

However, the
> term "microtonality" has a history, and I'm not sure you can
> really "redefine" it on a broad scale.

and

I'm not sure that one article/dissertation is going to be able to
> change generally accepted notions of the term "microtonality..."

Right, and again, I was not attempting to redefine it on a broad scale. As I wrote
earlier, I don't usually bother correcting people when, say, they mention the
"microtones" in certain non-Western and folk music. I *myself* most often use the
term in its general, broad and inclusive sense. As I wrote, I was only trying to get
very specific in that essay about the practice of composing with distinct
microintervals, as microintervals, and to point out the enormous artistic potential
of this simple act. (Which, by the way, is far from being a "Werntz" specialty. I'd
have to be insane to use a term like "Werntz-implemented." What about Carrillo,
Haba, Wyshnegradsky, Maneri, Eaton, Alain Bancquart, and others? )

I
> think you will "get more flies with sugar" as they say. More people
> would be "won over" to your viewpoint if you simply present it rather
> than *contrasting* it with the JI practicioners... I really believe
> this. It's part of what Paul E. calls "accentuating the positive"
> and I believe he's right there...

In my mind, my arguments regarding JI are a defensive, rather than offensive,
strike. Although many pure tuning practitioners are simply minding their own
busisness, others are quite polemical and quite influential with their polemics, and it
is the proclammations of such people, not even their music so much, that I was
responding to. (As you may have noticed, I didn't get into criticisms of specific JI
music itself in the paper. Like you, I have no interest in "naming names," when it
comes to the music. That really is "bad karma," as far as I'm concerned, and in
retrospect I'm glad you didn't answer that other question of mine about specific
composers, especially publicly.)

Certainly my paper would have been more popular if I had stuck to the points in
Part 2. And as I've said before, I never expected Part 1 to be popular *at all* with
musicians who believe strongly in just intonation and similar theories. Well, now
I've said what I had to say apropos of the pure tuning movement. If I ever get into
more scholarly papers in the future I will stick to what is really the most interesting
part: how a composer puts together his/her music.

> I think, as you define it below, we mean more "theoretical"
> music designed more to demonstrate a point than for *listening...*
>

Do you think that maybe the music of *some* practitioners of just intonation and
other pure tuning methods also falls within this definition of academic music, then?

-Julia

--- In tuning@y..., "jwerntz2002" <juliawerntz@a...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#38522

Hi Julia!

If I ever get into
> more scholarly papers in the future I will stick to what is really
the most interesting
> part: how a composer puts together his/her music.
>

****ALLLLLRIGGGHHHTTTTT!

> > I think, as you define it below, we mean more "theoretical"
> > music designed more to demonstrate a point than for *listening...*
> >
>
> Do you think that maybe the music of *some* practitioners of just
intonation and
> other pure tuning methods also falls within this definition of
academic music, then?
>

***Yes, I think it's possible. Lets say more it would be a
scientific demonstration of the overtone series, rather than music as
a possibility. I can't think of names, though...

[Whoops, I just thought of one, but I'm not "telling.." :) ]

best,

Joe

--- In tuning@y..., "jpehrson2" <jpehrson@r...> wrote:
> --- In tuning@y..., "jwerntz2002" <juliawerntz@a...> wrote:
> > Do you think that maybe the music of *some* practitioners of just
> intonation and
> > other pure tuning methods also falls within this definition of
> academic music, then?
> >
>
> ***Yes, I think it's possible. Lets say more it would be a
> scientific demonstration of the overtone series, rather than music
as
> a possibility. I can't think of names, though...
>
> [Whoops, I just thought of one, but I'm not "telling.." :) ]

Hey I just thought of one, and I _am_ "telling". It's me. :-)

Julia, you might like to see (and hear)
http://dkeenan.com/Music/StereoDekany.htm

This was originally _intended_ only as a "scientific demonstration"
but others (including several with no JI agenda to push) then told me
it was in fact music. Actually one person said it was definitely "dope
smoking" music, but of course I have no idea what that means. ;-) It
has no melody (except ocassionally accidentally) and no rhythm. It
uses a strictly justly-intoned scale but is "atonal", thanks to the
genius of Erv Wilson (and the computer programming expertise of Andy
Fillebrown). It has been "performed" publically three times now.

Hey guys, I finally got to go to a public "performance" of it (since
it was in my home town this time)! It was used to introduce a concert
by the ensemble Topology <http://www.topology.org.au/> with the theme
"Rational Melodies". Another piece in the concert was a marvelous
viola solo that consisted almost entirely of harmonics on the C
string, up to the 11th.

I totally agree with Julia that there is a lot more to music than JI.
By why go so far in the other direction as to imply that JI harmonic
resources are not even worth considering when deciding on the raw
pitch materials from which to derive one's compositions.

Down with outrageous JI fundamentalist claims!
But long live JI harmony (among other kinds).

It feels quite strange to be championing JI here. For most of my years
on this list I have been cast as one of those nasty tET-ists, because
(apart from my above "composition") I generally insist on tempering
scales (no matter how slightly).

Of course what I'm really for is for more inclusiveness. Transcend,
but include (at least the useful and fun stuff).

We should be presenting new would-be composers with a complete
pallette of resources and telling (and showing) them what each has
been found to be good for, at least in the past. We certainly
shouldn't be talking utter nonsense such as 12-ET being like eating
lots of red meat etc, but there's also no way we should be telling
them, in effect, "Don't even bother looking at (or listening to) that
JI stuff, it's irrelevant".

There is no denying, if one holds the pitch of one note constant and
moves another simultaneous one slowly up and down, that _very_special_
sounds_ are heard at certain _very_sharply_defined_ intervals (whether
you _like_ the sound of them or not). The same goes for three
simultaneous notes and four notes etc. There are only a few JI dyads
but even at four notes the number of possible JI chords is huge. Why
would anyone want to deny the usefulness of those special sounds as a
compositional resource? One doesn't need to know anything about
arithmetic or partials to appreciate the specialness of those sounds.

Actually, Julia has explained why someone might want to deny their
usefulness. It's because certain JI people and organisations (you're
right, it wasn't a straw person, it was several real ones, my mistake)
have been (and still are) going too far in the other direction,
essentially claiming that JI is everything.

In many cases, I totally reject claims that certain scales or
harmonies based on ratios are important simply _because_ they are
based on ratios, and that the numbers are supposed to _explain_
something. But I reject them in only those cases where quite large
mistunings away from the stated ratios would go completely unnoticed
by actual _listeners_.

Subliminal psychological and even physical healing effects (as has
been claimed by some), for inaudible changes to tuning, cannot be
rejected out of hand. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence, and so far this evidence has not been forthcoming.

One also cannot deny JI fundamentalists the specialness of the numbers
per se, on the mythic or magical level. Although we may not be able to
_hear_ any difference in some cases, and indeed there may be no
measurable effect, the knowledge on the part of the composer,
performer and listener that the numbers are somehow "in there" can,
for some people, form part of the enjoyment of the music. It is only
when people operating on this mythic-magic level start making claims
that can actually be tested on the rational level, that they go
astray.

This is similar to the situation with astrology providing comfort to
millions, despite having no basis in scientific fact. One needn't try
to deny this comfort. On the other hand, if you knew someone had a
disease that is treatable only by modern medicine but they insist on
sticking to their astrologers or tarot card readers, you would try to
convince them to do otherwise.

If I thought I was capable, I'd be looking at ways to make
voice-leading work _with_ the justly intoned sonorities (among
others), not rejecting their importance.

The good thing is that 72-ET is close enough to 11-limit JI that new
composers should eventually discover these special sonorities for
themselves, and can then decide whether to use them: almost all the
time, some of the time, or to try as they might to avoid them.

I think the distinction between JI and non-JI music is very
unimportant. But composers and performers should definitely be taught
that there are justly intoned harmonies and non just harmonies (and a
grey area between them), not because of any numbers, but because they
_sound_ different.

Regards,
-- Dave Keenan

Dave,

I'll keep it short, to conserve our precious bytes: that was one very
fine post. Inquisative, inclusive, and polite - just wanted to show
appreciation for it...

Cheers,
Jon (the guy who actually went and bought Excel to experience
your 'piece'!)

--- In tuning@y..., "dkeenanuqnetau" <d.keenan@u...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#38527

> --- In tuning@y..., "jpehrson2" <jpehrson@r...> wrote:
> > --- In tuning@y..., "jwerntz2002" <juliawerntz@a...> wrote:
> > > Do you think that maybe the music of *some* practitioners of
just
> > intonation and
> > > other pure tuning methods also falls within this definition of
> > academic music, then?
> > >
> >
> > ***Yes, I think it's possible. Lets say more it would be a
> > scientific demonstration of the overtone series, rather than
music
> as
> > a possibility. I can't think of names, though...
> >
> > [Whoops, I just thought of one, but I'm not "telling.." :) ]
>
> Hey I just thought of one, and I _am_ "telling". It's me. :-)
>
> Julia, you might like to see (and hear)
> http://dkeenan.com/Music/StereoDekany.htm
>
> This was originally _intended_ only as a "scientific demonstration"
> but others (including several with no JI agenda to push) then told
me it was in fact music.

***Well, let's put it *this* way: it's the most exciting EXCEL file
I have ever heard! :)

I think it qualifies as "music" whatever *that* is...

It has form, it *changes*... rather "algo" of course.

I'm not sure it sounds much like "Just Intonation" with the sound
cards I've been using, but no matter.

It's a fantastic contribution!

Joseph

--- In tuning@y..., "jpehrson2" <jpehrson@r...> wrote:
> I'm not sure it sounds much like "Just Intonation" with the sound
> cards I've been using, but no matter.

Try changing it to a patch with no vibrato or chorus etc. like a reed
organ.

