Berklee/tunings

Just chatted with Simon Yu, who is a student/collaborator of Dave Fiuczynski's at Berklee...they have a microtonal club, and this semester they have 25 members. This is a good thing; these students will get exposed to some concepts of non 12 eq tunings, and take these ideas with them back to their hometowns when they graduate. And, since the emphasis at Berklee is on actually playing/performing, hopefully some (maybe most) of these folks will get fretless/micro axes, and start producing some new micro music around the world. Fuze is also a specialist in jazz/fusion, so maybe these students will give some new life into those somewhat stagnant forms...here's hoping...Hstick
myspace.com/microstick

http://www.essentialguitarist.com/interviews/fuze_interview.html

I googled his name with microtonal and check out the above link. I
guess I'll have to look for a c.d. now..

thanks,

robin

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, <microstick@...> wrote:
>
> Just chatted with Simon Yu, who is a student/collaborator of Dave
Fiuczynski's at Berklee...they have a microtonal club, and this
semester they have 25 members. This is a good thing; these students
will get exposed to some concepts of non 12 eq tunings, and take these
ideas with them back to their hometowns when they graduate. And, since
the emphasis at Berklee is on actually playing/performing, hopefully
some (maybe most) of these folks will get fretless/micro axes, and
start producing some new micro music around the world. Fuze is also a
specialist in jazz/fusion, so maybe these students will give some new
life into those somewhat stagnant forms...here's hoping...Hstick
> myspace.com/microstick
>

microstick@msn.com wrote:
> Just chatted with Simon Yu, who is a student/collaborator of Dave > Fiuczynski's at Berklee...they have a microtonal club, and this > semester they have 25 members. This is a good thing; these students > will get exposed to some concepts of non 12 eq tunings, and take these > ideas with them back to their hometowns when they graduate. And, since > the emphasis at Berklee is on actually playing/performing, hopefully > some (maybe most) of these folks will get fretless/micro axes, and > start producing some new micro music around the world. Fuze is also a > specialist in jazz/fusion, so maybe these students will give some new > life into those somewhat stagnant forms...here's hoping...Hstick
> myspace.com/microstick

Good---and for the positive future of microtonal music, keep them unaware of this list!

-A.

http://www.plainsound.org/ is the website of the Plainsound Music
Edition, a project of violinist/composer Marc Sabat and composer
Wolfgang von Schweinitz. Both have been seriously engaged in
intonational issues for many years and compose in JI using a version
of the Helmholz-Ellis notation. Marc Sabat now teaches intonation p
courses at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Wolfgang von
Schweinitz was recently appointed composition teacher at CalArts.
Scores by both composers are online at this site.

djw

I'm always looking for constructive crit, or simply "wow that's cool"
I play fretless guitar and various wind instruments for Secret 49, a
microtonal band, now we're not so mathematical as a lot of tuning
people, we just pulled the frets off and play what we feel, rather
than trying for a particular set tuning. I do that with my own csound
compositions, where I use very specific tunings, but with the live
band its all about feel and improvisation:

http://secret49.com

djwolf_frankfurt wrote:
> http://www.plainsound.org/ is the website of the Plainsound Music > Edition, a project of violinist/composer Marc Sabat and composer > Wolfgang von Schweinitz. Both have been seriously engaged in > intonational issues for many years and compose in JI using a version > of the Helmholz-Ellis notation. Marc Sabat now teaches intonation p > courses at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Wolfgang von > Schweinitz was recently appointed composition teacher at CalArts. > Scores by both composers are online at this site.

I notice some mentions of "Helmholtz tuning" on the Sabat page. I hope that's an instance of Helmholtz temperament ;-). Probably it is, but it looks like *they* have priority.

They also have Tenney's paper "John Cage and the Theory of Harmony" on the site, which is where the Tenney metric's supposed to come from.

If anybody can't get past the first page, you have to click on one of the pictures.

Graham

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "djwolf_frankfurt" <djwolf@...> wrote:
>
> http://www.plainsound.org/ is the website of the Plainsound Music
> Edition, a project of violinist/composer Marc Sabat and composer
> Wolfgang von Schweinitz. Both have been seriously engaged in
> intonational issues for many years and compose in JI using a version
> of the Helmholz-Ellis notation. Marc Sabat now teaches intonation p
> courses at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Wolfgang von
> Schweinitz was recently appointed composition teacher at CalArts.
> Scores by both composers are online at this site.
>
> djw

I've been to this site several times before. Is there something
new of interest here? Last time, I think it was a PDF of
Tenney's 'crystal' paper. I won't comment about the music because
I don't have anything positive to say about it.

