That may, or may not, be the case. But I’m still finding it difficult to believe that - as a performer - you’re going to bend a perfectly ordinary note in the middle of a sequence (as opposed to these special cases such as leading notes or pre-leap hanging notes - i.e. the functionally dramatic ones) up or down towards the tonic according as to whether you’re approaching it from below or above.
If you’re a performer and that’s what you do then I must defer to your practice. As I’m more in the composition camp, it just means I must be more accurate in my specifications with regard to bendable pitch emitters, especially when they’re in concert with competing ones!
I’m primarily a composer, actually; have been for some 40+ years. I won’t say that the performers bend the tendency notes; they play them a bit sharp or flat, depending on the direction. It’s part of the phrasing.
You’d be surprised at the kinds of adjustments that get made. Harmony exerts its own demands on intonation. I recall reading an interview with… Sessions? Copland?.. where he noted an enharmonic pivot tone modulation in a score, with the pivot tone in the bass. He kept an eye on the double basses during the change of harmony, and, sure enough, they all made a slight adjustment when the harmony changed (noticeable on the long strings), and not one of them was aware they had done so.
I am no expert, but I’ll write a few things here for the folks enjoying the tuning “argument.”
The twelve-notes-per-octave scale that we are all accustomed to hearing was not handed to us by a deity: It is the result of centuries of trial and error. Once upon a time, nearly every human region and nationality on Earth had its own take on the concept of a musical “scale.” Some early tribal scales have only a handful of notes, instead of twelve, and are tuned to intervals that you might not recognize. The most obvious living scale that stands as an alternative to our western scale can be heard in Gamelan music from Indonesia. Check it out on YouTube: some of those notes will sound more like overtones from a bell or struck metal than they will sound like C, D or G#. Those notes are not “wrong” nor are they “out of tune.” They are more or less correctly tuned to a scale you are not so familiar with.
The scale that we are most accustomed to hearing in the western world I believe was popularized in the 17th century. That means that if you are going to “accurately” reproduce music written prior to the 1700s, you’ll need to find instruments that can properly reproduce those ancient scales.
You will not be surprised to know that the mass production of western instruments with their western tuning has obliterated other forms of tuning to the point where people are unaware that there is any other possibility. “Microtonality,” that is, music which explores the potential of ancient, new or unknown scale configurations is still, sadly, terra incognita for many music lovers.
Glissando non intendo. I knew what you meant and used the term to abbreviate ‘sharpen or flatten slightly but certainly not by a whole semitone, and maybe not even a quartertone - just a couple of cents guys’.
I thought ‘bend’ quicker. Maybe ‘tilt’? Or ‘nod’? And now the explanation is fifty times longer than it’s worth.
The places you cite where it does occur, I have no problem in agreeing with. It’s just that the remark you made was originally quite general and then got qualified bit by bit to first leading tones, then to include ‘paused leaps’ and now to include changes in harmony. Perhaps eventually we can include every note by such stepwise refinement, but I still doubt it
Not any more. I recall Xenakis v Feldman (Middelburg, 1986) where Feldman was talking about glissandi (oddly enough, given this bend/alter digression) and points out that
[quote] For instance, if you’re playing an ascending glissando on the violin, there will be an acceleration if your finger is uniform in its movement. It’s like a geometric progression of the distance. lf you need one uniform ascending movement of the glissando then the musician has to slow down his movement of the finger. They have to learn that but they don’t teach that at the conservatories. So you know, you’ll never obtain this uniform movement of the glissando with an orchestra.[/quote]
But this is a matter of notation and not of tuning, so is quite irrelevant!
Oh yes! I went to a Koto concert a few months ago, a friend of ours was playing. Amazing music, much more contemporary than I was expecting, most of the work was post 1970.
They showed us the tablature, it doesn’t have specific rhythm. Here’s a pic of something similar:
Don’t mistake “for instances” as qualification; they’re exemplification. Adjustments happen more often than that.
Consider ensemble playing with a piano, for instance. Piano tone is somewhat inharmonic; the strings are thick enough and stiff enough to act a bit like metal bars acoustically. Most pianos use a stretch tuning, because the first harmonic is somewhat higher than an octave above the fundamental. Now, I’m not sure what mix of conflicting tunings and adjustments (on the part of those players who can make them) you’ll get, but I’m pretty sure you will get a mix, quite unconsciously on the part of the players with the more flexible instruments. Idiophones will create similar conditions for ensemble playing.
That’s the thing: temperaments, right from the start, are and have been kludges. they are compromises that exist to reconcile competing requirements (acoustic, melodic, harmonic and polyphonic) as well as possible. The players will try to make the music they’re playing sound good, and that will mean occasionally (even fairly frequently) reversing those compromises.
I don’t. And I’m sure you don’t mistake “there exists” for “for every”. And that it’s the “for every” that I was challenging.
I’m sorry I interpreted your initial ‘general’ statement as applicable to every note in a melody. Although that’s the way I read it, I can imagine, now, that wasn’t necessarily your intention.
Just to show that I, too, can pick out examples, I’m sure we can both agree that such shadings would not be applied to every (or even any?) note in a twelve-tone tone row since there is (usually) no ‘tonic’ to shade towards. If I say that I’d find it very hard to believe that a performer would ‘shade’ their notes in that environment, would you be shocked? I hope not.
The finite thicknesses and weights of real piano strings (as opposed to the mathematically ideal massless one-dimensional vibrating-with-integer-multiples-of-the-fundamental strings) will necessarily introduce higher frequencies which may be very weird, irrational even, multiples of fundamentals (often based on bessel function expansions, or Lagrange polynomial expansions rather than sinusoidal - it depends on your physical string model’s co-ordinate system [e,g, spherical, polar, cylindrical etc helical even for wound bass piano strings if you want to go totally mad?]). And they’ll be available (most discernible) from the lower register piano keys especially. But even those waveforms are still expressible in straightforward (i.e. integer multipled) fourier series to varying degrees of accuracy.
For example, sin(wt) + sin(21/2wt)/10, with a decidedly ‘metallic’ non integer harmonic, can still be expressed as a(n infinite) fourier series such as b1sin(wt) + a1cos(wt) + b2sin(2wt) + a2cos(2wt) + b3sin(3wt) + … where b1 is going to be very close to 1 and the other coefficients are going to get quite small quite quickly. I’m no physiologist but I gather that the tiny little hairs in the human ear do a similar ‘re-analysis’ of inharmonic sounds into harmonic ones? But I’d hate to see that as an argument to support some thesis that humans are naturally tonal creatures and that atonality and Schoenberg are creations of the devil (tritonic or otherwise).
Ah, but how much of ‘good’ is ‘what they’re used to’, or ‘what their mentors taught’, or ‘what is expected’? I certainly don’t wish to suggest that all of ‘good’ is covered by those things, but eye-of-the-beholder must mean that they ought to be at least included to some degree.
Actually, I’ve written twelve-tone in my time, and yes, tonicisation does happen, albeit usually on a local level, and, yes, in many cases I’d be surprised if the performers don’t shade the notes a bit. As soon as you start stringing more than 3 notes together, you start developing tonal relations: they might be inadvertent, but they’re there. “Pat Boone” might have forgotten that; Schoenberg never did. (And that’s leaving aside the pan-chromatic, non-triadic tonal music of Hindemth and middle period Bartók.)
It’s sometimes worth remembering that Robert Simpson, who really disliked Schoenberg and his music, stated that he learned more about symphonic tonal organisation from Schoenberg’s (twelve-tone) Piano Concerto than from any then-modern symphonist. The Piano Concerto is clearly in (a non-triadic) C: the final C M7 is very convincing.
That’s fine, but where are the piano’s fundamentals relative to the other instruments? There’s some divergence once they start moving away from A = 440 Hz, no?
[quote=“LemoUtan, post:69, topic:77436”]
But I’d hate to see that as an argument to support some thesis that humans are naturally tonal creatures and that atonality and Schoenberg are creations of the devil (tritonic or otherwise).[/quote]
I hope you’re not attributing such an argument to me. I learned my counterpoint from Schoenberg’s example. The Kammersymphonie especially was an ear-opener in that regard. Most of what I write is what happens when you apply a similar sense of rhythm and line to modal/tonal, rather than chromatic, materials. (I also took Style and Idea to heart: the nature of the idea dictates the construction, and hence the style, of a piece, and most of my ideas are modal.)
That’s their prerogative. It is also something we can’t really control as composers, and I’m not at all sure we should - there are times when the performers with their “inappropriate” preconceptions bring out quite valid aspects of our work that we didn’t see.
I’m a member of a Facebook group with a lot of HIP harpsichordists (Skip Sempé, Ketil Haugsland, Alina Rotaru, etc. - FB kind of took over from listserv, eh?), and I almost always duck when I see mention being made of Glenn Gould - the bitchiness is going to get fierce. On the one hand, many of these practitioners are very musical, but, at their HIP worst, they can be boring; on the other hand, Gould could be extremely infuriating with his liberties, but was never boring, and occasionally had insights into his repertoire that none of the HIP players can match.
The problem, of course, is which “side” has the inappropriate preconceptions? I wouldn’t want my work played entirely by a bunch of Glen Goulds, but then, I am not purely a child of my historical circumstances - there are things I do that are a bit unusual (albeit they aren’t always noticeable), so some future HIP-type trying to slot me into a 21st-century niche (perhaps neo-Baroque or, Gawd forbid, a “period” composer) is going to do me some amount of disservice. It’s not that one needs something in between to arrive at the “truth” of a piece of music; it’s that one needs both poles and everything in between. Let a thousand flowers bloom, no?
For that reason, I tend to notate the bare minimum I need to get an idea across. I like Dechales for harpsichord, but if a performer is obliged to present my work in, say, Werckmeister III, or ordinaire, or even 12-TET, I’m not going to kick - a specific temperament isn’t really necessary to get the idea across; I thus don’t specify one. In my most recent piece, I’m sparing with phrasing marks (just where I specifically need breaks); I’m more detailed on the dynamics, and surprisingly detailed with the nuances of tempo (lots of short ritenuti that you ignore at peril of the rhythm). More phrasing is not really necessary in a context of Fortspinnung, so it can be left to the performer.
So, to bring this all back on topic, I’m not going to kick too much about temperament when faced with something like these Boethius songs: the transverse flute was as big an anachronism (they arrived in Europe from Byzantium some two centuries later) as a temperament that wasn’t, at any rate, 12-TET. The results were musical, and that’s my main concern. Hopefully, if my stuff is lucky enough to be revived in a thousand years, they manage something musical…
As you whittle away any last vestiges of staying on the actual note as written, I suppose I may take comfort in the fact that you don’t actually say they do but only that you’d be surprised if they did not. I could easily live with your surprise.
I’d expect ‘performance shadism’ from amateurs (just listen to the many ‘interesting’ interpretations in USAnian national-anthem singing at football games) but how about professionals? Performing something scored by an unknown composer in a clearly non-tonal piece (maybe something almost aleatoric but still written by a human) - and you’re going to insist that, possibly unconsciously, they’re still going to find enough of a handle in the multitude of pitch class sets embedded therein which will ‘allow’ them to go slightly off pitch purely for ‘artistic’ reasons, clearly discernible from performance ‘noise’ or mere mistakes? If that’s what you’re claiming, because of your experience, then I must (rather despairingly) accept it.
Bloody divas.
My father had his piano tuned - I think twice over 20-30 years - by a blind tuner, one C H Irwin (I’ll never forget his name), who happened to live about two hundred yards up our road. Being only a child at the time I was in no position to apprehend his method, but I could imagine that a concert piano tuner, who can have no possible advance knowledge of any instruments the piano may be used with, but only that it almost certainly will be used with other instruments, must tune each string’s fundamental to strict well-temperedness as its the only general purpose way of fitting in with any future unknowns. That the same tuner may tune a domestic piano differently (so that it will always sound good on its own because it doesn’t have to worry about other instruments being relatively ‘off’) is possible, I suppose. But is a pro piano tuner really going to learn two different ‘schools’ of tuning?
Any piano tuners in the vicinity please do chip in here.
Good heavens no. Even if I get the (probably mistaken) impression that you are mainly speaking from a tonal perspective in contrast to my more atonal position, I’d not attribute such judgmental mental states!
Must concede that. But then, if you figure out a way of notating what they did (even if it’s only as texty instructions), so you may use this new wonder in your next piece, you find that the performer of your new piece ignores it because they’ve got their way of ‘shading’. (And that sounds good too, dammit).
Only way out is to compose for robots who will do as they’re bloody well told.
Of course. Had you reminded us of this earlier then this exchange could have ended several essays ago.
