melodic intervals - a pitch for 5/4 & 81/64

Hello -

Searching my memory of singing I learned from
my mother and others, with quite a bit of listening
to popular singers from the 1940s and '50s over the
radio, plus listening to performances of early
music and even religious services, I get an impression
of there being two thirds which singers often aim for -
the "pentatonic" 81/64 third which is slightly
different in character than the 5/4 third which
I recall my mother being very careful to sing ever
so slightly lower than the familiar piano EQT
M3, although later she indicated preference for
EQT tunings over just ones. Her mother, my grandmother
had been born in 1870, had learned piano in the 1870s,
held the post of organist at the First Methodist Church
in Harrisburg, PA from 1890 to 1893. I have a distinct
memory of my grandmother's playing hymns on the piano
in 1944, when I was visiting my grandparents, emphasizing
major chords as though they sounded very sweet and
harmonious in a way which impressed me as not quite
fitting with those chords as they sounded on the piano
she was playing, although the ideal forms of those chords
would, I thought, have sounded as my grandmother seemed
to feel they sounded as she was playing them. When I started
playing a piano in quarter comma mean tone temperament
I gained a very strong sense that NOW I understood how
my grandmother might have played those chords with such
passion and emphasis. I do not have direct evidence of
this, but I believe it is more likely than not that
learning piano in a rural county in Pennsylvania in
the 1870s, my grandmother's first experience of the
piano was with an instrument tuned to quarter comma
mean tone temperament or a tuning close to that.

I believe that although one sings the notes DO and MI
in succession and one speaks of a melodic interval between
these notes rather than a harmonic interval between them,
the sound of the DO is still reverberating in short term
memory intensely as the MI begins to sound, so that the
melodic interval inescapably has some of the character of
a harmonic interval.

This is my 386 to 408 cents' worth anyway. Maybe
certain ancestral archetypes from a somewhat earlier
age in music were impressed on me early in life
without my understanding much about them, but maybe
it is useful for me to indicate what I know of these
possible traces of earlier ways of musical thinking -
which may see a resurgence in the future.

Dave Hill, La Mesa, CA (not here for much longer)

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