source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 29 Nov 1996 20:36:51 -0800 Subject: Miscellany From: John Chalmers Re Kraehenbuehl and Schmidt: K & B proposed a 12 out of 22 as the next=20 step in Western music and the 4:5:6:7 chord as the basic consonance.=20 Their procedure was to interpolate new notes into the larger intervals of the older tuning. By this means, which they attribute to Prosdocimus of Bellemandis, the pentatonic became the diatonic, the diatonic the chromatic, etc. See: Kraehenbuehl, David and Christopher Schmidt. "On the Development=20 of Musical Systems," =CAJournal of Music Theory: vol. 6 no. 1, Spring 1962. pp. 32-65. Alas, I've never seen the Ogolovets article. BTW, Yasser lived and worked in Shanghai after leaving Russia during=20 the Revolution. I recommend his "Medieval Quartal Harmony: A Plea for Restoration" (1938). It also appeared as a three part article in=20 the Musical Quarterly vol 23 (170-197) April 1937, (336-366) July, '37=20 and vol 24 (351-385) July 1938. He wrote about Chinese and Siberian music= =20 (he spent some time in Siberia on his way to China). In NYC he became very well-known as an organist and authority on Jewish music, which he felt was largely pentatonic and should be harmonized with quartal chords. I think ethnocentric is a somewhat oversimplified judgement, though perhaps true to some extent. He seemed to feel that Thai music in particular, was limited by its 7-tet intonation and that going to 14 was no more of an advance than going to 24 would be for us. BTW, Yasser did hear a piano in 19 and gave a lecture-demo with it. I am unclear from what Yasser himself told me and/or from the description= =20 in the annotated bibliography compiled by Albert Weisser exactly whether this was two pianos in 19 or one "specially preprared" piano in 19.=20 Weisser states it was the latter. It was done in 1935 at "Steinway and Sons in their New York studios." The talk was called "Supra-Diatonicsm in Live Sound." This should satisfy critics who think that Yasser never heard 19-tet. However, this experiment came 3 years after his book was published and his theory was in its mature form. Yasser admitted that it was hard to hear the 12+7 scale "as something inconstesibly clear and convincing." (The quotes are from the bibliography and are Yasser's words with or without minor paraphrasis.)=20 Re Hexachord: I've often wondered about the hexachord myself. Some=20 tunings of Wilson's hexany (i.e., the 1.3.5.9) approximate the hexachord,= =20 but in general, I've found it difficult to generate new scales based=20 on it. Lou Harrison has composed with hexatonic scales. Refield's scale: This scale has 3 minor triads on the 1/1, 4/3 and 3/2 and two major.Its modes are inversions of the Ptolemaic ones. I wasn't proposing it as a tuning of the major scale, but pointing out that Ptolemy's Intense Diatonic generates only half of the major-minor system. For a more complete discussion of the chordal genesis of the modal system, see Ellis's additions to Helmholtz. I think this is pretty much theoretical post-hoc musicology, but it is interesting and suggested to me at least, a way of harmonically generating scales. Personally, I think the tritriadic genesis of the major and minor scales to be post-hoc theorizing, but the fact that it is possible and largely agrees with musical usage, is further evidence for the "fitness" of the major and minor modes for tonal music. The challenge is to find analogues and homologues, as well as convincing new formations= =20 for xenharmonic music. --John Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sat, 30 Nov 1996 09:55 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA12617; Sat, 30 Nov 1996 09:57:41 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA12024 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id AAA19117; Sat, 30 Nov 1996 00:57:38 -0800 Date: Sat, 30 Nov 1996 00:57:38 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu