source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 18:57:58 -0700 Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: "The Art of Noises" -- Came across the book "The Art of Noises" by Luigi Russolo. "Translated from the Italian with an introduction by Barclay Brown." Pendragon press, New York, 1986, Monographs in Music No. 6. This book is a collection of short essays written by the Italian futurist Russolo. Creator of the orchestra of noise-makers known as intonarumori, Russolo is one of the founts from which springs modern music. (Great names for the instruments: "Sobbers," "wailers," "shriekers." Sort of like the New Yorker music critic at one of Johnny Reinhard's concepts.) It is less well known that Russolo was a radical and persistant microtonalist. In the paper entitled "The Conquest of Enharmonicism," Russolo sets forth explicitly his dissatisfaction with 12-TET and his militant advocacy of UNtempered harmonic series-based tunings. "After the introduction of the tempered system in music, only the word Enharmonicism remained to indicate the values that no longer found corres- pondence in musical reality. Indeed, the difference between an E sharp and an F, and a B sharp and a C are called enharmonic, while the tempered system, in rendering the semitones equal, has removed this difference and made the two notes into the same sound. "But unfortunately, the inconvenient result of the tempered system does not lie only in the word. Once that the octave was divided into only *twelve* *equal* fractions and applied in the tempred scale, there resulted a considerable limitation of the number of practical sounds and a strange artificiality in those that were adopted. The difference between the scale of the tempered system and hte natural one are well known. (..) With wind instruments, which produce the harmonic series of the fundamental note, the 7th, 11th, 13th and 14th harmonics are likewise corrected in their intonation to produce what we call closed sounds. "In the tempered system, therefore, the difference between the large and small whole tone (9/8:10/9 = 81/80) has disapperaed. Similarly, the differences between the diatonic semitone (16/15) and the chromatic ones (23/22 and 25/24) has also vanished. (..) "A tempered harmonic system can be compared in a sense to a system of painting that abolishes all the infinite gradations of the seven colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) and accepts only their type of color, having only one yellow, one green and so on." This is a remarkable passage. It almost exactly parallels several passages from Harry Partch. In "A Quarter-Saw Section of Motivations and Intonations," Partch talks in almost exactly the same way about a rainbow of colors being collapsed down into dull simplistic hues. Moreover, it's clear that Russolo knew very well the intricacies and advantages of just intonation, and that he thought the so-called natural (read: harmonic series- based) tuning superior to the tempered one. It's interesting that when this debate between harmonic- series-based and expanded equal-temperament (viz., 48-TET, 41-TET, 72-TET, etc.) occurred in Russia between 1917-1928, the Russian expanded equal-temperament faction won out. But when this debate occurred in Italy between 1917-1928, the Italian futurists made the fascinating choice of chucking tonality entirely in favor of noise. During the same period in Germany, Schoenberg resolved the debate by chucking tonality in favor of an elaborate scheme of statistically distributing the familiar 5-limit equal-tempered 12 pitches. In Mexico, Novaro and Carrillo resolved this debate by choosing the Russian option but using live acoustic instead of electronic instruments. Thus the claim that "Schoenberg solved the dilemma of the exhaustion of tonality" is untrue, insofar as MANY solutions were implemented in various different countries. The only solutions which survive to this day are the Russian one (represented today by folks who compose & perform microtonal music on synthesizers) and the Mexican one (represented today by folks who compose & perform microtonal music on acoustic instruments.) Needless to say, the German "solution" to the exhaustion of 12-TET tonality didn't last beyond 1978, and post-Webern serial composition is now a dead art form with no attraction for contemporary composers. Clearly, someone should do a 1/1 article on Russolo & his advocacy of ji as an Italian solution to this problem. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 9 Jun 1996 07:00 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id WAA27039; Sat, 8 Jun 1996 22:00:05 -0700 Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 22:00:05 -0700 Message-Id: <199606090458.WAA07938@freenet.uchsc.EDU> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu