Re: slendro: nothing equal about it!

> From: alves@orion.ac.hmc.edu (Bill Alves)
> >
> > [5]-227cents-[4] -233- [3] -255- [2] -224- [1] -261- [5] .
> >
> >What other slendro/slendro models do you know of?

I've always sited Gamelan as a (quasi-)indigenous music where the scale is
based on the overtone series of the instrument. The New Grove's Dictionary
of Music and Musicians mentions the use of a stretched octave and gives
measurements of the scale steps:

0 cents
257 cents
494 cents
725 cents
969 cents
1217 cents

William Sethares, in "Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale" states,

"Each Gamelan is tuned differently. Hence the pelog of one Gamelan may
differ substantially from the pelog of another. Tunings tend not to have
exact 2:1 octaves; rather, the octaves can be either stretched or
compressed. Each 'octave' of a Gamelan may differ from other 'octaves' of
the same Gamelan."

He sites a book which studies more than 30 complete Gamelans,

"W. Surjodiningrat, P. J. Sudarjana, and A. Susanto, 'Tone Measurements Of
Outstanding Javanese Gamelan in Yogyakarta and Surakarta,' Gadjah Mada
University Press, (1993)"

He goes on to list an average scale obtained by averaging all their results:

Slendro: 0, 231, 474, 717, 955, 1208 cents.

Actually, there's an appendix of tuning measurements of various Gamelans.
I'll post part of it at:

http://www.organicdesign.org/peterson/tuning/gamelan.html

Will, if this bothers you, let me know and I'll take it down. I just threw
it up there temporarily.

---
Glen Peterson
Peterson Stringed Instruments
30 Elm Street North Andover, MA 01845
(978) 975-1527
http://www.organicdesign.org/peterson

Thanks to Daniel Wolf for the engaging (gamelan tuning) post, I really
enjoyed it. I find things like his point about the bronze rising in
pitch over time: "Another factor that should be considered is that
bronze rise in pitch over time, and the smaller keys rise faster than
the larger ones -- so the stretching may not be a part of the initial
tuning design," fascinating.

Awhile back Joe Monzo wrote "what tuning sounds best in any particular
instant is highly dependent on many contextual factors." Not only do I
happen to wholeheartedly agree with this, but I also think it's fair
to say that some of those "contextual factors" can be disconcertingly
circuitous twists of happenstance.

To the same post of Joe's that I mention above, John Link responded:
"I have found with my vocal quintet that there is hardly ever any
disagreement about whether we're really in tune. So I don't think that
it is very much a matter of taste. I believe that there actually is
such a thing as good intonation, and that it is not such a subjective
notion as one might think."

While I find it easy enough to see (and agree) with the tenants that
make such a point of view fly, I also almost completely disagree with
it... It seems to me that what is easily in agreement in one
particular musical context, or one particular tuning paradigm, may be
anything but in another. I think that music -- and all the structural
articulations contained therein -- are as flexible as we are talented
driven and inspired... that talented, driven, and inspired people
always seem to find their way through the maze and tangle of what
will work and what won't work... of what's musically right and what's
musically wrong.

Do music's (often quirky) tools -- i.e., instruments and those who use
them -- shape music's structures to a greater degree than a
fundamental (Yasser-esque) art of space (I believe "raumkunst" was the
word he used), or are they more of an interleaved affair - does the
latter even exist for that matter...

While I personally see little hope (or need) of dragging anything
definitive out of a sociological mire of righteousness and
subjectiveness, these are questions that I do find fascinating, and
especially with regards to how they sit in the subject of intonation
and tuning.

Dan

I wrote,

>While I find it easy enough to see (and agree) with the tenants that
make such a point of view fly,

"tenants" should have (obviously) read tenets - "the tenets that make
such a point of view fly,"

sorry,
Dan

...awhile back I typed boarders for borders... must have some sort of
a suppressed landlord fixation or something...