Strange scales and temperament, tracks and discussion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9WPfkXQa_Y

http://youtu.be/NPZvcAyDY8M

In 1939 Joseph Goebbels (propaganda Minister for Nazi Germany) was the first to push for all music world wide to be played and listened to at A-440Hz. He failed. But in 1953 the Elite had a meeting in London to finally IMPOSE the a-440Hz Standard Concert Pitch and Succeeded. Prof Dussaut of the Paris conservatory had a poll of over 20,000 of the head classical musicians of France and they all voted unanimously for A-432hz but the Elite does not care what others think now do they?

There is more than one reason for doing this.

1) Goebbels knew that a-432 was the ONLY resonant frequency that had perfect harmonic balance.
2) He also new that locked inside the A-432 structure was one of Pandora's boxes.

http://www.projects8.com/sedona/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=40&Itemid=95

As of "Shaking The Habitual", The Knife have been using a 22-step keyboard, most audible evidence is on "Full Of Fire"

Oh, I meant to italicize that Goebbels quote. Those views expressed are not my own

best thread ever imo but I will just be learning I don't know that I have anything to add.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDdwOCdiffI

I have a thesis about altered-scale Western music: it sucks. But it sucks kind of deliciously, these lesser geniuses trying to create a school of thought that rivalled Second Viennese School -> musique concrete & Xenakis, and basically coming up with a lot of "I like to play out of tune and I am crazy"

Even stuff like Jute Gyte and Wendy Carlos "Beauty in the Beast", both of which I totally love, the altered scales in their music are completely superfluous and could just as easily be achieved by, say, detuning a string and just rolling with it. In Wychnegradsky's case, beating up a piano and paying some Chopin.

I'm just saying: destined to fail. God bless these people.

But the spectral guys were really on to something imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eRCQLKeQ5g

yeah I'm the same way with poetry - I love cockamamie theories about what poetry must or mustn't be, I love me a good manifesto and they're all ridiculous in the end but I can get pretty high on the rhetoric

a few weeks back I saw someone give a talk which referred to some of these wonderful wacky guys, I love the ridiculously intense theorization but yeah I can struggle to hear what it's really doing, even when it does sound good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7vZURdhucM

See that is exactly what I mean! You can spend all day tuning your piano to 24-tone and play some Alois Haba OR you can leave a Gershwin record out in the sun

Okay, I'm sold on the whole A-432 thing. Frankly, I'm perpetually hitting notes a few cents flat so I expect the switch to feel natural and easy.

I have a thesis about altered-scale Western music: it sucks. But it sucks kind of deliciously, these lesser geniuses trying to create a school of thought that rivalled Second Viennese School -> musique concrete & Xenakis, and basically coming up with a lot of "I like to play out of tune and I am crazy"

"Altered-scale Western music" is a broad category, obv, broader than either "Second Viennese School" or "musique concrete", I would think (at least at this time of night). LaMonte Young, Harry Partch, and Ben Johnston, to pick three examples, use/d different sorts of alternate tuning systems and use/d them for different reasons. They do not represent a single school of thought so it seems hard for me to make general statements about it.

I mean, I know you obviously know your stuff so I believe you have a serious reason for saying this. I'd be interested in hearing you expand.

Even stuff like Jute Gyte and Wendy Carlos "Beauty in the Beast", both of which I totally love, the altered scales in their music are completely superfluous and could just as easily be achieved by, say, detuning a string and just rolling with it

I don't think I know the Carlos piece but I really disagree about Jute Gyte, at least as far as Discontinuities is concerned. The microtonality seems pretty fundamental to the compositions to me. You could argue that with Sonic Youth or Pavement, 'microtonality' deriving from intentionally imprecise tuning is more or less just ornamentation. In the case of Jute Gyte, though, many riffs are built with quarter-tone intervals. That precision seems essential to me.

Going to go to sleep to some of James Tenney's microtonal electric guitar pieces, played by Seth Josel:

http://www.allmusic.com/composition/water-on-the-mountain---fire-in-heaven-mc0002422652
http://www.classicalguitar.org/2012/11/great-guitar-pieces-nobody-plays-james-tenneys-septet-1981/

(Btw, I remember really liking Lejaren Hiller's String Quartet no 5 (in Quarter-Tones). I should pull it out again.)

Johnston's Microtonal Piano disc a fave too.

time to bust out my copy of How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony?

i admit i don't have the theory chops to fully hear what's going on but like aero i am a lover of grand theory-building

Entirely on board to this thread - loved the Wyschnegradsky and the Partch - let me say too that Jute Gyte's Discontinuities is staggering music; my album of the year; it doesn't just 'integrate' microtonality but would fail to exist without it, and the overall effect is of a controlled face-off against Chaos in its divine and dormant primacy - it's truly liminal music, held together by sublime songwriting

Here's a track:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99yc-KVgORs

Early in the morning, waiting for a train. Can't listen to your guitar piece you posted Sund4r but I'm excited to do so!

Just to be clear, I am posting on this thread to be proven wrong. I love extended scales, my own new music uses 24-tone tunings, primarily for saturating the colours of essentially diatonic music. I've spent the last five years buying up as many records by famous scale-doctoring composers as I can find and what I've heard has been either:

- gamelan in disguise
- North Indian Classical music in disguise
- Romantic piano music in disguise
- LaMonte Young and Lou Harrison <3 <3 <3

Micropolytonal stuff like Ligeti, Penderecki and Xenakis, for some reason, I think of them as a different school of thought, because their music wasn't ~necessarily~ based on altered scales, the wavering of pitch was denoted aleatorically (Ligeti, Penderecki) or via smart instrumentation with little or no actual extended pitch stuff (Xenakis? right? I'm not familiar enough with his entire oeuvre but none of the scores I've seen have deviated from chromatic scales; pardon me if I've hugely mistaken). Ligeti used quarter tones in "Lontano" and scordatura in his violin concerto but for some reason it's just different

Nice of you, Sund4r, to assume so, but I don't "know my stuff", I have heard a couple Ben Johnston pieces but would love further recommendations wrt him.

I don't think I know the Carlos piece but I really disagree about Jute Gyte, at least as far as Discontinuities is concerned. The microtonality seems pretty fundamental to the compositions to me. You could argue that with Sonic Youth or Pavement, 'microtonality' deriving from intentionally imprecise tuning is more or less just ornamentation. In the case of Jute Gyte, though, many riffs are built with quarter-tone intervals. That precision seems essential to me.

I'd agree with you about Pavement, mostly because I've never heard them play out of tune except one of the guitars on "Range Life" and I wouldn't call it ornamentation but I get what you mean. Regarding Sonic Youth though, I disagree, even just starting with "Burning Spear"

I am glad too that we are listening to Jute Gyte in a thread may all the threads contain Jute Gyte :D

Tough for me to really argue about the necessity of 24p scales in his stuff. I guess it must be 24p, yeah, but I guess I'm being snobby about the fact that it's monophonic. And I do like that it's just an instrument. A large part of my dogma is rooted in the belief that "your altered scales must justify themselves to me if I'm going to retune my instrument" so yeah I love the idea of a 24-pitch guitar. Or Olaf's 22-pitch MIDI translator.

The "Goebbels invented A-440" thing enrages me so much. I keep hearing it repeated by people with very limited understanding of music/tuning & it's so clearly not true!!

A-440 is secretly NAZI MIND CONTROL adopted by a shadowy international elite cabal 8 years after Goebbels killed himself

this is dope:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odTIoRzbDhA

my friend's microtonal guitar + percussion duo, using custom-made instruments: https://soundcloud.com/thelivingearthshow/sets/white-blood-cells

I wouldn't necessarily say that I love the Tenney pieces unreservedly but there are some interesting ideas there, for sure. This thread just reminded me of them. (Tenney's uber-formalism and 'experimentalism' in the Nyman sense of the word can seem a little dry to me sometimes.)

(More to say later.)

Actually, no, Water on the Mountain... Fire in Heaven can be beautiful and engrossing if you let it be. I got lost in it this morning.

I'll have more to say later but

I'd agree with you about Pavement, mostly because I've never heard them play out of tune except one of the guitars on "Range Life"

I was including vocals too. I really don't believe, though, that the guitars and bass are precisely in tune (in standard 12tet terms) throughout Slanted and Enchanted. There's definitely a microtonal relationship between the guitars through most of "Zürich Is Stained", whether it's because the guitars' open strings are not precisely in tune with each other, because the slide guitarist is deliberately playing between the frets, or a combination of the two. They do seem to match on the tonic at some points. I think it's both intentional and imprecise.

It's inspired by the sound of the guitars on early 80s Fall records I always figured.

