Bach's Chaconne on solo violin?

[Paul Erlich, TD 493.20:]
>This piece was originally written for solo violin.

Is that possible? It's LOADED with chords! Were they all arpeggiated,
beyond the diads possible with a violin? Was there continuo underlying?

[Paul:]
>Who did this arrangement? Busoni did one; is it his? I'm still
>interested in the possible septimal augmented sixth chords as in Ken
>Wauchope's rendition.

I don't have a clue! I got this from www.prs.net. No, SORRY; just went
back there, and it clearly shows, this IS the Busoni version!

I missed the details of Ken Wauchope's version - when did that go by?

JdL

John, it's a Bach solo violin piece, no continuo. We've been dealing with
someone else's arrangement.

>I don't have a clue! I got this from www.prs.net. No, SORRY; just went
>back there, and it clearly shows, this IS the Busoni version!

Aha! By the way, Busoni would probably have no qualms about writing an Ab
for a G# or vice-versa.

>I missed the details of Ken Wauchope's version - when did that go by?

Are you serious? On 11/24/99, Ken Wauchope wrote,

"I've posted 1/4-comma and 1/5-comma meantone versions of JdL's Bach
Chaconne in D- at

http://www.aic.nrl.navy.mil/~wauchope/audio/tuning/b-b-b-MT.zip

I settled on meantone in C (F and G were close seconds) based mostly
on the chord progression from 2:09-2:20.

[By meantone in C, Ken meant a chain of meantone fifths from Eb to G#]

Since meantone does contain
several good 7-limit intervals, I hear quite a bit of lovely "septimal
buzz" in these versions, which perhaps supports JdL's preference for a
7-limit approach.

Like Wendy Carlos (and according to her, Bach also), I prefer the
1/5-comma tuning where the thirds have a bit more forward momentum --
in 1/4-comma they "sit back on their haunches", which is great for
Renaissance polyphony but not dynamic enough for the Baroque."

On 11/26/99, he wrote,

"The challenge as I see it in tuning this kind of music has always been
to reconcile melody and harmony, the horizontal and vertical. Static
JI has the purest harmonies, but even a simple melodic motive like
1/1-9/8-5/4 can be unsatisfying because you start off on a bold
204-cent step and then "back off" suddenly with a hesitant 182-cent step.
1/4-C MT evens this out melodically by splitting the 5/4 in half --
allowing consistent melodies in a consonant 5-limit harmonic context
-- but melodies that have a "laid-back" quality since the emphasis is
still on vertical sonority.

Since much of Bach does indeed "work" in MT in the sense that it is
possible to pick a key of MT that will get through the entire piece
without ever sounding perfectly awful (tuned in C MT the Chaconne has
only one very brief wolf fifth at beat 69:1:254), 1/5-C MT is a
nice compromise because the overall horizonal structure remains
logically consistent while trading off vertical consonance just a bit
for slightly more melodically aggressive seconds and thirds. At the
same time, there are noticeable changes in consonance as the piece
modulates, just as in irregular circular temperaments -- including the
occasional 5:6:7 or 4:5:6:7 harmony, such as the diminished chords
from 2:09-2:39 and the Bb7 and Eb7 around 5:01-5:17, a happy side
effect of the tuning that adds moments of spice and variety.

As I say, some of the pitch shifts in the tighter 5-limit adaptive JI
versions are evocative, but others strike me as weird or disturbing, a
disruption of the horizontal flow of the piece. Maybe there's some
relatively simple set of horizontal constraints that could control
that and result in a choir-like naturalness in both dimensions."

>>> [Paul Erlich, TD 493.20]
>>> This piece was originally written for solo violin.
>>> Who did this arrangement? Busoni did one; is it his?

>> [John deLaubenfels, TD 497.5]
>> I don't have a clue! I got this from www.prs.net.
>> No, SORRY; just went back there, and it clearly shows,
>> this IS the Busoni version!

> [Paul Erlich, TD 497.12]
> Aha! By the way, Busoni would probably have no qualms about
> writing an Ab for a G# or vice-versa.

I wouldn't be too hasty to assert that.

Even tho (AFAIK) Busoni left no microtonal compositions,
theoretically, he was an advocate of 36-tET/-EDO.
(see Busoni 1962, p 93-95)

In the 1920s he did have a keyboard built to produce it,
and in his _Sketch_ he briefly discusses Thaddeus Cahill's
'Dynamophone', citing Baker 1906c. This was an electric
instrument that was a forerunner of the modern synthesizer,
and was capable of producing any frequency (I don't know
what its limits of accuracy were); as Busoni says, 'an
infinite gradation of the octave'.

Busoni was also the person responsible for introducing
36-EDO to Alois Haba, who *did* compose pieces in that
tuning starting in 1923. See my Haba webpage:
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/haba/haba-worklist.htm

Busoni's 'preliminary expedient for notation' leaves a
lot to be desired, but at any rate, in 36-EDO there are
five pitches between any 'whole tone' (36-EDO does
include the familiar 12-EDO as a subset, one of the
reasons Busoni liked it), at least three of which
could be considered to represent various versions of
G# or Ab: [Busoni used 'C' as the reference here, 2^(0/36)]

degree cents
2^(x/36)

A 27 900
26 866 &2/3
25 833 &1/3
24 800
23 766 &2/3
22 733 &1/3
G 21 700

Hey John, can you make a version of this arrangement
using 36-EDO? Now *that* would be really interesting.

REFERENCES
----------

Busoni, Ferrucio. 1962. _Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music_.

reprinted in: _Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music_,
Dover, New York, 1962, pp. 73-102.

original: _Entwurf einer neuen �sthetik der Tonkunst_. 1907.

Neue Ausgabe: Insel Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1954.

_Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music_,
English translation by Th. Baker, London, 1910, p. 98.

(the Dover copyright page says that it was published
'by G. Schirmer, Inc., ca. 1911)

Baker, R.S. 1906a.
"Music by Telharmony",
_Electrical World_, vol. 47, 1906, p. 509.

Baker, R.S. 1906b.
"The Generating and Distributing of Music by Means of Alternators"
_Electrical World_, vol. 47, 1906, p. 519.

Baker, R.S. 1906c.
"New Music for an Old World",
_McClure's Magazine_, vol. 27, 1906, p. 291.

-monz

Joseph L. Monzo Philadelphia monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
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[Paul Erlich, TD 493.20:]
>>>Who did this arrangement? Busoni did one; is it his? I'm still
>>>interested in the possible septimal augmented sixth chords as in Ken
>>>Wauchope's rendition.

[JdL:]
>>I don't have a clue! I got this from www.prs.net. No, SORRY; just
>>went back there, and it clearly shows, this IS the Busoni version!
>>I missed the details of Ken Wauchope's version - when did that go by?

[Paul Erlich, TD 497.12:]
>Are you serious? On 11/24/99, Ken Wauchope wrote,
[extended quote...]

>On 11/26/99, he wrote,
[extended quote...]

Well, I DID see those posts, but I don't find the phrase "septimal
augmented sixth" in them; thus my question.

BTW, I have all the old digests, so a reference is as good as an
excerpt.

JdL

I wrote,

>> Aha! By the way, Busoni would probably have no qualms about
>> writing an Ab for a G# or vice-versa.

>I wouldn't be too hasty to assert that.

>Even tho (AFAIK) Busoni left no microtonal compositions,
>theoretically, he was an advocate of 36-tET/-EDO.
>(see Busoni 1962, p 93-95)

That doesn't matter. 36-tET has the basic structural intervals of tonal
music (fifths and thirds) in exactly the same tuning as 12-tET. Therefore,
Ab and G# are unequivocally the same in 36-tET. Busoni wasn't after
restoring the subtle pitch distinction of the meantone era. He was satisfied
with his Bach in 12-tET. 36-tET was meant to be an expansion for future
music, not past music.

John A. deLaubenfels wrote,

>Well, I DID see those posts, but I don't find the phrase "septimal
>augmented sixth" in them; thus my question.

The Bb7 and Eb7 that Ken refers to are not really dominant seventh chords;
since his tuning includes C# and G# but not Db or Ab, these are actually
augmented sixth chords. They are "septimal" since, as Ken points out, they
very closely approximate 4:5:6:7.