source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 11:03:20 -0700 Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: Raga pitches -- In Tuning Digest 712, Bruce Gilson mentions: "The book "Ragopedia" was mentioned on the digest of the 10th of last month. I've seen it, and unfortunately it is next to useless for tunings. Everything is reduced to normal scale notation, with no clue as to which notes are to be played sharper or flatter than 12-tET." Thanks for the info, Bruce. Alas, this accords with my suspicions. My experience in perusing Western books about Karnatic Indian music is that Western authors almost universally assume that the ignorant Indian musicians are trying to play the Western diatonic scale and getting it just a bit wrong, poor dears. The "errors" are generally "corrected" by writing down the pitches in standard Western notation. This appears to have had untoward results. To wit, Carol Krumhansl has written an article in which she makes the amazing claim that "the seven pitches of the Indian scale are identical to the pitches of the Western diatonic scale." If you have some CDs or cassettes of Karnatic Indian music lying around, you might want to give 'em a listen. Ask yourself whether Carol Krumhansl knows what she's talking about. Inasmuch as Krumhansl is a purportedly reputable researcher who is thought to have done some significant work on music perception and cognition, this is not a trivial issue. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 19 Jun 1996 18:41 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id JAA01631; Wed, 19 Jun 1996 09:41:40 -0700 Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1996 09:41:40 -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