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Contemporary Microtonal Music and Its Relationship to Past Practice

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Contemporary Microtonal Music and Its Relationship to Past Practice Contents p. 3 Introduction p. 4 Ancient (pre-500 CE) and Early microtonal practices, systems, stylistics: Medieval (500-1400), Renaissance (1400-1600), Baroque (1600-1760), Ingram, Dumbril, Plato, Pythagoras, Heptagrams, Babylonia, Assyria, and Greco-Arab Texts p 7 Ancient practices and oral traditions p. 10 Al-Farabi, 17TET system, kitab al-Adwa, al-Andalas and barzok p. 14 Common microtonal practices, systems, stylistics (1600-1900): Baroque (1600-1760), Classical (1730-1820), Romantic (1815-1910) Bach, equal temperament, Glarean p. 17 Jamaica and Africa, Koromanti and Angola, Ethiopian bowl lyre (krar), Quadrille music in Carriacou p. 18 Post-romantic and Pre-modernism, experimental, Carrillo, Ives, Rimsky-Korsakov, Russolo, Experimentalism, polytonality, tone clusters, aleatorics, quarter-tones, polyrhythmic p. 19 Contemporary & modern microtonal practices, systems, stylistics: Modern (1890-1930), 20 th century (1901-2000), Contemporary (1975-present), Modernism, Dadaism, serialism, microtonality, Verèse, Webern, Wyschnegradsky, Hába, Carillo, Villa-Lobos, Ives, Partch, Cowell p. 22 Yasser, infra-diatonicism, supra-diatonicism, evolving tonality p. 31 Darmstadt, neotonality, dodecophony, Stockhausen, Boulez p. 30 22TET, A Just 12-tone scale built on powers of 3 and 5, diminished 7th blue note, 1960s Rio de Janiero Jazz, Bossa Nova, US jazz, flattened 5th and hexatonics in the Blues, New Orleans resurgence, Copacabana p. 34 Pitch and cognitive acculturation, development of musical thought and thought in sound, schematic and veridical expectancy, mistuning perception p. 37 Just, Bohlen-Pierce scale, Wusta-Zalzal, Masonic ratios, 22 tone system of India, Ragas, Messiaen, Babbitt, Cage, Young, French Spectralists, 53TET, 19TET, Bagpipe tuning p. 48 Midi, scale perception, semiotics, notation, re-creation, Turkish, Eskimo, Indonesian Slendro in 5TET (Salendro), Thai 7TET p. 53 Xibeifeng, Xenakis stochastic emulator, fretboards and the 12th root of 2, world Fusion, evolving timbral domain, microtonality and after the fact of performance, societal technological status, cultural and logical outset, and aesthetical artistic nuance p. 56 Conclusion, truth in music, modality of believing, dynamic tonality, Third-stream music, sound painting, new directions p. 58 Glossary, p. 62 References 2 Microtonal music and its relationship to historical practice by Geoff Geer Introduction Intonation systems make up a large part of musical performance, often floating beneath the compositional surface, below the timbres, stylistics, speed and dynamics. It is conscious organised order of performance and composition that determines what we deem as music. A clever melody or evocative harmonic line may be altered by taking it out of the underlying context of intonation systems. Today these systems can be extended through use of an understanding of previous centuries’ performance stylistics in tonality and microtonality, and cultural and contextual ideology and application. In the paper we will trace past tonal systems and practices and musical ways of thinking tonally and microtonally to determine whether any patterns emerge. Are 12TET,1 24TET or Just intonation (small ratios) the best choices for today’s musicians? We will look at some of the leading historical musical thinkers and contrast their ideas with modern microtonal thought and practice, as well as the cutting edge research on tonality, technology and compositional practice for the 21st century. Are there logical patterns emerging in human musical thought and practices with regard to some examples of definite links to past and present practices? Musical practices and their tonal systems and theories build the sound track to transnational-migrations of peoples, politics, ideologies, capital and mass media images, acting as boundary-markers even as they cross boundaries, transforming and reinterpreting them—reconfiguring cultural imagination by expression of desires and memories. (Shannon, 2007) Microtonal music, as music that is not 12 tone equal temperament, has occurred worldwide, in the Americas, in Europe, in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia.2 Bach wrote pieces (as 1 12 Tone Equal Temperament, 12 equal divisions of the octave. 