Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Re: pitch adjustment, integer detectors, etc.

Brian!
OK i am going to push the "Devils Advocate" on this one. Much of what i
take issue with is "not" necessarily my own stance but feel is still a
part of the equation. My basic point being is that one cannot disect
even one aspect of a work of art. Its findings are not only inconclusive
are more often than not unappropiate to the situation at hand. How you
ask the question is as important as any answer.

xed@... wrote:

>
>
> "I sense that what John [deLaubenfels] is going at is what string
> players do when they play, adapt by ear to a myriad of acoustical
> situations [for] expressive goals. Where I have a problem is that I
> sense
> that, due to the language and function of different elements that
> make
> up tonal music, certain things like dominants might have rules `all
> their own.'" -- Kraig Grady
>
> If Kraig's post means to adhere to the debunked and
> pervasively false claim that "singers and string quartets naturally
> play in just intonation," that old wive's tale is contradicted by
> the documented facts.

Boomliter and Creel

>
> There is not one shred of evidence for the false claim that
> singers or string players "naturally play in just intonation,"
> and there much evidence against the musical old wive's tale that
> solo performers "naturally play in JI."

Boomliter and Creel

>
> However, if Kraig means to point out that string
> players and singers adjust their pitch in complicated ways (not
> according to JI, or any known ET, however) while playing, there's
> plenty of evidence for that.

As i stated before the question far exceeds what can be tested in a
labratory. If in our musical language we have certain intonation
tendency depending on where you are in a phrase than unlesds you kjnow
exactly what these are any test is meaningless. What we want from
Dominants is entirely different than what ewe want from a tonic chord.
we raise the third. why? because we are creating something that need to
be resolved.

>
> As for Kraig's larger point, it certainly seems likely that
> specific important types of harmonies (dominant, subdominant, etc.)
> in certain epochs will have a different set of pitch adjustments than
> other less stylistically important harmonies...assuming that
> variable-intonation performers _are_ applying some sort of systematic
> method of adaptive retuning to those chords.
> However no one has shown me hard evidence of any kid of system
> or plan in the intonational variations string quartets engage in,
> and there is a vast mountain of evidence _against_ any kind of
> systematic method of adaptive retuning in live performance by
> singers, string quartets, etc. Whenever these kinds of intonational
> variations occur, they seem to be neither just nor equal tempered,
> and they clearly do not follow any kind of comprehensible plan (of
> the kind deLaubenfels' program logic implies):

I just use my ear and can hear these things going on. according to you
all this is the arbitary wandering of people who can't hear

>
>
> "Experiments have repeatedly shown that musicians such as
> singers and violinists, who are not tied down to a fixed set of
> intervals (as keyboard players are) consistently vary the size
> of their intervals; indeed, most singers and violinists are
> perfectly aware that they do this.

for the very reason i stated above

> However, there is no generally
> accepted rationale for how it should be done; people have these
> adjustemnts `by ear.' Empirical studies have not, as yet, revealed
> the basis of the practice. But they have demonstrated that no
> explanation in terms of a fixed intervallic scale will match
> the facts;

that is because scientist have little or no understanding of what goes
on in a work of art. THey don't know what it is they are looking at in
the fiurst place

> violinists do not play in just intonation, or
> mean-tone intonation, or Pythagorean intonation, any more than
> they play in equal temperament. In other words, they determine
> their intonation in accordance with the individual musical
> context." [Cook, Nicholas. "Music, Imagination, and Culture,"
> Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1990, pg. 236]

If you look at an entire sample that is what you will see and unless you
can take into accdount the intent of the music at each micropoint

>
> "[The] object was to determine if people who sing tend more
> to equal temperament or to just intonation. To this end, it was
> only necessary to have the same melody sung by a number of people
> and to register their tones by a measuring instrument, such as
> an oscilloscope.

>
> "The result of these measurements was highly unexpected. It
> went so far beyond the limits of the original question as to
> render it meaningless.

Different people will hear the stress and pulls in a melody differently
thus changing their intonation

> What appeared was that the singers sang
> neither in just intonation nor in equal temperament--they simply
> sang unimaginably off pitch.

yes when people sing the aimlessly wander within a pitch band, In fact
different people may solve the musical problem in a different consistant
and logiccal way.

> And this was equally true of all
> the singers, trained and untrained, unmusical and highly musical.
> (..) ...The questions posed by the investigation were, for example,
> Does the singer at this place tend to produce the tone 300 or
> the tone 316, at this other place the tone 500 or the tone 498?
> The answer given by the merciless instrument, from which there was
> no appeal, was neither 300 nor 316, but 238; neither 500 nor 498,
> but 586. Tones which lay far closer to the adjacent tone of the
> chromatic scale than to the tone actually to be sung!

Boomliter and Creel asked singer to find the pitch they were attempting
to sing which is a far more acturate way in that it is influenced by
lack of muscle control and such.

> Such facts
> can no longer be discussed in terms of poor intonation; the singers
> simply sang different notes from those which the test prescribed.

>
> "As an answer to the original question, then, the result was
> valueless. Instead, it brought a very different and much more
> interesting situation to light. It became evident, that is, that
> the great discrepancies always appeared where a rise or fall of
> the melody was clearly marked, and that, in the majority of cases,
> the _direction_ of the discrepancy followed the upward or downward
> direction of the melody. (..)

here is the very intent of the melody from which i speak

>
> "But the most significant thing about the result of this
> experiment is the fact that it required the intervention of the
> measuring instrument to reveal these grotesque distortions of pitch,
> these false tones.

these are value judgements of the type of phenomenon i have put forth

> The audience, which included experienced
> musicians,
> had not noticed them at all." [Zuckerkandl, Victor. "Sound and
> Symbol,"
> Pantheon Books: New York, 1956, pp. 79-81]

of coure we don't notice them because they are a part of the language
that has taken thousands of years to build up. It is subconciously
assumed

>
>
> When I pointed out that:
>
> > The human ear/brain doesn't work that way.
> > There are no small integer ratio detectors in our
> > heads. In fact there are no integer ratio detectors
> > in our heads at all -- period.

you voice also

>
>
> Kraig Grady replied:
>
> "There is no conclusive evidence of this; against
> your findings I will put Boomsliter and Creel."
>
> In fact, Kraig, there exists a significant amount of
> conclusive evidence that the human ear/brain system
> contains no integer ratio detectors.

If you put different pitches in different ears the ear will hear
differenace tones. JI intervals will have these in tune and will beat
less

> Multiple
> experiments have been performed showing the
> documented fact that the human ear/brain system
> does not contain integer ratio detectors and does
> care about integer ratios:

>
>
> "This experimental evidence...does not support
> the classical view, still recently promoted by
> Boomsliter and Creel, that harmony is based on
> frequency ratio itself; that the ear might be
> provided with some sort of frequency-ratio detector.
> (..) The experiment does not support the hypothesis
> that the human ear is provided with some sort of
> frequency-ratio detector." [Plomp, R., W. A.
> Wagenaar and A.M.Mimpen, "Musical Interval Recognition
> with Simultaneous Tones," Acustica, Vol. 29, 1973,
> pp. 101-106]

then where did the major chord come from. People were adding thirds to
chords when all the theroy was telling them it was dissonant

> "An experiment on the perception of melodic
> intervals by musically untrained observers showed
> no evidence for the existence of `natural' categories
> for musical intervals." [Burns, E. M. and W. D. Ward,
> "Categorical Perception--Phenomenon or Epiphenomenon:
> Evidence from experiments in the perception of melodic
> musical intervals," J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 63, No. 2,
> 1978, pp. 456-468]

Basically all this data does nothing but to say they can't find any
pattern in itSo we are to turn around and become patternless, wantering
amoeba because some overpaid cartmaker says that is what we are doing

>
>
> "In 1987 IPO issued a wonderful disc by Houtsma,
> Rossing and Wagenaars...illustrating the effects of
> a moderate stretching...of scale frequencies and/or
> partial spacings. Part of a Bach chorale is played
> with synthesized tones. When neither scale nor partial
> frequencies are stretched, we hear the intended
> harmonic effect. When the scale is unstretched but
> the partial frequencies are stretched, the music
> sounds awful. Clearly, intervals in the ratio of small
> whole numbers are in themselves insufficient to give
> Western harmonic effects." [Pierce, J. R., "The Science
> of Musical Sound," 2nd Ed., 1992, pp. 91-92.]

this music was not written in JI why would you expect it to sound best
in it.
The same can not be said of music written in JI take the music of India

>
> "In fact, the interval that listeners accept as the
> best octave is not the interval with a precisely two-to-one
> frequency ratio but one with a slightly larger and thus
> numerically much more complex ratio (Ward, 1954; also
> see Burns, 1974; Dowling, 1973b, in press; Elfner,
> 1964; Sundberg & Lindqvist, 1973; Ward & Martin,
> 1961 Chapter 10, this volume).

on what timbre

> And the frequencies of
> the tones actually produced by musicians or preferred
> by listeners as representative of other musical intervals,
> as well, often fail to conform to the predicted most
> simple ratios (Seashore, 1938; Ward & Martin, 1961; Van
> Esbroeck & Montfort, cited in Risset, 1978).

and like i said you have Boomliter and Creel which found the opposite

>
> "Preference ratings that listeners give for pairs of tones
> that do stand in the various simple frequency ratios tend
> to depart systematically from the orderings of those ratios
> predicted on the basis of what is usually taken to be their
> numerical simplicities -- with, for example, the major third
> (5:4) often preferred to the numerically simpler perfect
> fourth (4:3) (e.g., Butler & Daston, 1968; Krumhansl & Shepard,
> 1979; see also Davies, 1978, p. 158; Fuda, 1975; Van de Geer,
> Levelt, & Plomp, 1962).

dah
Above a fundemental i hear a third before I notice the fourth found
between
two of the pitches i hear the 3 and fourth harmonic.

>
> "Despite numerological theories going back at least to
> Leibnitz (see Revesz, 1954, p.50), to my knowledge no
> psychologically plausible mechanism has been offered to
> explain how a listener determines that two tones achieve
> or approximate a simple frequency ratio -- particularly
> when the tones are pure sinusoids and are presented only
> successively." [Shephard, Roger, "Structural Representations
> of Musical Pitch," in "The Psychology of Music," ed. Diana
> Deutsch: Academic Press Inc., New York: 1982, pg. 347.]

gee I can think of a myriad of individuals that tune JI by ear

>
> "The conclusion now seems clear. (..) In general, the
> observation that simple tones can be differentiated according
> to ratio simplicity is largely an artifact, due to the
> correlation between ratio simplicity and interval width."
> [Levelt, W.J.M., J.P. van de Geer and R. Plomp, "Triadic
> Comparisons of Musical Intervals," The British Journal of
> Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, Vol. 19, Part 2,
> Nov. 1966, pg. 177]
>
> Later on, Kraig Grady wrote:
>
> "OK, this is still where I am having problems which
> lead me to my post the other day. This appears contradictory
> and perhaps you can clear this up for me. (..)
>
> "1. If you are proposing not using math as a basis how do
> you justify using ET's which out of all tunings [are] more
> mathematically based than any other type of tuning?"
>
> "JI is at least a very close appoximation to things in
> nature. You can hear the series on harmonics on the guitar,
> with harmonic singing as well as harmonic flutes."
>
> "2. If you are proposing not using math as a basis how do
> you justify using long meters?"
>
> Kraig, why are ETs "more mathematically based than any
> other type of tuning"?
> That statement does not seem to parse.
> In Western culture all our tunings are mathematically
> based.
> JI tunings use one mathematical procedure, while ETs
> use another mathematical procedure.
> Does it make sense to describe one particular mathematical
> procedure as being "more mathematically based" than another
> particular mathematical procedure?
> How so?
> Whether we're talking about the Nth root of an integer,
> or dividing one integer by another, these are merely different
> mathematical procedures. In what reasonable sense can one
> mathematical procedure be accurately described as being "more
> mathematically based" than any other mathematical procedure?
> This makes no sense to me.
> It is like describing broiling a steak as "being more
> culinary" than barbecuing a steak. Both broiling and
> barcebuing are culinary procedures. Why is one procedure
> any more or less culinary than the other?
> In the same way, given two different mathematical
> procedures which are both based in mathematics, why is
> one procedure any more or less based in mathematics than
> the other?
>
> In answer to your larger question, Kraig, as to
> how musicians justify using equal divisions of the octave...
> The reason musicians use ETs is that each ET has
> a particular unique musical character or "mood" or
> "overall sound," and thus each ET provides a unique
> set of emotional resources for music...just as each
> unique JI tuning has a unique set of emotional
> resources for music.

since according to all this scintific data on the perception of pitch ,
I see none wheree listeners attempt to produce an ET like 17 or 22. The
result would be far greater discrpancies than you will get from JI
If the tolerance is so great it seems to me that any mood does in an ET
could be done with a Cosntant structure of a JI in close approximity.

> Musicians use various equal divisions
> of the octave for exactly the same reason they use various
> JI tunings...because each tuning has its own remarkable
> musically useful "sound" or "mood" or "sonic fingerprint."

These scales only exist because of the computer and they are the
easieest things to do on them. They are not something that can be tuned
by ear and exstemely difficult with even a monchord.

>
>
> The claim that "JI is at least a very close
> appoximation to things in nature" is largely false.

listen to tuvan sing.
the fact is that then we can tune it by ear and if it doesn't exist in
nature how are we tuning it!

>
> In nature, essentially ALL vibrating objects produce
> INHARMONIC series of vibrations, forming non-just
> non-equal-tempered tunings. Almost every type of
> vibrating object, whether it is a glass or a spoon
> or a fork or a tire iron or wooden board or a CD
> case or champagne glass or doorknob or a metal
> bracelet or a ceramic tile...ALL of these types
> of vibrating objects produce INHARMONIC series.

add resonators at harmonic degrees and you will percieve a harmonic
series

>
> Only a microscopic minority of exotic and exceptional
> vibrating objects produce HARMONIC series -- namely,
> objects which vibrate in one dimension only. This
> set of vibrating objects is so small that it boils
> down to 2 exotic types *never* found in nature: thin taut
> strings and hollow tubes with tone holes.
> ALL other types of vibrating objects produce
> INHARMONIC series, *not* harmonic series.
> Accordingly the truth actually is that
> "JI is completely out of tune with almost every
> kind of vibrating object in nature, except for the
> exotic special cases of thin strings and hollow tubes."

our basic instruments or the ones that human beings have chaosen to make
instruments out of.

>
> That does not seem to me to be much of an
> argument for the purported "natural" or allegedly
> "universal" character of JI -- since in reality
> most objects found in nature (rocks, tree branches,
> quartz crystals, slabs of ice, etc.) vibrate
> inharmonically producing non-just non-equal-tempered
> modes of vibration.
> This basic fact is known as Weyl's Law of
> Acoustics. It is one of the basic principles of
> physical acoustics.
>
> As far as dealing with long meters, counting
> does not involve math -- you can count the beats
> in a long meter by beating your fist and after
> a while you will simply get used to the downbeat.

In Ethnomusicaology thety have a system of measurement equivalent to
cents for rhythmn. All the test finds the same thing it does with pitch.
the beats are not equal nor are the subdivions of even the simpliest of
rhythm patterns. So you should encourge everyone to dispell of the even
beat because it doen't exist.

>
> This is not math, it's muscle memory and habit.
> Dealing musically with long meters involves
> building up the muscular habits to ingrain
> in your sympathetic nervous system the reflex
> that "the downbeat comes up...now!" Counting
> might help get you started (or it might not), but
> very soon counting will confuse you. We have all
> been through this -- once your muscle memory
> takes over in musical peformance, trying to count
> makes you stumble and fumble. You have to *feel*
> where the beat is, not count your way to it.

It is pattern recognition

>
> This applies in my experience also with
> complex polyrhythms, which Bill Wesley has taught
> me to produce on his mbira. (Bill can teach anyone
> complex polyrthms, and quickly too.) Counting gets in
> the way. You have to do it until you feel it. Soon
> you just feel whether the downbeat it...you
> feel the polyrhythm as a single thing, not
> some complicated piece of math.

you can feel it because we have sinple relationship ingrained as
gestalts.
If it was there , how could you feel it

>
> In fact, Bill Wesley has pointed out that
> the biggest goddamn problem in producing a
> polyrhythm (one rhythm with one hand, one rhythm
> with another hand) is getting your blasted
> frontal lobes to SHUT UP AND STOP COUNTING
> so you can just settle down and live the
> experience. Once you live the polyrhythm, you
> know it and you can feel it and you can do it.
> That's the point at which you become
> fluent.
> Math has its place in various human
> activites, notably when playing blackjack...
> but in musical performance, in my experience,
> math is a disaster. It's almost as bad as
> the old dreaded "You must NOT play a SINGLE
> wrong note!!!" from the psycho music teacher.
>
> Later on Kraig Grady pointed out with typical
> insight:
>
> "The whole Sethares thing is interesting in
> that one can tune according to the timbre, but
> why then does 12 ET work so well with so many
> different timbres? Personally I want a tuning
> where I can use many different timbres but why
> certain things work and others don't is a mystery.
> The use of convential instruments bothers me at
> times because these instruments evolved along
> with the tuning and the the slight modifications
> in their structure were not done with certain intervals
> in mind. I can listen to strings do any Pythagorean out
> to the moon but higher limit JI? Well, I could do without
> the Partch Viola and trade it in for a rebab any day."
>
> Partch's use of inharmonic percussive timbres for
> most of his instruments (exceptions: the chromelodeon
> and the harmonic canon and the adapted viola) negates
> most of Partch's claims about the smoothness and beatlessness
> of JI intervals.
> Yet the fact that Partch used inharmonic percussive
> timbres (which are totally UNmatched to the JI tuning
> he uses) does not detract from Partch's music. On the
> contrary -- Partch's use of inharmonic percussive timbres
> immeasurably adds to his music. Those exotic timbres seem
> integral to his music, they're an indispensble part of
> his music.

Yes you can use JI for inharmonic timbres but the opposite does not
work.

>
> This points out how the theoretically plausible idea
> of matching timbre to tuning often breaks down in
> real music in the real world.
> See my paper "Tone-Color, Time Domain, Timbre,
> Tuning" for an explanation of the reasons why Bill
> Sethares'/John Pierce's/James Dashow's methods encounter
> significant limitations in real music in the real world.
> Bill Sethares' adaptation of John R. Pierce's and James
> Dashow's ideas can prove musically useful depending on the
> circumstances, but in the real world matching timbre to
> tuning isn't a magic bullet...and depending on the style
> of the music, matching timbre to tuning may have little or
> no musical effect.

a linited effect at best i will agree

>
> The most important reason is that melody proves far
> more important in music than harmony,

totally agree with this

> and Bill Sethares'/
> John Pierce's/James Dashow's timbre-matching process does
> nothing to change melodic intervals. And since harmonic
> progressions derive most of their musical effect from the
> melodic root movement of the chords, making harmonies
> beatless does not change the overall fact that the roots of
> the chords may still move by intervals which are too
> melodically distorted to function as conclusive cadences.
> However, many other subsidiary reasons combine to
> render the Pierce/Dashow/Sethares timbre-matching procedure
> less effective in the real world than you might suppose.
>
> Kraig Grady went on to mention:
>
> "Sometimes the only way to make progress is to regress backward to
> a
> previous step and start from there. Partch felt the need to go back to
>
> the Greeks, an extreme but possibly making it easier for margo to go
> back 700 years."