-Carl

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Brian Redfern" <brianwredfern@...>
wrote:
>
> I'm always looking for constructive crit, or simply "wow that's cool"
> I play fretless guitar and various wind instruments for Secret 49, a
> microtonal band, now we're not so mathematical as a lot of tuning
> people, we just pulled the frets off and play what we feel, rather
> than trying for a particular set tuning. I do that with my own csound
> compositions, where I use very specific tunings, but with the live
> band its all about feel and improvisation:
>
> http://secret49.com

Thanks for the link. I certainly recognize your name from around
these parts, and I'm glad to hear you're in a band. I listened
to everything here

http://secret49.com/audio

My advice would be to put some (non-12-ET) frets on, but then
again, I'm a crank. I like some of the sounds in Enter the
Thunder. Thanks for sharing.

-Carl

> I notice some mentions of "Helmholtz tuning" on the Sabat
> page. I hope that's an instance of Helmholtz temperament
> ;-). Probably it is, but it looks like *they* have priority.

I was just reading that. Clearly it's referring to
schismatic temperament.

-Carl

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Carl Lumma" <clumma@...> wrote:
>
>
> I've been to this site several times before. Is there something
> new of interest here? Last time, I think it was a PDF of
> Tenney's 'crystal' paper. I won't comment about the music because
> I don't have anything positive to say about it.
>

AFAIC, Wolfgang von Schweinitz's _Plainsound-Symphonie_ and _Franz &
Morton_ are major pieces, but I have found that many US listeners
find them to be inpenetrably European or avant-garde, and they are
indeed works in which the background radiation of Mozart (the masonic
music and the basset clarinet concerto especially), Ligeti (the
Hamburg Concerto; von Schweinitz was a student of Ligeti), and late
Feldman and Tenney are very strong. I don't know Marc Sabat's music
well enough, but he is an extraordinary player on both violin and
adapted viola and there are some very practical materials on his page
about "tunable intervals" (Sabat's term) for brass and string
instruments. I would be interested to hear George Secor's response
to the article on the Horn.

djw

> > I've been to this site several times before. Is there something
> > new of interest here? Last time, I think it was a PDF of
> > Tenney's 'crystal' paper. I won't comment about the music because
> > I don't have anything positive to say about it.
>
> AFAIC, Wolfgang von Schweinitz's _Plainsound-Symphonie_
> and _Franz & Morton_ are major pieces, but I have found that
> many US listeners find them to be inpenetrably European or
> avant-garde,

I wouldn't say that's my complaint.

> and they are indeed works in which the background radiation
> of Mozart (the masonic music and the basset clarinet concerto
> especially), Ligeti (the Hamburg Concerto; von Schweinitz was
> a student of Ligeti),

I like Mozart and love Ligeti.

> and late Feldman and Tenney are very strong.

These two I can do without.

> I don't know Marc Sabat's music well enough, but he is an
> extraordinary player on both violin and adapted viola and
> there are some very practical materials on his page about
> "tunable intervals" (Sabat's term) for brass and string
> instruments. I would be interested to hear George Secor's
> response to the article on the Horn.

I couldn't get past the first paragraph of that paper,
where says intervals that can't be tuned by ear (and: whose
ear?) are not consonances.

-Carl

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Carl Lumma" <clumma@...> wrote:
response to the article on the Horn.
>
> I couldn't get past the first paragraph of that paper,
> where says intervals that can't be tuned by ear (and: whose
> ear?) are not consonances.
>

there are at least two ways to respond to such a statement. The
first is simply to dismiss it as not corresponding to any other
definition of "consonance" that you or I accept. The second is to
recognize that it is a pre-compositional statement by a composer with
performing chops, and then the interesting thing is to consider what
the possible consequences of such a statement may be for a composer.
If the definition has an arbitrary, capricious, or -- as this case
may very well be -- prejudiced aspect or factor to it, the it is even
more interesting to consider how the consequences of the definition
might vary if this aspect or factor were varied.

We have an imponderably large vector space out there of compositional
possibilities, a fact that is interesting perhaps only in inverse
proportion to its magnitude, i.e. not much. However, real composers
write real pieces of music, and repertoires of music exist in which
recognizeable constraints on placed on that space. The extenti to
which those constrainst definine private and shared aesthetics --
here, a "practical" definition of consonance -- is worth
investigating. The extent to which those constraints correspond to
mathematical, physical, psychophysical or neurological constraints
surely varies, and varies in ways worth investigating.

djw

Daniel:
>>I don't know Marc Sabat's music well enough, but he is an
>>extraordinary player on both violin and adapted viola and
>>there are some very practical materials on his page about
>>"tunable intervals" (Sabat's term) for brass and string
>>instruments. I would be interested to hear George Secor's
>>response to the article on the Horn.

