source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 10:17:46 -0700 Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: Xenharmonic melodic theory vs. harmonic theory -- In Tuning Digest 715 James McCartney suggested: > It seems to me there is too much discussion of pitch sets, and scales > and not enough on harmonic progression and voice leading which seems to > me to be the more interesting problem. I mean, just choose the pitch set > you like and be done with it! -- James McCartney This is one opinion. Another opinion is that western music theory is already overburdened with theories of harmonic progression and voice leading. After a thousand years of obsessing over harmony to the utter exclusion of melodic theory, it seems to me long past time to concern ourselves with horizontal structures. Clearly, James McCartney has another opinion--and quite a lot of justification for it. Harmony has traditionally be considered a more fundamental subject for music theory than melody. The question is whether this notion is valid. There is at least one musical culture which elevated melodic theory far above harmonic theory: classical Greece. As best we can ascertain, the Greek thought melodic theory infinitely more fundamental to music than the theory of vertical intervals. Were the Greeks right or wrong? No way to tell. The question may not even be meaningful, given the iridescence and multidimensionality of the act of composing music. In the meantime, I shall continue in my posts to emphasize melody over harmony, the better to redress the long-standing theoretical imbalance twixt the two. -- Also in Tuning Digest 715 McCartney posted: > I came to this list because I was interested in compositional ideas arising > out of tuning. I don't think I've seen one article that got past selecting > the notes. -- James McCartney McCartney may not have seem 'em, but many *many* such posts exist. About a year ago I posted a long series of compositional ideas and compositional techniques for non-12 tunings. Warren Burt has also posted many such ideas, as have other forum subscribers. Gary Morrison has posted quite a few discussions on xenharmonic composition. It might be advisable for newer subscribers to read over past digests before they post. People who've been on this forum for some time would probably not appreciate it if I (or others) were to continually re-post old messages for the benefit of the newer subscribers. If James can't find those older posts on compositional ideas & techniques in non-12 tunings, I can easily re-post them, however. If there's sufficient interest, I can also post articles by Ivor Darreg on compositional techniques in various non-12 intonations. Ivor was a vertibale fountain of new ideas for xenharmonic composition, and his articles on the subject are a "must-read" for budding xenharmonists. -- Also in TD 715, Greg Scheimer asked for Csound compositions in non-12 intonations. I have a few of 'em, but they're long-- in excess of 100 kilobytes of ASCII. Thus it seemed inadvisable to post them on the Mills ftp site, since Dave Madole is already fighting the Attack Of The Files That Ate My Disk. Another issue supervenes, however: Many of the subscribers to this forum have done non-12 Csound compositions, but they're reluctant to give out scores for copyright reasons. I myself requested a number of subscribers to post Csound scores of their microtonal computer music compositions. Every single composer demurred, citing copyright concerns. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 20 Jun 1996 19:45 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id KAA27418; Thu, 20 Jun 1996 10:45:29 -0700 Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 10:45:29 -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