What is microtonal music: Difference between revisions

The difficulty in defining exactly what microtonal music '''''is''''' arises from the long history of Western music. Definitions of music have changed enormously over the past 2500 years of Western history, and as a result the very definition of what is and is not standard practice in Western has transformed beyond all recognition.

The reason why such compositions (using extended performance techniques) sound the same even when played with greatly varying pitches in repeat performance is simple. Two performances of Penderecki's ''Threnody for the Victims Of Hiroshima'', for instance, hardly sound any different...even though the individual pitches played by the orchestra are scarcely comparable. The overall effect is what matters in such music, not the individual pitches. Much tape music and ''musique concrete'' and a fair amount of contemporary music makes use of glissing effects. For instance, Iannis Xenakis' early orchestral pieces (''Metastasis, Eonta, Kraanerg'') or Penderecki's ''Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima'', akk make use of arbitrary pitch variations as a gestural or timbral effect rather than for their structural harmonic and melodic properties. Consequently, in many such compositions, the exact pitches are not even written down! Penderecki's score, for instance, merely uses thicker and thinner lines on an orchestral score to suggest general ranges of variation in pitch. This is clearly not microtonality because we are dealing here with glissandi or portamenti or other pitch variations used as gestures, rather than to produce audibly different harmonies and melodies which sound distinct from those of conventional Western music. Randomly-detuned pitches, especially those sounded in an orchestral ensemble, belong to an entirely different realm of music—the realm of aleatoric extended performance effects. Such gestural effects, while often musically valuable and useful, and often present in superb modern compositions, should not be confused with the specific structural use of non-Western harmonies and melodies as is found in, say, [[Ivor Darreg]]'s ''19-tone equal tempered prelude for guitar #1'', or [[Kraig Grady]]'s ''Farewell Ring'' (which uses one of [[Erv Wilson]]'s [[CPS]] JI tunings) or [[Bill Wesley]]'s ''Harmony 101'' or [[Kyle Gann]]'s ''Triskaidekaphilia (Tuning Study No.6)'' or [[William Schottstaedt]]'s ''Colony V''. Those latter compositions deploy a specific set of audibly non-Western pitches but nonetheless use relatively conventional harmonies and melodies. By contrast, Xenakis and Penderecki and tape composers like Pierre Henry and Tod Dockstader used non-western pitches as merely one among many audible effects in their arsenal of extended performance techniques to generate ensemble musical gestures in the service of a larger esthetic. To put it bluntly, tape music and mass random orchestral tone clusters are not meant to be heard in the same structural way as a Bach chorale, and listeners cannot expect to apply conventional methods of analysis of music theory to such compositions.

=== Non-Western ===

"'''Non-Western'''" sometimes proves a popular sobriquet. It has, as mentioned above, the drawback of implicitly defining modern conventional Western tuning as a universal standard. Since the conventional Western tuning of 12 equal semitones per octave did not even come into wide usage until roughly 300 years ago, and now seems to be going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon as more and more young composers use laptops and softsynths to generate music in tunings far outside anything inconventional western music, it becomes inadvisable to declare as a universal bedrock that which seems more like quicksand. As the history of all musical cultures shows, music changes, and often quite radically. The granite monuments deemed absolute for eternity in one musical era often vanish like smoke in the desert, leaving behind hardly a trace of their existence -- as the transformation of Western music proves. Western music started as an entirely melodic monophonic choral form based on pairs of conjoined ''tetraktys'' (sets of 4 notes) based on the number 4, and not recognizing triads as musical structures. In the early middle ages, Western music changed to a Pythagorean diatonic 7 note system based on the number 3 with occasional dyads involving perfect fifths, perfect fourths, and octaves (''fauxbourdon''). During the later middle ages, Western music changed yet again to a 12 note system of medieval modes in which the vertical perfect fourth became recognized as a point of musical stasis, while the major third was used as a musical [[dissonance]] but the major second was allowed as semi-[[consonance]] (Gothic era of Perotinus and Longinus). During the Renaissance period, these rules turned upside down, and tertian triadic harmony was employed for the first time, along with prohibitions against using the fourth as the final cadence because it was now judged a musical dissonance, while the major third became a musical consonance. Such radical transformations in Western musical usage over the years have continued to the present day, when such innovations as tone clusters, synthesizers, xenharmonic tunings, algorithmic composition, extended performance techniques, homebuilt instruments and sonification of non-musical datasets (as in ''The Earth's Magnetic Field'' by Charles Dodge) have in the 21st century become commonplace. Given the fact of such transilient change in Western music, it seems unwise to declare one particular aspect of Western music as a universal standard by which all other musics everywhere on the planet ought to be measured.

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