source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 09:53:21 -0700 Subject: Post 1 of 2 from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: Paul Rapoport's inadequate bibliographies part 1 of 2 --- A month or so ago, Paul Rapoport complained about my criticism of his inadequate bibliographies. He alleged that "we need fewer hurricanes frm the Northwest." Paul was presumably intent on demonstrating, sans evidence (ex nihilio, as it were) that the bibliographies at the end of his articles are by some convoluted twist of logic useful and adequate, rather than criminally deficient, atrociously deceptive, falling unpardonably short of even the lowest standards of slipshod scholarship. Of course, my posted statements stand. They were, if anything, too mild. Paul's refusal to cite 90% of the basically important articles on equal temperaments can no longer be explained away as "oversights" or "errors" or the result of being "just too busy." After a number of letters on this point, Paul continues to ignore references of fundamental importance. His bibliographies continue to deceive and misdirect generations of fledgling xenharmonists. Paul's bibliographies are holding back the progress of xenharmonics. So it's time to go public. Let me point out how *important* this issue is. At least one forum subscriber has stated that he wished he could go back and do his doctoral thesis all over again. After studying the many hundreds of pages of articles I xeroxed for him, this tuning forum subscriber was *shocked* and *disgusted* at the *lack* of adequate citation of microtonal articles and sources in current bibliographies and current articles. Paul Rapoport's bibliographies are among the very worst offenders in this regard. Paul is a fine researcher and a gifted composer and an insightful theorist. This doesn't change the fact that the bibliographies in Paul's extremely insightful and valuable articles are *artrociously* inadequate to the point of being overtly deceptive. In fact, if Paul Rapoport's articles (viz., "Some Equal Temperaments are More Equal Than Others--and Decidedly More Temperamental," MusicWorks 43, 1991) weren't as *excellent* as they are it wouldn't matter nearly as much that Paul's bibliographies are so incomplete. If the article's crap, no one will pay much attention to it-- but Paul Rapoport's papers are *important* and destined to garner many citations. Thus there is NO EXCUSE for Paul's failure to cite *most of the essential papers and the most important sources* on equal temperaments. Clearly, neither Paul Rapoport nor any of you will be convinced by a mere *statement* of these facts. Like mules, you've got to be *beaten* with a *two-by-four* before you wake up and PAY ATTENTION to this *vitally important issue.* Want to play mule? Fine. As always, the members of this tuning forum refuse to listen to reason. As always, I'm going to have beat you with a ton of references before you wake up and recognize the truth. As always, you've got to do it the hard way. Fine, let's do it the hard way. I've got a two-by-four the size of Texas. One blunt instrument, coming up. You want to play the mule, you're going to get an education. Consider, as a first atrocious example, the grossly deceptive bibliography at the end of Paul Rapoport's article "The Structural Relationships of Fifths and Thirds in Equal Temperaments," Journal of Music Theory, 1994, pp. 351- 389. Here is Paul's bibliography: "Blackwood, Easley. 1982. Twelve MIcrotonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, op. 28 [sore] New York: G. Schirmer." "---- 1985. The Structure of Recognizable Diatonic Tunings. Princeton: Princeton University Press." "Brun, Viggo. 1961. Muikk og Euklidske algoitmer. Nordisk matematisk tidskrift 9: 29-36" "Fokker, Adriaan. 1987. Selected Musical Compostiions. Ed. Rudolf Rasch. Utrecht: Diapason Press." "Mandelbaum, Joel. 1961. Multiple Divisions of the Octave and the Tonal Resources of 19-Tone Equal Temperament. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, no. 6104461." "Rapoport, Paul. 1989. "Some Temperaments are More Equal than Others...and Decidely More Temperamental. MusicWorks 43: 8-12." "-------, 1991. The Notation of Equal Temperaments. Unpublished. (Now published in Xenharmonikon 16, Autumn, 1995)" "Rasch, Rudolf. 1985. Relations between Multiple Divisions of the Octave and the Traditional Tonal System. Interface (now Journal of New Music Research) 14: 75-108" Regener, Eric. 1973. Pitch Notation and Equal Temperament: A Formal Study. Berkeley: University of California Press." -- That's it. First, let's ask: "What impression of microtonality would a naive reader come away with after reading Paul Rapoport's article and glancing through his biblioraphy?" The naive reader would conclude: [1] Easley Blackwood is *the* major theorist of equal temperaments. [2] Rudolf Rasch and Adriaan Fokker were important theorists on equal tempered tunings. [3] The bulk of the existing literature on microtonalty is heavily mathematical and theoretical. [4] Mathematical calculations of the size of various kommas in this or that equal-tempered system offer the primary means by which equal tempered tunings can be understood, and are the most important properties of equal-tempered tunings. -- *Every one of these impressions is false.* In actuality: [1] Well over 40% of Easley Blackwood's statements about equal-tempered tunings are verifiably false. Upward of a third of his mathematical results do not apply, or are irrelvant, or are taken so far out of their original Pythagorean just intonation context as to be meaningless. [2] Rudolf Rasch and Adriaan Fokker are minor theorists of equal-tempered scales. Rasch is primarily a psychoacoustician and music historian/musiclogist. Fokker was a major theorist of 31-TET, but he did not investigate, did not deal with, and clearly did not understand, equal temperaments other than 31, 19 and 53. The reader who looks to Rudolf Rasch and Adriaan Fokker to provide an understanding of 13-TET, 14-TET, 9-TET, 21-TET, 27-TET, 40-TET, ad infinitum, is badly mistaken. By contrast, Ivor Darreg was a major theorist of equal temperaments. His Xenharmonic Bulletins 5 and 10 described the characteristics of dozens of equal-tempered systems. Siemen Terpstra has also done important work on classifying large numbers of equal temperaments, as has Erv Wilson. John Chalmers has done important work in describing the characteristics of some of the more exotic equal temperaments (13-TET, etc). Not to blow my own horn, it remains a fact that Your Humble E-Mail Correspondent has also done some work in this area. [3] The bulk of the modern (post 1965) literature on equal temperaments is descriptive and lucid. Mathematics do not form the main basis of modern approaches to microtonality, primarily because after 1965 synthesizers were available and people could actually *hear* the various equal temperaments. Thus modern xenharmonic theorists can now speak about the "sound" of an equal temperament, whereas this would have been impractical pre-1965 because the theorist would have had to build 48+ acoustic instruments. [4] It is universally acknowledged that the most important characteristics of the various equal temperaments are their different "sounds" or "moods" or "sonic fingerprints." A piece of music which sounds thrilling in 19-TET is apt to go flat and lose its punch in 31-TET; a piece of music which sounds gorgeous in 31-TET will sound denatured and dull in 22-TET. And so on. None of this has *anything* to do with arcane mathematical measurements of abstract kommas, most of which are illusory and inapplicable in the equal temperament concerned. For example, while it's theoretically possible to calculate the closest approach to the Pythagorean komma in 13-TET, doing so is an utter waste of time. 13-TET has no perfect fifths and therefore the difference between a stack of perfect fifths and a stack of major thirds is meaningless in 13-TET, and calculating such a quantity is an exercise in futility. It is exactly as though you were to walk through a museum and listen to a respected art critic explain that the paintings of Picasso's Blue Period were inferior because the red in those paintings was a very washed-out and muddy hue of red. "Wait a minute," you'd say,"The paintings are *supposed* to be mostly blue. They're basically blue. That's the whole *point*!" If the art critic continued to explain that there was no such color as blue, that blue was merely a muddy form of red, and that blue had no place in painting, you'd give up on the guy and walk away. Yet this is what, in effect, Easley Blackwood and his mathematically- inclined ilk are telling. All ET scales are essentially the same, they can all be measured by their approximations to various just kommas, and we can understand all the equal temperaments by discussing the sizes of their perfect fifths, the most useful kinds of quasi-Beethovenian 19th century harmonic triadic progressions, etc., etc. This is obviously false and clearly ridiculous. Many equal temperaments do not have perfect fifths, cannot support consonant triads, do not obey the conventional laws of harmony and instead turn the "rules" voice-leading and harmonic progression and melodic modes upside down and inside out. In many equal temperaments, we must throw Beethoven out and learn from the Kwaiker Indians, the Javanese, or the Thai xylophone tuners. Beethovenian 19th- century triad harmonic progressions are a small sliver of the world's music, and it is silly to try to force the infinity of xenharmonic tunings into that tiny niche. -- Thus, *all* the impressions which the naive reader gets from Paul Rapoport's biblioraphy, quoted above, are verifiably FALSE. Every single idea planted in the mind of an impressionable reader by Rapoport's biblio will be deceptive, incorrect, useless, and will lead the naive microtonalist to try to compose using 12-TET-type harmonic progressions and standard diatonic modes in, say, 17-TET or 19-TET or 14-TET. *This is a recipe for disaster.* The predictable result? Any fledgling microtonalist who reads Rapoport's bibliography and seeks out ONLY Rapoport's cited sources will get such godawful results when he composes microtonal music according to Blackwood's and Brun's and Rasch's and Fokker's prescriptions that s/he will give up on microtonality in disgust. I contend that this is a serious problem. This is cause for SERIOUS concern. And so, it's time to end this vicious circle of silence regarding the most useful and the most informative sources for fledging microtonalists (Darreg's writings, Xenharmonikon, the ideas of Balzano and Douthett and Clough, Erv Wilson's writings, etc. ,etc) *MUST* be broken. Otherwise microtonality will continue to be seen as an impossibly difficult mathematical abstract niche, while it is in fact the most wide-open, joyous, exciting and musically vibrant area of late-20th-century music. The next post will get into the nitty-gritty, blow by blow, of the gross inadequacy of Paul's bibliography. For the rest of you who read this, remember--Paul Rapoport is no exception. YOU are just as culpable as he is. The problem of inadequate, deceptive, willfully misleading bibliographies is *endemic* throughout the microtonal theory literature. For the sake of the next generation of xenharmonists, this *MUST* change. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 18 Jul 1996 21:18 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id MAA18837; Thu, 18 Jul 1996 12:18:42 -0700 Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 12:18:42 -0700 Message-Id: <35960718191653/0005695065PK4EM@MCIMAIL.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu