Re: the word microtonal

In-Reply-To: <944166920.5670@onelist.com>
As the owner of the microtonal.co.uk domain, I have a vested interest
here. But I think of "microtonal" as having the most general meaning, for
two reasons:

1) In popular discourse (or as popular as discourse on tuning gets)
"microtonal" means "unconventionally tuned". And "conventionally tuned"
means 12-equal. If I ask a salesperson whether a particular instrument
can be retuned, they will point me to the absolute tuning function. If I
ask them if it supports xenharmonic scales, they will look at me blankly.
What I want is what they call a microtonal scale.

2) I think "microtones" should be very small intervals, smaller than a
quartertone. Microtonality is the observation that these intervals are
musically meaningful, even if it's only the difference between the
interval you get and the interval you expect. Most people expect
12-equal.

Both arguments lead to a definition relative to 12-equal. This seems
completely appropriate to the world I live in. When most instruments and
a lot of theorists implicitly assume one particular tuning, it is useful
to have a word for everything else. Yes, this is culturally biased, but
I think that's unavoidable.

I even think "microtonal" can be more general than "xenharmonic".
Meantone temperament requires a microtonal tuning table, but doesn't sound
strange. Even neutral third scales can be surprisingly un-strange.

I consider the act of using a tuning table to be a defining feature of the
concept of microtonality. So a tune played by a variable pitch instrument
would become microtonal when copied by a synthesizer. This means the word
becomes vague and inconsistent, but so do most words if you look at them
closely enough. Let's keep on going and pretend we know what we're
talking about.

All this said, it's not a word I use very often. I try to avoid words
that have been abused so often as to be rendered almost meaningless.
"Western" is another good one. But I wanted a domain name, and something
to put in the title bar, and "microtonal" seemed the obvious choice.

[Graham Breed:]
>In popular discourse (or as popular as discourse on tuning gets)
"microtonal" means "unconventionally tuned".

I agree with this... this seems to me to be its generally understood
implied meaning in the "popular lexicon"... also Graham, your
"microtonal means unconventionally tuned" is probably the most
straightforward "definition" I've seen pop up yet in this thread.

>And "conventionally tuned" means 12-equal.

And of course that's the rub with the ("microtonal means
unconventionally tuned") above... But I guess I find this to be less
problematic than some. I use microtonal as it's generally going to be
understood, but in my own music I tend to say things like, tuning
systems (or intonation systems), as I use (and freely mix) whatever of
the pitch continuum I can seem to make work with no real feel for
inherent hierarchies or implied compromises.

>2) I think "microtones" should be very small intervals, smaller than
a quartertone.

Again I agree... and the music that initially sounded most
"microtonal" to me was just that.

>Microtonality is the observation that these intervals are musically
meaningful, even if it's only the difference between the interval you
get and the interval you expect.

Again, well put (I think this was also a point Joe Monzo made).

>Most people expect 12-equal.

And how... When I first started sending out my "microtonal" tapes for
reviews I didn't include any information whatsoever about the tunings
(etc.). This was a bit of a hold over from the Maneri's; that if your
music couldn't excite and fire people up without any undue
flavor-of-the-month (microtonal) fuss - what's the point? And I agreed
with this 100% (still do, though I have softened somewhat as I believe
that interested people do enjoy knowing the extra-musical particulars
that interest them, and I suppose that there is always the chance that
others might find something that will make them want to dig in and see
what they can find for themselves). Anyway, though the reviews were
almost always very positive, not a single review (in about a three
year span) made even the slightest of "microtonal" comments... it
simply wasn't on the menu.

Dan

"D.Stearns" <stearns@capecod.net> wrote:
<snip>
>

> [Graham Breed:]
> >Most people expect 12-equal.
>
> [Dan Sterarns}
> And how...

I beg to differ. I believe if the average music listener heard a brass choir
play in 12tet, they would say they were out of tune.

Fred Reinagel

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[Fred Reinagel:]
>I beg to differ. I believe if the average music listener heard a
brass choir play in 12tet, they would say they were out of tune.

Perhaps your right (but I really only think this would be true if the
music were decidedly tonal, familiar and typical of a brass choir),
but this was not quite what I was trying to get at.

It has been my experience that darn few (even really *unaverage*
listeners) have much of any sort of an accessible reference that
enables them to say anything other than "that sounds out of tune," or
that sounds "exotic," or "weird," (etc.) when listening to music tuned
outside of a 12e framework... and in truth, very few of them ever seem
to notice at all (or at least this has been my experience)... So I
guess the point I was trying to make was that most people don't think
of intonation as a drastically mutable option outside of what "sounds"
familiar, and what is typical of whatever they're used to... so as my
music is hardly ever "diatonic" or "tonal" per say, people have tended
to hear it as some "atonal" variety of the only intonation they would
think of there (12e), and VERY VERY few people have made any
distinction whatsoever between what was tuned to 12e and what was
(often drastically) not.

I'm not so sure that I'm really explaining any of this very clearly,
but this was what I was trying to get at anyway...

Dan

In-Reply-To: <944806007.15916@onelist.com>
Fred Reinagel wrote:

>> [Graham Breed:]
>> >Most people expect 12-equal.

>> [Dan Sterarns}
>> And how...

>I beg to differ. I believe if the average music listener heard a brass
>choir
>play in 12tet, they would say they were out of tune.

I don't think so. They may notice something was wrong, but I don't think
they'd realise it was the tuning.

That one line quote is from a message I wrote a week ago, in digest 418.
In context, I said "Microtonality is the observation that these intervals
[microtones] are musically meaningful, even if it's only the difference
between the interval you get and the interval you expect." I now contend
that the difference between what the choir play, and what a keyboard would
play is not musically meaningful. They sound different, but would be
heard as the same piece of music. I deliberately avoided any connection
between microtonality and out-of-tune-ness.

I also said "a tune played by a variable pitch instrument would become
microtonal when copied by a synthesizer." This is a case in point. If
you programmed a synthesizer to exactly reproduce what the horns were
doing, that would count as microtonality. For "real instruments" no
reasonably tuned 5-limit music is microtonal, the way I think of it.