source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 23:27:57 -0700 Subject: TUNING digest 834 From: Daniel Wolf <106232.3266@compuserve.com> Re: Haba The quartet in 31-tone - the only Haba score I´ve ever found available commercially as a pocket score - was written in response to a Fokker request. (As I understand it, there was no cash commission involved; Haba was already on pension in the CSSR, & he would have been taxed at 100 percent anyways). His description of the work as in fifth tones is indeed confusing, especially for players trying to rehearse the work with whole tones divided in five parts. I have played a bit of it on my Rayna synth & it sounds a bit like free-hand drawing against a 31tone grid, as he takes no particular use of the good 31tone approximations of just intervals. Of course, Haba´s trademark was athematicism, and his theoretical works are essentially catalogs of interval and chords without any attempt to characterize his materials in terms of relative consonance or dissonance. (The Boston-area 72-toners (Manieri, Van Duyne etc.) seem to be working in a similar vein). I think that this "deficit" (the words of Georg Friedrich Haas) in Haba´s theoretical work is overcome to some degree in the work of Ivan Wyschnegradsky (I recommend Barbara Barthelmes´s "Raum und Klang: Das musikalisches und theoretische Schaffen Ivan Wyschnegradsky" 1995, Wolke Verlag, as an overview; the series MusikKonzepte also has two Volumes on Skryabin and the "Skryabinists"), and implicitly in the compositions of Julian Carillo, which tend to approximations of just materials as resolutions. The more impressive theoretical contributions remain those of Fokker and the still too-little-known Novarro (when is someone going to do a translation of Novarro?). Daniel Wolf, Ludwig-Landmann-Str 84B 60488 Frankfurt, GERMANY Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 11 Sep 1996 19:15 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA25626; Wed, 11 Sep 1996 17:40:21 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA25538 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id IAA18341; Wed, 11 Sep 1996 08:40:18 -0700 Date: Wed, 11 Sep 1996 08:40:18 -0700 Message-Id: <199609111133_MC1-964-B622@compuserve.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu