Content: #17 – Spring 2015 (All texts in English)
CHRISTIAN WOLFF
SHORT NOTE RE: INTONATION
ANDREW McINTOSH
QUESTIONS FOR COMPOSERS AND LISTENERS
CATHERINE LAMB
THE INTERACTION OF TONE
ALEXANDER MOOSBRUGGER
THE PRELUDE IS ALL.
SKETCHES ON THE HOW AND WHAT OF INTONATION
STEPHA SCHWEIGER
IN-TONARE
EDU HAUBENSAK
MUSIC IN SCORDATURA
JOHANNES KELLER
MEANTONE AND MANY-TONED MUSIC
WALTER ZIMMERMANN
THE LOST HARMONIKA
CLARENCE BARLOW
GLOSSARY OF TERMS WITH RESPECT TO INTONATION
[…] Musicians tune their instruments before a concert. They wish to settle themselves to an agreed-upon reference tone and thereby collectively establish a unison as purely as possible. Human hearing is precise enough to perceive the smallest deviations, especially when pitches are simultaneously played, since small discrepancies between them cause beating, audible as pulsation in the sound. Two successively played, almost identical pitches have a just noticeable difference of approximately 5–8 cents. Therefore, an orchestra is able to tune up using the established standard concert pitch ‘A’, these days commonly set to the frequency 442 Hz (Hertz=vibrations per second). This knowledge about the sensitivity of our hearing abilities is in no way an immediate or self-evident part of our conscious experience. We become refined through our practice as listeners—for example, by engaging with music traditions unfamiliar to us. The smallest interval in the commonly used tone system of European music is the minor second (100 cents), and that is in fact a huge step for our ears. For a long time microintervals were played rarely in European concerts, though this has been changing recently, both due to the revival of historic temperaments in early music performances as well as the increasingly fashionable trend of composing new music with smaller intervals.
In fact, the tuning of all of our instruments may be adjusted; for any instrument an alteration of the fundamental pitch (scordatura) is technically possible. String instruments have a great potential to retune individual strings and microintervallic scordature dramatically redefine harmonic relationships. Also, wind instruments, by changing tube and valve lengths (though within a somewhat more limited range generally between 20 and 50 cents), may also alter their basic intonation. Keyboard instruments may also be retuned without difficulty, perhaps with the exception of the organ, which would generally require individual pipes to be changed or replaced in order to produce a new tuning.
My first experience of music in scordatura was Charles Edward Ives’s composition Three Quarter-Tone Pieces (1903–23) for two pianos a quartertone apart, a work which halves the 100-cent semitone into two steps of 50 cents. Ives’s discovery in a Sunday school —two pianos whose tuning reference pitches differed by a quarter- tone—was a dinosaur of 20th century music history. These two instruments, taken together, are now capable of producing twice as many intervals as only one instru- ment alone. With these newly discovered harmonies at his disposal Ives juggles (tonal) melodies and chords back and forth between the two pianos. Around the same time, the Russian composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky had a quartertone piano built and composed a body of quartertone music, which eventually came to include the 24 Préludes dans tous les tons de l’échelle chromatique diatonisée à 13 sons, Op. 22 (1934, rev. 1960).
The idea of scordatura piano has for a long time remained almost taboo. Hardly anyone dares retune this instrument. Even now, whenever a piano is to be differ- ently tuned, one immediately faces enormous resistance from concert presenters, music schools, and from the piano manufacturers’ in-house tuners. Somehow the courage is lacking to venture something unfamiliar, even though it is technically no problem at all to turn a tuning peg. One commonly argued myth, about the instability of scordature, is easily overcome as long as certain technical limits are observed. My own piano tuner claims that two neighboring piano strings may vary as much as a major third (400 cents). So, to ensure stability of the tuning, this range of 400 cents is the upper limit, and is possible even within a single choir of strings (the group played by one key). Most of us would be astonished by the unexpected possibilities of using such a wide range of pitch. In fact, even small variations of intonation already have a pronounced transformative effect on the overall piano sound. In addition, changes in overtone structure form new mixtures of tone color and expand the instrument’s harmonic qualities. Newly devised intonations have a great potential to open up narrow ways of thinking in terms of the tempered tun- ing. Not only Just Intonation or equidistant ultrachromatic scales in 1/4, 1/5, 1/8, 1/10-tones may offer new harmonic results, but any and all conceivable intonations, made playable by means of various scordature, allow us to discover and experience new worlds of con-sonance. […]
Excerpt from Edu Haubensak: Music in Scordatura
Read more in the physical issue #17 !