Why are we bothering to try and describe an out-of-tune guitar as anything other than an out-of-tune guitar tho. Claiming that it's "microtonality" is not only inaccurate but it smacks of academic legitimacy tests. Not accusing anybody here of anything obv! When Thurston and Lee deliberately and intuitively tune their guitars just so or stick a screwdriver somewhere here you ~could~ perhaps get a paper published that delineates the harmonic implications of the resultant scales and get a Doctorate in Missing The Point

The opposite: matrices and diagrams and procedures that are lovingly created by composer-cum-mathemeticians-cum-architects, only to create, what what, a sound that could be better created elsewhere. By a detuned guitar or an LFO or two marching bands or a drunk guy. The needlessness of their rendering procedure contributes to the futility of their pursuit (which is part of what appeals to me about this stuff)

Meanwhile, part and parcel of my undying and unmixed love for the micropolytonalists is that their music cannot be created any other way; this is not true of many works in altered-scales.

When I say "micropolytonalists" btw I vaguely mean those cloud composers: Ligeti, Penderecki, Xenakis. Not the 13-tone scale dudes. Massive generalizations being made here obv because I'm looking for exceptions

Jeez, fgti, the only reason I brought up Pavement and Sonic Youth in the first place was to make that point: originally, you were saying about Jute Gyte that "altered scales in [their] music are completely superfluous and could just as easily be achieved by, say, detuning a string and just rolling with it". I was trying to say that what you described is more like what Pavement did but that what Jute Gyte does is different and actually depends on a precise alternate (24tet) tuning system. (You could play "Zurich" on a 12tet piano and still get the melody and harmonies across - so I called the out-of-tune quality 'ornamentation' - but I don't think you could do that with a track from Discontinuities. The melodic figures in the guitar lines are actually written in quarter-tones.) And I cagily described the guitars in "Zurich" as "microtonal" rather than "out of tune as hell" mainly because you said that you'd never heard Pavement play out of tune before. (Anyway, I don't have access to Grove now but by this definition, it doesn't seem that it would be "inaccurate" to call it "microtonal" in any case: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/380706/microtonal-music)

Jute Gyte and Wendy Carlos "Beauty in the Beast", both of which I totally love, the altered scales in their music are completely superfluous and could just as easily be achieved by, say, detuning a string and just rolling with it.

I think there's a bit more going on with that Carlos record than you're describing. She's doing things with instantaneous retuning of instruments that are only possible with electronics.

The main roadblock with non-equal-tempered tuning systems going for pure intervals is the difficulty in modulating to any new key. You're usually stuck in drone-land exploring a beautiful but purely modal key. If you use 24-tone scales, you get to retain all the compositional tricks of the last 500 years of written notation, and get more color, but none of those intervals are pure either; they further divide the error of the 12-tone scale.

There's a moment on the Carlos record where she's got her painstakingly synthesized gamelan ensemble churning along, doing an accurate cover version of a Balinese Barong dance -- it hardly tricks the ear, and it goes on long enough that you almost begin to wonder about the effort it took to simulate something that already exists perfectly well in the acoustic world, and then, out of nowhere, the Gamelan ensemble executes a perfect Western 1-4-5 chord sequence. And it sounds so natural that you almost don't even notice that it's completely physically impossible, short of constructing three Gamelans each tuned to its own scale.

I take that your main point was that the resulting sounds are 'superfluous' but I'd also debate that. I'm in the camp that we lost something essential when we made the equal-temperament sacrifice, and that microtonal exploration is trying to restore something intrinsic, not superfluous. I might not go as far as Ben Johnston's comment that equal-temperament is the reflection of a sick society sending out vibrations that is making us all ill, but Lou Harrison's quip that the only music that sounds good in equal-temperament is atonal music is pretty much dead on.

fgti we have talked before about how music school makes one a little too reflexively anti-the-things-people-from-music-school-might say

I didn't go, and so I'm cool with all manner of ways of talking about when somebody's playing out of tune and it sounds good

First, I retract "inaccurate" bc I meant "imprecise". And I got you, Sund4r! I said once but should've said twice "I am not calling anybody out itt" you and me are on the same page

Ennh I was gonna talk a little more about "why I have a problem with Jute Gyte's version of 24p scales" but I don't really, I actually like it and I think I'm just splitting hairs that his guitar parts are mostly monophonic and/or the effect of the altered scales is largely obscured by the drums but I have only listened to Discontinuities so give me a couple days to eat my words

awesome thread

this a nice resource for those interested in non 12tet music

http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/

there are some beautiful pieces in this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S62yVU1pspQ

this is a great resource while we're on:

http://www.huygens-fokker.org/index_en.html

thanks for that link!

chris cutler's Probes #2 and #2a are a good starter podcast for this subject as well. playlists in the pdf links.

http://rwm.macba.cat/en/probes_tag

holy shit thank you crackle box

ok I'll be sorted for a good hour tomorrow, awesome

Ennh I was gonna talk a little more about "why I have a problem with Jute Gyte's version of 24p scales" but I don't really, I actually like it and I think I'm just splitting hairs that his guitar parts are mostly monophonic and/or the effect of the altered scales is largely obscured by the drums but I have only listened to Discontinuities so give me a couple days to eat my words

― flamboyant goon tie included, Monday, 29 July 2013 18:20 (3 hours ago)

I think Discontinuities is the first album he's done that's fully and satisfyingly composed in microtones. I think you maybe overstate the obfuscation occasioned by the drums (and the vocals); I find it to be, for all its noise and dissonance, an extremely tuneful record absolutely chock full of memorable, catchy melodies and harmonies that just so happen to be microtonal. I can't think of any microtonal music I've heard that exploits its possibilities quite so vibrantly, although I'm expecting great things of this thread.

"I like to play out of tune and I am crazy"

This is pretty much my favourite kind of shit, though.

best thread ever imo but I will just be learning I don't know that I have anything to add.

― tight in the runs (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, July 29, 2013 2:32 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also, this ^^^

Listen to the Chris Cutler podcast it is an excellent primer. I forgot how awesome "The Letter" is

like others on this thread, i don't have the knowledge/chops to contribute much, other than to ask - does arnold dreyblatt's music fit here?

Ezra Sims is really great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP6-sFdYsQs

Arnold Dreyblatt sure does. With him and some just-tuned LaMonte though it seems The Drone is the beginning and end of their interest in just intonation and afaic that means they "get it"

fwiw here is a piece I wrote after "The Well-Tuned Piano" for a film score and if you can guess what the temp score was I'll give you a nickel

https://soundcloud.com/owen-pallett/blash-7c-fullgirl-leonv05

Awesome thread, looking forward to learning!!!

Also, wanted to be the one to post this video from the best movie ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IxjqBgz0Ic

I have a thesis about altered-scale Western music: it sucks. But it sucks kind of deliciously, these lesser geniuses trying to create a school of thought that rivalled Second Viennese School -> musique concrete & Xenakis, and basically coming up with a lot of "I like to play out of tune and I am crazy"

This is anti-intellectual, smug conservative challops in the extreme. No passes.

― Gregory Bateson is always appropriate (sarahell), Wednesday, 31 July 2013 23:21 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?? I write altered-scale Western music, it was a comment of self-indictment.

― the best sucks (flamboyant goon tie included), Thursday, 1 August 2013 01:16 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Think the point was that even in self-indictment you shouldn't deign to speak for everyone; perhaps your biggest crime (in my opinion) was to not elaborate on "I like to play out of tune and I am crazy" because I think that while *perhaps* a lot of this music does stem from a subconscious desire to push beyond, to transcend the meagre palette conventionally available, in manifesting experimentally this conceit, perhaps genuine and sincere expression is found. I suppose that would be your thesis, which would be very welcome on the altered scale thread. I'm also perturbed by "lesser geniuses" - subjectivity is permitted, of course, but it's a really loaded term regardless. Anyway, it's a fucken great thread and you've posted loads of awesome stuff there, which is the real reason you get a pass (from me at least)

― imago, Thursday, 1 August 2013 01:25 (0 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

kinda want to discuss this here :)

That's cool that you could do that for a film score, fgti. You used the same tuning system used in WTP? I was obsessed with WTP for a little while in undergrad. I did this synthesizer drone piece in that same tuning system at that time: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B67vm-JtYfsgb0JHZVdicnhUUVk/edit?usp=sharing . (Huge lossless version: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B67vm-JtYfsgSWlxQU8tUzJSdTA/edit?usp=sharing ). That's the only really serious thing I did with JI/alternative systems of tuning/temperament/intonation before I decided that my time would be better spent struggling to be competent in 12tet first.

xposts

Where was that quoted from??

some c&p thread. want to discuss the *impulse* to write altered-scale music and to what extent this music is what is sincerely *meant* to be expressed

Don't want to pile on you too badly, fgti, but these comments made me a little uncomfortable too, even with the disclaimer about self-indictment:

In Wychnegradsky's case, beating up a piano and paying some Chopin...

- Romantic piano music in disguise...

You can spend all day tuning your piano to 24-tone and play some Alois Haba OR you can leave a Gershwin record out in the sun

I think these are in the same spirit as the comments on Jute Gyte that we talked about already. Basically, these don't seem that different from saying e.g. "You could learn Schoenberg's Piano Suite or you could play some Bach blindfolded" or "you could buy a Sonic Youth CD or you could just detune your guitar and play some Who tunes". On the one hand, that's not completely wrong: it's actually part of the point in all these cases! The artists are working from a tradition but approaching that tradition from an oblique angle, coming up with something that's both old and new in the process. In the case of Wychnegradsky, as with Jute Gyte, the microtonality seemed essential to the melodic ideas he was working with.

And again, I'm pretty sure you realize all of this so I'm eager to hear you elucidate.

I do get that it's fun to be flip sometimes, though.

I thought that the "it sucks" and "lesser geniuses" and reference to fart/crazy would be enough to read that post as flamboyant seriousness. Especially in contrast to my regular dry posting style 8) Guess not. :D

Sund4r and others a large part of my approach to musical appreciation I suppose is based on the necessity of the gesture. Is it necessary for us as technicians to spend several hours retuning a piano so we can play this piece. Is it necessary for us as composers to spend several days creating tonal matrices to bind our scales to. Is it necessary for us as performers to have to learn these scales. afaic much of a work's success is dependent upon the economy of its composition. (Unless a deliberate lack of economy is itself the intention, I dunno, like Ferneyhough, "Licht", "Turangalîla")

With that in mind, it's 100% clear to my ears and eyes and experience that the stream of serialists from Schoenberg to Xenakis have completely and utterly vindicated themselves and their procedures, the aleatorists as well, Cage and crew too, and so on, but the altered-scale crew have not. Altered-scale writing is in many cases very time-consuming and inefficient. Writing on a 24tet guitar or 22tet keyboard (Jute, Knife) are clear exceptions. There are deffo some hundreds of altered-scale works that necessitate the research and tech and training required to pull them off, but, as I argued upthread, there are hundreds more where the production is unnecessary; we already have gamelan, we already have out-of-tune pianos, we already have turntable warble.

yes we already have those things, but what you're not getting at is what we've all forgotten we've lost by settling for 12-tet: accurate, resonant intervals. you'd even think it'd be a prerequisite for music, but we've thrown it all away in favor of the bag of tricks offered up by written notation & the ability to change to novel keys. the difference is so subtle that most people don't even know we've thrown it away, and it is notable that the technology that enabled piano tuners to precisely tune in 12-tet arrived in 1917 -- in other words, roughly contemporary with the dawn of commercial recording, so for the last hundred years the entire recorded literature of classical music has been executed in a different temperament than the one it was written in.

which is why many people approach just intonation as a kind of religious reform; they see a very real necessity for these tuning systems. and the reason why they do it is because there is no other way to get these sounds. (and to be honest, your tone makes you sound less like you're actually being dismissive than fighting off an inner-conversion to full on born-again believer that's already well in progress.) if you read the first two chapters of harry partch's 'genesis of a music' or the ben johnston interview in william duckworth's 'talking music', I think you will understand much more deeply why those composers felt it necessary to take the pains, and why, when done correctly, the results go far beyond what you can get with turntable warble.

also: the people working with electronics need to be put in a different category. you really couldn't have picked a less convincing example than Wendy Carlos to describe music that "could just as easily be achieved by, say, detuning a string and just rolling with it" -- electronics allow you to instantly retune your instrument whenever you modulate to a new key. you entirely free of the physical limitations that forced the 12-tet compromise.

and: you're the only person I've ever heard call lou harrison a spectralist. gérard grisey's 'les espaces acoustiques', which is beginning to look like the 'Art of the Fugue' of just intonation orchestral writing, is more at the center of what people are calling spectralism.

Gérard Grisey
Gerard Grisey and his pupils (who/what should i check out?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX77MC5oXDY

I keep meaning to start a thread listing recordings of classical / early in historical temperaments; it can be difficult to find resources like that, even online, though it's getting easier now just to type the name of a composer and the word 'meantone' into youtube and find amazing things

I don't get ASMR responses to someone whispering about towels, but I definitely get the same weird physical responses to some of these that I do to La Monte Young's 'Well Tuned Piano' or Terry Riley's 'Harp of New Albion'

Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" from Microfest 2011: Meantone Magic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=xXz9nAHKofo&t=296

Mozart Fantasie KV397 in Three Different Temperaments (the notes are incorrect: the last section is in meantone, and the middle one in Prelleur)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=lzsEdK48CDY&t=701

(from this wonderful cd: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/enidkatahn)

I always thought l'Orfeo was a little on the slow side, long and modal. Well, if you're playing modal, it helps if you're playing in tune; this recording in meantone is sensational. the tuning at its least subtle for the big ensemble ending on the last two tracks on disc two.

http://www.amazon.com/Monteverdi-Orfeo-Claudio/dp/B0000022BQ/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375387291&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=monteverdi+orfeo+artek+ensemble

To pick nits, fgti, were you referring to Xenakis as a serialist? Did he ever compose serial works? I didn't think that was the case.

Going to listen to Purcell in meantone now.

Wow!

Systems derived from serialism, no? Not a Xenakis scholar but it felt like a natural progression from Boulez

Also Milton your posts are too deep for me to respond to in late night I will respond with coffee buzz and thanks for such a generous response

Great fucking thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I5Ft9Gxgo0

Okay I'm going to add Horse Lords here- the guitarist in this band has removed and relocated the frets of the guitar and the bass guitar so that they can play in just intonation (I don't remember what "limit" offhand). I'm super fond of this band, and their work has that wrong-yet-right clicking into place effect that I get from, say "Harp of New Albion". Full disclosure: my boyfriend made the video and these guys are pals.

Downloading "Talking Music" now, thanks Milton.

we've thrown it all away in favor of the bag of tricks offered up by written notation & the ability to change to novel keys.

ay-yi-yi at "bag of tricks" ha ha I love it! "Think of what we lost when we settled on the binary system for transmitting data" ;) And yes I am of course a total non-tempered convert already, I wouldn't take the time to criticize something I wasn't already in love with.

I do think the just vs. tempered debate is a different beast altogether... is it even a debate that just tuning is awesome, I mean, I feel like there's a Historical Performance Pepsi Challenge every couple of years and audiences consistently give it up for just intonation

Tbh you are probably right about Lou Harrison not being a spectralist. I fell in love with a few of his works that utilized 24tet tuning and then bought everything I could find by the guy and most his stuff it seems has been written with another purpose in mind.

Gerard Grisey ftw why haven't I heard this guy before I am dying over here

You've listened to Murail and Vivier, right?

Tbh you are probably right about Lou Harrison not being a spectralist. I fell in love with a few of his works that utilized 24tet tuning

24-tet is a world away from spectralism. The advantage of 24-tet is that you get to retain traditional written notation without too much extra clutter. You tune existing instruments instead of physically modifying them or renting bizarre new ones, trained musicians can easily sightread a score, and composers get more intervals to work with -- great! except none of them are true ratios, you've just neatly divided the compromises of 12-tet. Your pieces are more likely to get programmed, but you still can't even get a perfect fifth let alone a triad.

I do think the just vs. tempered debate is a different beast altogether

it kind of is the same debate though -- they're altered scales. composers & technicians fought for various tempered solutions for hundreds of years before everyone compromised on equal, at which point we wrote the fact that the battle had even happened out of the history books. but a good meantone performance of Monteverdi's '1610 Vespers' in a nice resonant church occasionally hints at some of the same sonic effects you get with the ultra-consonant moments of Grisey or Tenney's 'Just Another Bagatelle' / 'Critical Band' or Riley's 'Harp of New Albion'.

also: I <3 the Horse Lords

do not miss an opportunity to see them live. so much ensemble just playing is so stiff, but those guys play rock music

Thanks for that Mozart link. I'm generally fine with the 12tet compromise (not the same as saying that I have any problem with or disinterest in microtonal or alternate-tuning music!) but that does help to illustrate how it IS a compromise. As Kyle Gann notes, the consonances are more consonant and the dissonances are more dissonant in meantone.

I'm feeling the opposite right now. I listen to this Givens and it makes me feel like all my laboured 24tet chamber music has been not much more than a monument to repression :( I gotta get some Givens scores.

@ Sund4r I have listened to some Vivier over the years (but admittedly mostly because he's gay and dead and Canadian.)

Have you written a lot of 24tet chamber music? Had no idea.

This thread is ruining me. I just got a recording of a keyboard piece I wrote. I keep thinking that I want to hear it in JI.

Vivier's "Lonely Child" is one of my favourite pieces of all time, incidentally. He does use quarter-tones in it but I wouldn't say it's really an example of systematic exploration of an alternate tuning system.

I'm giving The Harp of New Albion a first listen and goodness it's lovely, though I don't have the critical vocabulary or auditory acuity to say much but "that's a bit odd and also very nice that is".

Bought an album of Ben Johnston microtonal piano off emusic today (on Koch). Thread is infectious.

family stearns is where you need to go, people:
sigmata
dan's solo stuff is also braxton-level-mad-genius, but he's a humble tiefstapler and doesn't keep too much of it out there for long these days.
this recent vid isn't particularly microtonal but it is a wonder. i will stan for dan til the cows come home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vN9GuIYRjk

this really is an amazing thread.

This is pretty good JI drone imo for something that some guy in the Xenharmonic Alliance just linked on FB:

https://soundcloud.com/scottthompson-3/2013-08-08

(Btw: https://www.facebook.com/groups/xenharmonic2/?hc_location=stream )

I have friends that swear by the 432 stuff.

I get why that could make sense if you're using a Pythagorean tuning. Without researching this, though, I don't see why equal temperament with A=432Hz would provide an advantage over equal temperament with A=440Hz.

A-432 is as legitimate as any tuning but some newage chakra crap people have adopted it

Sadly I haven't had a stable internet connection this past week or the time to sit down and absorb all this info, fully investigate the xenharmonic site, listen to all the links. But Milton once again you are awesome thank you for such an educational and sensitive response to my underslept yelling

I thought many of the songs were spoiled by unnecessary embellishments and additions, like "The Weight" in particular. Sometimes it seems like everyone wants to compete too much for attention. Things like one singer saying "take the load off" and then someone having to add in "oh yeah you take the loooooad offff".

Whoops wrong thread.

Loool

hahaha

not strange but a mod on his keys to play double harmonic is pretty cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSPaaGJ0Rog&feature=youtu.be

That is AWESOME!

Rod Poole needs a mention. If the idea of John Fahey doing La Monte Young transcriptions is up your alley, you will enjoy 'The Death Adder'.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-death-adder/id257466763?i=257466806

Ivor Darreg's article 'New Moods' from Xenharmonic Bulletin No. 5, 1975

http://www.furious.com/perfect/xenharmonics.html

I listened through to 'Detwelvulate' last night -- very improvised and unstructured, but eventually pretty compelling. Listen to this kind of music long enough and it'll definitely make you different

http://www.discogs.com/Ivor-Darreg-Detwelvulate/release/1046949

"National Society for the Decriminalization of Microtones -- representatives in many cities and communities"

the recording of Duane Pitre's 'Feel Free' was a slight comedown after seeing him play it live in SF -- that was really something; need to check out his new album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnDc7I8qzH4

Kraig Grady needs a mention as well

http://www.anaphoria.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-ifjE7sJbI

Came across Prospection earlier this year - what a serialist plus alternate tuning approach might sound like.

Listening to a few of the things posted again. Most of this completely passes me by - it shamelessly trades on victmisation but the people involved never write much more than what sounds like furniture demonstration.

The Harrison piece is marvellous though. Been listening to Blandine Verlet's Couperin sets and it will complement nicely.

it shamelessly trades on victmisation but the people involved never write much more than what sounds like furniture demonstration.

You need to explain this!

I think that's self-explanatory. I don't care that Boulez or Berg or Nono were proving or disproving a way of writing music, more that they used whatever was at hand to write really good music, much of which made gave a different weight and perspective to things outside of music (Lulu's brutalisation, or when thrid world struggles invade a concert hall in a metropolitan city).

Wyschnegradsky, Blackwood, Haba a lot of Partch...I always wanted to listen to that stuff whilst aboard a ship someday. Its dis-sonant, dis-harmonious in that chugging slow motion way, and then there is the way it has been presented - as arguments that were 'lost' and how these people were written out of history...or you could say they are quite boring composers of music.

And then we get to the whole business of music, how compromises can be good things that allow music to be made and played in the first place too.

