Microtonal music
Microtonal music is a collective name for various kinds of
music that use tone systems different from what is customary in Western music. The
normal Western Scale one can imagine the
best using a piano keyboard: from one octave to the other there are twelve keys
present, which produce the same amount of tones. The distance from one key/tone
to the next is called a semitone; twelve of these semitones make full an
octave.
In microtonal tone systems this is different. To go from one
particular tone to the next which is one octave higher, more, and often many
more steps must be gone through. This means, evidently, that the distance from
one tone to the next is smaller than in the usual twelve tone system. Such a
smaller distance is called a microtone, or - which would be a slightly better
word - microinterval.
There are numerous methods for building musical tone systems
with microtones. More or less familiar systems are the quartertone system
(where the octave is divided in 24 quarter tones) and the 31-tone system (where
the octave is divided in 31 small steps which are called dieses). But there are
also plenty of other systems, for example with 19, 43 and 53 tones per octave.
For these said systems applies that they still have a relation in some way with
the normal 12-tone system making them sound somewhat familiar. One can also go
about in the opposite way by choosing an arbitrary microtonal system, examine
its possibilities concerning scales, intervals, chords, etc. and using them in
a microtonal composition.
Why microtonal tone systems?
Why would one choose a (complicated) microtonal tone system,
while Western music has flourished for centuries with the relatively simple
twelve-tone system? The answer to this question is twofold. In the first place
microtonal music creates much more refined nuances with respect to pitch,
intervals and chords, and it can be refreshing employing these new sounds and
harmonies in musical compositions. In the second place, this aspect hasn't been
mentioned here yet, in some microtonal systems certain traditional intervals
can be realised much purer than in the twelve-tone system, which because of its
restrictions had to make a compromise with respect to purity. Microtonal
systems based on the latter point of departure, are called just intonations.
These just intonations are often very complicated systems, which can also lead
to the development of new instruments.
Is it out of tune?
What sounds out of tune and what not is merely a matter of
habituation. Something sounds out of tune if it's impure, but what's pure is a
matter of agreement, of a certain norm. It is an agreement of a certain group
of people in a certain cultural domain. The longer this norm serves as a value,
the more one begins to believe it is the only true norm, like a physical law.
For example in the 16th century people were used to meantone tuning, and found
equal temperament to sound rather out of tune. Now that we are used to it, we
sometimes have to get used to the special character of meantone tuning when we
hear it.
Not a new style
Microtonality is not a certain style in music. It concerns
only the material with which composers work. But by the use of microtonal tone
systems usually music originates that has a wholly new sound, which cannot be brought
under the usual denominators of the music of the twentieth century. Though,
even if most microtonal works have been written in this century, in particular
after around 1920, a small number is already of much older date, going back to
the sixteenth century. In that century it were the theoretically interested
composers, who in their attempts to revive the Greek enharmonic tetrachord,
wrote the first microtonal music, if we leave the Greeks themselves out of
consideration; of their music almost nothing has survived.
On a normal piano it is not possible to realise
microtonality (unless the instrument is retuned drastically). On most wind
instruments microtonality is applicable with the help of special blowing
techniques and fingerings. For the voice, string instruments and the trombone
microtones are mainly a matter of practice; these instruments can after all
produce any desired pitch. But where microtonal music feels at his best are of
course the microtonal musical instruments, instruments with a large number of
keys, strings, pipes, frets, et cetera, each tuned to a certain pitch. And
obviously in the world of synthesizers and computer music everything is
possible for microtones.
Which music is called microtonal music?
In classical music microtones occur more often than one
would probably think initially. Think for example about vibrato, glissando,
small intonation adaptations by string players and microtonal ornamentations by
singers. Still this doesn't make this music microtonal. This is the case if it
is based on a microtonal tone system. We call a tone system microtonal if it
contains intervals which are smaller than a minor second (semitone), or are not
a multiple of it, in other words: "fall between the piano keys". So
the tone system doesn't necessarily need to have more than 12 tones per octave.
Much non-Western music is microtonal: classical music from
India, Turkey, Arabia and Persia, gamelan music from Indonesia, xylophone music
from Africa, Byzantyne liturgical music, folk music from Middle- and Eastern
Europe, the Caucasus, etc.
Source:
Website
of Huygens-Fokker Foundation
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