Sorry - Karl, Tony, John....I've spent so many years doing set theory
with atonal music that I'm just too accustomed to labeling sets by
counting the number of notes in the sets. It's been a long time since
I've thought about Greek tetrachords, not to mention Guido's hexachord!
I have always tried not to attribute a greater significance to the
intervals produced by the bounding pitches of a melodic set when
describing a music with no single pitch as tonal center; However, when
theorists begin to talk about "tonal" music, or the kind of music that
places greater emphasis on the lower partials of the harmonic series
(i.e. 2:3:4 -- P5ths and P4ths), they tend to conclude that these
intervals are archetypal in some sort of "causal" sense, to consider
them to be the cognitive building blocks of the melodic materials in the
music. Of course, we all know that the debate over the cause of tonality
will never be resolved. Is tonality the product of the harmonic series
"having its way with us," or is tonality solely the product of culture?
Do musicians consciously or unconsciously draw upon interval archetypes
and interval-filling procedures when creating, composing, or improvising
melodies? Are our compositions and improvisations the products of
acoustical theoretical archetypes having their ways with
us...("nature"...the innate Chomskian mental grammar) or do they arise
as a product of our cultures ... ("nurture"...the acculturated
associative responses?) I also find it interesting that modern theorists
of various tonal traditions, Western and non-Western, continue to return
to what is at root Western medieval concepts of musical structure. For
example, the idea that the ancient Greek diatonic and chromatic scales
were simply conjunct and disjunct tetrachords ("filled-in" P4ths), that
the 16th-17th Cen. Major and minor scales were just disjunct
diatonically "filled-in" tetrachords. Was Bach "filling in" archetypal
intervals when composing the famous Partita in D Minor, and were these
same pesky primal intervals bending the minds and fingers of our
shakuhachi-playing ancestors when they gave birth to the honkyoku?
Anyway, here they are again, popping up in Koizumi's musical discourse
and in the discourse of other musicians when describing the P4th-filling
melodic motions [C, D-flat, F] [C, E-flat, F] [C,D,F], or [C,E,F]. The
sheer number of melodic ideas world-wide that fill-in P4ths seem to lend
credibility to the notion the P4ths are some sort of archetypal or
universal musical force. Who knows?
-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Signell [mailto:signell@cpcug.org]=20
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 5:51 PM
To: Shakuhachi@communication.ucsd.edu; Shakuhachi@communication.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: [Shaku] Everything you wanted to know about re-meri
At 04:52 PM 12/29/2004, John Baker wrote:
>Call me dense, but I can see only two tetrachords: C,
>D, F & C, E, F.
Thanks for the correction, John. I had copied and pasted it from the=20
online text without remembering that the flat sign is unavailable in
ASCII:
in or miyako-bushi (C, D-flat, F)
ritsu (C, D, F)
y=F4 or min=92y=F4 (=91folksong=92) (C, E-flat, F)
ry=FBky=FB (C, E, F).
>The Grove link required a log in, so I did not use it.
My DC Public Library barcode logs me in. You may belong to a library
that=20
offers access to New Grove 2 online.
A local library might also have the print version.
Karl
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