source file: mills2.txt Subject: Partch, Riley, Reich From: "Jeude, James" Two events framed my interest in microtonal and non-standard tunings. The first was my father's off-handed comment that he wondered what 7th root of 2 musical scales would sound like and explained the "small whole number ratio" rationale of JI. Between his slide rule, my tape recorder, and my school's sine wave generator, I completed a rough school project on 7tet. The second, when I was maybe 12 years old, came when my mother's copy of Switched On Bach coughed up a second 7" single from Columbia Records with samples of other avante-garde releases. There were several selections (6, as I recall) but only three made an impression: 1)Terry Riley's Rainbow In Curved Air, an accident of fate that changed my musical life -- Riley though not a rigid JI theorist does use just tunings on almost all of his work the past few decades,. 2) Steve Reich's Violon Phase, which when I sought out and found various Reich albums also introduced me to tape work like Come Out and It's Gonna Rain and, obliquely, the ideas of psychoacoustics 3) Harry Partch. Only with Harry Partch did I get a sense that this was something I really was supposed to appreciate, intellectually, but I just couldn't find a way to understand and integrate his approach into my own music-making. Harry's piece made an impression but I've never really gotten used to it. As an adult I've re-listened to Partch and acquired two albums which rarely leave their album covers. For me, he's one of those artists whose corpus has a meaning that far exceeds the sum of the individual pieces. Li Po was wonderful when I saw it live at The Knitting Factory but it was because it was part of the Harry legend. If I'd run across Li Po on the radio, I might well have continued searching the dial. It seems from reading this TUNING list that a newbie with an interest in Partch today has to do a fair amount of research to pull together enough obscure or out-of-print recordings, interviews, personal reminisces, and so on to get a picture of the man and his music -- and live performances with correct instruments are rare. I hope Partch can become more "quickly" accessible (which is different than more "easily" accessible) through a new wave of Partch recordings and documentation. Maybe I'll give Harry another try. ------------------------------ Topic No. 6 Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 18:44 +0200 From: COUL@ezh.nl (Manuel Op de Coul) To: tuning Subject: Scala command script example Message-ID: <009A74AB8C311EA0.30B9@vbv40.ezh.nl> In this post I shall give a short lesson of how to create a Scala command file that calculates a scale as a function of some parameters. Bela Bartok has devised an axis-system of notes. It consists of steps of subdominant-tonica-dominant triplets. There is a main step (Dutch: hoofdtrap): f c g S T D and secondary steps (Dutch: neventrappen) where the mediant of the previous step becomes the dominant: d a e b f# c# ab eb bb S T D S T D S T D Arranged in axis crosses (assenkruis, Achsenkreuz): S T D f c g d ab a eb e bb b f# c# The middle cross is used for instance for the global tonality structure of Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Reference: E. Lendvai: Einfu"hrung in die Formen- und Harmoniewelt Barto'ks, 1957. We can (ab)use this system to create scales with, by taking the size of dominant and mediant as parameters. The subdominant will be the octave inversion of the dominant. So if we for instance start with the major triad 4:5:6 we get the scale 25/24 10/9 125/108 5/4 4/3 25/18 3/2 125/81 5/3 125/72 50/27 2/1 which ratios have lattice structure (to the right: 3, upwards: 5, the zero is C): * * * * * * * * * * 0 * This is sort of a slanting version of Euler's genus bichromaticum [33555]. Here comes a solution for the command file: clear 0 echo enter the mediant append ? echo enter the dominant append ? First we have to enter the values for mediant and dominant. A question mark is substituted with what the user enters. The working scale is cleared and the two notes entered into it. calculate/noout 2-%2 append $0 The value of the subdominant is calculated by subtracting the second note (referenced with a % sign) from the octave. That value, which is stored in pitch memory number 0 (referenced with a $ sign), is added to the scale. calculate/noout 2+%1-%2 delete 1 copy 0 1 Now we calculate what the shift must be to get the next step. It is O+M-D, or S+M (from C to A). This value is now in pitch memory 0. The mediant is deleted so the working scale contains now T-D-S. This scale is saved in scale memory number 1. equaltemp 1 $0 3 product 1 A cycle of three steps (so four notes) of the shift value is created. The 1 indicates it is undivided (division of 1). Now comes the trick: the Carthesian product of this is taken with the saved T-D-S triplet, giving the 3 x 4 = 12 notes at once. clear 1 reduce 2/1 sort append 2/1 Scale memory 1 is no longer needed and cleared. All the notes are octave reduced and sorted in order and the octave is added to the resulting scale. So instead of having to write expressions for each separate note, we make use of the structure of the scale and use the proper Scala command that can make it. Taking a quarter-comma fifth for the dominant (Scala expression: 3/2-$k\4 ) and 5/4 for mediant gives us a regular mean-tone scale in the key of B-flat. All the command files supplied with Scala may serve as other examples. In particular the ones for creating tritriadic, tetratriadic, tritetradic, etc. scales, for creating Fokker's single- and double-tied circular mirrorings of triads and tetrads, for creating duodenes, straight and reversed triadic diamonds, hexany diamonds and mean-tone scales. Manuel Op de Coul coul@ezh.nl ------------------------------ Topic No. 7 Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 18:44:04 +0100 From: blee@dircon.co.uk (Brian Lee) To: tuning Subject: New Partch recordings promised Message-ID: <199608231744.AA04918@felix.dircon.co.uk> Here's a tidbit I picked up on the newsgroup rec.music.classical.contemporary on the usenet and I repost it here. Please note that the discussion on Partch he refers to is on that newsgroup not related to what's going on here. Toodle pip! Brian Lee ***************** It's great to see all this discussion about Harry Patch! CRI has kept his music available for more than twenty years. He's a back bone of our catalogue not to mention the experimental tradition in American music. When we reissued on CD The Bewitched, we made a flyer offering both our Patch CDs plus three books by our about Partch and the video of The Dreamer That Remains. If you e-mail CRI, we can send you this flyer by standard U.S. mail. Of the three books offered (an annotated catalogue of his works, Genesis of a Music, and Bitter Music), Genesis is out of print when last we checked, but the other titles can be obtained still through CRI. AND, we have plans to reissue the majority of Patch's remaining Gate 5 recordings on CD. Gate 5 was Patch's own label wherein he recorded the majority of his major works. Our two CDs of recordings are drawn from Gate 5 material. Lots still remains -- many recordings not heard in years. I spent a weekend last spring with Danlee Mitchell, Patch's heir, in San Diego reviewing the material. That's all I'll say for now... It's going to be a lot of work to get this done (two or three new CDs) with proper notes and librettos, etc. So, my guess is winter/spring of next year will be the time to look for a major new Patch series on CRI. Joseph Dalton Managing Director COMPOSERS RECORDINGS, INC. 73 Spring Street, Suite 506 New York, NY 10012-5800 phone 212.941.9673 fax 212.941.9704 e-mail: CRInyc@aol.com