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Some of you might have noticed that I've been reading Harry Partch recently. One of the things usually used to describe Partch in capsule bios is his development of a sometimes 43-tone to the octave system of intonation he called just intonation. He seemed to take real umbrage that the music establishment just assumed that the 12-tone system, developed hundreds of years ago by certain "Germanic gentlemen," were all the tones any serious musician could and should ever want.
I have lived all my life listening to music based on equal temperament, and really have had no aural experience with so-called microtonality, except as it appears in, say guitar string bends, noise music, etc. So I downloaded a demo of a soft-synth that allows the user to specify the intonation system of the instrument. The above link, by the way, is to a synth that I don't particularly like, sound-wise. But anyway, the tones available in Partch's tunings are incredibly beautiful. It's as if a visual artist, at the start of his career was handed the standard 8-color box of crayons, and told, "Go nuts, kid." One evening, our allegorical artist discovers oil paints and their attendant potential for being blended.
It's amazing how well our ears are trained to hear equal temperament, though. Sit down at a piano and play two consecutive notes. Now try to whistle three or four intervals between them. I find myself, for the most part, alternating between to two and not being able to rest comfortably on anything between.
So anyway, just my response to an admittedly-poorly understood introduction to microtonal music. Are there any composerliths that have had more broad experience in these wildernesses? Does anyone own a microtonal instrument? |
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