2 Examples include Byzantine liturgical music, Scottish bagpipe, Iranian chamber music, Indonesian Gamelan, Za’atar Jewish music, Bakshish ensemble, and African xylophone. Tonal systems today include equal tunings 5TET (Indonesian slendro), 6TET (Tone Equal Temperament), 7TET (Thai traditional), 12-Equal or 12TET (Western c.1800-present), 15TET, 16TET, 17TET(Arab), 18TET (Wyschnegradsky), 19TET (Guillaume Costeley), 22TET, 24-Equal or 24TET (quarter-tone), 26TET, 31TET (Huygens, Fokker), 34TET, 36TET (Wyschnegradsky),, 41TET, 3 harmonically as possible) using (according to Forkel, his biographer) thirds tuned slightly sharp, a prerequisite in transpositional functioning. Just intonation was generally used before this in various systems worked out through ratios, and is defined as small interval ratios. Bach was limited in composing by meantone temperaments, and today we can hear some of what he was unhappy with using special software that enables closer approximations, highly accurately, in Just intonation. Werckmeister, a Baroque era composer notable for his invertible counterpoint, did away with the unnecessary applicability of enharmonic keyboards of the time, which had more than 12 notes, of which many were euphonious. While Pythagoras may have developed whole number ratio tunings, the Harmonists had perhaps thousands of ratio tunings which were lost after the fall of the Roman empire, with some going to the Arab world for development. After this, during the early middle ages, consonance was based on a 1/1 unison, 2/1 octave, 3/2 perfect 5th, 4/3 perfect 4th, with 3rds and 6ths being dissonant. In 1300 the English monk Walter Odington came up with: 5/2 minor 6th, 5/3 major 6th, 5/4 major 3rd, 6/5 minor 3rd, though later it was realised that it had already been discovered. (Denton, 1996) These various ratios used throughout history differ markedly from various equal-tone and meantone temperaments that came later on, including 24-TET (quarter-tone equal temperament). In the 1500s Gioseffo Zarlino thought that ratios 1 through 6 were consonant, leading to use of major and minor triads during the renaissance, which developed chordal and harmonic music based on ratios and Just intonation, yet there was also a growing body of work for fretted and keyboard instruments. Before this, music was predominantly vocal, and instrumental music then took off in the classical period. In the 20th century Partch envisioned instruments that could modulate and retain Just intonation. 24-TET instruments are very complex, and notational systems vary. During the Baroque period meantone temperament was used: 4ths and 5ths are about 2 cents off, 3rds and 6ths are slightly out, 8 scales are near perfect and 4 are very mis-tuned. With more complex music and modulations came the need for equal-temperament around 1750. In the middle-ages A 440 varied from 370 to 567 Hz and people had their own tuning forks. The church pitch was often a whole step higher than the choir pitch, and a compromise chamber pitch resulted from this at around 420 Hz. Alexander J. Ellis created charts of the pitch of instruments which can tell 43TET, 47-edo (equal division of octave), 50TET, 53TET (Turkish), 72TET. Linear tunings, that temper non-octave notes via a stack of perfect fifths, include Syntonic (generators P5 and 8ve), Meantone (quarter-comma, septimal), Schismatic (Helmholtz), Miracle (a regular temperament), Magic (generator 5/4 narrows or widens). Irregular temperaments include Well temperament/Temperament ordinaire (Kirnberger III, Werckmeister, Young, Neidhardt, Vallotti, and Young). Other systems include Just intonation, Pythagorean, Partch’s 43-tone, Ptolemy's intense diatonic scale, tonality diamonds, numerary nexus, tonality flux, otonality, hexany, scale of harmonics and non-equal temperament tunings. 4 us what we are hearing. (Denton, 1996) For the Russian ancient liturgical styles Joseph Yasser, whose major work was A Theory of Evolving Tonality, talks about the byways of tonal evolution and pleads for tonal restoration. Yasser asserts that pentatonic [infra-diatonic] theory precedes more advanced temperaments, and that quartal harmony, rather than tertian [3rds], is the proper harmony for the infra-diatonic. This was followed up by his attempt to demonstrate the pentatonic character of Gregorian chant. Yasser’s letter to Schoenberg criticised his chromatic 12-tone acoustic interpretation. Schoenberg tabulates the harmonic series to the 13th partial. For Schoenberg these six first partials are founded on the root, fourth and fifth of the harmonic series, and constitute the diatonic scale, while adding the remaining seven partials forms a complete chromatic scale. Yasser asserted that the first few notes may sync well enough, but as the harmonic series evolves (phi ratio) there is greater error between the three ascending series’ pitches microtonally, and he maintained that Schoenberg did not take the trouble to check his flawed work. For example there is a 38 centitone difference between the Eb at the 7th and 13th partials, and the C# and Db at partials 11 and 13 are off by almost a semitone, or 43 centitones. (Yasser, Schoenberg, 1953) A main problematic is how the instruments were built and their relation to written notation. With the old folk flutes for example, and their
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