source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 26 Jun 1996 12:23:25 -0700 Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: Microtonal Varese -- The following excerpts from lectures and letters by Edgard Varese, never published, appeared in Soundings. Ran across 'em the other day: Varese foresaw electrical instruments which promised "Liberation from the arbitrary, paralyzing tempered system: the possibility of obtaining any number of subdivisions of the octave, consequently the formation of any desired scale, unsuspected range in low and high registers, new harmonic splendors obtainable from the now impossible use of subharmonic combinations..." Sounds as though Varese would have been right at home on this tuning forum. In discussing "Integrales," Varese mentioned: "While in our musical system we deal with quantities whose values are fixed, in the realization that I conceived the values would be continually chaning in realtion to a constant. In other words, this would be like a series of variations, the changes resulting from slight alterations of the form of a function or by the transposition of one function into another. A visual illustration may make clear what I mean: Imagine the projection of a geomtrical figure on aplane with both figure and plane moving in space, each with its own arbitrary and varying speeds of translation and rotating. The immediate form of the projection is determined by the relative orientation between the figure and the plane to have motions of their own, a highly complex and seemingly unpredictable image will result. Further variations are possible by having the form of the geometrical figure change as well as the speeds." This is uncannily akin to a description of music produced by one of Erv Wilson's higher-dimensional just intonation lattices using changing timbres. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 27 Jun 1996 10:35 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id BAA21265; Thu, 27 Jun 1996 01:35:48 -0700 Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 01:35:48 -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