source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 10:47:44 -0800 Subject: Miscellaneous replies to TD #934 From: John Chalmers Harry Partch reproduces a letter of Fox-Strangways in which a 23-note per octave harmonium for Indian music is mentioned and also decried as being too expensive. I've seen small harmoniums (shruti-boxes?) with a hand-operated bellows and 12-tone keyboards in Indian import shops and performance. Perhaps a microtonal version could be cheaply produced. I found it difficult to extract a coherent scale from the Gudjieff excerpt. One can see the chromatic scale there and perhaps 14 sympathetic strings or an octave of 26 tones. The names seem to be a mixture of Greek and Armenian, at least I see a few number roots in both languages, though my knowledge of Armenian is virtually nil. Gurdjieff, as I recall, was born in Russia of Greek parents and directed an Oriental dance troupe in Moscow for which he wrote the music. Hence he might well have been acquainted with Near Eastern music, which is largely based on Iranian styles. BTW, the Armenian vocabulary has been greatly influenced by Iranian languages too. In any case, scales of roughly 24 tones in Pythagorean, some sort of JI, or near ET are known in the Near East. D'Erlanger discusses them in some detail in the later volumes of La Musique Arabe. I'm not clear whether Persian and Turkish music is basically 12 tones of Pythagorean with commatic and double-commatic inflections or not. The effect is quarter-tonal in many instances. As for contemporary Greek Orthodox or Byzantine liturgical scales, I consulted several somewhat contradictory sources for my book on tetrachords. The sources are these: Xenakis, Iannis. 1971. "Towards a Metamusic." in Cybernetics, Art and Ideas. Jasia Reichardt, ed. New York Graphic Society Ltd. Greenwich, CT. Another translation of this article appears in Xenakis, Iannis. 1971. Formalized Music, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IA, USA. Tiby, Ottavio. 1938. La Musica Byzantina. Fratelli Bocia Editori. Milan, Italy. Savas, Savas I. 1965. Byzantine Music in Theory and Practice, Hercules Press. Boston Athanasopoulos, Georgios D. 1950. Theoria tes Byzantines Mousikes, Patras, Greece. (excerpts in another article.) Xenakis uses Aristoxenos's/Cleonides's cypher notation of 30 parts to the 4th to come up with scales in JI. He discusses the Trochos and other chains of tetrachords and pentachords as well as heptatonic scales, modulations,etc. Savas's and Athanasopoulos's scales use the same system, but if anything, their resemble some contemporary Islamic scales as much as Aristoxenos's genera. I found Sava's book quite confusingly written in some places and I used Athathanasopoulos only for some unusual tetrachords. Tiby uses an oldar 28 parts to the 4th, 68 to the octave system. --John Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 24 Dec 1996 23:22 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA02566; Tue, 24 Dec 1996 23:25:20 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA02567 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id OAA04586; Tue, 24 Dec 1996 14:25:18 -0800 Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 14:25:18 -0800 Message-Id: <199612241723_MC1-DDF-8BCB@compuserve.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu