Re: Canons and imitation: Open letter to Bill Alves

Hello, there, Bill, and everyone.

Please let me begin, Bill, by thanking you for both for your
contributions and for your graceful and indeed most gracious response
which somehow seems to mitigate my regret for posting certain
insufficiently tempered words on this list. Also, one of your studies
has helped to set in motion a musical project on which I am now
engaged, making this an all the more appropriate occasion to support
some of your insights on the question of music education and "canons."

In 1597, Thomas Morley wrote of some "faults to be avoided in
imitation," and the kind of "canons" we are discussing may indeed
involve faults such as universalizing the musical values of a
particular style or era or culture while ignoring or even actively
devaluing other equally important values of other styles and eras and
cultures.

Morley specifically wanted to warn his students against emulating
certain Italian composers (then all the rage in post-Armada England)
in what he viewed as their licenses involving parallel fifths and
octaves, or near approaches thereto. Here, I suspect that both of us
are urging that people avoid unquestioningly engaging in the imitation
and perpetuation of "canonic" values which, as you emphasize,
marginalize many kind of European as well as other world musics.

Since this is a Tuning List, one good example of a "canonic" view is
the assertion that 16th-century practice and theory are moving toward
12-tone equal temperament (12-tet) as well as the major/minor key
tonality of the 18th and 19th centuries. In other words, it seems to
me, the Classic/Romantic eras of European music favored by this
"canon" become a kind of universal frame of reference by which all
other music should be measured -- as you so well describe in your own
article.

Is it really so "obvious" that "everyone" today would wish to trade a
keyboard in 31-note meantone, for example, for one in 12-tet, or that
the modal system of the 16th century (with all its flexibility and
"mixed modes" documented in theory and practice) is somehow less
beautiful or fertile than the 18th-century key system (conceived,
incidentally, in an environment where unequal well- temperaments for
keyboards were likely far more prominent than 12-tet approximations)?

While I tend to look at the "canon" from the perspective of medieval
and Renaissance European music, there is another curious tendency: the
tendency of authors to identify with a "we" which may pertain to
18th-century norms, but not necessarily to 20th-century norms as
expressed in actual contemporary European "classical" music, let alone
the historical and current practices of many other world musics.

For example, I have seen in various places the assertion that a
three-voice sonority of 4:6:9 "was consonant to medieval composers,
but is dissonant to us." Here it is tempting to ask, "What about all
the 20th-century music using fourth and fifth chords as favored
concords?" Such sonorities indeed sound "dissonant" in musics where
they are out of place, or are treated in ways other than the idiomatic
ones (e.g. suspensions).

One value of the current movement for alternative tunings is that it
affords a radically different perspective -- or many such perspectives
-- for viewing history. As Glenn Watkins notes in his study of
Gesualdo, quoting Giedion, absolute points of reference are no more
open to the historian than to the physicist. Looking at music in terms
of its basic assumptions regarding the size of intervals is one way to
appreciate some different points of view.

The case of Nicola Vicentino, the topic of the paper which introduced
me to you and your writings, today remains a leading example. Even
modern authors who have considerable interest in "avant garde" music,
Renaissance or current, tend to accept the view that Vicentino "went
off the deep end" when it came to really taking the chromatic and
enharmonic genera seriously, and proposing their very practical modern
use.

Then, as now, a music based on radically different intervals and
premises requires some acculturation; thus I can easily understood how
an unfamiliar listener might conclude that "this is just a mathe-
matical or historical exercise which even the composer doesn't
_really_ like to hear." Maybe the issue here, quite apart from the
actual quality of the new music (another question), is how willing the
listener is to adjust to a novel set of sounds -- or, in the case of
Vicentino, a set of often familiar concords arranged in radically new
relations.

Along with an acculturation to new sounds may go a new orientation to
history: for example, the various systems of the 16th and 17th
centuries with more than 12 notes per octave.

Finally, such a flexible approach to tunings and styles may invite us
to join in the making of history, to create new music following a road
which may not have been taken (or may indeed have bene taken, but not
as often as others).

As Morley declares, there be more ways to the woods than one. In
the matter of musical "canons," I find it often a useful rule to
follow one of the time-honored doctrines of discant and counterpoint:
the value of contrary motion.

Most respectfully,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net