source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 10:58:39 -0800 Subject: Unsent replies From: Daniel Wolf John Chalmers wrote: '' What other culture deliberatively writes unsingable melodies, uses unplayable (and undanceable) rhythms, and specifies unnatural intervals? '' While I do agree that western Art musics have gone to extremes in this direction, I think that there are plenty of examples of cultures where the ''unsingable'' is a constituent part of instrumental music, or more precisely, where instrumental realizations of song become ''unsingable''. The most virtuosic Mbira music is one example. Chinese, Korean, and Japanese court musics often fall into this category with marked differences between the sung and instrumental versions of a work; the legal limitations on music making (e.g. forbidding melodies from exceeding a seventh) at certain points in their histories certainly turned melodies into ''unsingable''. There are also instrumental traditions which are constructed on relatively abstract bases (Balophone playing based on patterns, the Balinese ritual 7-tone orchestras whose melodies are extracted mechanically from the vowels of texts). The question of ''unplayable'' musics, on the other hand, is much more complicated. Perhaps from San Diego, John, you might be better able to disambiguate what the Ferneyhoughites have in mind when notating a rhythm that is impossible to perform accurately - do they want the failed performance (a kind of improvisation on the composer's notation), or is there an ideal performance which is to be eventually achieved? I suspect that the general disinterest by the complexity folk in computer realizations (a significant difference from Babbitt, by the way) indicates that they are more interested in failure... Could you perhaps be more specific about what you mean by ''unnatural intervals''? (I assume that it requires mature and consenting pitches). Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 24 Mar 1997 20:33 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA13717; Mon, 24 Mar 1997 20:33:15 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA13722 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id LAA17957; Mon, 24 Mar 1997 11:31:30 -0800 Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 11:31:30 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu