Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning pelog (wasRe: 2 intriguing "items")

>From: "Dave Keenan" <D.KEENAN@UQ.NET.AU>
>Subject: Re: 2 intriguing "items"
>
>--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, czhang23@a... wrote:
>> 2) Interesting scale-tuning correlation [values in rounded cents]:
>>
>> - "primitive Pelog" (IIRC cited by Colin McPhee):
>> 102 , 258, 522, 678, 780, 936, 1200
>>
>> - Pythagorean-like scale with 5th averaged from Chinese bamboo
>>tubes (as documented in SCALA):
>> 48,
>> => *102*,
>> 156, 204,
>> => *258*,
>> 312, 366, 414, 468,
>> => *522*,
>> 570, 624,
>> => *678*,
>> 726,
>> => *780*,
>> 834, 882,
>> => *936*,
>> 990, 1044, 1092, 1146, 1200
>>
>> Co-incidence or possible proof that there is a definite early
>>Chinese musical substrate to Indonesian music?
>>
>> ---
>> Hanuman Zhang,
>
>This is intriguing.

LOL that's why I titled my posting as such :)

>> But of course there are many other possibilities
>>besides the two you suggest.

I wasn't so much "suggesting" possibilities as much asking a question as
I am some what dubious of the entirely "too neat"-ness of the data :)

>I'd like to know more about the first tuning above.

Me, too.

> The second is a
>purely theoretical construction based on iterating a 768 cent "fifth".

Ya mean a 678 cent 5th, right? Recent theories say the ideal Chinese 5th
is 680 cents.

>It is only that fifth that is claimed to be derived from Chinese
>bamboo pipes (of what place and time?).

I got those numbers from a SCALA file.
I am not absolutely sure, but I have a feeling this particular scale
might be circa 1908-1911 - pre-Republic China.

>Pelog tunings do also contain a chain (or chains) of "fifths" of about
>that size, but the one given looks too perfectly so, and so I suspect
>it to be partly theoretical too.

I had suspicions as well.

>It might be that there was no influence from one to the other and the
>[678] cent generator just happens to be the best solution to a
>particular musical problem (like the evolution of the eye as a
>solution to a biological problem, ocurring at least three times
>independently).

Polygenetic evolution ;)

In a message dated 2003:07:14 05:25:25 PM, Warren "the Scarlet Aardvark" Burt
writes:

>And I've seen ancient Greek modes in some Indonesian scales. I think there
>was a common culture going way back to Babylon that went west to Greece
>etc, and east to Japan, China and Southeast to Indonesia, and they all cross
>fertilized like crazy.

... back to Dave Keenan:

>But what exactly is the problem that it solves? Paul Erlich has
>suggested that, in the case of Pelog, it is the problem of
>approximating 4:5 and 5:6 frequency ratios with a short chain of
>approximate 2:3's, even shorter than that of meantone. Paul's argument
>relies on inharmonic timbres to eliminate the objectionable nature of
>the 24 cent errors involved. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for
>bamboo pipes. I think there may be some other explanation of the [678]
>cent generator.

::jokin' sweet&sour:: Mayhaps it just sounds more right, good and roundly
beautiful than the rather thin, anemic "Western" 12tET 5th, eh? 0_o?
*gigglabyte!*

---
Hanuman Zhang,
musical mad scientist (no, I don't wanna take over the world, just the sound
spectrum...)

"What strange risk of hearing can bring sound to music - a hearing whose
obligation awakens a sensibility so new that it is forever a unique, new-born,
anti-death surprise, created now and now and now. .. a hearing whose moment
in time is always daybreak." - Lucia Dlugoszewski

"The wonderousness of the human mind is too great to be transferred into
music only by 7 or 12 elements of tone steps in one octave." - shakuhachi master
Masayuki Koga

"Music is the art of thinking with sounds." - Combarieu

"There's a rabbinical tradition that the music in heaven will be microtonal"
-annotative interpretation of Schottenstein Tehillim, 92:4, the verse being:
"Upon a ten-stringed * instrument and upon lyre, with singing accompanied by
harp." [* utilizing new tones]

NADA BRAHMA - Sanskrit, "sound [is the] Godhead"

"God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself." -Thomas
Merton

LILA - Sanskrit, "divine play/sport/whimsy" - "the universe is what happens
when God wants to play" - "joyous exercise of spontaneity involved in the art
of creation"

...improvisation is about change, about flux rather than stasis. ... you have
to be aware of the fact that improvisation is about a constant change. -
Steve Beresford

improvisation: "a process of liberation, a working around the assumptions
that define our civilization, and the results are open-ended." - John Berndt

pelog (wasRe: 2 intriguing "items")

🔗czhang23@aol.com

🔗Martin Braun <nombraun@telia.com>