Jump to content
This Site Uses Cookies. If You Want to Disable Cookies, Please See Your Browser Documentation. ×

Recommended Posts

I haven't listened to this podcast but it sounds interesting and has a couple of examples of 19-Tone-Equal-Temperament music:

The Juggler by Aaron Krister Johnson.

"The Juggler nicely represents the main strands of my compositional personality at once: The predilection for neo-Bachian counterpoint, but with a modern twist, using asymmetrical time signatures and changing meters, and of course, a fascination for non-12 per octave tunings. The tuning here is 19-Tone-Equal-Temperament also known as 19 Equal Divisions of the Octave. This intonation has rich harmonic resources, and a wonderfully vibrant and insistent energy. The title was arrived at after the composing. The music conveys what I feel when I watch a skilled juggler at work on his/her "aerial counterpoint"!"

Prelude #2 by Jeff Harrinton.

"The final piece is by Jeff Harrington for 19 tone piano, called Prelude #2. It is part of a series of four preludes Jeff wrote to be played together. I've played all four previously on a podcast. Today I'm just going to play the second one, since it has a lot in common with the other pieces I played today."

Link to comment

I went, I listened, and I didn't understand. The piece was an orchestrated version of a piece written by blues guitarist Neil Haverstick, and was organized as a sort of guitar concerto. Since I don't listen to blues, I didn't have any point of reference to compare this piece against, so I didn't gain any understanding of what the advantage of using the 19-tone system for the piece was (not that I likely would have comprehended the piece in a single listening anyway - my listening skills are not that sophisticated). I was impressed by the orchestra (Colorado Chamber Orchestra), as they didn't, at least by my ear, have any problems with playing the 19-tone piece in tune. (I was even more impressed by their rendition of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste.)

I unfortunately didn't get a chance to talk to my violinist/violist (she played both in the concert) friend afterwards. She is also a music historian (she was largely responsible for the orchestration used in the Opera Lafayette/New York Baroque Dance Company production of Zelindor last fall) and so I would have loved to get her take.

Link to comment

Very interesting topic. Although I'm not familiar with 19-tone, I made a great effort to become comfortable with the varieties of 12-tone long ago and was delighted to find myself learning to enjoy this music. Now that I'm living at a distance from any serious "new music" scene, I've been trying to reconnect a bit on the internet and dvd. You've both given me something to explore.

I've found it helpful to see contemporary music as part of a long developmental process. After all, much of 20th century ballet is set to scores which constituted the "new music" of their day. For those who've read Alex Ross in The New Yorker -- or his book on 20th century music, The Rest is Noise -- there is a compilation of brief audio clips on his blog site. Each clip is related to portions of the book.

http://www.therestisnoise.com/audio/

Link to comment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Drummond

Dean Drummond's Newband has the Harry Partch instruments which, as discussed in the wiki link posted by innopac, have up to 49 tones to the octave. I heard Newband in 1994 or 1995 and found much of it very beautiful. Partch was quite the back-to-nature person, with pieces like 'Cloud Chamber Music', and these built Partch instruments are among the most exotic things I've ever seen and heard. The concert was all Partch, with whom I had been familiar for some time. When I was doing some research on Indian music, the microtones called 'srutis' were discussed, so that the ancient Eastern musics have been working with these in a more natural way for much longer than Western musicians.

A composer friend of mine could not enjoy the adjustment that is required of the ear to hear this music as you would any other, or rather to hear music we're most used to--he referred to is as being 'out-of-tune' which surprised me. Because this is, in fact, wrong, of course. The sensation that it is 'out of tune' comes only because out-of-tune instruments do themselves go into these microtones, which have to sharpened up and out to get the 12 tones as equally spaced and without any 'fuzz' of the always-neighboring microtones. You don't want any of the microtones in a conventionally-tuned piano, for example, because that's not what a piano (a 'non-prepared piano', that is) is.

The terms 'twelve-tone music' referring to the systems developed beginning with Schoenberg and then Webern and most thoroughly with the high modernists interests me because, although it does destroy tonality when it is employed, tonal music equally has twelve tones. The hierarchies and orders, etc., are all different when serialization becomes more rigorous, but it's still the notes of the chromatic scale.

I hadn't specifically heard of 19-tone music until now, though. These kinds of things will always be esoteric, because they are not an outgrowth of Western tradition, which 12-tone music (which, incidentally, can be even more difficult to listen to than Partch, Drummond, et alia) is, however. This kind of thing with microtones is more experimental and doesn't form a general united movement as such, or at least not that I'm aware.

Link to comment
I should have mentioned that the 19-tone piece was a "serial" piece. Neil Haverstick said that he was trying to follow the model laid out by Shoenberg and Webern.

Yes, you could theoretically serialize any number of pitches. Was your impression that it sounded out-of-tune? because you're hearing 19 tones per octave rather than 12? By the time it got to high modernism, Boulez was serializing timbres, dynamics, and rhythmic figures as well as pitches, so there's probably no end to the experiments along these lines, that have been done over the years, even though there are some names that are very well-known, a few that are becoming well-known, some have been long-forgotten already, given that Boulez, Xennakis, and Stockhausen were all going to be imitated a lot due to their prominence. Haverstick is apparently pretty well-known, and here is another article in which he's shown to have been interested in the 34-tone scale, which this explains is 'less natural' than 19-tone and others. Very esoteric, but these things probably have their devoted followings, even though very out of the mainstream:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34_equal_temperament

Link to comment
I should have mentioned that the 19-tone piece was a "serial" piece. Neil Haverstick said that he was trying to follow the model laid out by Shoenberg and Webern.

Yes, you could theoretically serialize any number of pitches. Was your impression that it sounded out-of-tune? because you're hearing 19 tones per octave rather than 12?

If I hadn't known that they were playing a 19-tone work, I would have thought that they were a little sharp on some notes. Unfortunately, during the concert Haverstick's statement about serial music didn't sink in, so I wasn't listening for what I should have been listening for.

Haverstick is apparently pretty well-known, and here is another article in which he's shown to have been interested in the 34-tone scale, which this explains is 'less natural' than 19-tone and others. Very esoteric, but these things probably have their devoted followings, even though very out of the mainstream:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34_equal_temperament

Haverstick has been experimenting with a number of different tunings, as evidenced by his guitar collection:

http://www.microstick.net (and click on "Guitars").

Link to comment

That link is very interesting, I see how he notates the quarter-tones, which is what they are with this number of pitches; it's even more fractional, of course, with the more tones per scale. If you look at the scale notated underneath 'Mysteries' after clicking on 'Microtonal Music', you can see that what he does is use what is a single pitch in its two different notations, in order to reach 19. It works like this: If you look at the 2nd and 3rd pitches, they are written as E Sharp and F Natural: This is the same pitch in the 12-tone scale, but written differently according to progression funtion, key, etc. As well, the 4th and 5th are written F Sharp and G Flat, which are also the same pitch in the 12-note scale. If he did this for every one of the 12 tones, there would be 24, but he does not notate 5 of the pitches except once: E Natural, G Natural, A Natural, B Natural, and D Natural. This is very strange that he would choose this, although some more delving would explain it, I'm sure. But with some of the enharmonic pitches not given, viz., for those 5 tones, it would give more the impression of some sharpness than if there were quarter tones around every note of the 12-note scale. Incidentally, the serialism would not have any effect on what you heard as sharpness, etc., because serialism has to do with the ordering of the pitches, which could 12, 19, or many other numbers (both real and almost imagined, I suppose; I once read that there was not 'absolute existence' of the Indian srutis, which I now realize is one of the weirdest things I've ever read, since they may have been referring to something other than just the microtones, i.e., something mystical.) So what sounded somewhat strange to you was the veering off usual pitch of 7 of the usual tones (unless this notation is not literal, in which case there might be a more equivalent division among all 19 tones.)

Link to comment
If you look at the scale notated underneath 'Mysteries' after clicking on 'Microtonal Music', you can see that what he does is use what is a single pitch in its two different notations, in order to reach 19. It works like this: If you look at the 2nd and 3rd pitches, they are written as E Sharp and F Natural: This is the same pitch in the 12-tone scale, but written differently according to progression funtion, key, etc. As well, the 4th and 5th are written F Sharp and G Flat, which are also the same pitch in the 12-note scale. If he did this for every one of the 12 tones, there would be 24, but he does not notate 5 of the pitches except once: E Natural, G Natural, A Natural, B Natural, and D Natural. This is very strange that he would choose this, although some more delving would explain it, I'm sure.

I was under the impression that this was the standard way of notating the 19-tone scale, but I could be wrong. Unfortunately, my friend's next concert is the same night as the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet program in Denver, so I won't get a chance to query her on this in the foreseeable future.

Link to comment

It probably is the standard way, but this is not exactly well-known material--so you were already well into the Rarefaction Territories if you had any knowledge even of its existence (I didn't). My point was the notation does not divide the 19 tones up equally, which the Indian srutis did, I'm fairly sure, because I recall that each pitch of 12 was divided into 2 pitches, making a relatively straightforward scale of quarter-tones, but I believe sometimes each of our tones was divided into three--you do the math if you want to, the fact is, there are many variations on these microtones.

Link to comment
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...