source file: m1451.txt
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 11:44:18 -0700

Subject: Barbershop

From: Carl Lumma <clumma@nni.com>

>I'm not very familiar with the barbershop style.  Do they generally use
>the dominant 7th as V7 of the key, as opposed to jazz harmony which uses
>it as a sound color that can occur almost anywhere, functionally?

The Barbershop style is jazz.  It uses both otonal and utonal (tho mostly
otonal) 4-5-6-7 chords functionally.  These chords, along with chords like
the 12-14-18-21, form the basic consonances of this music.  They are built
on every beat of the music, just like major and minor triads are built on
every beat of a Bach chorale.

The V7 chord is usually tuned with the harmonic seventh, as opposed to the
16/9 or 9/5 sevenths.  But the music modulates widely (it is composed in
12TET, with all the effects of that tuning assumed) and lots of things
happen throughout the 5 and 7 limits.

By far the best example I have found of this music is Nitelife's Basin
Street Blues album, available at...

http://www.harmonize.com/nightlife/record02.htm


>The point is, given this interpretation the distance to the 4:5:6:7 is
>36/35, which is the septimal comma plus the syntonic comma or nearly 49
>cents, a significantly larger interval to swallow as a comma--though
>still not as big as the 648/625 I mentioned in a previous message.

Because the ear is orders of magnitude more sensitive to tuning
harmonically than it is to tuning melodically, huge commas can effectively
be swallowed by a capella quartets.

*Note.  By "sensitive to tuning", above, I mean the preference for one
interval over another.  How accurate can you tune a *given interval*
melodically vs. harmonically.  I do not mean pitch discrimination -- can
you tell the difference between these two tones? -- which seems to be
roughly the same in either case.

Carl