On Apr 19, 2010, at 9:54 AM, Laurence Libin wrote: > I imagine not many wind and string players and singers intentionally > (rather than intuitively or automatically) inflect leading tones, > etc., or are always aware they're doing it. In the case of string players, I believe it is conscious and taught. At least there is a fairly predominant school of thought in violin pedagogy that calls for both inflected leading tones, and additionally raising all sharps and lowering all flats. This school of thought has been around at least from early 1800s, and I believe started a bit earlier (Barbieri has a good chapter on the subject in his Enharmonic Instruments book). Wind players, I haven't heard much either way on the subject. They seem more apt to worry about blending. For the violinist playing as a soloist, the melodic alteration of pitch tends toward thirds wider than ET, something akin to an extended Pythagorean tuning (all fifths just, but maybe even wider than just). For small ensemble, like string quartet, blending becomes the rule, so just thirds are aimed at, at least in slow passages. So there is an inherent disjunction of intonation styles, and violinists are often categorized as good at ensemble or good at solo, rarely at both. I have been interested to discuss intonation with our violin professor, who has an extraordinarily acute ear. He talks about all the considerations of this or that context, and how contradictory they are. I empathize. > The fact that we have little problem accommodating pitch inflection > by orchestral instruments and singers indicates that in- and out-of- > tuneness aren't absolutes; rather, they're largely culturally > determined and relative. That's one reason (xenophobia's another) > why much Asian music sounds out of tune to Western ears. I'm afraid > our rigidly fixed-pitch keyboard instruments don't foster > appreciation for such subtlety, and I wonder whether sitar and di > players would be more sensitive to deviation from ET than most > pianists are. Non-western music tends to be more melodic than harmonic. Western music almost always has stacked thirds played simultaneously, while Indian, Chinese, Persian and Arabic music is more likely to have unison or octave playing of melodic material. In the monophonic line, bending intonation becomes a dominant expressive devise, and the effect that might have on harmonic intervals can be ignored. Practitioners of these musical styles that I have known don't like ET at all. Whether or not they would be sensitive to ET versus minor deviation from ET, I don't know, but suspect it would all sound equally bad until it got close to a pattern that was normal or acceptable to them. Traditionalists among Indian musicians are aghast at the use of the fixed pitch harmonium, which is tuned to various scales (often more than one on different stops), but it is a very popular melodic instrument (the Indian harmonium is a portable instrument, pumped with one hand while the other plays the short keyboard). For the traditionalist, the ability to bend pitch expressively at the moment is the essence of making music. Regards, Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu http://www.youtube.com/fredsturm
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