Subject: Re: Re: Messiaen's use of harmonic series

In a message dated 2003:06:21 12:16:38 AM, Kurt Bigler <kkb@breathsense.com>
writes:

>on 6/20/03 10:56 PM, Louis_Nelson@adidam.org <Louis_Nelson@adidam.org>
>wrote:
>
>> but W. A. Mathieu, in his book "Harmonic
>> Experience", occasionally analyzes whether the gap between two
>> different JI tones implied by the same ET tone is crossed directly, or
>> over a period of ambiguouty. Also, (and this is very pertinent to
>> Messian) he analyzes how JI harmony in one tonality slides into
>> symmetrical harmony, which, in some sense, implies ET, where all
>> intervals are the same, and slides out again into a different JI
>> tonality.
>
>Yes, the question will be whether there is some "force" in the music which
>persists through what might be called an ambiguity, even if that is just
>the memory of a previous tonality. The gluing together of the different
>tonalities may be somewhat arbitrary in relation to certain kinds of
>analysis, but might also end up being fairly specific from a listening
>experience point of view. (Yet I hear that Mathieu is interested in the
>experience.) That's what I want to find out. The presence of the ET tones
>obviously can not be excluded as a normalizing "force" in the piece, and
>in organ music (which is what I am mainly considering, for the moment) the
>ET tones are all that is _really_ there. I wonder if Mathieu looked into
>octatonic.

YES! He has a whole chapter devoted to "Symmetrical Harmony and the
Dissolution of Tonality." Fascinating approach to whole-tone, diminished/octatonic,
and augmented/nonatonic scales and modes. But sorely doesn't cover much
Messiaen, Scriabin, Ravel's creation and use of these modes nor symmtrical
decatonic scales/modes. Or two octave and multi-octave forms of "synthetic"
scales/modes...
all subjects of which I am keenly interested in and would love to learn more
(& more of).

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