source file: mills3.txt
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 1997 18:53:56 +0200

Subject: Re: What Is Microtonal Music?

From: DFinnamore@aol.com

Jon Szanto writes:

> Sooooooooooooooooooooo: what is microtonal music? Maybe it's all been about
>  chasing our tail, and could have easily been boiled down to "non-12TET
>  musics".  I just don't think *everything* is microtonal. It has to be more
>  than a casual happenstance, at least on some level.

If I may jump in here, I'd like to postulate that it's all relative.  I'm
generally an non-relativistic kinda guy, at least philosophically.  You've
seen that demonstrated by my JI fascism. ;-)

But here, I think it really is a matter of perspective.  Hypothetically, how
would my European 11th-century forbears hear a 12-tET piece?  Would the pitch
relationships sound extraordinary to them?  I bet they would.  Probably
downright out-of-tune.  How about people who grow up with 7-tET or Pelog; do
they hear their own culture's tuning as microtonal?  I do.  But I bet they
don't.  On the other hand, when I hear Candlebox (rock band), I hear the
guitars as 12-tET and thus non-microtonal, but the lead singer, who is
intentionally all over the place pitch-wise (for emotive purposes) as
clearly, deliciously microtonal, both by comparison with his accompaniment
and with my ears' expectations.

It seems logical in a sense, but still a bit restrictive to me, to limit the
term to intervals smaller than a particular size.  That doesn't seem to make
for a very musically-useful definition since lots of music uses larger
intervals that are none-the-less different from what some might expect by
small-but-significant amounts.  E.g., 7/6 might be used with intervals that
are all more than 50 cents away from it, but it is less than 50 cents away
from what many ears expect of a "minor third."

So microtonal music may be, to a given listener, any music whose
compositional/performance model includes pitch relationships that the
listener finds to be beyond his own range of perceived normalcy.  I say
"compositional/performance model" to exclude performed pitches that miss the
performer's intended mark.  How's 'at?

Well, what happens when I get used to, say, 13-limit JI to the point that it
sounds normal to me?  Or what if I got used to a tuning that contained
intervals smaller than 50 cents?  O. K., I still know that most of my
audience will hear it as microtonal.  It's the listener, not the composer,
who defines microtonality.

David J. Finnamore


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From:  DFinnamore@aol.com
Subject:  Re: Morpheus and microtonal
PostedDate:  08-10-97 18:55:07
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