User:Basemetal/sandbox/Discussion4

Transposition at sight

Called it "hellish" as requiring fluency in all clefs. Students here (everybody including strings, bassoon, timpani; not sure about voice with their "solfège pour chanteurs" rather than the regular classes) had to sing solfeggios (such as Lemoine) with one clef change per bar. If one isn't able to do it my own beotian method of choice would be by "scale degree" rather than "interval". How did you become fluent in all clefs? Contact Basemetal here 21:07, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I learned clefs gradually, and according to need. As for most non-keyboardist musicians, I expect, treble clef was where I started. Being a clarinetist, the most useful clefs after this were tenor and alto (for transposing A and C clarinet parts on B-flat clarinet). Bass clef of course became necessary at about the same time, perhaps even a little earlier. It was only when I began playing recorders (and other "early" instruments) that things really got under way. In the end, what motivated me most, I suppose, was an eagerness to read more music without having to go through the process of transcription. It does not take very long sight-reading from facsimile editions to begin to realise that there are actually only seven notes than can belong to a given staff line, so already knowing four clefs means there are only three others to learn. Throw into the mix woodwinds that finger most often in four different basic scales (so-called F-, C-, G-, and D-fingerings), and it is a very short step to simply checking where your fingers need to start, and the diatonic intervals surrounding that point. Once I reached this stage, I stopped even thinking about key signatures most of the time—knowing where the "mi-fa" points are is sufficient (unless you are playing twelve-tone music, of course!). Now, I agree that changing clefs every bar is a bit extreme. Not many composers are sadistic enough to actually require this of performers, and the ones who do probably don't get many of their pieces played.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:32, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

You've learned it hands on by practicing transposing with your instrument and at your own pace rather than going through what those poor guys have to lest they fail their end of year tests. Those pieces with one change of clef per bar are not published music. They're exercises in solfeggios such as the "Solfège des solfèges" of Henri Lemoine and not all are like that. You may take a look the S. des s. some time if you're curious as it is now on the net. The idea of aiming at this kind of fluency is supposedly that if, for example, you're a conductor and have to jump in the score from the B-flat trumpet to the French horn to the flute in G you have to mentally "change clef" fast. When you answer this whole business of not writing all parts at concert pitch in the conductor's score is what's insane, you're told surreal stuff like that the conductor has to speak to the French horns "in their own language", that is in F, and so has to see their part the way they see it. As if it weren't saner he switch to "talking in F" when he addresses the French horns rather than having to have in front of him constantly a part he's got to mentally transpose. Our friend Kentaro Sato (remember him?:) who, though Japanese, is a product of the American musical education system, thinks preliminary training in Europe and Japan is unreasonable: see a statement I found while rummaging through his website for hints of notability. Funny thing, he slightly reworded the statement from the 10th to the 11th, I don't know why. I would tend to side with him on that, if I felt I really knew what I was talking about. And there've been other crazy things in music education in France and Belgium in the past 200 years, e.g. the fixed-do system, I had to undergo 5 years of that and I still don't understand how such an idiotic system is possible. Since I've got you on the line, do you remember a minor piece by Stockhausen where he uses an equal temperament of the 12th into 19 equal parts (19th root of 3)? Contact Basemetal here 00:14, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

It's always best to learn things when you can see the need. I can well imagine how pointless those tests must have seemed to the poor slobs who had to pass them. I do know that those test pieces were not "real music". That was just my point. If your are going to read 17th-century viola da gamba music (for example), you may expect to have to change clefs a few times per page. Perhaps an exercise requiring twenty or thirty clef changes in the same space will make reality seem easy by comparison, but it still is unreal.

Your example of the conductor is exactly the kind of thing my professor would talk about. As a conductor, this is precisely what he would do (or so he said he did), and this had a lot to do with the fact that he had an acute sense of absolute pitch. He needed to "see" the correct pitches on the page of the score in front of him.

I think the Stockhausen piece you are referring to must by the second Elektronische Studie, only the scale used there involves an interval of 5:1 divided into 25 equal parts (25th root of 5). Is there some other piece with the 19th root of 3? Stockhausen had just as acute a sense of absolute pitch as my former professor. Neither of them let this prevent them getting past twelve-equal A=440Hz tuning. My professor was, amongst other things, an ethnomusicologist with an intense interest in non-Western tuning systems (or, to be more precise, "non-systems", since he was convinced that many world tunings are not systematic at all). Stockhausen explored microtonal tunings of the most refined sort (though he told me once that he believed these subtler divisions of the octave would always remain nuances within the chromatic semitonal system). For him, too, these microtonal elements were not systematic, but rather pitch inflections of a practical compositional interest.

This sort of thing does of course exceed the usual function of clefs, and I'm not sure how music-education systems are supposed to deal with them (for example, in sight-singing exercises).—Jerome Kohl (talk) 06:02, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

If you don't remember such a piece then it doesn't exist and I mixed up in my mind 5th and 3rd harmonic. But why 25? A 17th is divided into 28 semitones. How do his 25 pitches map into the expected 28 pitches inside a 17th? Each interval may be only slightly bigger than the 28th root of 5 but little by little the discrepancy must accumulate and you'll end up with some pitches being ambiguous, won't you? Regarding the view that subtler divisions of the octave would remain nuances, I can see how that would work if the inflected note is closer to one of the twelve uninflected tones: the ear would hear it as just a variant. But what happens if it is in the middle of a semitone and remains ambiguous and the ear refuses to identify it with either the higher or the lower tone as in the case of a neutral third that the ear refuses to hear either as a major third or a minor third? What then? Finally I'd be delighted if you had the time to expand on the opinion of your professor that non-Western traditional tuning practices are actually non-systematic. Ok I'll go listen to Studie II. Talking with you always expand our horizons. The problem is we all take a lot of your time. Lots of people have questions to ask you and you must sometime feel overwhelmed. That's the problem with being WP's resident musicologist :) In the past Antandrus pulled his weight but lately he's been sending people to you :) Thanks again for all this information, but don't hesitate to ask for a little peace and quiet if it gets too much. Contact Basemetal here 08:39, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

I don't think I understand your question. What has a 17th to do with this? The ratio 5:1 defines an interval of two octaves plus a just major third, but this only can be called a 17th if you assume seven diatonic scale steps in each octave. Your count of semitones assumes not only this, but also division of each whole tone into two semitones. I think most commentators agree that Stockhausen must have chosen this particular interval because it is fairly close to a semitone in size (a little bit larger, in fact), and because the resulting scale misses octaves by a wide margin. It also fails to approximate perfect fifths, which is one reason that the harmonic sound of the piece is dominated by thirds. The composition is constructed from sets of five elements, which is as good a reason as any for choosing a tuning system based on 5 and 25. Semitones however are not relevant when using such a tuning system (unless you redefine the use of the word "semitone", of course, to mean an interval that divides a 5:1 into 25 equal parts—a "tone" then being the interval that divides a 10:1 into 25 equal parts).

Sorry for not making much sense. I guess I saw this file

Tone mixtures in Group I of Stockhausen's Elektronische Studie II (Maconie 2005, 134).

which uses standard note designations for the frequencies, assumed (w/o doing the calculation) that his frequencies could be reasonably approximated by the notes of our usual 12 tone equally tempered scale and so thought I'd try to understand Stockhausen's ${\sqrt[{25}]{5}}$ system as an inflection of a usual 12-tones-to-the-octave system which a ${\sqrt[{28}]{5}}$ system would be. That was a mistake I guess. The "octave" in a ${\sqrt[{28}]{5}}$ system (that is ${\sqrt[{28}]{5^{12}}}={\sqrt[{7}]{5^{3}}}$) would still miss $2$ though not by much. Contact Basemetal here 01:55, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, those notations are misleading, but there is no clear way of representing non-12-equal pitches in conventional notation.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:15, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

As for my professor's contention that non-Western tuning systems are non-systematic, you can read the arguments in his book, Donald Lentz, The Gamelan Music of Java and Bali: An Artistic Anomaly Complementary to Primary Tonal Theoretical Systems (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). As he explained it to us, he asked instrument makers in Java and Bali how they arrived at the intervals they used. Most could only say, "they are traditional", but one pointed up into a tree, and said, "Do you hear that bird? Those are the notes I use to tune these two keys", and demonstrated by playing the two notes on the instrument before him. I think to a lesser degree this same line of thinking informs his earlier book, Tones and Intervals of Hindu Classical Music (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), but I have not read that one. The book on gamelan was very badly received at the time, since the dominant paradigm amongst ethnomusicologists was the overtone-series or small-whole-number-ratio basis for tuning, even though it was very difficult to explain certain intervals in gamelan scales that way. However, times have changed and, had he published that book twenty years later, Don's views would have found much greater favour. By then Paul Berliner's classic The Soul of Mbira had been published (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978; reprinted, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). This book was largely responsible for the repudiation of (or at least for casting strong doubt on) the number-ratio or overtone theory, which is now regarded by many ethnomusicologists as an indefensible imposition of European music-theoretical thinking on extra-European cultures.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 22:40, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

I'll have to try and see where a copy The Gamelan Music of Java and Bali can be located, and that may not be easy, but before I do, I'm curious if Donald Lentz found that the scales used varied widely and randomly from gamelan to gamelan? And shouldn't we have a Donald Lentz article in WP with some description of his theories. These seem musicologically significant. Even on the web it is not that easy to come by information regarding Donald Lentz let alone his theories. This is all I got from Googling "Donald Lentz Music" (first 5 pages). Contact Basemetal here 01:55, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it may be difficult to track down a copy of this book. To answer your question: Yes, if I recall correctly (and it has been a very long time since I last re-read his book) the tunings varied from village to village. Berliner found the same sort of variation for the mbira, with especially pronounced differences in the sixth scale degree.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 07:15, 16 February 2014 (UTC)