source file: m1390.txt
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 19:12:59 -0400

Subject: response to Nangaku re: Schoenberg

From: monz@juno.com (Joseph L Monzo)

Nangaku (Tuning Digest 1389):
> Trying to understand the 12ET overtone Schoenberg
> discussion - Are we saying Schoenberg recognized that
>  the tempered scale's ratios were a bit off, but if you pay
> attention to the overtones created by the tempered scale
> (which will reflect the natural harmonic series), you can
> include that aspect into your music?  Was he trying to
> connect the equal tempered system to the pure intervals
> you would associate with just intonation?  And would
> Partch's response be - that's nice, but why don't we just
> start off with the pure ratios? 

Monzo:
Basically, yes to all of the above, sort of.  You've got a pretty
good grasp of the general ideas.

The main point is that Schoenberg knew of the limitations
of the 12-eq scale (in the sense that most of us on the
Tuning List feel it is limited) and decided, mostly for
reasons of practicality on instruments and in notation,
that it suited his needs.

(By the way, he invented an interesting new notation
designed specifically for the 12-eq scale.   See the
article "A New Twelve-Tone Notation" [1924], reprinted
in "Style and Idea", p. 354-362, with some examples
from "Pierrot Lunaire" in the notation.)

Partch insisted that practicality was not a good enough
reason to sacrifice the subtlety and "acoustical truth"
of just-intonation, and so he built a whole ensemble
of his own instruments which were accurately tuned
according to his 43-note-per-octave 11-Limit
 just-intonation system.  (See Partch's book
"Genesis of a Music", 2nd ed. [1974].)

I will re-quote what I feel is the most relevant part of
Schoenberg's letter to Yasser (quoted more completely
by Daniel Wolf in Tuning Digest 1386):

Schoenberg:
> ''I have presented the little tabulation of overtones
> not in a scientific fashion, not as a theory, but solely
> as a handy assertion that...even the chromatic
> scale appears to be justified through circumstances of
> a natural character.
 
> ...indeed whenever I have had occasion to take up intonation
> with string players, I have always insisted on its _tempered_
> form...  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..."

Monzo:
Schoenberg thought of the study and use of just intervals
as belonging to science, while art (composition) should
utilize the "defective",  but infinitely more practical, tempered
scale, perhaps basing at least some of its technique upon
the  _implied_  just ratios.  Wolf very succinctly summed
up the whole subject with two sentences (especially the
second):

Wolf:
> Need I remind anyone of Partch's anguished plea for the
> 'truth of just intonation'? Schönberg here is not rejecting
> such a "truth" in itself but rather the compositional
> utility of such.


   Joseph L. Monzo
    monz@juno.com
    4940 Rubicam St., Philadelphia, PA 19144-1809, USA
    phone 215 849 6723

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