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seraph
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 Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 4:55 am Post subject:
Quotes about Microtonality |
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As Terry Riley says, Western music is fast because it's not in tune...I've learned to hear equal temperament music as a kind of aural caffeine, overly busy and nervous-making...Equal temperament could be described as the musical equivalent to eating a lot of red meat and processed sugars and watching violent action films. The music doesn't turn your attention inward, it makes you want to go out and work off your nervous energy on something.
http://www.kylegann.com/tuning.html
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Dufallo: Well, I am a former clarinettist too, and I know about that instrument. What is your interest in the idea to break the scale into quarter-tones or smaller intervals is it philosophical, is it technical what?
Stockhausen: It sounds marvelous.
http://www.stockhausen.org/vibrato.html
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Q: Is any musical element still susceptible to radical exploitation and development?
A: "Yes: pitch. I even risk a prediction that pitch will comprise the main difference between the 'music of the future' and our music"
— Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971), from Memories and Commentaries (1970) [p. 115]
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"Our musical alphabet must be enriched."
— Edgard Varèse (1883 - 1956), from the New York Morning Telegraph, (1916)
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blue hell
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| Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 5:36 am Post subject:
Re: Quotes about Microtonality |
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| Terry Riley wrote: | | Western music is fast because it's not in tune... |
I love that quote, and I love slow music 
It was meant to hold for harmonies I think ?
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also .. could someone please turn down the thermostat a bit.
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Acoustic Interloper
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| Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2007 7:16 am Post subject:
Re: Quotes about Microtonality |
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| Blue Hell wrote: |
It was meant to hold for harmonies I think ? |
I think so too. Dissonant notes played fast with fast attacks and decays sound better than dissonant notes with sustain smeared together, and so, if the entire scale is dissonant, fast music.
Last evening I read the following interesting quote from Steve Reich at the end of an essay "The Desert Music - Steve Reich in Conversation with Jonathan Cott (1984)", which is chpater 28 in Reich's *Writings on Music 1965-2000*
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I once had a vision where light became a metaphor for harmony, for tonality. You know, of course, that the notes on the piano aren't all there are -- there's a continuity of vibration from the lowest to the highest sounds we can hear. Slowly, over more than a thousand years, out of this complete continuity of vibration from low to high, musicians in the West have evolved the selection and ordering of notes we find on the keyboard and in all our other instruments. These notes, and the harmonic system we have used to order them, struck me as a light radiating out of the dark infinitude of available vibrations. And when listening in particular to two pieces -- Handel's "The Water Music" and Stravinsky's "The Rakes Progress" -- I used to get a vision of a kind of barge of light, floating down a river in very dark surroundings, in complete darkness.
You see, I understood that human conventions are, in a sense, the *light* -- a kind of conveyance in which we ride, in which we live, and without which we die. And the human construct that we call our *music* is merely a convention -- something we've all evolved together, and that rests on no final or ultimates laws. And it sails, in my mind, like a ship of light down an endlessly dark corridor, preserving itself as long as it can. And no more and no less.
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It's interesting to see diametrically opposed perceptions from Riley and Reich on this. Personally, I think it's more like a long term relationship like a marriage or a good job than a barge of light. Basically positive and enjoyable and productive, but also restrictive at times. Even without just intonation or microtones as a basis of a piece, there are all kinds of music that bend or stretch or slide into microtones in passing, or that use specifically detuned 'blue' notes in their scales. They are all stretching against restrictions. It's a little surprising to read this, but of course each of us benefits from some framework within which we work, even if it is restrictive at times.
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seraph
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| Posted: Fri Jul 27, 2007 7:37 am Post subject:
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there isn't anything wrong with the 12 tone equal division of the octave tuning system but, of course, is not the only available one and technology makes much esier than ever before to explore alternative tuning systems as I will try to prove with my presentation at Chateau Sonore 2007 next week.
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