Hi Dave.

Thanks for your post. I downloaded your piece, but couldn't open it. I am very
eager to hear it, and when I get back into the country next week I'll try it again. But
already I appreciate your extending your own example in this manner, and
demonstrating with your story the blurry lines between what seem like "academic"
intentions, experimenting, musical searching, creativity and musical "finding."

We certainly
> shouldn't be talking utter nonsense such as 12-ET being like eating
> lots of red meat etc, but there's also no way we should be telling
> them, in effect, "Don't even bother looking at (or listening to) that
> JI stuff, it's irrelevant".

I'm almost ready to give up, here at the Tuning List. I never said, even in effect ,
"Don't even bother looking at (or listening to) that
JI stuff, it's irrelevant." [Sigh] Have you read the paper? Have you read my posts
here on the Tuning List? Where did I ever imply such a thing?

> One also cannot deny JI fundamentalists the specialness of the numbers
> per se, on the mythic or magical level. Although we may not be able to
> _hear_ any difference in some cases, and indeed there may be no
> measurable effect, the knowledge on the part of the composer,
> performer and listener that the numbers are somehow "in there" can,
> for some people, form part of the enjoyment of the music. It is only
> when people operating on this mythic-magic level start making claims
> that can actually be tested on the rational level, that they go
> astray.
>
> This is similar to the situation with astrology providing comfort to
> millions, despite having no basis in scientific fact. One needn't try
> to deny this comfort. On the other hand, if you knew someone had a
> disease that is treatable only by modern medicine but they insist on
> sticking to their astrologers or tarot card readers, you would try to
> convince them to do otherwise.

I agree with all of this, very much.

Why
> would anyone want to deny the usefulness of those special sounds as a
> compositional resource? One doesn't need to know anything about
> arithmetic or partials to appreciate the specialness of those sounds.

It's quite sensible, when put this way.

Thanks,
Julia

--- In tuning@y..., "jwerntz2002" <juliawerntz@a...> wrote:
> We certainly
> > shouldn't be talking utter nonsense such as 12-ET being like eating
> > lots of red meat etc, but there's also no way we should be telling
> > them, in effect, "Don't even bother looking at (or listening to) that
> > JI stuff, it's irrelevant".
>
> I'm almost ready to give up, here at the Tuning List. I never said,
even in effect ,
> "Don't even bother looking at (or listening to) that
> JI stuff, it's irrelevant." [Sigh] Have you read the paper? Have you
read my posts
> here on the Tuning List? Where did I ever imply such a thing?

Hi Julia,

Please don't give up on us yet. About 2 weeks ago I read the first 24 pages at
http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/preview/9967617
which I understand contains all the sections relating to JI. Apparently, at that distance in time I was left with only the general flavour of your rejectyion of JI. I have just reread it now and will address specific points.

You are welcome to send a copy of the complete dissertation to
Dave Keenan
116 Bowman Parade
Bardon QLD 4065
AUSTRALIA
in which case I will definitely read the whole thing.

I apologise that I have not read all your posts to the list. Recent ones have thankfully led me to understand that it is not that you do not think that just or near just intervals are worth having in a tuning system (for their special sounds) but that you reject the JI fundamentalist dogma that just (or near just) intervals are the fundamental consituents of melody and harmony.

But this distinction between the dogma and the intervals is far from clear in your paper. This is apparently because what you reject as JI theory in your paper is pretty much only the dogma, and when you do describe some psychoacoustic theory you misrepresent it. Such as that relating to sensory-dissonance. Incidentally it is called sensory-dissonance to distinguish it from contextual-dissonance, among other kinds. You see, we scientific JI theorists are quite aware that there are other influences on our perception of consonance, apart from the coincidence of partials.

It can easily be demonstrated that the perceived consonance of a sustained chord, in a harmonic or near-harmonic timbre, in the absence of any other musical context, is dependent to a _very_ large degree on the proximity of its component intervals to justly intoned intervals. You probably agree that this is not dogma. Now while I acknowledge that shorter sustain and musical context and lots of vibrato and different timbres etc etc, can alter this perception of consonance, I don't believe it can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. I would be pleased to hear a demonstration that shows otherwise.

Of course if you were to reject science as _any_ kind of method of obtaining useful knowledge, as was at first suggested by your remark:

"[Just intonation, as an idea] accomodates those who seek to apply a scientific model to music - perhaps a vestigial product of the Age of Reason."

then we wouldn't have much left to talk about. I would suspect you had caught a mild case of "boomeritis" (postmodern extreme relativism combined with narcissism) as it is very prevalent in the humanities departments of universities at the moment. See Ken Wilber's book of that name. In Wilber's view we should transcend but include science. It isn't everything, but it is not merely a "social construction" either.

Just to elaborate on something I wrote earlier:
I should perhaps distinguish (at least) two kinds of nonscientific JI which I have been blurring together somewhat. There is JI fundamentalism (as mentioned above) and then there is JI numerology (which I earlier likened to astrology). There is no shame in being a JI numerologist (particularly if you admit that's what you are doing). We all enjoyed Jacky Ligon's "I'm a numerologist" ditty. But there ought to be some shame in continuing to make fundamentalist claims which are testable on the rational level and are demonstrably false (such as those on Kyle Gann's and David Doty's web pages).

Now to some specifics of your paper.

You have misunderstood Partch's terms "otonality" and "utonality". A single interval or dyad cannot be utonal or otonal, only assemblies of 3 or more notes can be one or the other. Also, we have since discovered some other kinds of maximally consonant JI chords that don't fit into Partch's otonal or utonal categories. We call one kind ASS's for (Anomalous Saturated Suspensions) and another kind we call "magic" which are necessarily tempered but still rely on proximity to JI for their relative consonance. I did suggest the acronym TITS for this second category (Theoretically Indispensably-Tempered Saturations) but perhaps to our credit, it never caught on. :=)

You wrote, in the last footnote on page 7,
"However, time has shown - as will this study - that these speculations were myopic: that the urge to "fill the gaps" between the 12 equal tempered intervals in order to /expand/ the vocabulary and the desire to respect the overtone series are in fact very different, even mutually exclusive, and therefore incompatible."

If I take a very literal interpretation of that sentence then I suppose it is true. But it assumes that we want to leave the 12 equal notes where they are and merely add more. This is not usually the case. It also assumes we want to have most of the notes being multiples of a common "fundamental" or a very few common "fundamentals" (maybe a tonic, dominant and subdominant). This is not necessarily so either.

You should learn about Erv Wilson's family of atonal justly intoned scales called CPS's (combination product sets) which are in one sense the complete opposite of Partch's monophony.

That footnote certainly invites interpretation as saying that the desire to have justly intoned intervals is incompatible with the urge to expand the musical vocabulary. Which is of course nonsense.

p 8
You say:
"Just intonation is specifically a vertical view of music ..".
I say:
"Just intonation is an important property of the vertical aspect of music."

Further on page 8 you actually say that just intonation requires all pitches to have a strict relationship to a fundamental. This seems to imply that all pitches must have a _just_ relationship to the fundamental. This would be an incredibly narrow version of JI, and is just not so.

You also imply (on p8) that JI composers do not regard consonance and dissonance as relative. This is not so. In fact one popular rule of thumb says that the sensory-dissonance of a just interval is roughly proportional to the product of the two sides of the ratio when in lowest terms. e.g. A just minor sixth of 5:8 is considerably more consonant than a just neutral sixth of 8:13. And when this product gets up around 120 then it's pretty much not Just any more (at least not on its own).

You say that:
"Acoustics obviously do play a /partial/ role ..." and you admit it might explain the consonance of octaves and fifths.

But then you apparently think you are going on to refute some psychoacoustic results, or at least their relevance to music, when in fact you are refuting only your own (or possibly others) misrepresentations of them.

In a footnote that spans pages 9 and 10 you write (and by the way it's annoying not to be able to just copy and paste quotes from your paper, like I can with anyone's posts to this list):

"But even here there is ambiguity: is the next most consonant interval [after octave and fifth] determined by the next new /pitch class/ to appear, measured against the /fundamental/ i.e. the major third (followed in rank by the minor seventh), or by the /interval/ created by the /adjacency/ between the third and the very next (fourth) partial - i.e. the perfect fourth."

Well I thing it's the fourth (3:4). What theory says that it would be the major third (4:5) or the (sub)minor seventh (4:7)? However we do recognise that we seem to find frequency ratios where the smallest number is a power of two (the "fundamental" in your terminology) to be more consonant than would be suggested by the simple rule of thumb given above. But so what if there is some ambiguity about which has the greater sensory-consonance, 3:4 or 4:5? I don't think anyone would suggest that 4:7 is more consonant than 3:4.

By the way, when "beats" are too fast to be perceived as variations of timbre over time, or as countable events, then we call it "roughness".

You claim on page 10 that psychoacoustical theory predicts that an equal tempered minor sixth must be dissonant and you say you experience it as such out of musical context, but as consonant in a diatonic context.

In fact current theory, as I understand it, predicts that the 12-ET m6 should have some intermediate kind of consonance/dissonance which musical context could easily turn to relative consonance. But really, how often do you find a verticality consisting of a _bare_ minor sixth functioning as a consonance? And of course timbre, register and the sheer span of an interval are important determinants. You seem to imply on page 11 that JI types or psychoacousticians deny these influences. In fact we've discussed them many times at length on this list.

I don't think that the "jarring" ocurrence of a perfect fifth in a certain context can be considered an example of it being perceived as dissonant.

