Re: AW.: Re: re: thoughts on Haba's 2th quartet/Ives/Wyschnegradsky

This is interesting. I was just thinking today about an observation that Hall
Overton had about jazz pianists. (He had a studio in NYC. He mentioned Chick
Corea used to reherse in the building.) He noticed that they seemed to relish
out-of-tune pianos and made them sound great. I was thinking about that
statement today. It would seem to me that a piano would go flat over time thus
giving a perceptive musician better thirds, sevenths, elevenths and thirteenths
in relation to other instruments at "concert" pitch.
RT

Afmmjr@aol.com wrote:

<snip>

There is an interesting story in the Memos about Ives coming upon anout-of-tune
piano that charmed so much he returned to it on another day to recapure its
intervallic pedigree, but alas, it was lost to him.
Johnny Reinhard

In a message dated 11/18/1999 06:47:03 AM, you wrote:

>From: Rick Tagawa <ricktagawa@earthlink.net>
>
>This is interesting. I was just thinking today about an observation that
Hall
>Overton had about jazz pianists. (He had a studio in NYC. He mentioned Chick
>Corea used to reherse in the building.) He noticed that they seemed to
relish
>out-of-tune pianos and made them sound great. I was thinking about that
>statement today. It would seem to me that a piano would go flat over time
thus
>giving a perceptive musician better thirds, sevenths, elevenths and
thirteenths
>in relation to other instruments at "concert" pitch.

"... Playing with simple, pure harmonies is like playing with light,
and the fascination with that cusp between complexity and out-of-
tuneness is like playing on the dark side. The flirtation between the
light and the dark is a kind of confrontation with destiny itself, an
reenactment of the battle between survival and annihilation, harmony
and noise. We cherish this in our music. As long as we are singing about
life and death we know we are still alive. The various commas, whether
they are used as expressive shading or a functional way of zapping through
harmonic territory, far from being pesky problems that many theorists
have assumed them to be, are in fact windows to the affective dark side
of the psyche, and they enable music to fill up to the brim with the full
range of human feeling. ... " - W. A. Mathieu,
_Harmonic Experience: Tonal
Harmony from its Natural
Origins to its Modern Expression_

"Cut-Up cento" poem based on another passage from Mathieu's book:

Existence is a piano
in the woods
abandoned in the damp woods
somehow defied its
own disintegration
music hideously
hilariously distorted

still recognizable

...............................................

zHANg