source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 23:36:29 -0800 Subject: Re: Reply to Matt Nathan From: Matt Nathan PAULE wrote: > > Melody is historically probably > and aesthetically too general an assertion > prior to harmony. Melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, and location --the basic parameters of music--have varying relative priority in various musics. There are also musics (like some Stochausen [sp?]) which attempt to blur these categories. > If the unaccompanied melody uses equal-sized whole tones > and no comma shifts, then the harmonized melody should too. That's a big "if" there. Even assuming the most innocuous and supposedly intuitive-for-Westerners diatonic JI scale: 1/1 9/8 5/4 4/3 3/2 5/3 15/8 2/1, as a basis for the various et and other approximations, you see different-sized whole steps. We are the final arbitors of our own music, you and I. My music uses as many intervals and pitch classes as I want, melodically and harmonically. Yours uses what you want. If you want to get into discussing what others do in practice, I'm sure I can produce examples of "comma shifts" in melody, accompanied and unaccompanied: Bartok's field notations; lead singers in pop music who (consistently, not accidentally) use for certain passages pitches not available from the fixed-pitch accompanying instruments; blues singers and blues players, jazz players like Miles Davis, who purposely use different fingerings to produce pitches near the "normal" ones; string quartets; barborshop quartets; etc. The only times you'll probably hear equal-sized whole steps and no comma shifts in melody will be on fixed- pitch instruments or from performers rigorously trained to match such instruments. (I read, I think in Helmoholtz, about the comparative difficulty of solfege students to stay in tune as a group when accompanied by the (et) church organ and ease when unaccompanied and allowed to sign in JI.) Comma shift is probably a misnomer too (like "wandering tonic"). I'd rather think of it not as a "shift" to a different version of the same pitch class, but a movement to a new pitch class. Maybe there's a psychological transistion or grey area between when "shifts" become "new classes". In other words, maybe historically (following scale-expansion theories like Yasser's) new pitches were added as "shifts", but over time became distinct "classes". For example, if you were composing in a diatonic C Major scale and were inspired to use a V7 of the relative minor (E7), the G# might initially be thought of as a "shift" of the psychological grouping "fifth of scale" rather than a new class. In fact, our notation system still shows the fossil remains of such thought in the very name "G#" (one of 7 letter names plus a "shift" command, rather than having 12 letter names with no shift commands). > >Will you explain this dissonance function with > >figures please? It sounds interesting but I'm > >not sure what you mean by derivative. > > ...calculus. Interesting. Do you have a formula? > >I measure ["complexity"] not by multiplying the members of a > >ratio or chord, but by adding them! > > This may be a valid issue but is irrelevant here, since we are > merely comparing representations of the same interval(s). Technically, "we" includes me, so we are talking about both issues. Is your dissonance function not applicable to comparing perfect representations of different intervals? (I guess it would give equal dissonance, 0, for both?) Matt Nathan Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 21 Feb 1997 17:17 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA13987; Fri, 21 Feb 1997 17:17:30 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA13976 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id IAA05484; Fri, 21 Feb 1997 08:05:14 -0800 Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 08:05:14 -0800 Message-Id: <199702211101_MC2-1191-ECFD@compuserve.com> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu