American S ociety o-f University Composers Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference / April 1967 AMERICAN SOCIETY OF UNIVERSITY COMPOSERS Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference, April, 1967 Copyright © 1969 The American Society of University Composers, Inc. clo Department of Music, Dodge Hall C<1lumbia University New York, N. Y. 10027 Subscription Information: Proceedings of The American Society of University Composers are published annually by the American Society of University Com­ posers, Inc. Subscriptions are available at $5.00 per year (domestic) and $6.00 per year (foreign). Back issue rate: $5.00 per volume. Subscription requests should be addressed to: Proceedings Editor American Society of University Composers Department of Music, Columbia University New York, New York 10027, U.S.A. AMERICAN SOCIETY OF UNIVERSITY COMPOSERS Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference, April, 1967 H eld at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri in cooperation with the Department of Music, Washington University The Society gratefully acknowledges the support of THE A LICE M. DITSON F UND in assisting the publication of this volume. Founding Committee BENJAMIN BORETZ, DONALD MARTINO, J. K. RANDALL, CLAUDIO SPIES, HENRY WEINBERG, PETER WESTERGAARD, CHARLES WUORINEN National Council ALLEN BRINGS, BARNEY CHILDS, RANDOLPH E. COLEMAN (Chairman), DAVID EPSTEIN, CARLTON GAMER, LOTHAR KLEIN, DONALD MACINNIS, CLIFFORD TAYLOR Executive Committee ELAINE BARKIN, RICHMOND BROWNE, CHARLES DODGE, WILLIAM HIBBARD, HUBERT S. HOWE, JR., BEN JOHNSTON, JOEL MANDELBAUM, RAOUL PLESKOW, HARVEY SOLLBERGER Editor of Proceedings HUBERT S. HOWE, JR. CONTENTS I Proceedings of the 1967 Conference Part I: Sung Language 9 PETER WESTERGAARD Sung Language Part II: Performance Pr.oblems 39 MELVIN STRAUSS Performance Problems in Contemporary Music 42 JoEL CHADABE Performing Problems 45 FRED COULTER Simplification of Complex Musical Structures 48 CHARLES WUORINEN Comment on Fred Coulter Part III: Professional Colloquium 51 PAUL A. PISK Arnold Schoenberg as Teacher 54 ROY TRAVIS Directed Motion in Webern's Piano Variations, Op. 27/II 61 JOHN ROGERS Toward a System of Rotational Arrays Part IV: Microtonal Music in America 77 LEIGH GERDINE Introductory Remarks 79 PETER YA TES Micro tones 89 BEN JOHNSTON Three Attacks on a Problem 99 LEJAREN A. HILLER, JR. Electronic Synthesis of Microtonal Music 107 JOEL MANDELBAUM The Isolation of the Microtonal Composer 113 CARL TON GAMER Deep Scales and Difference Sets in Equal-Tempered Systems 123 Other Presentations 125 Membership List, February, 1969 The music examples in this issue are reprinted by kind permission of the copyright owners as follows: Theodore Presser Co., Bryn Mawr. Webern: Symphony, Op. 21, Copyright 1929, Universal Edition; Piano Variations, Op. 27, Copyright 1937, Universal Edition. The Proceedings are printed by LIPSIUS PRESS, 460 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, N. Y.10024, U.S.A. PART I SUNG LANGUAGE PETER WESTERGAARD 9 SUNG LANGUAGE I WOULD like to talk about some of the problems that come up when composers write vocal music with a text. The problems that I have in mind are not the aesthetic ones caused by mixing up two different communications systems; ·they are the compositional ones caused by the fact that both systems depend on the articulation and perception of sequences of differentiated sounds. That is not to say ·that both systems use the same differentiations or that the same differentiations, should they exist in both systems, would serve the same structural functions. But there is no avoiding the fact that in vocal music with a text some of the differentiations are bound to be the same for both systems and some of the struc­ tural functions of each will either join forces or collide. Now while I assume that you all know all about the differentia­ tions among sounds and their structural functions in music, I won't 10 assume the same for language. So at the risk of appearing to treat my colleagues like a bunch of freshmen, I will devote the first half of my talk to an informal resume of some of the findings of linguistics that seem to me to be relevant to composing. 1.1 SPEECH SOUNDS 1. SPOKEN LANGUAGE Consider for a moment your capabilities as a sound generator. If you push with your diaphragm or squeeze with the mus.cles between your ribs or just plain let your chest sag, you can force air out of your lungs, up your windpipe, through your open vocal chords, and (if you've closed off your nasal passages with your soft palate) out through your mouth. As the air moves out through the relatively wide aperture, the friction will produce a wide band of white noise of rather weak intensity [h] .1 To get a stronger signal you must limit the aperture and increase the pressure. By placing the tip of your tongue against your lower front teeth and the edges of your tongue against your back upper teeth and then almost closing your jaws you can c-reate a much smaller aperture at the front of the mouth. Air passing through this aperture will be vibrating at around 3900 c/ s and up [s]. By gradually widening the aperture and moving it back into your mouth, you can lower the bottom limit of the band to around 2000 c/s [s+SJ.2 By limiting the aperture to a thin space between the tip of your tongue and your upper front teeth you can get another kind of band 1 Square brackets around a symbol mean the sound indicated by the sym­ bol. One of the advantages of giving this paper orally was that I could simply make the necessary sound at the appropriate place in the sentence. Anyone who reads the paper will of course have to make the sound for himself. For those not familiar with I.P.A., here are some of the symbols used in this paper that are not self-explanatory together with examples of words that use the sound they represent. [f1 ship [f IP] [8] thin [81n] [3] vision [vi;•ml [17] sing [s111] [x] loch [bxl [:J] log [l:J g] [t] bet [btt] [re] bat [bretl 2 + means a continuous change from the first sound to the second. [8]; by putting your lower lip against your upper front teeth, yet an- 11 other [f]. Since the envelope of these sounds is controlled by the breathing apparatus, the rise time tends to be pretty long - the big- ger the aperture, the longer; steady states are possible for as long as you've got air. (The bigger the aperture, the more air you'll have to use.) To get a fast attack on a high narrow band, put the front of your tongue against the ridge of your hard palate (just above your upper front teeth) so it closes off the air; build up the pressure, and then release it in a sudden puff [t]. To get a slightly wider, considerably lower band in a slightly slower attack, close off the air with your lips instead [p]. To get a still wider and lower band in a still slower attack close off the air with the very back of your tongue against the soft part of the roof of your mouth [k]. Now none of the sounds described so far has had a pitch. To get a pitch you have to close your vocal cords to a thin chink. The moving air will then set the cords in periodic vibration and itself be set into periodic vibrations. Pitches can be added to any of the foregoing noises. Because of the common envelope they are easily associated into a single complex sound [t], [d]; [p], [b]; [k], [g]; [s], [z]; [SJ, [J]; ff], [v]; [e], [8]. In each case the rise time is a little longer for the complex (or voiced) sound than it is for the straight noise (or unvoiced) sound. To produce a pitch without a noticeable noise component you must cut down the friction by sending the periodically vibrating air through a wider aperture. But even with a wider aperture you can still shape the passage and channel the vibrating air past soft tissues or bony walls, thereby damping some partials and boosting others. Jamming the edges of your tongue against your upper molars will channel the vibrating air between the soft groove of your tongue and the hard roof of your mouth [r]; putting the tip of your tongue against the ridge just above your upper front teeth will channel the vibrating air past your even harder back upper teeth and the edges of your tongue, to produce yet another timbre [l]. To get an essen­ tially different kind of timbre you can open the valve to your nose and close your mouth sending the vibrating air through the soft tissues of the nasal passages: if you close off the whole resonating chamber of your mouth by closing the valve at the back of the mouth you get one timbre [>;]; if you close off the front half of your mouth (including your teeth) by putting your tongue against the ridge above your upper front teeth, you get another [n]; or, if you close off the mouth at the lips only, yet another [m]. 12 Now you can make any of these sounds as soft as you want to, but you can't make all of them equally loud. Try as you may you will never be able to get [h] or [8] anywhere near the maximum loudness of [s] or [ S]. Of the voiced sounds described so far the ones with the biggest dynamic range were the last five [r], [1], [m], · [n], and [1]. But there is another class of sound with a much greater dynamic range.