I really didn't think it was possible to condense an explanation of Partch's music into about 5 minutes. But through some sort of alchemist wizardry you just did. Bravo! The Genesis Scale sound example may have been the kicker.
This is brilliant. One of my teachers studied and performed with Partch when he was at UC San Diego. I learned a little bit from him. This is the best explanation of tonal diamonds and the Genesis scale I've ever heard. Congratulations!
That's what Music Theory is to composers. To me (western) Music Theory is helpful to learning music notation without throwing up. A lot of different names for the same thing, and different things with the same name, and a lot of things with a very very loose if existing relationship to their names. Music discussion may resemble English, but you need a glossary of music term meanings or as a non-musician you are completely screwed. Erwin Corey and Leonard Bernstein, Were they the same man? That's my level of understanding, I've a lot to learn before anything useful can be accomplished by me musically.
i will recommend this video to anybody reading 'genesis of a music!' A perfect review of the materials i've been trying to figure out for months! ! ! Such a great and concise explanation, bravo!
This is truly a remarkable summation of Partch's work. It also serves as a concise tutorial for explaining the process...of defining/describing a single word...for the sake of sounding confident in your own abstract human version of understanding. Dare I conclude by stating the word itself? I can only speak from my own experience, but my brain is beyond grateful for absorbing the best explanation of "irony" I could ever hope to find after 37 years on Earth. Thanks!
This video came at an interesting time for me. The Harry Partch instruments (or some of them at least) are currently at the University of Washington's Seattle campus, and I just took part in a program the Seattle Symphony does annually that lets high- schoool-ish composers write some chamber music and have it performed by the Seattle Symphony musicians. The workshop director was also the director of the Partch Instrumentorium, so we all went there, saw the instruments, played on the instruments a bit, and only one person actually wrote for one. For the benefit of the comment section, the way that Partch's music is performed is with his custom, hand-made instruments, like a marimba organized in the diamond that Cody drew in the video, a modified pedal organ that played about an octave and a half with all those genesis scale notes there (actually two of them), some guitars, the bottoms of some glass jugs suspended on strings. Since it'll likely come up, my entry was drive.google.com/open?id=0B1d51DNkX5A5YjNJSnZFd0t0YWs (pdf) and soundcloud.com/user289745065/stairs-of-a-size-with-a-magnitude-greather-than-that-of-the-size-of-the-average-stair (musescore trying to make audio) _(it would mean the world to me if you analyzed it but I'm sure you have better things to do)_
1. Yet again, awesome video (don't need to watch the video to know that if the video is about scales, or it's a video made by you) 2. Why did I 1st think the title said "Harry Potter"? 3. Oooh, more on microtonatity
At first I thought this would be about the band Genesis. Didn't know about Partch until now so thanks for another great video! Btw I would really appreciate a video about Genesis (Prog era). They had a lot of interesting things going on (chord progressions, key changes, Orgelton, etc.) ;)
I can't remember if I've mentioned Haas' Limited Approximations before, but that involves 6 pianos tuned in descending twelfth-tones from A=440 downwards, which makes for an *interesting* listening time! 72 "tones" to the octave, yum...!
I just learned that the Prophet 6 synthesizer includes this scale as an option...so thanks for the quick overview & I will post a video or two tomorrow.
I'd love to see more videos on microtonal music. Any chance of mentioning the 22tet porcupine scale at some point? Bohlen-Pierce? Also, mind maybe directing people toward some microtonal music too?
Yeah, those are definitely on my list! I keep meaning to do Bohlen-Pierce and then deciding I have to do a bit more research first, but it's one of the craziest things I've ever seen and I definitely want to talk about it!
columbus8myhw Brendan Byrnes and Pianodog have good stuff too. Byrnes has a video on writing microtonal music, and Pianodog has a few videos on the Porcupine and 17tet neutral scales. Also King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has a microtonal album (Flying Microtonal Banana). Syzygys has some good stuff too, and if you look on bandcamp there's stuff like Redrick Sultan, Bad Canada, and Cryptic Ruse.
Hey, I was playing something on my piano and I sort of accidentally came up with a melody that sounds pretty nice. I played around with it a bit and then I tried to determine what scale it was in and do some harmonic analysis but I got pretty confused because it wasn't anything I knew. In the first part kept Db as a pedal throughout the whole thing. Basically while I was playing Db all the time my left hand also played a descending pattern Bb-Ab-G-Gb-F-F-Eb diminished chord-Eb diminished with flat 3rd chord. In my right hand the main pattern (paired with the pattern in my left hand) was F-Bb-Bb-Db-Db-Bb minor chord-Gb-F, and then it went back to the beginning and changed a bit. I can't even tell what the tonality is here. Then there was a second part where the tonality seemed to fluctuate between F and Bb but the Db pedal stayed there. In the second part when the tonal center was F (or at least I think it was) the scale seemed to be a Locrian with a sharp 5th which I've never heard of again. The pattern in the left hand became Bb-Ab-Gb-F. I really need some help because I like that melody, but it confuses me and I don't know what to do with it... If it sounds like anything to anyone, feel free to tell me.
My only true goal in life is to be smart enough to watch these fascinating #12tone videos with requiring a slower speed playback. Also, sub-goal is that I wish I could tastefully doodle like this. Thank you for all your hard work!
I'm currently working on a research project about microtonality. I am waiting on Partch's Genesis of a Music through interlibrary loan, but this will hold me over until it arrives. Thanks for this.
This is beyond awesome! I tried to read Genesis... but encountered just as I was starting out in Electrical Engineering school, so I like totally didn’t have a chance to read it.
"The Genesis Scale" seriously sounds like a magical object. Like, it sounds like it would be the dragon's scale that creates life or time or something.
It’s also worth noting he, at least to some extent, wanted to have a musical system that was comparable to the way in which we converse and speak in everyday life. That plus ancient Chinese opera were big motivators. Plus that Helmholtz book
Finally! Once again, fantastic explanation. I read Partch's book and especially liked his analysis on just intonation. The whole explanation of how he came up with his scale went over my head tbh. Love Partch's music, but it ironically doesn't sound too good to the average listener. I think microtonal intervals sound great with percussive instruments, since the tones are there but less intrusive and more for effect and to echo melodic lines. Definitely some largely untapped potential there!
Yeah, it's a little hard to evaluate Partch's theories when we're so ingrained in modern equal-tempered sounds, but I agree, it doesn't really sound very good to me either. Can't really separate that from my modern ears, though, so that's not a condemnation of his work or anything!
Did Partch try to incorporate functional harmony into his music? Is it possible to construct a microtonal scale for the purposes of functional harmonic progressions (in a single key)?
pman5595 without using any modulations, any just scale will usually do fine for simple functional harmony. In complex functional harmony, such as jazz and 20th C° classical, players adopt what can be considerd a "movable do" just system,where they temper their pitches to the root of the chord. This ends up generating a "2 dimensional" scale - on one axis, you have an equally tempered chromatic series of roots; but on the other axis, you have 12 different just scales. This creates with an imaginary 144 note hyperscale containing ever possible temperament in this system. It's pretty neat and almost all good musicians temper this way instinctively, if they are playing temperable instruments.
But you need more than 12 pitches to create justly tuned chords even in just one key. For example in C major you need a 4 : 3 F for the root of subdominant F major, but you also need a 21 : 16 F to be the harmonic 7th of dominant G7. How many different pitches do you need to cover every different version of each note used in normal functional harmony?
This is very interesting, but I still don't quite understand what advantages this system has over very high EDO tunings. Why this instead of say for instance, 48 EDO?
would need a piano specially made, that in fact EXISTS. The whole keyboard has just one octave but as many keys as a regular keyboard. Search for "FAR OFF SOUNDS - Microtonal Man" on youtube, you will find more details. It's a mini-documentary about Harry Partch
He built his own instruments. He had an organ called a "chromelodeon" that had a piano-like keyboard with painted keys so he knew what part of the tonality diamond each note came from.
Partch generally didn't compose for the full 43-tone system (what he called the 11-limit tonality diamond) but rather smaller subsets.The 43-tone system was more like the theoretical boundary of his musical world. While he did make a few full 43-tone instruments, there were many more that were quite limited in tonal range. From Partch's perspective, the most important thing was that all the instruments were in just intonation.
F to f# isn't the same thing as f# to g and they don't look the same. F to f# is an augmented unison and f# to g is a minor second; these intervals are different because in meantone, just intonation, and pythagorean tuning because there are 25 different intervals you can describe using scale steps excluding the perfect octave, diminshed unison, and augmented octave because they're basically the same as the perfect unison, diminshed octave, and augmented unison. The tuning systems mentioned treat those intervals differently therefore, pythagorean and meantone are practical but give out tune intervals.