Carl:
> I couldn't get past the first paragraph of that paper,
> where says intervals that can't be tuned by ear (and: whose
> ear?) are not consonances.

It's fine with me as a practical definition. It gives you something easily testable and tends to produce the intervals we'd expect as most consonant. It's subjective -- like all definitions of consonance.

Graham

djwolf_frankfurt wrote:

> AFAIC, Wolfgang von Schweinitz's _Plainsound-Symphonie_ and _Franz & > Morton_ are major pieces, but I have found that many US listeners > find them to be inpenetrably European or avant-garde, and they are > indeed works in which the background radiation of Mozart (the masonic > music and the basset clarinet concerto especially), Ligeti (the > Hamburg Concerto; von Schweinitz was a student of Ligeti), and late > Feldman and Tenney are very strong. I don't know Marc Sabat's music > well enough, but he is an extraordinary player on both violin and > adapted viola and there are some very practical materials on his page > about "tunable intervals" (Sabat's term) for brass and string > instruments. I would be interested to hear George Secor's response > to the article on the Horn.

Ah, I see accidentals with arrows that look like the things in the Unicode spec!

Graham

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "djwolf_frankfurt" <djwolf@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Carl Lumma" <clumma@> wrote:
> >
> > I've been to this site several times before. Is there something
> > new of interest here? Last time, I think it was a PDF of
> > Tenney's 'crystal' paper. I won't comment about the music because
> > I don't have anything positive to say about it.
>
> AFAIC, Wolfgang von Schweinitz's _Plainsound-Symphonie_ and _Franz
&
> Morton_ are major pieces, but I have found that many US listeners
> find them to be inpenetrably European or avant-garde, and they are
> indeed works in which the background radiation of Mozart (the
masonic
> music and the basset clarinet concerto especially), Ligeti (the
> Hamburg Concerto; von Schweinitz was a student of Ligeti), and late
> Feldman and Tenney are very strong. I don't know Marc Sabat's music
> well enough, but he is an extraordinary player on both violin and
> adapted viola and there are some very practical materials on his
page
> about "tunable intervals" (Sabat's term) for brass and string
> instruments. I would be interested to hear George Secor's response
> to the article on the Horn.

The idea of using tubing in lengths that are rational fractions of
the total effective tube length (with no valves depressed) is
intriguing, because it appears to be a way to overcome the shortfall
in length that results when valves are depressed simultaneously
(since the combinations are all rational values; see page 20). It's
not perfect, however, because the major 3rd that results is 15:19; to
get a true 4:5 downward alteration you'd need to "lip" the pitch
upward by about a comma (which is more difficult on a brass
instrument than "lipping" it downward).

My solution to the problem of shortfall is to make use of the
compensating mechanism already present in the instrument (in
conjunction with the thumb valve), but to connect it to the 3rd-valve
tubing instead (which requires major surgery), leaving the thumb to
operate a 3-position micro-interval valve -- admittedly a more
drastic (and expensive!) change than what Marc has outlined.

The function of the finger valves is strikingly similar to what I
advocate in that the first and second valves alter downward by
approximately a major 2nd and minor 2nd, respectively, which retains
their conventional functions, while the third valve alters downward
by approximately a major 3rd (as in my plan), which makes it easier
to fill the gap between the 2nd and 3rd harmonics (than if it were to
lower by the conventional minor 3rd).

I thought I had a spreadsheet of my plan out there, but evidently
not, so I've just added it here:
/tuning-math/files/secor/Brass.xls

The tables use Donald Boucher's notation, which both Dave Keenan and
I have seen before. It was developed more recently than Sagittal and
contains some similar ideas (which is not surprising, since Sagittal
combines several of the best features of 20th-century microtonal
notations). My chief criticism is that there's too much to take in
at once when reading the accidentals, in too large an area (above,
below, and/or to the left of the conventional sharp/flat/natural
symbol. In Table 7 (page 24) observe the 3rd example on the top
staff and the 4th, 6th, 7th, and 8th examples on the 3rd staff. In
each of these the compound accidentals alter in opposite directions
from one another (bad form, IMO).

--George