That's where I'm at this music. Little patience for it I'm afraid. However I'm now listening to a few bits of Johnston's Microtonal Piano, liking it immediately, so I'll hunt that down over the weekend.

Our man Dan is at it again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GBZ7rC8oqI

Listening to a bunch of Ivor Darreg this morning. Sadly he don't do it for me. No joy taken in the new intervalic relationships, it sounds to my ears like an approximation of 12tet diatonicism.

Stearns is v v v cool though

I like what I've heard of Dan Stearns, there's a just-intonation song called "With Eyes So Blue And Dreaming" I wish I could link to but he's retracted it

Ivor Darreg is a real strange one. All the work goes into the tunings; once he's got that, he improvises in a very free way, so the performances themselves aren't particularly distinctive -- in fact his first impression is pretty much the definition of 'detuning yr strings and going for it', even if the intervals aren't improvised. I still eventually get that feeling of deep difference that I really appreciate keeping in touch with.

I probably sound too Catholic in discussing a lot of this stuff -- there's a very limited subset of these records I've returned to more than twice, though I've learned not to write any of them off even when I find them boring (and especially when I find myself hating it) -- it's just a fine line between enjoyable delirium and just feeling ill, and the latter has slid into the former more than once

all that polaris talk has gotten me hungry for some flamboyant goon tie microtonality

in other news jute gyte's discontinuities is still by a comfortable distance my album of the year & a revolutionary artistic statement

in OTHER news ILM is boring me atm so can we get this thread going again pretty please?

sorry my man I have had a busy month, continues to be busy. I will post a thing on IMM

:D cool!

I also wanna get back to the Bartok 4tet thread, I scored five new-to-me recordings at that record store in Pittsburgh but need a free weekend to really digest them

The Bohlen-Pierce scale is some next level shit. No octaves, built around the 5th instead. I like this example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOL9syf7h5s

my friend's microtonal guitar + percussion duo, using custom-made instruments: https://soundcloud.com/thelivingearthshow/sets/white-blood-cells

― precious bonsai children of new york (Jordan), Monday, July 29, 2013 6:27 AM

this is cool -- they are actually playing in Berkeley next week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EFGxsDTBcU

1) Buy this software at www.pymmusic.com for 12 €
2) Read the user manual
3) Compose microtonal music

not great music but I liked the description

Posted this on time travel but it might be of interest to people who skip that thread because they don't know what it is:

All of Wendy Carlos's Beauty in the Beast is on Soundcloud.

The tuning systems are described here.

i skip that thread because i know what it is

Admittedly, a category I overlooked.

I skipped it for a long time because I didn't. I'm still trying to work it out but I mostly post whatever wouldn't fit in another rolling thread.

i'm only joking really, tho it doesn't intersect exactly with my own tastes in out music - thanks for these links btw

;_; this was the thread that got me into the true spectralists (Grisey, Murail, Vivier) who've occupied so much of my listening space these past 2.5 years that I feel like they've always been here.

Thank you Milton Parker, I can't believe how weirdly holey was my "music school" education

You try making an undergrad syllabus!:P

What's your favourite Vivier, btw?

Sund4r (or anyone else), are you familiar with this guy?

I wasn't, thanks! Cool stuff.

In addition to the A-432 Goebbels thing being nonsense, A-432 has literally nothing to do with microtonality, strange scales, non-standard temperament, etc.

new Horse Lords album "interventions" is forthcoming on Northern Spy y'all

and bandcamp link is here:

https://horselords.bandcamp.com/album/interventions

there's a teaser video with an excerpt on that site too

sounding dope

haven't listened yet but I love the description of the new record as more of a collage, influenced by the mixtapes. very promising!

xpost thanks fgti! this thread introduced me to bunches of things as well, hadn't heard vivier

as a survivor of a "music school" education you aren't a fan of Christopher Small's books are you? sometimes I feel like starting a thread on him but I'm not sure how lonely that would be

xxpost can't wait for that new Horse Lords album, this feels like it might be a particularly good year for them

I'd never heard them until a week ago or so. The guitar sound was revelatory.

whenever someone says "goebbels" in a music thread i think "heiner".

listened to vivier's 'lonely child' inspired by this thread and that's a remarkable piece alright.

i'm not a music school person exactly (my ideal career trajectory is teaching at music school without ever learning how to read music) but i've read and enjoyed christopher small, i don't think i'd have much to contribute but i'm sure i'd enjoy a milton parker thread on him