source file: mills3.txt Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 21:36:09 +0200 Subject: Re: stray thoughts From: "Collins, Gordon" Johnny Reinhard mused: >If I played Mary Had A Little Lamb a quartertone sharp from convention's >A=440, then each and every tone I advanced would be a microtone. By >virtue of the tortured fingerings in sometimes embarrassing postures, >these lambs were microtones. Why is it no one listening to my >Mary... rendition on the bassoon would notice and remain >convinced that there were absolutely no "microtones" at play (the >rare perfect pitchers aside). (You mean that they *would* remain so convinced, right?) Because there aren't any microtones at play. A=440 is far from a universal convention. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the international pitch standard is still 435, and most major orchestras play higher, upwards of 448. (The string players think they sound better there - it drives the wind players nuts.) Early music players tune to A=415 ... or 392 ... or 460 ... because 250 years ago reference pitches varied considerably, with choirs and chamber ensembles often having different (by a third or more) reference pitches at the same time and place! Even if you didn't travel, you had to be good at transposition, and there are Bach cantatas where the recorder parts are written in a different key so the instruments would end up playing at the same pitch. Perfect pitch may be more curse than gift! Is this not why folks on this list use ratios and cents to describe intervals from an arbitrary reference, notated 1/1? So no matter what your reference pitch, if all the intervals in your performance are powers of the twelfth root of 2, you're playing in 12TET. Thus a "microtone", whatever it is, is an interval, not a pitch. >A tone can be an interval of major and minor size, of numerous variations, >actually. It is also the blend of harmonicities and inharmonicities >of a plethora of amplitudes which all make up the klangfarben of vivid >color in musical tone. Well, this is throwing in a completely different definition of the word "tone", meaning "timbre".... >Could a microtone be an interval that bridges to another microtone, or >not? Must its pedigree be the remainder of real time arithmetical >calculations .... I suspect that the problem with the word "microtone" is that it has been applied to tunings far removed from the context of its invention. Didn't the word come out of early 20th-century experiments with 24TET, 96TET, and other tunings that were derived by subdividing 12TET? Its meaning seems clear in that context. Now it gets applied to things like 7TET, the intervals of which are barely smaller than a tone, far from "micro". It seems to be no more specific than a cue word to indicate a non-12TET interval. In that sense, sure, an interval between two microtones is another microtone, however wide, as long as it is not 2^(n/12). But this strips the word of almost all meaning. >"Microtonal" is the personal sensibility one achieves when making the >acquaintence of a progressive number of powerful sound >angles...skipping stones on the sound continuum one moment, >placing stones to cross a river in the next, knocking on >familiar doors all along the way. Hmm - "microtonal" essentially meaning "unfamiliar" - a good place for the word "xenharmonic". Would someone brought up listening to Indian music get the same sensation on hearing 12TET? How far away must one get from the familiar doors to produce the microtonal sensation? If you played "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in Pythagorian tuning, who would consider that microtonal? The predominance of the equal-tempered piano and fretted guitar has evidently led many to overlook that, to this day, good musicians who can produce arbitrary pitches do not consider C# and Db to be the same pitch. (They may say otherwise, but one must judge from their performance!) Is the music they produce microtonal? The exclusion of music thought to be 12TET by the speaker or writer but never actually *performed* in 12TET strips "microtone" and "microtonal" of the rest of their meaning. I think it would be best to restrict the word "microtone" to "an interval significantly smaller than a 12TET semitone", and "microtonal" to "making explicit use of microtones". Then we need other words to describe the scope of the AFMM. Since I'm not sure what exactly is excluded, I'm not sure what to suggest. ("The American Festival of Nonquasiequidodecatonic Music" - ruling out "sort-of-12TET" music ???) Musing further, Gordon Collins gordon_collins@jhuapl.edu SMTPOriginator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu From: Aline Surman Subject: Microstock 3 and various PostedDate: 18-10-97 00:10:15 SendTo: CN=coul1358/OU=AT/O=EZH ReplyTo: tuning@eartha.mills.edu $MessageStorage: 0 $UpdatedBy: CN=notesrv2/OU=Server/O=EZH,CN=coul1358/OU=AT/O=EZH,CN=Manuel op de Coul/OU=AT/O=EZH RouteServers: CN=notesrv2/OU=Server/O=EZH,CN=notesrv1/OU=Server/O=EZH RouteTimes: 18-10-97 00:09:28-18-10-97 00:09:28,17-10-97 23:10:10-17-10-97 23:10:11 DeliveredDate: 17-10-97 23:10:11 Categories: $Revisions: Received: from ns.ezh.nl ([137.174.112.59]) by notesrv2.ezh.nl (Lotus SMTP MTA SMTP v4.6 (462.2 9-3-1997)) with SMTP id C1256533.0079B642; Sat, 18 Oct 1997 00:09:25 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA20145; Sat, 18 Oct 1997 00:10:15 +0200 Date: Sat, 18 Oct 1997 00:10:15 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA20107 Received: (qmail 18050 invoked from network); 17 Oct 1997 15:10:05 -0700 Received: from localhost (HELO ella.mills.edu) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 17 Oct 1997 15:10:05 -0700 Message-Id: <3447DF97.4840@dnvr.uswest.net> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu