Justin, in the US and Europe the avante-garde microtonally saturated
"free music" of the 1960's and 1970's, which developed through a
number of paths into what's now called improvised electroacoustic
music --somewhat fits your description to a rough degree in that
multiple scales, sometimes with varied tunings are used (and
sometimes combined) freely, and tuning is taken (by some) as much to
be an adjustment or tempering of timbre as it is the choosing of a
well-defined domain for pitch expressions. Because part of the
impetus for this movement was a reaction to "total serialism" and the
growth of a hyper-technical approach to music creation there was an
aesthetic that emphasized that displays of virtuosity were kept
"casual", and that preference was in some way given to "beginner
sound." This freely improvised approach owed much to John Cage's
interest in letting sounds be themselves, and in silence as an
important and structural part of the compositional palette or
toolkit, although Cage did not do improvisation.
There was (and is) an emphasis on extended techniques,
indeterminancy, open-ended form, timbre as a structural dimension.
Practitioners of this genre may very well have produced music that
would be *percieved* (by some) as having "all kinds of pitch in no
seeming consistency."
But that doesn't mean that there would not have been some (or even
great) consistency in actual fact, or that delicate and unusual pitch
choices were not made for aesthetic reasons.
The SF Bay Area has always been a center of this type of experimental
activity, indeed the entire US W.Coast is full of microtonal and
improvised music experimentalists of one sort or another, and because
it is on the Pacific, WCoast music has felt big influence from Asian
music of all kinds, Indian music with its rags and rasas, and
Indonesian Gamelan in particular have both exerted a very strong
influence, the one with it's system of 22 srutis per octave and the
other with its gong orchestras sounding a plethora of pentatonic
pelog and slendro tunings- that differ with each orchestra.
Some of the folks Phil Gelb plays with use just intonation and other
microtonal systems in their instrumentation- Pauline Oliverous's
justly tuned accordian. I use laptop that listens to whatever comes
into it's microphone port (my shakuhachi, but also just whatever is
in the air) via a pitch and envelope detector that uses a moveable
Do version of Partch's 43-tone per octave tuning system. Many
electronic musicians use complex tuning systems that are not 12-TET.
The studies that have been done of classical musicians in various
traditions (european, and carnatic classic musicians) that show a
low-frequency (1 over F) based randomness to the microtonal
fluctuations in tuning that professional players make during
performance may look random because they do not account for musical
context, and because there are so many different types of musical
context coming into play. If there are a number of perceptual
dimensions in play that influence a musicians use of micropitch
nuance, and it seems (to me) that there may be, it's not surprising
to find some "randomness" to the resultant actual frequency mapping.
Nor do such results mean that nuance is without purpose or
structure, either one.
It's hard to design good studies that mean anything re actual musical
practice, something Dan's alluded to in previous posts. Good
musicians have always made use of subtle tuning variations for
expressive purposes, this we know. Maybe that randomness the
frequency meters is showing is fractal randomness, rather than simply
statistical randomness.
Compositional practice (and performance practice, especially in the
improvising traditions) tend to run ahead of music theory, and
current theory is only relatively recently competent to deal with
microtonally saturated music although in practice such has been being
produced on a steady basis by avantegardists for over a half century.
Though this music does not conform to classical tonality rules, nor
to serial organization, nor to other pitch-content limited
frameworks, it does display musical purpose in its use of pitch, and
that use can be analyzed on a case by case basis using spectrograms
and other contemporary analysis tools, as well as one's ears and
mind, of course.
When I listen to Kurahachi or other great shakuhachi players whose
pitches waver randomly, my heart melts at their stillness.
Justin to Dan:
>....I was just interested about the pitch
>at that time, that's all. Also, I would love to hear
>your views on the playing style where people play all
>kinds of pitch in no seeming consistency. Have you
>heard stuff like that? What do you think about it?
>Best wishes
>Justin.
>
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