re: Slendro, Pelog propriety

>I know these references very well. I'm still not clear on what exactly
>makes a scale "proper," but, as he says, both pelog and slendro encompass a
>variety of scales. These "scales" can vary considerably from one set of
>instruments to another, so it's difficult to make sweeping generalizations.

Yes- while I do believe that Rothenberg was really on to something
important, I'm aware of the kind of mistakes that were made in
ethnomusicology around the time of his writing the papers, so I'm very
interested in checking out this and his many other cross-cultural claims.

As far as understanding propriety, did you catch the original discussion on
it this past fall? It was Chalmers' article in Xenharmonikon 3 that turned
me on to the whole business, and I think it explains the basics of the
model very well. If you can't get to it, I'll give it another shot on the
list.

This Rothenberg stuff is definitely the heaviest music theory I've ever
approached. That's why I published some here, and offered to send copies
out --- to get help. Aside from what I've tried to cover so far, he has
stuff about graph efficiency (and node-minimal sets) that tries to explain
the use of altered tones (micro-chromaticism) and scale subsetting. Way
over my head.

>Kunst 1949 and Hood 1966 give some tuning data for certain gamelan. In his
>pioneering ethnomusicological study of many aspects of Javanese music (not
>just tuning), Kunst gives just the middle octave of a single instrument of
>a select number of gamelan. Hood (his student) found this approach
>insufficient because of the stretching and compression of octaves. That's
>mainly what his 1966 article is about. The 1954 book (basically his
>dissertation) is mostly an empirical study of how melodic formulae help
>define the patet (roughly, "modes") of Javanese music. However, the largest
>set empirical data of gamelan tunings is in:
>
>Surjodiningrat, Wasisto, P. J. Sudarjana, and Adhi Susanto. Penjelidikan
>dalam pengukuran nada gamelan-gamelan djawa terkemuka di Jogjakarta dan
>Surakarta. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press; translated by the
>authors as: Tone measurements of outstanding Javanese Gamelan. Yogyakarta:
>Gadjah Mada University Press, 1969, rpt. 1972, 1993.

Thanks for the reference! If the rest of Rothenberg's measures can be
incorporated into Scala, we can try to check the predictions of his model
ourselves!

>One schema into which pelog tunings have been forced is that they are
>tempered versions of a subset of 9TET. I have seen this hypothesis,
>together with a kind of cycle of "fifths," proposed by both Javanese and
>Western writers. Dan Wolf had some very interesting speculations along
>these lines in a Xenharmonikon article, though I remain skeptical about the
>9TET connection.

What do you think of Sethares' results about Javanese scales minimizing
roughness, given the timbres of their instruments?

-C.

>From: Carl Lumma <clumma@nni.com>

>As far as understanding propriety, did you catch the original discussion on
>it this past fall? It was Chalmers' article in Xenharmonikon 3

Yes, I recall now. In reference to slendro and pelog, "propriety" seems to
restate the rather uninteresting (though musically important) observation
that one scale has steps roughly the same size while the other has steps of
very different sizes. Clearly, all slendro scales are proper.

With pelog, the picture is more complicated. If one takes pelog as a
heptatonic scale, then a quick glance at the Surjodiningrat reference I
gave earlier shows that only one of the 30 or so pelog gamelan they
measured seems to be proper (gamelan Udanaram of the Mangkunegaran palace
in Solo -- the scale in cents is: 140 124 249 165 108 176 255 -- I'm not
running Scala, I'm just adding up seconds and thirds in my head, so I could
be wrong.) In most gamelan, the interval between pitches 4 and 6 is
narrower than the interval between pitches 3 and 4 or 7 and 1.

However, pelog is really only used in 2 pentatonic subsets (12356 and
23567), with the occassional addition of pitch 4. Those scales are clearly
improper in all instances.
>
>What do you think of Sethares' results about Javanese scales minimizing
>roughness, given the timbres of their instruments?
>
I *still* haven't read his book, so I can't comment directly. It is an
interesting idea and timbre could play a role. However, I would make
several cautionary statements to those who wanted to pursue this
hypothesis. First, as I pointed out before, specific instances of slendro
and pelog differ considerably, even among gamelan that seem to me to have
pretty much identical timbres. Secondly, tuners use the gender barung as
their tuning reference, which, after the initial attack, has a relatively
pure spectrum, certainly not as inharmonic as, say, the saron. Third, the
tuners themselves cite various musical desiderata as guiding their tuning,
so timbre can't be the whole story (though I'm not saying that Sethares
says it is).

>From: Rick Sanford <rsanf@pais.org>
>
>Bill Alves wrote:
>
>> Though slendro approaches 5TET, very closely in some cases, the differences
>> are very deliberate and give each version of slendro a different quality.
>> Tuners and musicians describe these qualities as favoring one patet over
>> another, thus suggesting that the tunings are being tempered in various
>> ways to favor (or flavor) different modes, much as irregular temperaments
>> of the European Baroque favored different keys to a greater or lesser
>> degree.
>
> Bill:
>
>I'll buy it. Can you please list some references discussing
>the approaches to Slendro tunings?
>
I wish I could. I had heard at one point that there was a dissertation in
the works along these lines, but I haven't heard anything more about it.
Hood in his 1966 article discusses some evidence about the importance of
small deviations affecting the characters of different slendros. Lou
Harrison in "Thoughts about 'Slippery Slendro'" (_Selected Reports in
Ethnomusicology_ 6 (1985) 111-17) reports some interesting discussions with
Pak Coko about the different character of some slendro tunings. My own
observations above about different slendros favoring different patets come
from a variety of informal conversations with tuners and musicians. I would
love to be able to go back to Java someday and study these differences in a
deeper and more systematic way.

From: Johnny Reinhard

>I had the opportunity to question Mantle Hood following a lecture in
>ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He said there were as many as 19
>tones in Indonesian music. Slendro (5) and pelog (7) ...do they share a
>common tone?...and various vocal/kemanche tones which can be independent of
>the ideophone instruments.

There is normally one common tone, or tumbuk, between a set of slendro and
pelog instruments, but in some sets there are two tumbuk tones. (According
to Surjodiningrat et al, there is even one with three tumbuk tones,
Sadadpengasih, owned by radio station RRI Yogyakarta.) I have read several
theories about the pitches outside of the (idiophone) tuning system that
are interpolated by singers in a few very special contexts. This device is
called barang miring (lit. "slanting thing") or laras miring (lit.
"slanting tuning").

Some writers call barang miring pitches pelog pitches interpolated into
slendro (barang miring is only used in slendro). Martopangrawit has
classified the possible barang miring pitches used into 3 scales he called
"minor" scales, each with two or three altered pitches, though one of the
scales was fairly rare. He seemed to have thought of barang miring as a
kind of "polymodality" -- that is, the superimposition of one scale on
another as a special effect. Each of these scales would be transposed for
different patet. Suryabrata notes that in the town of Semarang there is
sometimes a miring-like interpolation between slendro 1 and 2, which he
attributes to Arab influence.

Mantle Hood's comments should not be taken as evidence that he thought that
all gamelan and vocal pitches could be aggregated into a kind of Javanese
Greater Perfect System, though his reminder that we shouldn't neglect the
vocal basis of most gamelan music when studying its tuning is well taken.
There was an interesting discussion on the gamelan list some time back
about the tuning of macapat and other a cappella vocal chants, but from
what I read, more work needs to be done in that area to draw many
meaningful conclusions.

Bill

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