I've run out of time today, but let me say that nothing you describe on page 11 goes in any way against any of the JI or psychoacoustic theory that I currently use. Maybe they do go against something Helmhotz said, but the field hasn't been standing still since Helmholtz. And page 12 is infuriating for its obvious lack of understanding of the scientific method. It's _supposed_ to change with time. It's supposed to become a more accurate description of reality. Of course it's very difficult to get at what that reality is when it resides in the heads of many different people and is influenced by culture (which itself changes).

On another tack, I understand that you personally wish to avoid associations with diatonic or common-practice music (or 12-equal in general) so as to attempt to define a new musical dialect. Many of us on this list could apply JI theory (of the scientific non-dogmatic kind) to help you in this goal, by finding or designing scales and tuning systems that avoid intervals close to ratios of 3 or 5 but still providing for extremes of consonance and dissonance by using ratios of 7, 9 and 11 to provide the extreme consonance, and without everything referring to a single fundamental. Disssonance is easy but consonance is hard to put into a tuning system that also has desirable melodic properties, particularly if you want to avoid diatonic implications. But scientific JI theory can help us to do it. We might even find for you, subsets of 72-equal that are more manageable than the full 72 but are still likely to satisfy your requirements.

I'm looking forward to hearing you make a bare 833 cent interval sound like a consonance (using a harmonic timbre). :-)

Regards,
-- Dave Keenan
-- Dave Keenan
Brisbane, Australia
http://dkeenan.com

--- In tuning@y..., "dkeenanuqnetau" <d.keenan@u...> wrote:

>(you're
> right, it wasn't a straw person, it was several real ones, my
>mistake)

dave, i must disagree. david doty, in the just intonation primer,
delves enthusiastically into quite discordant just intonation chords
such as the "supermajor seventh chord" (14:18:21:27). kyle gann,
meanwhile, has no particular attachment to the first six partials,
something one can find ample evidence for in both his websites and
his music (which i've seen him perform to much delight).

the "just intonation" entity/credo that julia defines in her paper,
the one she says "limits the composer stylistically to a sparse,
simple triadic idiom", *is* a straw man. she hasn't named, even in
the footnotes, a single composer or theorist who could serve as a
consistent example of such a view. meanwhile, she would have us
believe that it is the just intonationists who are being
inconsistent, who are violating their own dogma, any time they write
interesting music or posit interesting sonorities. the nerve!

my sense is that only in current academia, where interest and study
in just intonation and the history of tuning and acoustics have been
swept aside (under the rug, in fact) in favor of "set theory" (which
sprung from atonal quandaries and has come to take over even
discussions of the diatonic scale in tonal music) and related
abstractions, could the argument in the first part of werntz's paper
or dissertation fly among serious musical thinkers. all too happy to
dismiss and ignore just intonation, not only its merits but also its
difficult problems, no one in the academe even raises an eyebrow over
such a narrowly-founded and poorly-researched premise and argument.

oh well, i can get over it. we all agree that the new intervals need
a chance to speak for themselves. and in the end, i guess that's what
really counts . . .

--- In tuning@y..., graham@m... wrote [#38532]:
>
> But 72-equal is still a strange scale to use if you want to avoid
> 12-equal.

--- In tuning@y..., David C Keenan <d.keenan@u...> wrote [#38559]:
>
> Hi Julia,
>
> Please don't give up on us yet. ...
>
> ... I understand that you personally wish to avoid associations
with diatonic or common-practice music (or 12-equal in general) so as
to attempt to define a new musical dialect. Many of us on this list
could apply JI theory (of the scientific non-dogmatic kind) to help
you in this goal, by finding or designing scales and tuning systems
that avoid intervals close to ratios of 3 or 5 but still providing
for extremes of consonance and dissonance by using ratios of 7, 9 and
11 to provide the extreme consonance, and without everything
referring to a single fundamental. Disssonance is easy but consonance
is hard to put into a tuning system that also has desirable melodic
properties, particularly if you want to avoid diatonic implications.
But scientific JI theory can help us to do it. We might even find for
you, subsets of 72-equal that are more manageable than the full 72
but are still likely to satisfy your requirements.
>

Julia,

I was thinking about these very same things these past couple of
days. If I were going to avoid diatonic and 12-ET intervals, I would
pick a division of the octave that would be as far removed from both
of those as possible, e.g., 11, 13, or 23-ET.

In fact I did just that around 30 years ago, when I retuned an
electronic organ to 11-ET and improvised a fugue, one part at a time,
on tape. It was quick and easy and quite a lot of fun in that I had
the freedom to do whatever I felt without worrying about how the
vertical harmony was going to come out (and without any concern about
adhering to a tone row). By selecting a suitable tonal system, I
found that I had no problem achieving the "atonal" (pardon the term)
effect that I was after.

Some others on the Tuning List have since done quite a bit more with
ET's of this sort, as I found out recently.

I'm not about to recommend that you abandon 72-ET for something else,
however. There is so much available in 72 that, as Dave Keenan
suggested above, I think it would be possible to find subsets with
properties similar to the ET's that I mentioned above. These would
give you the option of using the tones either serially or freely, as
you wish.

One subset of 72 that might be employed successfully in this manner
is 8-ET. Although it contains the diminished seventh chords of 12-
ET, it is very un-diatonic and might be used to good effect in a
portion of a composition.

I believe that you could simulate 11-ET in 72-ET by using a series of
tones generated by an interval of 13 degrees:

deg72 nearest ratio
0 1:1
13 15:17
26 7:9
39 11:16
52 17:28
65 15:28
6 17:18
19 5:6
32 11:15
45 11:17 or 13:20
58 4:7

This would give the following scale (in degrees of 72):

0 6 13 19 26 32 39 45 52 58 65 72

This results in the almost complete avoidance of 12-ET intervals
(exception: the 12-ET semitone & major 7th), as well as excluding
most of the intervals that approximate low-number JI ratios. (I have
included the nearest ratio suggested by each tone in the table above;
observe that most of them are double-digits.)

These are just a couple of possibilities that I came up with off the
top of my head. I'm sure that others could find quite a few more.

--George

--- In tuning@y..., David C Keenan <d.keenan@u...> wrote:

> But really, how often do you find a verticality consisting of a
>_bare_ minor sixth functioning as a consonance?

quite a lot, say in bach two-part inventions.

>And of course timbre, register and the sheer span of an interval are
>important determinants. You seem to imply on page 11 that JI types
>or psychoacousticians deny these influences.

i'd like to see a list of references that support this claim. if
julia can support it, she's clearly found a whole body of ji types
and psychoacousticians that i'm not even aware of. but i doubt that.
instead, it appears that julia failed even to read most of the works
she cites (such as helmholtz), and has completely ignored the body of
literature that has sprung up in the century or so since.

by the way, the idea dave mentions about multiplying numerator by
denominator to determine relative discordance of the simplest just
intervals goes back to benedetti, in the 16th century. and benedetti
had a "scientific" (at least *very* scientific for the standards of
his day) explanation for this, rather than a numerological one . . .

--- In tuning@y..., "emotionaljourney22" <paul@s...> wrote:

> by the way, the idea dave mentions about multiplying numerator by
> denominator to determine relative discordance of the simplest just
> intervals goes back to benedetti, in the 16th century.

Should we say Benedetti reduction rather than Tenney reduction?

--- In tuning@y..., "emotionaljourney22" <paul@s...> wrote:
> --- In tuning@y..., "dkeenanuqnetau" <d.keenan@u...> wrote:
>
> >(you're
> > right, it wasn't a straw person, it was several real ones, my
> >mistake)
>
> dave, i must disagree. david doty, in the just intonation primer,
> delves enthusiastically into quite discordant just intonation chords
> such as the "supermajor seventh chord" (14:18:21:27). kyle gann,
> meanwhile, has no particular attachment to the first six partials,
> something one can find ample evidence for in both his websites and
> his music (which i've seen him perform to much delight).

I wasn't very clear about this. The fundamentalism (i.e. claiming JI
to be fundamental to harmony _and_ melody) was real people. The
incredibly impoverished version of JI that Julia describes and argues
against (all pitches in a single harmonic series) is definitely only
straw.

> the "just intonation" entity/credo that julia defines in her paper,
> the one she says "limits the composer stylistically to a sparse,
> simple triadic idiom", *is* a straw man. she hasn't named, even in
> the footnotes, a single composer or theorist who could serve as a
> consistent example of such a view. meanwhile, she would have us
> believe that it is the just intonationists who are being
> inconsistent, who are violating their own dogma, any time they write
> interesting music or posit interesting sonorities. the nerve!
>
> my sense is that only in current academia, where interest and study
> in just intonation and the history of tuning and acoustics have been
> swept aside (under the rug, in fact) in favor of "set theory" (which
> sprung from atonal quandaries and has come to take over even
> discussions of the diatonic scale in tonal music) and related
> abstractions, could the argument in the first part of werntz's paper
> or dissertation fly among serious musical thinkers. all too happy to
> dismiss and ignore just intonation, not only its merits but also its
> difficult problems, no one in the academe even raises an eyebrow
over
> such a narrowly-founded and poorly-researched premise and argument.

Yes. The ignorance of psychoacoustically-based JI theory and practice
is absolutely astounding. But I can certainly understand why people
would be turned off, and assume there's no substance to it, when they
read the kind of statements I highlited on Gann's and Doty's websites;
which are typically the first things you see if you do a web search on
"just intonation".

> oh well, i can get over it. we all agree that the new intervals need
> a chance to speak for themselves. and in the end, i guess that's
what
> really counts . . .

I don't think Julia is an entirely lost cause yet. She seems like she
might be willing to allow us to educate her a little. I know I would
like to be educated about generalise voice-leading theory. I may be
imagining it, but she seemed interested in the idea of _atonal_ JI a
la Wilson's CPS's, and if we can leave the numbers out of it for her
and just talk in terms of just subminor sevenths etc there may be some
hope.

