Re: TD 411 -- Reply to John deLaubenfels on dissonance and style

Hello, there, and I'd like to venture an impassioned but hopefully
friendly response to John A. deLaubenfels, who writes in Tuning Digest
411:

> First, let me re-state where I'm coming from. My ear demands
> everything, Bach included, in 7-limit tuning. There, a tritone is
> something to be tuned, either as 7/5 or as 10/7, according to
> context. In 5-limit, as I am slowly learning, a tritone is
> something to be subject to creative fudging, along with creative
> rationalizations about why it should be dissonant, yet we should
> still call this "Just Intonation".

Please let me begin by warmly acknowledging that 7-limit tuning might
artfully be applied to many kinds of music, and that if you like it,
that is "justification" enough.

Further, as an aside to this thread, I would add that I have tried a
15-note-per-octave 5-limit just intonation (JI) scheme based on a
keyboard proposed by Zarlino which can be very pleasing for some
16th-century vocal music, and inevitably involves comma shifts if a
piece requires consonant fifths on both D-A and G-D. Of course, as an
enthusiast for Vicentino's enharmonic style with its very deliberate
shifts of a diesis (128:125 or ~41.06 cents in 1/4-comma meantone, or
~38.7 cents in 31-tone equal temperament, 31-tet for short), I may
hardly be the most selective listener to give an opinion on comma
shifts <grin>.

However, there are two possible implications of your last sentence I
quote above which would raise some concerns for me as an advocate of
medieval and Renaissance European styles of music and tunings,
including 3-limit and 5-limit JI and meantone. In fairness, I would
emphasize that here I deal mostly with very different periods than
Bach, and touch on broader philosophical issues.

To assert my points in a positive manner, I would say:

(1) A musical style may quite legitimately choose to treat certain
intervals as outright "dissonances" more or less urgently seeking
resolution (e.g. the 729:512 tritone of 3-limit JI, or the 64:45
tritone of 5-limit JI). This is not a mere matter of "creative
rationalizations," but a matter of artistic practice and expectation.
Similarly, a musical style may quite legitimately treat certain
intervals as "dual-purpose" sonorities perceived as _relatively_
blending but unstable, for example the Gothic major and minor thirds
realized in 3-limit as 81:64 and 32:27.

(2) A JI system is not obliged to maximize the consonance of _all_
intervals; it may either incidentally or quite deliberately accentuate
the _dissonance_ or "beatfulness" of certain intervals.

In other words, while recognizing the validity of applying different
adaptive tunings to historical pieces as a creative reinterpretation,
I would want to keep an understanding also of the original tuning
systems as reflections of the musical languages of these pieces.

From this viewpoint, realizing Machaut in 5-limit rather than 3-limit,
or Monteverdi in 7-limit rather than 5-limit, is a creative exercise
in blurring the concord/dual-purpose/discord spectrum of the music.
Machaut with 5:4 major thirds, or Monteverdi with 7:4 minor sevenths,
represents an interesting kind of "overrealization," with a certain
obscuring of the tension which an 81:64 in 3-limit or 9:5 in 5-limit
would lend in keeping with musical contrasts of instability and
stability.

Above all, I would urge that whether a tritone, for example, is taken
as "consonant" or "dissonant" may be a matter of _musical style_ at
least as much as tuning.

That is, in medieval, Renaissance, or Baroque music, a tritone is
taken as unstable or "dissonant" regardless of whether it is realized
as 729:512, 64:45, 10:7, or some irrational ratio of meantone or a
well-temperament, etc., _because this is the way it is treated
musically_.

Similarly, in Machaut, major and minor thirds are always unstable
because that is the style of the music, whether the music is played in
3-limit, 5-limit, meantone, 12-tet, etc.

Thus 3-limit JI "fits" the style of Machaut by lending beatfulness to
intervals which are musically treated as "_imperfect_ concords," and
the rather complex ratio of the tritone in 5-limit JI "fits" the
dissonant character of this interval in Renaissance music.

Of course, this "classic" approach of fitting the acoustical nuances
of the tuning to the concord/dual-purpose/discord spectrum of the
music suggests a very interesting question: what if we deliberately
try a certain "mismatch" between tuning and musical structure, so that
certain dual-purpose sonorities or even outright discords have their
acoustical consonance or "beatlessness" maximized?

Such creative experiments may produce beautiful music, and fall under
a wider category of what the great theorist Joseph Yasser called
"hybridization."

However, the fact that 7-limit JI _can_ be applied to music in styles
or "languages" suggesting 5-limit JI or some approximation
(e.g. meantone, well-temperaments) by no means vitiates the musical
logic of the original tunings.

Rather, one might call a 7-limit tuning applied to such music as a
form of "Mannerism," that is, a creative distortion of the classic
tuning in order to achieve a new effect. As someone who takes this term
as a compliment applied to some of my favorite music (e.g. the _Ars
subtilior_ or "subtler art" of the late 14th century, and the late
16th-century madrigal), I would emphasize the positive connotations this
term carries for me.

Please note that I speak here in nonexclusive terms: in asserting that
the original historical tunings are "right," I don't mean to suggest
that other alternatives are in any sense wrong, only that the original
tunings indeed fit the musical languages in question.

While my own focus is mainly on medieval and Renaissance music, I
would add one comment about at least some keyboard works of Bach: here
the subtly graduated scale of tension, or "acoustical dissonance,"
afforded by performance in a period well-temperament is indeed an
expressive feature which neither a JI rendition (7-limit or otherwise)
nor meantone can provide.

Again, this isn't at all to exclude such alternative realizations, for
example Bach in 7-limit JI or in 31-note meantone with pure major
thirds or in 31-tet, only to recognize the special advantages of the
likely historical realization.

Most respectfully,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net