source file: m1386.txt Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 09:19:31 -0400 Subject: TUNING digest 1385: Scho"nberg and Partch From: Daniel Wolf Although there are astonishing parallels between Scho"nberg and Partch - just compare a 12-tone row matrix with the diamond (which each multiply a series by its inversion; intonational mappings aside, the structures are essentially identical) - the fact that the two parallels will never meet becomes rapidly apparent on close inspection. Partch's 'coporeality' would admit only precisely tuned rational physical relationships and rejected all mappings onto temperaments, while Scho"nberg's position in a particular cultural tradition demanded reification of that tradition (i.e. temperament) through = the discipline of composition. Scho"nberg did indeed make an appeal to nature with regard to the perception of dense chords in terms of 'higher partials', but he clearly viewed the compositional task as one of assimilating such perceptions to the tempered scale. = In his 1934 letter to Joseph Yasser, Scho"nberg writes (Yasser's translation): ''I have presented the little tabulation of overtones not in a scientific fashion, not as a theory, but solely as a handy assertion that the connection of tones = rests on their relationship and that even the chromatic scale appears to be justified through circumstances of a natural character. Far be it from me to contend that = your claim does not more readily meet scientific demands. I am only trying to indicate that the chromatic scale is being hinted at through the relationship of overtones = which the ear but unclearly (!) recognizes. One might = compare this to a hint received by a painter through his model which he freely re-interprets, unlike a photographer who reproduces the original as precisely as his lenses will permit (their defect being corrected by him through the addition of a pertinent 'atmosphere'). A scientist, however, must always strive to transmit the pure truth even though the defect may be more beautiful, more pleasant, or = more practical. I believe this to be one of the divergencies between art and science.'' Need I remind anyone of Partch's anguished plea for the 'truth of just intonation'? Scho"nberg here is not rejecting such a "truth" in itself but rather the compositional utility of such. Schoenberg goes on: ''...indeed whenever I have had occasion to take up intonation with string players, I have always insisted on its _tempered_ form.(...) To be sure, one of the difficulties of my music is that the classically trained ear, hearing a note c#, may ask whether this should really not be db. In reality, however, this is nothing else but the measured half-tone betwen d and c, regardless of any harmonic considerations. And I believe that a listener who, in his hearing, combines other tones than those I have indicated, is not sufficiently cultivated. To be musical, then, means to have an ear in the sense of music and not in the sense of nature. A musical ear must have assimilated the = tempered scale. And a singer who produces natural pitches is unmusical, just as one choosing to act on a street in a 'natural' way would be considered indecent.'' ''I do not wish these words to imply that I have any quarrel with your theory, with which I am as yet not sufficiently = acquainted with to either approve or disapprove. I merely wish to emphasize the attitude of the composer toward the theory of _composition_, which has no connection with other = disciplines.'' (...) Scho"nberg's strikingly clear insistence on the autonomy of musical composition could not be more distant from Partch's in-and-of-the-world corporealism. A good illustration may be found in the highly artifical, expressionist use of the speaking voice in Scho"nberg's _Sprechstimme_ when contrasted with Partch's intention of setting the natural inflections of the voice. (That neither composer was completely successful in their goals and the results are often similar is another matter altogether!). Daniel Wolf Frankfurt