But Julia, you must believe us when we tell you that what you've
described as JI is not JI, but only the tiniest least-important slice
of it.

--- In tuning@y..., "gdsecor" <gdsecor@y...> wrote:
> I believe that you could simulate 11-ET in 72-ET by using a series
of
> tones generated by an interval of 13 degrees:
>
> deg72 nearest ratio
> 0 1:1
> 13 15:17
> 26 7:9
> 39 11:16
> 52 17:28
> 65 15:28
> 6 17:18
> 19 5:6
> 32 11:15
> 45 11:17 or 13:20
> 58 4:7
>
> This would give the following scale (in degrees of 72):
>
> 0 6 13 19 26 32 39 45 52 58 65 72

That's a great idea.

In ASCII-fied Sims notation that would be

Eb^ E^ F> F#> G] A[ Bb< B< Cv C#v D

Where
A,B,C,D,E,F,G,#,b are as for 12-tET
] = quarter-tone up (+50 c)
> = sixth-tone up (+33 c)
^ = twelfth-tone up (+17 c)
v = twelfth-tone down (-17 c)
< = sixth-tone down (-33 c)
[ = quarter-tone down (-50 c)

Julie, I hope all those ratios don't scare you off. Apart from 4:7,
5:6, and 7:9 they are of course largely irrelevant to how the bare
dyads will sound. But they do allow us to predict what will be some of
the relative consonances of this tuning with _more_ than 2 notes. You
could spend an awful lot of time trying all the possible triads and
tetrads etc, looking for something remotely consonant in this tuning.
(I know you claim that composers can make just about anything sound
consonant purely by musical context, but please bear with me). But I
claim that JI theory can take us straight to some likely candidates,
namely the tetrads that consist of, (from the root) a supermajor
third, a minor ninth and a narrow neutral tenth. There are four of
them (given horizontally).

rt SM3 m9 nN10
-------------------
1. D F#> Eb^ F>
2. E^ A[ F> G]
3. F#> B< G] Bb<
4. A[ C#v Bb< Cv

Even if you chose not to use those chords as formal consonances in a
new vocabulary which you might develop in this tuning, you might have
to admit that they have a somewhat special sound compared to the other
zillion possible tetrads in this tuning.

If you listen to them and you agree, and you want to know how I pulled
those bizarre needles out of that haystack, without listening to a
single one (I'm taking a big risk here), then any number of people on
this list can tell you how I did it.

And it will have to be someone else, because I've got to finish up a
little business over on tuning-math and then go cold turkey off all
tuning lists for quite some time. The tuning list addiction is
starting to make my life unmanageable again.

Regards,
-- Dave Keenan

--- In tuning@y..., "emotionaljourney22" <paul@s...> wrote:
> --- In tuning@y..., David C Keenan <d.keenan@u...> wrote:
>
> > But really, how often do you find a verticality consisting of a
> >_bare_ minor sixth functioning as a consonance?
>
> quite a lot, say in bach two-part inventions.

Were these written for equal temperament?

Oops. I should also have mentioned the triad consisting of only a
minor third and a subminor seventh from the root. There's only one of
these in that 11 of 72 tuning.

Eb^ F#> C#v

In-Reply-To: <agigpv+hbfs@eGroups.com>
dkeenanuqnetau wrote:

> I don't think Julia is an entirely lost cause yet. She seems like she
> might be willing to allow us to educate her a little. I know I would
> like to be educated about generalise voice-leading theory. I may be
> imagining it, but she seemed interested in the idea of _atonal_ JI a
> la Wilson's CPS's, and if we can leave the numbers out of it for her
> and just talk in terms of just subminor sevenths etc there may be some
> hope.

Oh, come come. Julia isn't a "lost cause" in any way. Hopefully she
won't be lost to this list. She's writing microtonal music, and promoting
it in a prominent journal. Nobody's had any problems about the part of
her paper where she explains her own approach. So she said some silly
things about systems she isn't (explicitly) using. She also said she'll
avoid that in future.

Whether she'll use some particular piece of theory isn't really that
important. The emphasis of the bit of the dissertation I could get at is
on freedom and subjectivity, which is great. I don't see why she'd object
to numbers if they have subjective qualities. But if she does, who cares?

Graham

--- In tuning@y..., graham@m... wrote:

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#38583

> In-Reply-To: <agigpv+hbfs@e...>
> dkeenanuqnetau wrote:
>
> > I don't think Julia is an entirely lost cause yet. She seems like
she
> > might be willing to allow us to educate her a little. I know I
would
> > like to be educated about generalise voice-leading theory. I may
be
> > imagining it, but she seemed interested in the idea of _atonal_
JI a
> > la Wilson's CPS's, and if we can leave the numbers out of it for
her
> > and just talk in terms of just subminor sevenths etc there may be
some
> > hope.
>
> Oh, come come. Julia isn't a "lost cause" in any way. Hopefully
she
> won't be lost to this list. She's writing microtonal music, and
promoting
> it in a prominent journal. Nobody's had any problems about the
part of
> her paper where she explains her own approach. So she said some
silly
> things about systems she isn't (explicitly) using. She also said
she'll
> avoid that in future.
>
> Whether she'll use some particular piece of theory isn't really
that
> important. The emphasis of the bit of the dissertation I could get
at is
> on freedom and subjectivity, which is great. I don't see why she'd
object
> to numbers if they have subjective qualities. But if she does, who
cares?
>
>
> Graham

***That's right, Graham. I think she'd be better off just *dropping*
the first part of the article and in her *next* one simply
concentrating on the system she likes to use and its compositional
procedures and implications, etc... And it seems she already agrees
with that assessment.

Her point of view of a subjective "freedom" in "adding pitches" is
something I had never read about previously.

Now whether that "freedom" really exists is another matter, but her
approach is interesting and I never have seen it expressed in quite
this way...

Joseph

Paul,

Thank you for your insistence that I not be misunderstood, especially considering
your general objections to the points I make in my paper. And thanks for your
well-considered remarks. Just a couple of little points, to add to my statements in
my other post of today. I'd be happy to meet after I get back next week.

> the "just intonation" entity/credo that julia defines in her paper,
> the one she says "limits the composer stylistically to a sparse,
> simple triadic idiom", *is* a straw man. she hasn't named, even in
> the footnotes, a single composer or theorist who could serve as a
> consistent example of such a view.

No, I didn't, though I must say I've heard a good deal of such music. I was not at all
interested in publicly attacking anyone's music (and I still am not interested), so I
presented it in a hypothetical way, the main point there anyway being that a
harmonic vocabulary of 2/1, 3/2 5/4 and 7/4 *would be* quite limiting, after having
made my other point about overtones, beats, etc. (See my other post from today
about that latter point.)

> my sense is that only in current academia, where interest and study
> in just intonation and the history of tuning and acoustics have been
> swept aside (under the rug, in fact) in favor of "set theory" (which
> sprung from atonal quandaries and has come to take over even
> discussions of the diatonic scale in tonal music) and related
> abstractions, could the argument in the first part of werntz's paper
> or dissertation fly among serious musical thinkers. all too happy to
> dismiss and ignore just intonation, not only its merits but also its
> difficult problems, no one in the academe even raises an eyebrow over
> such a narrowly-founded and poorly-researched premise and argument.
>

It may be that certain corners of the American academe refuse to accept just
intonation. But you may be interested to know that it could hardly have been
worse for Joe Maneri at the New England Conservatory (microtonal course
notwithstanding) in terms of acceptance and recognition, and that for most of my
time at Brandeis, up until hip David Rakowski arrived on the faculty and agreed to
advise me on my thesis, it is no exaggeration to say that I was laughed at and
publicly humiliated for composing with microtones and presenting microtonal
works in analysis class, and was even told not to compose with microtones as long
as I was there! (By the time I left, I think I may have softened some of them, but
not without much bitter heartache.) In addition, I have been rejected repeatedly
from certain "establishment" conferences and competitions, specifically for
submitting microtonal works. In fact, I have sometimes felt that Joe Maneri and I
and his other students who study microtones don't fit in anywhere as
microtonalists, other than in our own "scene" here in Boston. All of this is not
intended to make anyone feel sorry for us (we're fine), but to respond to the
absurd notion that we somehow represent "current academia." (!)

Although I believed that my PNM essay was well written and well thought-out, I
was almost surprised that they accepted my paper. No one recommended me or
pulled strings for me there, nor had anyone there presumably ever heard of me.
And call me naive (again), but considering that the PNM editorial board includes
some "friends of just intonation" such as Larry Polansky and Pauline Oliveros, and
that their 1991 Forum On Microtonality featured mostly JI and pure-tuning
microtonalists, I have no reason to believe that I was playing into someone's
agenda with the views in my paper. (I do wonder what Johhny was referring to...)

-Julia

--- In tuning@y..., graham@m... wrote:
> In-Reply-To: <agigpv+hbfs@e...>
> dkeenanuqnetau wrote:
>
> > I don't think Julia is an entirely lost cause yet. She seems like
she
> > might be willing to allow us to educate her a little. I know I
would
> > like to be educated about generalise voice-leading theory. I may
be
> > imagining it, but she seemed interested in the idea of _atonal_ JI
a
> > la Wilson's CPS's, and if we can leave the numbers out of it for
her
> > and just talk in terms of just subminor sevenths etc there may be
some
> > hope.
>
> Oh, come come. Julia isn't a "lost cause" in any way.

I said she wasn't. I think you are taking this out of context. The
specific question was, if she's going to argue against something
called "JI", whether she might be willing to learn a little more about
what it actually is.

Of course, if (as Joseph suggests) she simply did not try to argue
against anything called "JI", that would be ok too. However I'm
personally quite happy for her to continue to argue against certain
aspects of JI, namely the fundamentalist ones.

> Hopefully she
> won't be lost to this list. She's writing microtonal music, and
> promoting it in a prominent journal.

Yes. That's wonderful.

> Nobody's had any problems about the part of
> her paper where she explains her own approach.

Indeed. Nor probably would I, if I could easily get to read it. But
that wasn't what we were discussing.

> So she said some silly
> things about systems she isn't (explicitly) using. She also said
> she'll avoid that in future.

I'm sorry I wasn't aware of that. I apologise for not having read all
her posts. Can you please point me to where she admitted to saying
some silly things?

> Whether she'll use some particular piece of theory isn't really that
> important.

Of course not, but whether she _understands_ what she is trashing when
she uses the term "JI" for something that is only a tiny slice of JI,
_is_ important.

Anyway, judging by her most recent posts, we've badgered the poor
woman enough about this. I think she's got the message.

Julia, I wish you well for the future and hope you keep reading and
responding to this list. Most of us _want_ to be challenged and be
forced to refine our theories on the basis of new evidence, but you
can't expect us not to put up a struggle. We hope to learn as much
from you as you will from us. Thanks.

-- Dave Keenan

On Wednesday, July 10, 2002, at 02:31 , tuning@yahoogroups.com wrote:

> David C Keenan <d.keenan@uq.net.au>
>
>
> But this distinction between the dogma and the intervals is far > from clear in your paper. This is apparently because what you > reject as JI theory in your paper is pretty much only the > dogma, and when you do describe some psychoacoustic theory you > misrepresent it. Such as that relating to sensory-dissonance. > Incidentally it is called sensory-dissonance to distinguish it > from contextual-dissonance, among other kinds. You see, we > scientific JI theorists are quite aware that there are other > influences on our perception of consonance, apart from the > coincidence of partials.

> It can easily be demonstrated that the perceived consonance of > a sustained chord, in a harmonic or near-harmonic timbre, in > the absence of any other musical context, is dependent to a > _very_ large degree on the proximity of its component intervals > to justly intoned intervals.

Brown can be demonstrated to be in close proximity to red. So what ? Is brown any less valid in it's existence ? What b.s.

> You probably agree that this is not dogma. Now while I > acknowledge that shorter sustain and musical context and lots > of vibrato and different timbres etc etc, can alter this > perception of consonance, I don't believe it can make a silk > purse out of a sow's ear. I would be pleased to hear a > demonstration that shows otherwise.

And how does the JI proponent know she/he is not making a sow's ear out of a silk purse ?

> Of course if you were to reject science as _any_ kind of method > of obtaining useful knowledge, as was at first suggested by > your remark:
>
> "[Just intonation, as an idea] accomodates those who seek to > apply a scientific model to music - perhaps a vestigial product > of the Age of Reason."
>
> then we wouldn't have much left to talk about. I would suspect > you had caught a mild case of "boomeritis" (postmodern extreme > relativism combined with narcissism) as it is very prevalent in > the humanities departments of universities at the moment. See > Ken Wilber's book of that name. In Wilber's view we should > transcend but include science. It isn't everything, but it is > not merely a "social construction" either.

Well, that's not how I interpret the above quote. I don't think this is Pythagorean v/s Aristoxenian situation you make it out to be. Think Ptolemy, Nicomachus, maybe.

From <http://humanities.uchicago.edu/classes/zbikowski/week3sum.html>

'the entire judgment is not to be granted to the sense of hearing; rather, reason must also play a role. Reason should guide and moderate the erring sense, inasmuch as the sense-tottering and failing-should be supported, as it were, by a walking stick.'

'According to Ptolemy the harmonic scholar directs his activity in such a way that what the sense estimates, reason weighs; accordingly, reason searches out ratios to which the sense expresses no objection.'

> Now to some specifics of your paper.
>
> You have misunderstood Partch's terms "otonality" and > "utonality". A single interval or dyad cannot be utonal or > otonal, only assemblies of 3 or more notes can be one or the > other. Also, we have since discovered some other kinds of > maximally consonant JI chords that don't fit into Partch's > otonal or utonal categories. We call one kind ASS's for > (Anomalous Saturated Suspensions) and another kind we call > "magic" which are necessarily tempered but still rely on > proximity to JI for their relative consonance. I did suggest > the acronym TITS for this second category (Theoretically > Indispensably-Tempered Saturations) but perhaps to our credit, > it never caught on. :=)

So, will JI dogma be twisted to include and explain all this, like holy astronomers ? I'm just kidding, I don't need or use JI to validate my musical thought. Between HI, RI, CI, & various generators yielding fractional and other generated intonations, there's a much bigger and more inclusive playground. And who are these keepers of the holy writ you keep referring to as 'we' ?

> You wrote, in the last footnote on page 7,
> "However, time has shown - as will this study - that these > speculations were myopic: that the urge to "fill the gaps" > between the 12 equal tempered intervals in order to /expand/ > the vocabulary and the desire to respect the overtone series > are in fact very different, even mutually exclusive, and > therefore incompatible."
>
> If I take a very literal interpretation of that sentence then I > suppose it is true. But it assumes that we want to leave the 12 > equal notes where they are and merely add more. This is not > usually the case. It also assumes we want to have most of the > notes being multiples of a common "fundamental" or a very few > common "fundamentals" (maybe a tonic, dominant and > subdominant). This is not necessarily so either.

Perhaps she's referring to a specific case and specific aspect, not making a generalisation ? Rhetorical.

> That footnote certainly invites interpretation as saying that > the desire to have justly intoned intervals is incompatible > with the urge to expand the musical vocabulary. Which is of > course nonsense.

As would be such an interpretation itself. It does not invite such an interpretation. If you look at it through tainted lenses, you may perceive it to be tainted.

> p 8
> You say:
> "Just intonation is specifically a vertical view of music ..".
> I say:
> "Just intonation is an important property of the vertical > aspect of music."
>
> Further on page 8 you actually say that just intonation > requires all pitches to have a strict relationship to a > fundamental.

This is more or less true, in context.

> This seems to imply that all pitches must have a _just_ > relationship to the fundamental.

I wouldn't interpret it as implying this, unless I *wanted* to see it that way...

> You also imply (on p8) that JI composers do not regard > consonance and dissonance as relative.

I would be inclined to think many JI proponents invoke this perception.

> This is not so. In fact one popular rule of thumb says that the > sensory-dissonance of a just interval is roughly proportional > to the product of the two sides of the ratio when in lowest > terms. e.g. A just minor sixth of 5:8 is considerably more > consonant than a just neutral sixth of 8:13. And when this > product gets up around 120 then it's pretty much not Just any > more (at least not on its own).

Why do you JI types insist on proving everything and anything by reducing it to 'lowest terms' ? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> On another tack, I understand that you personally wish to avoid > associations with diatonic or common-practice music (or > 12-equal in general) so as to attempt to define a new musical > dialect. Many of us on this list could apply JI theory (of the > scientific non-dogmatic kind) to help you in this goal, by > finding or designing scales and tuning systems that avoid > intervals close to ratios of 3 or 5 but still providing for > extremes of consonance and dissonance by using ratios of 7, 9 > and 11 to provide the extreme consonance, and without > everything referring to a single fundamental. Disssonance is > easy but consonance is hard to put into a tuning system that > also has desirable melodic properties, particularly if you want > to avoid diatonic implications. But scientific JI theory can > help us to do it. We might even find for you, subsets of > 72-equal that are more manageable than the full 72 but are > still likely to satisfy your requirements.

Oh so patronising ! And imagine what I'd think if this were directed at me.

> I'm looking forward to hearing you make a bare 833 cent > interval sound like a consonance (using a harmonic timbre). :-)

What sort of consonance ? Just curious. And I'm pretty certain it can be done. But the question is will someone like find it consonant or admit it if they do ?

Cheers,
Joel

On Wednesday, July 10, 2002, at 02:31 , tuning@yahoogroups.com wrote:
> Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@anaphoria.com>
>
>> Hello Joe!
>
> My objection to the use of the tern is that it implies that > practitioners of JI try to impose it on others.

The 'true path' ideology of JI is implied often enough, perhaps sometimes unwittingly.

> In Case of Fact I have
> seen more insistence of the contrary on this list. This list > has done more to censor JI practitioners than any single entity

Personally I am so tired of seeing everything under the sun being reduced to a small numbers to serve JI advocates. Ooh look she/he says 704.xxx cents, that's so close to 701.954980949, ooooooh juuuuuusst intonation baby !!! The sad part is this is only a slight exaggeration, as like statements *have* been made here.

> . Just look
> at how many of them post. They have all been driven off. It > seems its OK to attack what JI people do and let what ever the > ET crowd do
> and say without any reflection.

I've yet to see this any of this supposed hard-line ET advocation. You seem to be stuck in some kind of JI v/s ET limbo. Wake up Kraig ! It's not real ! You're just having a bad dream...

> Yes doty is wrong but so is serialism. It doesn't work and that > it has to run to microtones to cover up
> the fact that it have fail and caused more damage to music in > general than any JI person has.

Serialism is *wrong* and has damaged music ?!?? Also *if* you're implying anyone is saying JI is wrong, that's a misunderstanding.

With re. to serial music & 'atonal' music, I was going to suggest that perhaps it doesn't fails per se, rather there may just be some bad music written under it's pretext. And then found happily, as I suspected, someone's thought of this before.

See 'Dirty Dozens: A HyperHistory of Serialism' by James Reel on New Music Box.
<http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=32tp03>

'Some did manage to stand out, either because they bent the rules of serialism to their will, or because they possessed the imagination and developed the influence to spread the word that serialism could be a vibrant, meaningful technique.'

