source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 14:25:18 -0800 Subject: More to John Chalmer's post From: Daniel Wolf <106232.3266@compuserve.com> The current school of thought regarding Turkish Art and Folk Musics is based upon a tone of nine _koma_s - suggesting a 53 tone scale. (A good introduction to contemporary Turkish music - albeit more cultural than theoretical - is Martin Stokes' _The Arabesque Debate_, Oxford 1992). However, the exact value of a _koma_ varies from theorist to theorist, and it is more than likely that we are dealing with something akin to Aristonexian units, or a more precise sruti-like unit. The centuries long debate within the Byzantine theoretical tradition has largely been over what is the most appropriate equal division to describe a practice that has not been - until the advent of the latest technical resources - equally divided. I realize that that a large faction of the tuning community maintains that the Aristoxenian units are/were units of an equal temperament. I am more comfortable - and find Aristoxenus, as well as Sruti theorists, or writers on Byzantine, Turkish, or Arabic musics easier and more useful to read - when these units are viewed conceptually, as smallest bits of meaningful pitch differences, with exact rational values left undetermined. It is striking to me that, almost universally, musicians in these traditions who are also familiar with methods for the accurate measurement of pitches and intervals refrain from making such measurements, or find them of little value in analysing their music making. (I have come to think of Aristoxenus as the first cognitive scientist). Since we spend a lot of time discussing exactitudes of pitch and interval, it may be useful to discuss what we can learn about musical tunings without reference to exact magnitudes. Certainly intonational tolerance is one aspect of this discussion, but I am also interested in what may be called a 'topological' analysis of pitch materials, of properties that are unaltered by elastic deformations. Best wishes for the holidays - Daniel Wolf Frankfurt Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 25 Dec 1996 00:39 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA02681; Wed, 25 Dec 1996 00:41:50 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA02680 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id PAA05238; Tue, 24 Dec 1996 15:41:42 -0800 Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 15:41:42 -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