>
>
> In the 21st century, the concept of musical "progress" (so-called)
>
> seems like something we have had to give up. We have witnessed two
> centuries of what got called musical "progress" only to wind up in
> a situation where now, pretty much everything goes. All styles
> coexist
> today. The musical past coexists today with futurist musical projects
>
> like real-time computer music or fractal-generated interactive
> MIDI synth duets, etc.
> Nowadays, almost all the former "avant-garde" composers like
> Penderecki have abandoned their modernist muiscal style for tonal
> relatively diatonic musical styles typical of European music
> written in the 1920s or 1930s.
> Today, there seems no longer to exist any such thing as a
> musical "avant garde." There's no longer any place to go in
> advance of the public -- there is no musical vanguard, because
> some 14-year-old kid with Csound on his home computer has
> already gotten there first.
> Such concepts as a musical vanguard and a musical avant garde
> presupposed conditions in which cutting-edge musical knowledge was
> limited to an elite. The very idea of a musical vanguard
> seems to derive from the axiom that only certain large institutions
> or certain enclaves of special individuals have gathered the
> expertise or the technology necessary to advance to the "next
> level" of musical practice.
> Today, anyone has access to an unlimited range of
> musical expertise and knowledge courtesy of modern media.
> Whereas wannabe-avant-garde composers had to study with
> Nadia Boulanger during the 20th century, today wannabe
> modern musicians can use the wealth of CDs and videotapes and
> documentaries along with the internet to network with others
> and gain access to other people with special expertise in
> new music.
> Moreover there is today no longer any sign of unexplored
> advanced realms of musical practice the knowledge of which
> is restricted to some elite musical priesthood. In the 1950s
> and 1960s, if you wanted to electronic tape music you had
> to study at Columbia-Princeton or Darmstadt. In the 1960s
> if you wanted to do computer music you had to go to Bell
> Labs, or, a little later, to Stanford University. And so on.
> Today, any eager composer who wants to do even the most
> exotic electronic music using even the most state-of-the-art
> algorithms merely has to scour the web for shareware. Csound
> today represents the tip of the iceberg...huge numbers of
> grad students and interested bystanders now create exotic
> compositional and timbre-generating computer music programs
> available for free. Software from the Bourges competition
> nowadays typically gets dumped on the web as freeware, or
> at most as shareware.
> But the most important issue today involves the fact
> that there no longer exists any obvious historical direction for
> music to go in. In the 1910s, there were certain things
> composers had not yet done -- large tone clusters for
> orchestra, extended performance techniques, etc. Composers
> explored these musical resources and made them a part of
> the general Western symphonic "language." In the 1920s
> there were certain other things composers had not yet done --
> using all 12 chromatic pitches in ways that did not emphasize
> any specific tonal center. Composers did that and moved on.
> In the 1930s there were certain other things composers had
> never done -- using electronics and tape recorders and
> recording phonographs and oscillators. During the 1930s
> and 1940s and into the early 1950s, composers did that too.
> In the 1950s, there were still certain things composers
> had not done -- composing music by pure chance operations,
> or by physically modifying Western instruments by placing
> paper in the strings of a harp, or nuts and bolts in the
> strings of a piano. Composers did that too.
> In the 1960s there were still a few things composers
> had not yet done -- specifying complex soundwaves directly
> by computer, or using electronic synthesizers to generate
> gestural music, or to produce more complex rhythms or
> tempo streams than could be attained by human performers.
> Composers did that too.
> By around 1970, it seems fair to say that composers
> had run out of things they hadn't done yet. Microtonality
> had been done -- Partch and Haba, Carrillo and Vyshegradsky,
> Fokker and Darreg, Mantle Hood's and Lou Harrison's American
> gamelans. Much remained to be done with various specific
> tunings (whether JI or ET or NJ NET), but by 1970 microtonality
> had just become one among many musical options. It was no
> longer shocking or daring or startling.
> By around 1970 creating music by flipping coins or
> by programming a computer had been done and was no longer
> any kind of "vanguard." Tape music, atonality, aleatoric
> music, synthesizers, oscillators, ring modulators,
> extended performance techniques, home-built instruments,
> modified orchestral instruments (i.e., nuts and bolts
