source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 13 Oct 1995 10:04:17 -0700 Subject: Re: 12-tet in China From: Johnny Reinhard The large cache of 12-bell/chimes per octave running several octaves and found laying on the ground out of order are an interesting historical find. A Chinese friend translated a Chinese article about them and Fritz Kuttner played me a tape of these rare percussion. It seems that the majority of them have 3 koo...different points with which one can strike, giveing off different pitch. Non-Chinese have been forbidden to directly play these percussion and I don't know if that has ever changed. Surely, they have been hung in size order, but it is wrong to deduce the tuning implications by the mere 12 bell/chimes per octave. Even solid metal loses it exact tuning after 2 thousand years. Chin music made use of tuning modulations from Just (harmonic-representing heaven), Pythagorean (open strings-representing earth), and Stopped (fingers on the strings now heard in equal temperament-representing people). My surmise is that before the Mongol invasions outlawed Han Chinese social theater and music, in effect raping it over hundreds of years, there may have been microtonal activity in the form of multiple notes per octave - past 12. As a result of the Mongol invasions, pentatonicism as the simplest means would dominate. There is a Chinese word for a foreign note outside the system. (Pinyon? sp.) Yin Fah Loo, guest musicologist from Shanghai, spent a year as guest lecturer in Chou Wen Chung's graduate Chinese music classes at Columbia University shared this material with us when I was a grad student in ethnomusicology in 1982. Johnny Reinhard Director American Festival of Microtonal Music 318 East 70th Street, Suite 5FW New York, New York 10021 USA (212)517-3550/fax (212) 517-5495 reinhard@ios.com Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sat, 14 Oct 1995 05:42 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id UAA12955; Fri, 13 Oct 1995 20:41:40 -0700 Date: Fri, 13 Oct 1995 20:41:40 -0700 Message-Id: <951014033853_71670.2576_HHB37-1@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu