source file: m1422.txt Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 16:32:10 -0400 Subject: RE: Ivor/Blackwood From: "Paul H. Erlich" Neil Haverstick wrote, >Blackwood is a world >class pianist and composer . . . his compositions on "Microtonal" are surely >well crafted and technically complex. Yet, I find myself listening to >Ivor's "Detweleveulate" more often; I have no reason other than I like >the feeling more. That's the only reason you need! I guess I'm somewhat into well-crafted, technically complex music, which is why I listen to bands like Yes and King Crimson. But I can appreciate music that's more on the feeling level of things, like Bob Dylan and the blues. About halfway through Detwelveulate, though, I'm just bored, becuase I know that what's coming next is some doodling in the same style but with even smaller intervals. Maybe I should try Gary's suggestion and put the CD on shuffle. >And, on the subject of Blackwood's 15 tone guitar >etude; the sharp 5ths really bug me, especially because the piece itself >is reflective of music ("Baroque") where the 5ths were much closer to >pure. In fact, I've always wondered why Blackwood chose such a form for >the 15 octave tuning; nothing wrong with 15, but it seems to be fighting >the very style it's composed in. I think he chose the form because he wanted to show how circle-of-fifths sequences, which were common in Baroque music, close after five steps in 15tET. The same goes for his 21tET piece (seven fifths close the cycle here), which is fashioned as a Baroque suite, but which the tuning makes extremely sour. I think the problem with Blackwood's use of 15tET is not so much the sharp fifths but the fact that he is trying to use diatonic scales. The melodic succesion of a 240-cent whole tone and a 160-cent whole tone, which occurs in 15tET diatonic scales, I find positively ugly. Blackwood himself agrees in his writings in PNM, although I suppose he wanted to keep this ugliness in the compositions for illustrative purposes. Much more interesting is the 10-tone symmetrical scale in 15tET that Blackwood describes; his use of it in his compositions is hidden beneath his diatonic language. Had he chosen to explore this scale in its own right, I think he would have had a chance of being a real Xenharmonic pioneer, instead of a skilled composer mainly trying to adapt old ideas into new tunings. As I said, I do love the ending of the 19-tone piece, because it doesn't sound like something that's been done before, but it does sound like something, a true musical innovation rather than a trick or gimmick, or one of those ideas that looks better on paper than it sounds to the ear.