> in the piano strings, or paper in the harp strings)...
> By around 1970 this stuff had all been done, and done
> often enough in new music circles that no serious
> person truly thought any of this stuff was any kind of daring
> new breakthrough.
> So by 1970, pretty much everything that could be done in
> music, in broad general terms, had been done. I'm talking
> outlines here. Specific details still had not been filled
> in -- by 1970 people had built their own gamelans and some
> folks in America had tuned them to "authentic" Javanese
> tunings, while other Americans had built & tuned other
> gamelans to JI. There remain an infinite variety of JI
> tunings or NJ NET "authentic" Javanese tunings to explore,
> and vast amounts of music yet to write for such American
> gamelans. But in broad outline, the idea of either a JI
> gamelan or an "authentic" Javanese-style American gamelan
> no longer strikes any informed person as new or startling
> or "avant garde."
> Likewise, interested composers can now apply an infinite
> variety of algorithms and computer models to the task of
> generating music by computer. That work remains, and will
> continue. But in rboad outline, the idea of generating
> music via computer no longer strikes any informed person
> as new or startling or "avant garde."
> Ditto atonality. People who adore the idea of serial
> rows have vast new realms to explore in the anti-tonal
> non-cadential ET tunings like 8 or 11 or 13 or 16 equal.
> Likewise, even in 12 equal, there remain a vast range of
> mathematical schemes to apply in order to get atonal
> methods of composition. But in broad outline, the idea
> of using some method (whether Babbitt's pitch-class
> matrices, or Boulez's idiosyncratic numerical systems,
> or Schoenberg's tone rows, or Elliott Carter's metric
> modulation schemes) no longer strikes any informed person
> as new or startling or "avant garde."
> So wherever you look in music today, there seems no
> "avant garde" left. Everything, in broad outline, has
> been done. If it's musically possible, someone n the
> 20th century did it -- probably a bunch of people in
> the 20th century did it. In fact, there's probably a whole
> musical clique doing that kind of thing, or more likely
> many musical cliques scattered around North America.
> And yet despite this we continue to use the term
> "avant garde" to describe certain types of music.
> I believe that this anachronistic usage no longer
> has any real bearing on the historical musical
> situation we find ourselves in.
> We seem to have reached, in short, a point in history
> where the musical future and past occupy the same point
> at the same time. Increasingly, non-western and American
> and European historical musical practices also occupy the
> ame point at the same time.
> This means that it no longer makes any sense to speak
> about "progress" or "regression" in music today. Those
> terms imply that musical history is a one-dimensional
> line with an arrow pointing backwards and an arrow pointing
> forwards. The backwards-pointing arrow indicates musical
> practices no one uses anymore, while the forward-pointing
> arrow indicates musical practices no one has yet used.
> But today, contemporary composers have written for
> harpsichords and for medieval instruments and for
> gamelans and for African traditional instrumnets. Composers
> like Margo Schulter reach back into the musical past and
> create new music by refracting past musical practices
> through today's technology and today's compositional and
> intontional techniques. Likewise, other composers reach
> into the future and create computer music which they
> then combine with gamelans or other non-Western ensembles.
> Today, the historical model for contemporary music
> (at least in America) is not a line with arrows pointing
> forward and back, but a 3-D gas in which millions of
> different musical practices collide and bounce off one
> another. In the 20th century up to about 1970, it was
> possible to talk about certain musical practices as
> being "mainstream" or "dominant." The symphony orchestra
> legitimized serious new music, Western orchestral
> instruments (piano, violin, trombone, etc.) legitimized
> the musical oeuvre for both new and old music,
> conservatories legitimized musical expertise, and so on.
> That is no longer the case.
> Today large numbers of highly talented musicians
> emerge from out of nowhere, never having gone through
> a conservatory. (Some still do, of course, but the
> point is that it's no longer necessary.)
> The CD and other technologies have knocked
> symphony orchestras out of the ring financially, and
> today most large symphony orchestras continue to survive
> only by spending a significant amount of time playing
> film scores. However, now that Eastern Europeean
> orchestras have become available for film score work
> at much lower cost, American symphony orchestras
> increasingly face massive threats to their very survival.
