source file: mills2.txt


Subject: RE: Post from McLaren

From: PAULE <ACADIAN/ACADIAN/PAULE%Acadian@mcimail.com>

Brain wrote,
>As I've pointed out before (and as Paul Erlich's
>experiments with his roomate demonstrate), listeners
>hear the whole-tone portion of a 19-TET diatonic
>scale as very reasonable and familiar-sounding, but
>the 2/19 of on octave "semitones" (a misnomer, since
>this term presupposes that whole tones are
>divided into 2 parts whereas in 19-TET they are
>divided into 3 parts)  always make folks squirm.
>They sound...weird. "Out-of-tune" is the typical
>description.
>The solution, in my experience, is to fracture the
>mislabelled "semitone" intervals in the 19-TET
>approximation of the 12-TET diatonic scale into
>1/19s of a tone.

Ivor Darreg exploits this idea in his 19-TET Guitar Player magazine guitar 
piece. It's a way of distracting the listener away from the "out-of-tune" 
2/19-oct semitones with something totally unfamiliar. I suppose every 
musical advance is tempered - no pun intended - by the habits and 
expectations of the prevalent musical culture. But meantone tuning with its 
large semitones was THE diatonic tuning for centuries, and human ears were 
constructed the same way back then. It doesn't take much listening to accept 
meantone as "in tune," and hear 12-TET as "out-of-tune." So I don't care 
what my roommate thinks, I'm going to use large semitones anyway, and he'll 
have to learn to like them! This approach might not fly too well in the real 
world, and so we find the Southern California Microtonal Group and Ivor 
Darreg and Neil Haverstick using lots of 1/19-oct steps. Out of this may 
come a style that is very beautiful and highly developed, and could not have 
been anticipated on the basis of pure theory alone. Theorists will 
inevitably come along and try to prove that it had to be that way, but no, 
of course it didn't have to be that way, it wasn't that way for Costeley, or 
for me sitting in my room.

An interesting note is that Yasser though with 19-tone tuning would come a 
fracturing of the larger steps of the diatonic scale. McLaren is describing 
the exact opposite of this prediction.