I love these kind of topics! It's always fascinating to see alternative perspectives on music theory outside the tried-and-true practices. Unrelated question: I'm wondering what the penguin represents? Is it meant convey awkwardness or un-elegance? Because Partch's scales are hard to work with?
Honestly, the line for that in my animation directions was just "doodle for three seconds." I had to kill time during the scale 'cause I wasn't notating it, and penguins are fun to draw. I like your theory, though, that's a way better answer than mine!
I’m assuming something and I want to see if it’s a mis assumption: justly-intoned intervals are all relative to a tonic note? If so, the set of frequencies changes in every key because the reference point changes? That would make modulations on a justly tuned instrument a problem since the tuning would be optimized for one key
I'm pretty sure I heard of a harmonic theory based on the timbre of different instruments but I can't find it. Any ideas? I think it was a form of classical music from the 20th century. I'm experimenting with using timbre to forshaddow microtonal modulations. Eq. the fourth harmonic of a square wave is about four cents lower than the 12tet one, so if I'd like to modulate four cents down, I'll simply filter out the fourth harmonic of a square wave, and then make the next tone four cents lower than it should have been. Would like to hear about similar techniques.
Towards the end of 2 minutes in, 12tone makes the point that you only need to deal with odd ratios when doing this, because even ones are just octaves. After you pass the octave, wouldn't you end up with a different set of notes? I know these aren't the same, but it's like when you stack thirds and the 9th is actually the 2nd and the 11th is the 4th and the 13th is the 6th. Wouldn't something comparable happen? The distance from the root would just mean the sound would be fainter?
Harrison Glaeser imo, it's not that interesting, Schoenberg just thought moving the bass in that particular fashion worked well. The only interesting part is how much the musical establishment overreacted to such a tiny harmonic occurrence.
HallMonitor it illustrates how bounded music was even just a century ago and how much our musical environment has developed into a freer post-tonal society because of the seemingly benign artistic choices of peeps like Arnold boi how could you not expand that into a relatively interesting four minute video blurb
Not necessarily; part of it is because just preceding that you heard the 81/64 frequency, so because of the drop in pitch of the higher note it sounded very jarring because you were just exposed to another variation of the major 3rd.
I think shiplak got it right. Adding to that: it sounded dissonant because you were expecting something different. Now try this: hear a drone or some sustained harmony of a 1 and a 5/4 (look it up somewhere, you'll find it), and do the same with a 1 and a pythagorean major 3rd or an equal tempered one. What you'll find is, though the 5/4 major third sounds lower than you would expect, it's harmony it very stable. In comparison the other two major 3rds are much more tense and wobbly
Good to know the old ear is working. I could hear the difference in each note, even when it got to 43. Then again, as a theorist and composer, I developed a 240 TET system. It was a rather esoteric work, but if you ever wanted to interview me on that or other theories I've derived, I would be up for that challenge.
Would you consider covering pitch/tone space theorists like Riemann, Tenney/Minkowski, Krumhansl, etc.? I think it'd be an interesting contrast to this end of the artist/theorist spectrum.
Definitely! We did a thing on Neo-Riemannian analysis (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_VxN4rnOpho.html ) but I'm always looking for more stuff in that area!
I've always appreciated partch's viewpoint, to take the just intonated system warts and all. Life isn't all about the perfect balance of consonance and dissonance. It's ugly on the surface with beauty buried in the patterns. His ideas teach how to create music that expresses the human experience as freely and honestly as possible; outside of the constraints of societal culture. Lots of equal tempered music sounds ridiculous to me due to the common attempt to make it say things it wasn't meant to. It should be used to express the highest ideals, the unreachable stars that guide people. the idea of making all tones slightly out of tune to create the illusion of perfection is a quite accurate metaphor for the abstractions necessary to keep large societies functioning. I understand the utility of the 12 tone system very much, don't get me wrong, but to truly express the world honestly, systems similar to partch's become necessary.
That's an interesting perspective! I'd never thought of it like that, but it makes sense: A lot of modern music is about smoothing out problems in the mathematical ideals we strive for, and Partch's work argues that we really shouldn't bother. Thanks for sharing!
I would love to have a drink with you. Or even a conversation, with no drink. What I'm saying is I like what you're saying, and want to hear much more of it
For more information on microtonality, discussions on microtonal scales and composition, and pieces of microtonal music, please check out the Xenharmonic Alliance group on Facebook.
"Burn the whole system to the ground", isn't that what the pure Bohlen-Pierce scale does by replacing 2/1 as the harmonic equivalence and then ignoring even harmonics altogether, but especially by ignoring even harmonics altogether? *N. B. "Ignoring" is more conceptually correct than "excluding" here because these harmonics are not truly "excluded", but rather reduced to technical irrelevance to the understanding of the scale even though they are obviously still "there", albeit faintly.
12tone You seem to be saying that what Harry Partch ultimately did with the Genesis scale was not to "burn the whole system to the ground" but rather to make explicit what tonal composers of his times were using this same system to imply. I doubt he could have brought himself to settle on the former given that he was contemporary to the heyday of the so-called atonality of twelve-tone serialism which was designed to not generate music which sounded classically "good". And most serialist music does not, even if it uses a technically tonal tone row. Tone rows are accomodated well by equal temperament having only twelve tones because they need to be of a manageable length in order to guarantee that the music cycles through the whole temperament before needing to repeat the first tone of the row (just imagine a "normal" person trying to do 43-tone serialism without going crazy). In resolution, it was because of the immediate context in which Harry Partch happened to find himself working, that, as you seem to be saying, what he ultimately did with the Genesis scale was not to "burn the whole system to the ground" but rather to make explicit what tonal composers of his times were using this same system to imply.
So.... in the comments of your last video an Italian dude (hi!!! if you're reading) mistakenly called the staff a 'pentagram' (understandable, btw! If I was Italian or Spanish I would probably have assumed the same)... and now in this video you've used an _actual_ pentagram in the illustration. Coincidence?
Watched this first thing when I got home from work, misread the title as "Harry Potter any the Genesis Scale", and spend the entire videoer wondering where the mixrotonality was in the Harry Potter score..
We've done a couple! We did an introduction to it through the concept of Forte Numbers (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7wTOLhufgBQ.html ) and more recently we took a look at Interval Vectors (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_QLDmuJI-1Q.html ) but it's a fascinating area and I'm definitely gonna do more!
I hate to harp on this point, as the video otherwise does a great job of summarizing Partch's musical system in a very short time frame... "When we hear two notes, our brain does a quick calculation to determine the ratio of the frequencies between them" There is, as far as I know, no neurological evidence that this occurs. Our brains do not calculate ratios in a mathematical sense, but rather weigh the coincidence of overtones. For harmonic timbres, yes this coincidence is largely harmonic i.e. reducible to simple integer ratios. But for inharmonic timbres, this is simply not the case. Partch (despite using many wooden and glass idiophones) was unfortunately mistaken in his formulation of 'Monophony.' We do not perceive consonance according to the mathematical values of 'just intonation,' but rather according to timbre.
Looks like you'll be working on a musical analysis of Linkin Park next, with the recent tragedy, if you want to pay tribute to them as you did with Soundgarden, 12tone. Apparently, Bennington and Cornell were good friends. Well, let's all try to carry on in this messy world.
Notes are obsolete. The future of music is pure frequencies measured in Hertz with a resolution of a hundredth of a cent. The "octave" between A=440 Hz and A=880 Hz will be broken into 44 million distinct tones.
Yeah, I was editing on a different rig from usual and it turns out their default export settings had a frame rate of 25 for a video shot in 29.97, which I missed until it was too late. It bugs the crap out of me too. Sorry!
Yep! It really bugs me how bad justly tuned major 3rds sound to my modern-trained ears. Like, it feels like it should sound great but it just sounds out of tune.
It's disorientating to hear music based on say Bach' scales as being 'in tune' and say Arabic music as therfore 'out of tune'; but African influenced western music-blues and jazz- seems to me also seedsto push against our regularpiano based ideas of 'the right notes'. Disorientating because revealing that our learned ideas of correct tuning are so subjective
12tone can you please help me? I noticed your very well versed in mathematics involved in music theory. I'm still a student learning this craft. However, I am terrible at math. What mathematics would I need to improve if I want to understand music theory and tuning systems more? I noticed there's a lot of fractions so I should get better at those. What do you recommend 12tone?
David Gonzalez-Herrera The only math you really need for scales is understanding ratios. For instance a perfect fifth above a note with frequency x is x * 3/2 and an octave above is 2x. This is what the fractions in this video mean.
