Microtonal music
Microtonal music is music that includes intervals outside of those from the customary Western tuning of twelve equal divisions of the octave (12edo). The boundaries of microtonal music are fuzzy for various reasons, namely cultural context and psychoacoustic effects.
Terminology
Many dictionaries define microtonal music as music that employs intervals smaller than a semitone. However, in contemporary practice, microtonal music is any music that is not in 12edo, even if it is in a tuning system that does not use any intervals less than a 12edo semitone step.
Several terms have been proposed with more or less similar definitions. A notable example is xenharmonic music, coined by Ivor Darreg, which describes music that sounds significantly different from 12edo. There are many gray areas regarding what sort of systems qualify as xenharmonic or not, and no rigorous definition seems to be universally acceptable among xenharmonists.
Scope of this wiki
Despite being named the Xenharmonic Wiki, this wiki documents any and all kinds of musical tunings, no matter whether one counts them as xenharmonic or not.
Debates and usage
Xenharmonic
Many theorists caution against using the term xenharmonic for non-Western traditions that use non-12edo tunings. This is because the prefix xen- denotes otherness, so calling those traditions xenharmonic implies they are "exotic", and that Western 12edo music is "normal".
To avoid unintentionally spreading such misconceptions, theorists often use xenharmonic only to mean Western non-12edo traditions, with microtonal being a broader catch-all term that also includes non-Western traditions too.
Because the prefix xen- denotes otherness, many theorists also caution against using xenharmonic to describe tunings that are very similar to 12edo, on the grounds that they do not really exhibit that "otherness".
Some theorists, for example, would argue that historical temperaments like meantone are not xenharmonic, because they follow almost identical rules to 12edo and sound very similar to it too. They would argue that only tunings which deviate significantly from 12edo, like 11edo, Bohlen–Pierce or orwell, are truly xenharmonic. Xenharmony, of course, can be conceived as a spectrum of increasing distinction from 12edo in terms of tuning as well as how that tuning may be used in a piece of music.
Microtonal
The term microtonal is itself contested, because it implies that 12edo's step sizes are "normal-sized tones" and that anything smaller than them is "micro". Of course in reality, there is nothing more or less "normal" about 12edo's step size than any other system.
The term microtonal can also cause confusion for music students because some microtonal scales like 5edo or orwell[9] actually have larger step sizes than 12edo.
Despite these concerns, microtonal still remains in broad use among most musicologists as the main catch-all term to describe this kind of music. Because it does not cause too much offense, and because of the sheer inertia of the term being so widely known, it seems likely that microtonal will continue to be the most common term for non-12edo music in general.
Aside from microtonal, xenharmonic is the most common other term in broad use, and though its exact boundaries are debated, it is widely agreed among music theorists that xenharmonic is in some way a more strict version of microtonal. Microtonal is something of a catch-all term, while xenharmonic refers to something more specific. But what exactly the boundaries of that "something more specific" might be continues to be debated.
Other alternatives
History
Sometime before 1900, composer Julián Carrillo Trujillo performed experiments on a violin string, using a razor blade to achieve very precise intervals smaller than a semitone, which he called microtono. Over a decade later, the music theorist Maud MacCarthy Mann began using the term microtone to describe Indian sruti intervals that were smaller than a semitone, to differentiate them from quartertones.
In the 1910's and 1920's, there was some discussion as to whether the term microtone was appropriate, or if competing terms, such as heterotone or fraction-tone etc., would be clearer. By the 1930's, with interest in American Blues music booming, and with people like Ivor Darreg becoming active with new tuning methods, many more terms were proposed, but the terms microtonal and xenharmonic were most prominent in the English language by the end of the decade.
See Category: People for a list of people involved in microtonality or xenharmonics.
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See also
External links
- What is microtonal music? What is xenharmonic music? by Margo Schulter, on UnTwelve's website