source file: m1417.txt
Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 18:05:25 -0400

Subject: TUNING digest 1416

From: Daniel Wolf <DJWOLF_MATERIAL@compuserve.com>

Michael Dixon wrote:

<I am writing a thesis on JI notation and so far my research shows most J=
I =

<composers to be in the US, and those who compose microtonally in Europe =
 =

<to be using various EQ divisions.

As a Californian who has lived for a decade in Germany, perhaps I can hel=
p.
The difference between the two sides of the ocean is fundamentally one of=

an attitute towards tonality, and the predominant choices for tunings
reflect this distinction. =


In European 'serious' music, there is generally no interest in reviving a=

functional tonality. The 'complex' composers use microtones to create a
heavily inflected surface, the 'spectral' composers and even the profound=

tuning theorist and composer Klarence Barloh typically use quarter-tone
approximations of harmonic series values, the 31-tone scene in Holland -
which did offer interesting possibilities for the extension of tonality, =
is
virtually extinct, European minimalism was not deeply interested in tunin=
g,
and the most serious scholar of Just Intonation, Martin Vogel, promotes
'improved' intonation for historical musics, particularly Mozart, with no=

great interest in contemporary composition.

In contrast, in the US, the composition of tonal musics is a going concer=
n,
despite brief periods in which it faded out of fashion, and even the
serious musicians involved with equal temperaments (i.e. Blackwood, Wilso=
n,
Rapoport) tend to view these resources in terms related to historical ide=
as
about tonality.

The difference was very well summed up some years ago in Darmstadt where
Brian Ferneyhough took James Tenney to task for holding the very position=

that tempered intervals would be interpreted by the listener in terms of
rational intervals! The implication here was that Ferneyhough did not
intend the complex intervals in his own music to be heard in any harmonic=

terms but simply as uninterpretable detail; the transfer of this mode of
not listening to a music like that of Tenneys conveyed the real depth of
the oceanic divide, and suggested that Ferneyhough's understanding of
musical complexity is, at least in harmonic terms, curiously
one-dimensional.

Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt      =