Here's a lovely turn of phrase from the above series of articles, a quote from Nicolas Slonimsky describing Sheila Silver's music, '"enlightened dissonance devoid of ostensible disharmonies."'. I'd like that plastered on a T-shirt. I dare say some JI hard heads would sooner suck a lemon than utter a sentence like that.

> I can see it has provided nothing more
> than one more thing for academia to "talk " about.

I disagree. But will say that if *mainstream* music academia could get it's butt off the couch and show some courage, we'd have a hope. Still at least there may be more mutual respect and civility on display in academia than here.

> I really don't enjoy being on this list.
I'm sure everyone else is loving it ;-)

Cheers,
Joel

On Wednesday, July 10, 2002, at 08:14 , tuning@yahoogroups.com wrote:

> "dkeenanuqnetau" <d.keenan@uq.net.au>
>
> Me (Dave Keenan):
>>> Down with outrageous JI fundamentalist claims!
>>> But long live JI harmony (among other kinds).
>
> Kraig Grady:
>> All this talk of JI fundamentalism and i have yet to see any posted.
> The JI people make no claims-they don't even post. I find this a
>> figure of imagination and in continued bad taste to associate JI
> with Fundamentalism. One the other hand there is a posse of Witch
>> hunters.
>> Talk about psycho acoustical proof, show me the fundamentalist!
>
> I'm sorry about the unavoidable association with the worst excesses of
> Religious Fundamentalism, but the term "fundamentalism" has a meaning
> independent of what the beliefs are about.

> They may not post, but they certainly make claims on their websites.

etc.

Well said, Dave ! There are many more examples to support this.

Off-hand I offer the following

Johnny Reinhard: 'For true composition, I implore people on this list, please, don't compromise. If you really want to use Just for its qualitative properties...timelessness, ringing, partials and harmonics, basis of brass sound, basis the timbre of the human voice, of strings. The true home: Om.'

Johnny at <http://www.newmusicbox.org/hymn/sep00/reinhard.html> :
'Just Intonation is arguably definitive consonance, or the key to the relationship between numbers and pitch, or the natural universal that jump starts the diversity of music around the world. And yet its melodies lose their angularity in the harmonic blend that produced them.'

Johnny may keep saying 'polymicrotonality', but you'd be surprised at how many times he mentions JI, see <http://stereosociety.com/body_jrpolymi.html>, an article which purportedly is about 'polymicrotonality'.

BTW, in this he also says, 'Significantly, just intonation is an American phenomenon with Europe looking on, much as it previously did with jazz.'

To this my response is 'Nice of you to say so !' Given what Europe has done with Jazz, there is hope yet for microtonality !

Kyle Gann says, 'If 12-tone equal temperament is the Big Mac of tunings, then just intonation is the health food.'. See <http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=17tp04>

However he does otherwise present a much broader definition of JI than usually presented. George Secor may be interested in <http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=17tp08>

Pauline Oliveros at <http://www.amoeba.com/rrintdeep.html> :
'Just intonation is a way to think about harmony. It is the origin of harmony, as ancient as Pythagoras or possibly the Babylonians. It is a tuning system, based on divisions of the harmonic series. This is the way we hear harmony, and sounds better to me than Equal Temperament, which is the approximation to true harmony that has become standard in Western cultures in the last 200 years or so. '

Again at <http://trfn.clpgh.org/free-reed/reviews/oliveros.html>
'Just Intonation is a sytem of tuning based on pure fifths and thirds. I use it because it makes the instrument very resonant and the unequal intervals are very colorful.'
This is not about any fundamentalism, but supports Monzo's JI definition.

The following is a serious question, which I seriously hope someone has an answer to:

When and where was the term that has come to be called 'Just Intonation' coined, what was the original term, and in what language was it in ?

Not about JI, but relevant to what Julia suggests, see what Lois Vierk says at <http://www.newmusicbox.org/hymn/sep00/vierk.html>.

Sincerely,
Joel

--- In tuning@y..., Joel Rodrigues <joelrodrigues@m...> wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 10, 2002, at 02:31 , tuning@y... wrote:
>
> > David C Keenan <d.keenan@u...>
> >
> >
> > But this distinction between the dogma and the intervals is far
> > from clear in your paper. This is apparently because what you
> > reject as JI theory in your paper is pretty much only the
> > dogma, and when you do describe some psychoacoustic theory you
> > misrepresent it. Such as that relating to sensory-dissonance.
> > Incidentally it is called sensory-dissonance to distinguish it
> > from contextual-dissonance, among other kinds. You see, we
> > scientific JI theorists are quite aware that there are other
> > influences on our perception of consonance, apart from the
> > coincidence of partials.
>
> > It can easily be demonstrated that the perceived consonance of
> > a sustained chord, in a harmonic or near-harmonic timbre, in
> > the absence of any other musical context, is dependent to a
> > _very_ large degree on the proximity of its component intervals
> > to justly intoned intervals.
>
> Brown can be demonstrated to be in close proximity to red. So
> what ? Is brown any less valid in it's existence ? What b.s.

this response has nothing to do with what dave actually said. where
are you coming from on this? you're seriously misunderstanding
something.

> > You wrote, in the last footnote on page 7,
> > "However, time has shown - as will this study - that these
> > speculations were myopic: that the urge to "fill the gaps"
> > between the 12 equal tempered intervals in order to /expand/
> > the vocabulary and the desire to respect the overtone series
> > are in fact very different, even mutually exclusive, and
> > therefore incompatible."
> >
> > That footnote certainly invites interpretation as saying that
> > the desire to have justly intoned intervals is incompatible
> > with the urge to expand the musical vocabulary. Which is of
> > course nonsense.
>
> As would be such an interpretation itself. It does not invite
> such an interpretation.

i can't see any way to interpret werntz's statement here so that it
comes out looking any better. can you?

> > p 8
> > You say:
> > "Just intonation is specifically a vertical view of music ..".
> > I say:
> > "Just intonation is an important property of the vertical
> > aspect of music."
> >
> > Further on page 8 you actually say that just intonation
> > requires all pitches to have a strict relationship to a
> > fundamental.
>
> This is more or less true, in context.

oh really? what context is that, exactly?

> > This seems to imply that all pitches must have a _just_
> > relationship to the fundamental.
>
> I wouldn't interpret it as implying this, unless I *wanted* to
> see it that way...

how else is one to interpret this? seriously.

> > You also imply (on p8) that JI composers do not regard
> > consonance and dissonance as relative.
>
> I would be inclined to think many JI proponents invoke this
>perception.

apparently julia was so inclined as well. unfortunately inclination
doesn't count nearly as much as actual evidence. the actual evidence
speaks to the contrary view.

> > This is not so. In fact one popular rule of thumb says that the
> > sensory-dissonance of a just interval is roughly proportional
> > to the product of the two sides of the ratio when in lowest
> > terms. e.g. A just minor sixth of 5:8 is considerably more
> > consonant than a just neutral sixth of 8:13. And when this
> > product gets up around 120 then it's pretty much not Just any
> > more (at least not on its own).
>
> Why do you JI types insist on proving everything and anything by
> reducing it to 'lowest terms' ? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

what on earth are you talking about? lowest terms means that instead
of writing 2:4 or 3:6 or 5:10, we write 1:2. so what problem do you
have with this, or which anything in the paragraph above? where's
the "self-fulfilling prophecy"?

--- In tuning@y..., Joel Rodrigues <joelrodrigues@m...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#38599

>
>
> > On another tack, I understand that you personally wish to avoid
> > associations with diatonic or common-practice music (or
> > 12-equal in general) so as to attempt to define a new musical
> > dialect. Many of us on this list could apply JI theory (of the
> > scientific non-dogmatic kind) to help you in this goal, by
> > finding or designing scales and tuning systems that avoid
> > intervals close to ratios of 3 or 5 but still providing for
> > extremes of consonance and dissonance by using ratios of 7, 9
> > and 11 to provide the extreme consonance, and without
> > everything referring to a single fundamental. Disssonance is
> > easy but consonance is hard to put into a tuning system that
> > also has desirable melodic properties, particularly if you want
> > to avoid diatonic implications. But scientific JI theory can
> > help us to do it. We might even find for you, subsets of
> > 72-equal that are more manageable than the full 72 but are
> > still likely to satisfy your requirements.
>
> Oh so patronising ! And imagine what I'd think if this were
> directed at me.
>

***Hi Joel...

I don't know. I read this as a sincere attempt on Dave's part to
be "helpful." I have to say that Dave Keenan and Paul Erlich really
helped me to find a *lot* of very interesting sounds and quasi-
dissonances in the Blackjack scale. Many more interesting ones than
I would have found just wandering around "adding pitches..."

J. Pehrson

--- In tuning@y..., "jwerntz2002" <juliawerntz@a...> wrote:

> the main point there anyway being that a
> harmonic vocabulary of 2/1, 3/2 5/4 and 7/4 *would be* quite
>limiting,

even after remedying the inconsistency in this claim, it still is
deceptive and seemingly short-sighted.

first, the inconsistency: there isn't even a *triad* that contains
*only* intervals from your list (2/1, 3/2 5/4 and 7/4). so in this
view, the harmonic vocabulary would be not only limiting, it would be
nonexistent.

let's assume, then, that this is not what you're actually discussing.

the basic septimal tetrad, 4:5:6:7, contains six intervals (besides
any possible 2/1s): 3/2, 5/4, 7/4, 6/5, 7/5, and 7/6. you mention
seventh chords so i suppose this is what you're really thinking of.
in 7-limit music, all of these intervals are considered consonant
(and you seem to *like* 7/6 on page 171 -- more seeming
inconsistency).

and this doesn't even get into the fact that this sort of harmonic
vocabulary is *not* limiting *melodically* in the sense that you seem
to be concerned about in your paper -- even the blackjack scale (a 21-
tone subset of 72-equal), which is constructed to *maximize* the near-
4:5:6:7 chords, has absolutely no bias toward the melodic intervals
familiar from 12-equal, and in fact has 41 different intervals that
are distributed as evenly as possible along the 72-equal "virtual
intervallic continuum" . . .

> after having
> made my other point about overtones, beats, etc. (See my other post
from today
> about that latter point.)

will do . . .

>All of this is not
>intended to make anyone feel sorry for us (we're fine), but to
>respond to the
>absurd notion that we somehow represent "current academia." (!)

i did not advance this notion, not whatsoever. i simply meant that in
the *environment* of current academia, it is not surprising that one
could advance all the way to a doctoral degree without encountering
or being exposed to any information that would remedy such a poor
understanding of just intonation.

> that their 1991 Forum On Microtonality featured mostly JI and pure-
tuning
> microtonalists,

do you consider easley blackwood a pure-tuning microtonalist? what do
you think of his 13-equal piece, or his 18-equal piece?

Dear Joel,

Thank you for your contribution to mutual understanding on this list.

You wrote:
> > Dave Keenan:
> >>> Down with outrageous JI fundamentalist claims!
> >>> But long live JI harmony (among other kinds).
> >
> > Kraig Grady:
> >> All this talk of JI fundamentalism and i have yet to see any
posted.
...
> Dave Keenan:
> > They may not post, but they certainly make claims on their
websites.
>
> etc.
>
> Well said, Dave !
...

Thanks Joel. Err, you _do_ realise this is the same Dave that you just
accused (at least by implication)
in /tuning/topicId_38491.html#38599
of
(a) making a value judgement about just harmonies versus others, which
in fact I did not (and have never) made,
[and the next one really cracked me up :-) ]
(b) a twister of JI dogma to suit myself, or at least a proponent of
JI exclusiveness,
(c) considering myself as a member of some elite "we" as 'the keepers
of the holy writ', when in fact my "we" simply meant "the tuning
list",
(d) looking through tainted lenses,
(e) being patronising, and
(f) being dishonest about my own experience of consonance.

Joel, when Julia writes that just intonation requires all pitches to
have a strict relationship to a fundamental, what "strict
relationship" do you suppose she is referring to?

I particularly loved this one:

> Why do you JI types insist on proving everything and anything by
> reducing it to 'lowest terms' ? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So I'm a "JI type" now. Hee hee. What do you think of that Dave
Beardsley? :-)

I think you have the wrong meaning of "lowest terms" here. This is a
purely mathematical term regarding cancelling common factors on both
sides of a ratio. I suspect you thought it included the further
music-specific operations of octave-reduction and octave-inversion. It
does not.

So for example, a just minor sixth can be represented as 10:16, which
is 5:8 in lowest terms, but this cannot be reduced to 4:5 (a just
major third).

Regards,

On Saturday, July 13, 2002, at 03:30 , tuning@yahoogroups.com wrote:

> "emotionaljourney22" <paul@stretch-music.com>
>
> --- In tuning@y..., Joel Rodrigues <joelrodrigues@m...> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, July 10, 2002, at 02:31 , tuning@y... wrote:
>>
>>> David C Keenan <d.keenan@u...>
>>>

>>> It can easily be demonstrated that the perceived consonance of
>>> a sustained chord, in a harmonic or near-harmonic timbre, in
>>> the absence of any other musical context, is dependent to a
>>> _very_ large degree on the proximity of its component intervals
>>> to justly intoned intervals.
>>
>> Brown can be demonstrated to be in close proximity to red. So
>> what ? Is brown any less valid in it's existence ? What b.s.
>
> this response has nothing to do with what dave actually said. where
> are you coming from on this? you're seriously misunderstanding
> something.

Sorry about that. I didn't have the time to phrase that comment correctly. Rest assured I understand quite well. What I as trying to point out was the implication that JI is the 'true harmony', and that if anything is perceived to be consonant, then it must be because of the proximity to 'Just' intervals.

>> Why do you JI types insist on proving everything and anything by
>> reducing it to 'lowest terms' ? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>
> what on earth are you talking about? lowest terms means that instead
> of writing 2:4 or 3:6 or 5:10, we write 1:2. so what problem do you
> have with this, or which anything in the paragraph above? where's
> the "self-fulfilling prophecy"?

Oops. I made an error. I meant small numbers. I think I may have made the same error elsewhere.

- Joel

On Saturday, July 13, 2002, at 09:46 , tuning@yahoogroups.com wrote:

> "dkeenanuqnetau" <d.keenan@uq.net.au>
>
> Dear Joel,
>
> Thank you for your contribution to mutual understanding on this list.

If that's meant to be sarcastic, it's well taken. I had a terrible 2 days and I may have lost it a bit. All those post were lying in my Drafts folder never intended to be sent, merely letting off steam and clearing up my thoughts. Which is why though I do stand by my criticisms of the comments directed at or about Julia, I could have phrased them much better.

Eventually I would have had to say something, simply because I feel it's important to stand up and speak when you disagree, at least to simply show that there *are* differing view points. i.e., not everyone agrees with the criticisms of Julia Werntz. If I had the time or inclination, I could quite easily, with a few semantic adjustments, etc., rewrite some of the lengthier 'critiques' to actually support her ideas.

Also, one shouldn't dish out what one can't take. If one is going to accuse someone of being 'deluded', well *someone* just might have something say in response. And the gasps of 'who the heck is this fella trying to say we're wrong ?' 'Come on tough guy, show us the error of our ways, we dare you !' were all too predictable. Johnny R says, 'Joel, please teach us about graciousness...'. I tried before and it fell on deaf ears. Perhaps by gracious, you mean I should say nothing to contradict you.

Apologies all round for any offence caused, that was not my intention. I mean it. Maybe it would have been 'tactful' not to use words like 'patronising' and 'pompous'. But that is my honest impression and it was said in a spirit of friendship, you know, telling each other when we goof. But the worst of it has in fact been the lack of the slightest allowance for the possibility of error. 'No we understood you perfectly, Julia, don't try to explain anything more to us, it's no use, we're right and you're wrong.'

The question I'm asking myself now is, what would I lose if I simply unsubscribed from this list. Sure I'd miss Alison's and Margo's posts, then there's the overall spirit of friendship I perceive from Kraig & Joe P. (sorry if I've left out anyone), but there's all too little here of Starret, Morrison, Chalmers, Monzo, Stearns, Haverstick, et al.

> You wrote:
>>> Dave Keenan:
>>>>> Down with outrageous JI fundamentalist claims!
>>>>> But long live JI harmony (among other kinds).
>>>
>>> Kraig Grady:
>>>> All this talk of JI fundamentalism and i have yet to see any
> posted.
> ...
>> Dave Keenan:
>>> They may not post, but they certainly make claims on their
> websites.
>>
>> etc.
>>
>> Well said, Dave !
> ...
>
> Thanks Joel. Err, you _do_ realise this is the same Dave that you just
> accused (at least by implication)
> in /tuning/topicId_38491.html#38599

The irony is not lost on me. Actually I was surprised that even though you seem to have an understanding of where a response/ideas like Julia's may come from, you still joined in the now tiresome and predictable stream of like-minded posts.

> of
> (a) making a value judgement about just harmonies versus others, which
> in fact I did not (and have never) made,
> [and the next one really cracked me up :-) ]
> (b) a twister of JI dogma to suit myself, or at least a proponent of
> JI exclusiveness,

> (c) considering myself as a member of some elite "we" as 'the keepers
> of the holy writ', when in fact my "we" simply meant "the tuning
> list",
> (d) looking through tainted lenses,
> (e) being patronising, and
> (f) being dishonest about my own experience of consonance.

Dave, some of that was not referring to you directly, but jokingly to a general perception of what the JI hard line is. That last paragraph of yours to Julia did come across as patronising. I'm sorry I had to say it. And were you referring to all 500+ members of this forum ? It most definitely does not include me.

> I particularly loved this one:
>
>> Why do you JI types insist on proving everything and anything by
>> reducing it to 'lowest terms' ? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>
> So I'm a "JI type" now. Hee hee. What do you think of that Dave
> Beardsley? :-)
>
> I think you have the wrong meaning of "lowest terms" here.

Yes, there it is again. Sorry. It's an error. I meant small numbers. The rest stands.

Cheers,
Joel

On Saturday, July 13, 2002, at 09:46 , tuning@yahoogroups.com wrote:

> Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@anaphoria.com>
>>>
>> 'Some did manage to stand out, either because they bent the
>> rules of serialism to their will, or because they possessed the
>> imagination and developed the influence to spread the word that
>> serialism could be a vibrant, meaningful technique.'
>
> The direction of new music left it all behind. Go into a store > and look in the experimental section. It is divorced from such > dead ends and it's practices are antiquated at best. Still born > at Cage with some Minimalism in the
> background

I know what you mean. But there must be some to whom the above praise would still apply.

>> Here's a lovely turn of phrase from the above series of
>> articles, a quote from Nicolas Slonimsky describing Sheila
>> Silver's music, '"enlightened dissonance devoid of ostensible
>> disharmonies."'. I'd like that plastered on a T-shirt. I dare
>> say some JI hard heads would sooner suck a lemon than utter a
>> sentence like that.
>
> why? (BTW i studied with him )

Perhaps the point is that the JI hard line should ask itself why such a perception would so easily be made of them.

Tchau,
Joel

----- Original Message -----
From: "dkeenanuqnetau" <d.keenan@uq.net.au>

> I particularly loved this one:
>
> > Why do you JI types insist on proving everything and anything by
> > reducing it to 'lowest terms' ? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
>
> So I'm a "JI type" now. Hee hee. What do you think of that Dave
> Beardsley? :-)

Let's hear some music!

* David Beardsley
* http://biink.com
* http://mp3.com/davidbeardsley

--- In tuning@y..., David Beardsley <davidbeardsley@b...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "dkeenanuqnetau" <d.keenan@u...>
>
> > I particularly loved this one:
> >
> > > Why do you JI types insist on proving everything and anything by
> > > reducing it to 'lowest terms' ? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> >
> > So I'm a "JI type" now. Hee hee. What do you think of that Dave
> > Beardsley? :-)
>
> Let's hear some music!

I was being facetious. I fully expected you to say "I'd call you
obnoxious before I'd call you a JI type", or some such. Thereby
pointing out to Joel that he shot the wrong man. :-)

But now that you mention it, you've already heard the "music"! The
tumbling dekany (10 voices from the 4th dimension). I know this is
getting a bit old and I'm resting on my laurels here, but hey I've got
lots of other things to do, like help George Secor finish his notation
so it can do 31-limit JI with no approximation required, as well as
most ETs and temperaments.

In a message dated 7/13/02 7:47:22 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
d.keenan@uq.net.au writes:

> I was being facetious. I fully expected you to say "I'd call you
> obnoxious before I'd call you a JI type", or some such. Thereby
> pointing out to Joel that he shot the wrong man. :-)
>
>

This is an important point to recognize, Dave K.., we are all independent
players. There is no team. It's not like music critics having an unspoken
(or spoken) bond not to pan each other. We might wish it otherwise,
sometimes, but we're independent agents. Maybe Joel needs to realize this as
well.

best, Johnny

--- In tuning@y..., Afmmjr@a... wrote:
> In a message dated 7/13/02 7:47:22 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> d.keenan@u... writes:
>
> > I was being facetious. I fully expected you to say "I'd call you
> > obnoxious before I'd call you a JI type", or some such. Thereby
> > pointing out to Joel that he shot the wrong man. :-)
>
> This is an important point to recognize, Dave K.., we are all
independent
> players. There is no team. It's not like music critics having an
unspoken
> (or spoken) bond not to pan each other. We might wish it otherwise,
> sometimes, but we're independent agents. Maybe Joel needs to
realize this as
> well.

I'm sorry Johnny, I don't follow. You quoted something I wrote and
then seemed to be telling me it contained an important point for me to
recognise. But it doesn't seem to contain anything relating to the
point you then make. However I think I already understood (a) any
points made in my own quote and (b) the point you then make.

Can you point me to what I wrote that made you think, that I think,
that we have, or should have, a bond not to pan each other? Or was
it that should have a bond not to think that you think that I
think, or majbe just not to think at all. Ah, never mind. :-)

So many people seem to be accusing so many other people of saying
things they never said, we might as well just declare open season on
anyone for anything. ;-)

Ditto, Dave. ;) Johnny

----- Original Message -----
From: "dkeenanuqnetau" <d.keenan@uq.net.au>

> --- In tuning@y..., David Beardsley <davidbeardsley@b...> wrote:
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "dkeenanuqnetau" <d.keenan@u...>
> >
> > > I particularly loved this one:
> > >
> > > > Why do you JI types insist on proving everything and anything by
> > > > reducing it to 'lowest terms' ? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> > >
> > > So I'm a "JI type" now. Hee hee. What do you think of that Dave
> > > Beardsley? :-)
> >
> > Let's hear some music!
>
> I was being facetious. I fully expected you to say "I'd call you
> obnoxious before I'd call you a JI type", or some such. Thereby
> pointing out to Joel that he shot the wrong man. :-)

OK, I can insult by request: I'd call you obnoxious before I'd call you a JI
type!!!

Didn't I write this a while back?

* David Beardsley
* http://biink.com
* http://mp3.com/davidbeardsley

Joe

Is there a book on tuning that is regarded
as the universal best and most comprehensive? Ideally
it should cover everything from the most basic concepts
to the most complicated. Thanks.

S. Szpak

_________________________________________________________________
Worried about inbox overload? Get MSN Extra Storage now! http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Szpak" <stephen_szpak@h...>

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#51313

wrote:
>
> Joe
>
> Is there a book on tuning that is regarded
> as the universal best and most comprehensive? Ideally
> it should cover everything from the most basic concepts
> to the most complicated. Thanks.
>
> S. Szpak
>

***Hi Stephen,

Regrettably the answer to this question is *no* (!) and many of the
best books on tuning and microtonality have gone out of print! (One
can still find them sometimes in used venues.)

However, you should be familiar with some of the great "classics"
that are still in print, if you aren't already:

Harry Partch _Genesis of a Music_

David Doty _The Just Intonation Primer_ (available through the Just
Intonation Network)

Hermann Helmholtz _On the Sensations of Tone_

There are some other important "classics" that are now out of print,
including J. Murray Barbour's _Tuning and Temperament_ (and important
one, but hard to find... I'm selling my copy for $1000.... :)

That should get you started, and I'm sure other people on this list
will have further recommendations should you need them.

Curiously enough, some of the most interesting and advanced work in
this field, it seems, is on this very list!

In another lifetime, I'm going to read and study the entire archive
of 50000+ again (actually, at one point I started to read back and
*did* go back at least a couple of years from where I was
posting... :)

There is, of course, a considerable amount of misinformation in the
Tuning List, since it's generally a "work in progress," but much of
it gets corrected, mostly by the indefatigable Paul Erlich...

Hope this helps! Yell if more.

Joe P.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Joseph Pehrson" <jpehrson@r...> wrote:
>--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Szpak" <stephen_szpak@h...>
>
>/tuning/topicId_38491.html#51313
>
>wrote:
> > > Joe
> > > Is there a book on tuning that is regarded
> > as the universal best and most comprehensive? Ideally
> > it should cover everything from the most basic concepts
> > to the most complicated. Thanks.
> > > S. Szpak
> >
>
>***Hi Stephen,
>
>Regrettably the answer to this question is *no* (!) and many of the best >books on tuning and microtonality have gone out of print! (One can still >find them sometimes in used venues.)
>
>However, you should be familiar with some of the great "classics" that are >still in print, if you aren't already:
>
>Harry Partch _Genesis of a Music_
>
>David Doty _The Just Intonation Primer_ (available through the Just >Intonation Network)
>
>Hermann Helmholtz _On the Sensations of Tone_
>
>There are some other important "classics" that are now out of print, >including J. Murray Barbour's _Tuning and Temperament_ (and important one, >but hard to find... I'm selling my copy for $1000.... :)
>
>That should get you started, and I'm sure other people on this list will >have further recommendations should you need them.
>
>Curiously enough, some of the most interesting and advanced work in this >field, it seems, is on this very list!
>
>In another lifetime, I'm going to read and study the entire archive of >50000+ again (actually, at one point I started to read back and *did* go >back at least a couple of years from where I was posting... :)
>
>There is, of course, a considerable amount of misinformation in the Tuning >List, since it's generally a "work in progress," but much of it gets >corrected, mostly by the indefatigable Paul Erlich...
>
>Hope this helps! Yell if more.
>
>Joe P.

STEPHEN SZPAK WRITES:::::::::::

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I thought there was no super book and
you have confirmed that. Looking at what you call "advanced work" is what I call
gibberish.
I'm going to save all these suggestions at my special e-mail address in case I need them
though. One last thing, one of my local libraries can get almost any book in any library
in the country. That is something you don't want to forget about. It's your tax money,
you might as well get something for it.

stephen_szpak@hotmail.com

_________________________________________________________________
Check your PC for viruses with the FREE McAfee online computer scan. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Szpak" <stephen_szpak@h...>

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#51315
>
> STEPHEN SZPAK WRITES:::::::::::
>
> Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I thought there was
no super
> book and
> you have confirmed that. Looking at what you call "advanced
work" is
> what I call
> gibberish.

***Well, Stephen, maybe it *won't* be though after you've read the
*other* books.. :) That's the point... :)

JP

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Szpak" <stephen_szpak@h...>
wrote:
>
> Joe
>
> Is there a book on tuning that is regarded
> as the universal best and most comprehensive? Ideally
> it should cover everything from the most basic concepts
> to the most complicated. Thanks.

It's not going to cover the most complicated, I assure you.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Joseph Pehrson" <jpehrson@r...> wrote:
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Szpak" <stephen_szpak@h...>
>
> /tuning/topicId_38491.html#51315
> >
> > STEPHEN SZPAK WRITES:::::::::::
> >
> > Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I thought there was
> no super
> > book and
> > you have confirmed that. Looking at what you call "advanced
> work" is
> > what I call
> > gibberish.
>
>
> ***Well, Stephen, maybe it *won't* be though after you've read the
> *other* books.. :) That's the point... :)

It will still be gibberish. You may take your courage and a few math
textbooks in hand, and plunge in, if you wish.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Gene Ward Smith" <gwsmith@s...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_38491.html#51319

> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Joseph Pehrson" <jpehrson@r...>
wrote:
> > --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Stephen Szpak"
<stephen_szpak@h...>
> >
> > /tuning/topicId_38491.html#51315
> > >
> > > STEPHEN SZPAK WRITES:::::::::::
> > >
> > > Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I thought there
was
> > no super
> > > book and
> > > you have confirmed that. Looking at what you call "advanced
> > work" is
> > > what I call
> > > gibberish.
> >
> >
> > ***Well, Stephen, maybe it *won't* be though after you've read
the
> > *other* books.. :) That's the point... :)
>
> It will still be gibberish. You may take your courage and a few
math
> textbooks in hand, and plunge in, if you wish.

***That's *Tuning Math,* Gene! For *this* list one only needs a
general knowledge of tuning concepts, terms (which are not that
difficult to pick up if one hangs around) and high school algebra,
for the most part... :)

J. Pehrson