> As a result, young composers have largely given up
> composing for the orchestra...since there is just
> no realistic prospect of getting a commission to
> write for a large orchestra. This means that symphony
> orchestras have now become irrelevant to legitimizing
> the work of today's serious composers.
> Likewise, the emergence of the computer and
> the digital synthesizer and home-built instruments has
> largely eliminated classical Western orchestral
> instruments as the sole means of legitimizing contemporary
> serious music repertoire.
> This leaves no dominant or central American institutions
> left as the musical "mainstream." Everyone knows
> about the extreme age of today's average symphony
> audience member, but less obvious is the fact that
> concerts of "classic rock" and "classic jazz" all tend to
> use the same terminology and the same publicity and
> the same type of language once used to cement the
> sole and exclusive legitimacy of conservatories
> and symphony ochestras as the musical "mainstream"
> in American/Europe.
> Thus, today we have scholarship dealing with
> authentic performances of classic jazz in the same
> way that we have scholarship dealing with authentic
> performances of a Bach concerto. Music journal
> articles today increasingly analyze rock songs
> in the way that Webern experts used to analyze
> Webern songs. (Sometimes this kind of minute
> analysis goes on in guitar magazines or pop
> music magazines, but the levels of scholarship
> are similarly high. For example, a series of recent
> books on groups like The Cream and Jimi Hendrix
> used intensive scholarship and methods of source
> comparison and textual analysis to discover the
> order in which various tracks of classic rock
> albums were composed. This differs only in details
> from the methods of scholarship used to establish
> authenticity of medieval musical manuscripts.)
> In short, large numbers of music lovers refuse to
> believe in the innate cultural superiority of, say,
> European classical symphonic music as opposed to
> American fusion jazz, or "classic" rock, etc. There once
> was a time when this was not the case. At one time,
> during the 1910s and 20s and 30s up through the 1940s,
> the most famous and well-respected musical figures in
> North America were people like Van Cliburn (after winning
> that Russian piano competition in 1957) and Leonard
> Bernstein (after filling in when a famous European
> conductor got sick).
> Can anyone imagine a classical pianist becoming
> world-famous today because he won a Russian piano
> competition? Can anyone imagine a New York conductor
> becoming nationally famous today because he filled in
> for an ailing European symphony orchestra conductor?
> These things no longer happen. Our culture has
> simply changed. The musicians on the cover of TIME
> magazine nowadays are rock stars, not classical pianists
> or conductors of the New York Philharmonic.
> However, today even the rock 'n roll scene has
> fragmented to such an extent that there are no longer
> any towering figures as dominant as, say, the Beatles
> or the Rolling Stones or Jimi Hendrix. Today, in rock
> the megastars come and go within a matter of 18 months.
> Consequently there is no longer any
> musical mainstream. There is no longer any
> dominant musical culture in America. If you
> turn on the radio in a large metropolitan area,
> you'll find a lot of top 40s AOR. If you turn
> on the radio in a rural area, you'll find country
> music is the dominant musical culture. But if
> you walk past student dorms at a university, you'll
> find rap is the dominant musical culture. Meanwhile,
> at the lofts or proscenia of the local new music
> scene modernist-sounding new instrumental music
> sounds like the dominant musical culture, while
> if you get to know the local industrial music
> fans, industrial music will sound like the
> dominant musical culture.
> Despite claims to the contrary, there is
> no longer any genuine dominant musical culture
> that runs the length and breadth, from top to
> bottom, of American society nowadays.
> Instead, many different musical cultures
> interpenetrate one another and blend into each
> other nowadays, like colors blurring into one
> another in a tie-dye shirt.
> This makes terms like "musical avant garde"
> and musical "progress" and musical "regression"
> largely problematic in their meaning today. It
> raises serious questions as to whether these kinds
> of terms even have a meaning nowadays in music
> -------------
> --mclaren
>
>
>
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-- Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria island
http://www.anaphoria.com

The Wandering Medicine Show
Wed. 8-9 KXLU 88.9 fm

Re: pitch adjustment, integer detectors, etc.

🔗jpehrson@...

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🔗Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...>

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