source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 08:09:31 -0700 Subject: Allotonality From: wauchope@AIC.NRL.Navy.Mil Adam Silverman wrote: > (Ken): Who uses the word "allotonality", and who came up with it? Back in the 70's there was some discussion in the tuning community (I think it may have been in Jonathan Glasier's Interval journal) about what name to use for what we were doing. "Xenharmonics" was already widely used by many, but the implication that non-12-TET tunings were necessarily "strange" (xenos = alien) was not fully satisfactory to those using historical tunings or Just Intonation to get more pleasant sounds using conventional harmonies -- to the latter, JI was the (natural) native and 12-TET was the stranger/intruder. The term "microtonal" was also criticized for a couple of reasons. First for being culturally and tonally biased, since a microtone is defined as any interval smaller than a 12-TET semitone. Also, to some people the term implied music in which one would necessarily hear tiny melodic intervals, which required explaining that "macrotonal" scales like 7-TET are also included in the definition, not to mention alternative 12-tone scales derived by selecting a subset from a microtonal source scale. Anyway, at that time I coined and proposed the term "allotonality" meaning "alternative tunings" (allos = other), which seemed more all-inclusive and captured the essential spirit of "xenharmonic" without the implication of oddness. I've never heard anybody else use it, though I was glad when I discovered the Alternate Tuning mailing list had come up with the same idea in naming themselves. Under that concept, 12-TET just becomes one valid alternative among an infinity of tonal possibilities. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- |/ Ken Wauchope (wauchope@aic.nrl.navy.mil) 202-767-9004 |\_| Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC _| http://www.aic.nrl.navy.mil/~wauchope/audio ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 19:03 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA12373; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 19:05:28 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA12271 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id KAA17601; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:05:26 -0700 Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 10:05:26 -0700 Message-Id: <199610241705.SAA29459@gollum.globalnet.co.uk> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu