source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 07:32:52 -0700 Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: Partch's tonality diamond -- In "History and Principles of Microtonal Keyboard Design," 1985, Douglas Keislar proposes that Harry Partch might have gotten the idea for the tonality diamond from a book by Max Meyer(!) Keislar suggests that "Partch might have been inspired by his reading of Meyer (1929), who depicts a similar diamond on page 22 " of Max Meyer's 1929 book "The Musician's Arithmetic." Can anyone confirm or deny this? -- The Innova Release 2 4-CD set of Partch recordings boasts a cover photo of Partch with the adapted viola and an instrument I've never seen before--the Monocordion. It looks like a version of Partch's 1932 circular-key ji keyboard mapped onto an accordion. Does anyone know anything about this instrument? Any sources available on it? Partch mentions nary a word about the Monocordion in "Bitter Music," the 1933 "Exposition of Monophony," or any other material I've been able to find. -- Gary Morrison objected to my posted statement "therefore, naturally, no one has written an article on the tunings between 5 and 11 tones per octave." Gary pointed out that he has written a number of articles about 10-TET. My statement should have read "therefore, naturally, no has written an article on all the tunings between 5 and 11 tones per octave as a group." This set of tunings forms an obvious "island" of equal temperaments separated from the main body of divisions of the octave usually discussed by music theorists. It seemed surprising to me years ago, and still seems astonishing, that no one else has penned a monograph on this clearly distinct group of equal temperaments. Thus Gary Morrison and Yaws Twuwy are both correct. -- Some weeks back, Thierry Rochebois asked for citations of composers who'd combined different tunings in a single composition. It turns out Allen Strange wrote a string quartet with a tape part circa 1980. "I just finished a piece which was premiered in December, a string quartet, and it dealt with simultaneously seven, twelve nineteen and twenty-five-tone equal temperament, as closely as players could come to it, being kept in tune by a tape..." ["Interview: Allen Strange," Ear Magazine West, 8(3), May-June 1980, pg. 1] No doubt there are bezillions of other composers who've nonchalantly combined different tuning systems but who haven't bothered to let anyone know. How about posting on this forum? How about letting the rest of us know, folks? -- Gary Morrison stated recently that he judged this tuning forum a place for recitations of personal experience in microtonality, rather than for citations of the literature on the subject. Permit me to suggest that both are necessary and appropriate. Without citations, this tuning forum would degenerate into a C.B. radio-type chat line..."Breaker breaker, we got a cool tuning comin' up on the left!" Without descriptions of the personal experiences of the participants, this tuning forum would degenerate to the Perspectives of New Music level (shudder). -- To emphasize my point about the MIDI tuning standard, this quote from Jim Cooper in January 1986 article in "Keyboard" magazine: "Since MIDI is not part of some police state decree, there are differences in implementation. These are mostly too esoteric to explain here, but they can definitiely cause communications problems when two devices are MIDIed toegether. Like most other people, I refer to MIDI as a "standard," but for it to really be a standard would bring up severe legal problems of an anti-trust nature. (...) So MIDI is a specification for a method of interfacing, not a law. Exactly which parts of the specification actually find their way into a given instrument or device depends on complex tradeoffs that the engineering and marketing departments of each manufacturing company must decide on." Exactly the same point applies to the MIDI tuning dump specification. So the next time someone on this forum claims, "Wow, I just read that such-and-such synthesizer will have a tuning precision of 1/800,000 of a cent!" blow it off. It's nonsense. We're lucky (alas!) to have the 1024 parts per octave given us by Yamaha and Ensoniq. Incidentally, my point here is NOT that Yamaha and Ensoniq are horrible folks for giving us "only" 1024 parts per octave tuning resolution--this resolution is completely adequate for any musical applications I can think of. The point is, rather, that people on this tuning forum ought to stop wasting their time mooning around for some super-accurate tuning resolution and instead get off your rears and use the equipment we've got. A number of microtonal theorists who won't be mentioned continue to mope & sulk and refuse to compose in exotic scales with modern digital synths because the "tuning accuracy is inadequate." C'mon, people, remember the Nike commercial: "JUST DO IT." --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 4 Jun 1996 19:25 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id KAA18096; Tue, 4 Jun 1996 10:25:21 -0700 Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 10:25:21 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu