source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 17:04:13 -0700 Subject: Johnston's notation From: kollos@cavehill.dnet.co.uk (Jonathan Walker) A brief cautionary note concerning Ben Johnston's notation: On Wed, 23 Oct 1996, Adam B. Silverman wrote: > ... and Ben Johnston's notation, best described by > John Fonville in "Perspectives" issue 29, No. 2 (1991). These > both describe the pitches very closely, although Johnston's are only > really useful for JI, and do not include the convenience of enharmonic > spellings. I feel I must reluctantly take issue with this appraisal of John Fonville's Perspectives article; while Fonville deserves praise and encouragement in his efforts to bring Ben Johnston's music before a wider (academic) public, I have been disturbed by some misunderstandings which threaten to confuse anyone new to Johnston's (and indeed Partch's) theorising. I can't recall everything that worried me, and I don't have the article to hand at this moment, but I do clearly remember the most important matter, which is as follows: Fonville employs the terms "otonal" and "utonal" in a manner which contradicts their original usage in Partch -- a usage which Johnston has preserved. In Partch, strictly speaking, only a sequence of intervals can have the property of otonality or utonality; in Fonville, on the contrary, a single interval considered in isolation will have these properties. For Fonville, "otonal" means that the highest prime appears in the numerator, and "utonal" that the highest prime appears in the denominator. Fonville was at liberty to devise new terms for the purpose, but he chose, rather perversely, not to do so; this new and conflicting usage threatens to undermine the important and much more elusive distinction that Partch and Johnston draw by means of these two terms. As for the supposed limited usefulness of Johnston's notation, I would again tentatively beg to differ, since I have myself been generalising this notation for the purpose of representing meantone temperaments, and for analysing Renaissance polyphony in JI terms. Readers may see for themselves whether they approve of the results at: http://boethius.music.ucsb.edu/mto/issues/mto.96.2.6/mto.96.2.6.walker.html and in recent exchanges on mto-talk, the e-mail list accompanying mto (Music Theory Online). If my comments on Fonville are not clear enough for some readers, I'd be prepared to expand a little. The same volume of Perspectives (1991) contains Steven Elster's analysis of Johnston's String Quartet No.6, and of course he explains "otonality" and "utonality" in a clear and orthodox fashion (he could hardly have analysed this quartet otherwise!). -- Jonathan Walker Queen's University Belfast mailto:kollos@cavehill.dnet.co.uk http://www.music.qub.ac.uk/~walker/ Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 11:55 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA11655; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 11:56:59 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA11673 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id CAA14884; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 02:56:56 -0700 Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 02:56:56 -0700 Message-Id: <199610240934.AA18274@felix.dircon.co.uk> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu