Microtonal music

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For sounds on the time scale shorter than musical notes, see microsound.
"Microtone" redirects here. For the slicing tool, see Microtome.

Composer Charles Ives chose the chord above as a good candidate for a "fundamental" chord in the quarter
tone scale, akin not to the tonic but to the major chord of traditional tonality [1]
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Two examples of an Ives fundamental chord with quarter tones

Microtonal music or microtonality is the use in music of microtones—intervals smaller

than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any
music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of twelve equal
intervals per octave. In other words, a microtone may be thought of as a note that falls
between the keys of a piano tuned in equal temperament. In Revising the musical equal
temperament, Haye Hinrichsen defines equal temperament as “the frequency ratios of
all intervals are invariant under transposition (translational shifts along the keyboard),
i.e., to be constant. The standard twelve-tone equal temperament (ET), which was
originally invented in ancient China and rediscovered in Europe in the 18th century, is
determined by two additional conditions. Firstly the octave is divided into twelve
semitones. Secondly the octave, the most fundamental of all intervals, is postulated to
be pure (beatless), as described by the frequency ratio 2:1.” [2]

Contents

 1Terminology
 o 1.1Microtone

o 1.2Microtonal

 2History

 3Microtonality in electronic music

o 3.1Limitations of some synthesizers

 4Microtonality in rock music

 5In the West

o 5.1Eastern microtonal pioneers

o 5.2Western microtonal pioneers

o 5.3Modern Western microtonal composers

o 5.4Western microtonal researchers

 6See also

 7References

 8Further reading

 9External links

Terminology[edit]
Microtone[edit]

Quarter tone accidentals residing outside the Western semitone:

quarter tone sharp, sharp, three quarter tones sharp;
quarter tone flat, flat, (two variants of) three quarter tones flat

Microtonal music can refer to any music containing microtones. The words "microtone"
and "microtonal" were coined before 1912 by Maud MacCarthy Mann in order to avoid
the misnomer "quarter tone" when speaking of the srutis of Indian music.[3] Prior to this
time the term "quarter tone" was used, confusingly, not only for an interval actually half
the size of a semitone, but also for all intervals (considerably) smaller than a semitone. [4]
[5]
 It may have been even slightly earlier, perhaps as early as 1895, that the Mexican
composer Julián Carrillo, writing in Spanish or French, coined the
terms microtono/micro-ton and microtonalismo/micro-tonalité.[6]
In French, the usual term is the somewhat more self-explanatory micro-intervalle, and
French sources give the equivalent German and English terms
as Mikrointervall (or Kleinintervall) and micro interval (or microtone), respectively.[7][8][9]
[10]
 "Microinterval" is a frequent alternative in English, especially in translations of writings
by French authors and in discussion of music by French composers. [11][12][13] In English, the
two terms "microtone" and "microinterval" are synonymous. [14] The English analogue of
the related French term, micro-intervalité, however, is rare or nonexistent, normally
being translated as "microtonality"; in French, the terms micro-ton, microtonal (or micro-
tonal), and microtonalité are also sometimes used, occasionally mixed in the same
passage with micro-intervale and micro-intervalité.[6][15][16][17]
Ezra Sims, in the article "Microtone" in the second edition of the Harvard Dictionary of
Music defines "microtone" as "an interval smaller than a semitone", [18] which corresponds
with Aristoxenus's use of the term diesis.[19] However, the unsigned article "Comma,
Schisma" in the same reference source
calls comma, schisma and diaschisma "microintervals" but not "microtones",[20] and in
the fourth edition of the same reference (which retains Sims's article on "Microtone") a
new "Comma, Schisma" article by André Barbera calls them simply "intervals". [21] In the
second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Paul
Griffiths, Mark Lindley, and Ioannis Zannos define "microtone" as a musical rather than
an acoustical entity: "any musical interval or difference of pitch distinctly smaller than a
semitone", including "the tiny enharmonic melodic intervals of ancient Greece, the
several divisions of the octave into more than 12 parts, and various discrepancies
among the intervals of just intonation or between a sharp and its enharmonically paired
flat in various forms of mean-tone temperament", as well as the Indian sruti, and small
intervals used in Byzantine chant, Arabic music theory from the 10th century onward,
and similarly for Persian traditional music and Turkish music and various other Near
Eastern musical traditions,[22] but do not actually name the "mathematical" terms
schisma, comma, and diaschisma.
"Microtone" is also sometimes used to refer to individual notes, "microtonal pitches"
added to and distinct from the familiar twelve notes of the chromatic scale, [23] as
"enharmonic microtones",[24] for example.
In English the word "microtonality" is mentioned in 1946 by Rudi Blesh who related it to
microtonal inflexions of the so-called "blues scales".[25] In Court B. Cutting's
2019 Microtonal Analysis of “Blues Notes” and the Blues Scale, he states that academic
studies of the early blues concur that its pitch scale has within it three microtonal “blue
notes” not found in 12 tone equal temperament intonation. [26] It was used still earlier by
W. McNaught with reference to developments in "modernism" in a 1939 record review
of the Columbia History of Music, Vol. 5.[27] In German the term Mikrotonalität came into
use at least by 1958,[28][29] though "Mikrointervall" is still common today in contexts where
very small intervals of early European tradition (diesis, comma, etc.) are described, as
e.g. in the new Geschichte der Musiktheorie[30] while "Mikroton" seems to prevail in
discussions of the avant-garde music and music of Eastern traditions.[citation needed] The term
"microinterval" is used alongside "microtone" by American musicologist Margo Schulter
in her articles on medieval music.[31][32]
Microtonal[edit]
The term "microtonal music" usually refers to music containing very small intervals but
can include any tuning that differs from Western twelve-tone equal temperament.
Traditional Indian systems of 22 śruti; Indonesian gamelan music; Thai, Burmese, and
African music, and music using just intonation, meantone temperament or other
alternative tunings may be considered microtonal. [33][22] Microtonal variation of intervals is
standard practice in the African-American musical forms of spirituals, blues and jazz.[34]
Many microtonal equal divisions of the octave have been proposed, usually (but not
always) in order to achieve approximation to the intervals of just intonation.[33][22]
Terminology other than "microtonal" has been used or proposed by some theorists and
composers. In 1914, A. H. Fox Strangways objected that "'heterotone' would be a better
name for śruti than the usual translation 'microtone'". [35] Modern Indian researchers yet
write: "microtonal intervals called shrutis". [36] In Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in
the 1910s and 1920s the usual term continued to be Viertelton-Musik (quarter tone
music[37][page  needed]), and the type of intervallic structure found in such music was called
the Vierteltonsystem,[38][39] which was (in the mentioned region) regarded as the main term
for referring to music with microintervals, though as early as 1908 Georg Capellan had
qualified his use of "quarter tone" with the alternative term "Bruchtonstufen (Viertel- und
Dritteltöne)" (fractional degrees (quarter and third tones)). [40] Despite the inclusion of
other fractions of a whole tone, this music continued to be described under the heading
"Vierteltonmusik" until at least the 1990s, for example in the twelfth edition of
the Riemann Musiklexikon,[41] and in the second edition of the popular Brockhaus
Riemann Musiklexikon.[42]
Ivan Wyschnegradsky used the term ultra-chromatic for intervals smaller than the
semitone and infra-chromatic for intervals larger than the semitone;[43] this same term
has been used since 1934 by ethnomusicologist Victor Belaiev (Belyaev) in his studies
of Azerbaijan and Turkish traditional music.[44][45][46] A similar term, subchromatic, has been
used by theorist Marek Žabka.[47] Ivor Darreg proposed[when?][citation needed] the term xenharmonic;
see xenharmonic music. The Austrian composer Franz Richter Herf and the music
theorist Rolf Maedel, Herf's colleague at the Salzburg Mozarteum, preferred using the
Greek word ekmelic when referring to "all the pitches lying outside the traditional twelve-
tone system".[48] Some authors in Russia[49][50][51][52][53][54] and some musicology dissertations[55][56]
[57][58][59][60]
 disseminate the term микрохроматика (microchromatics), coined in the 1970s
by Yuri Kholopov,[61] to describe a kind of 'intervallic genus' (интервальный род) for all
possible microtonal structures, both ancient (as enharmonic genus—γένος ἐναρμόνιον
—of Greeks) and modern (as quarter tone scales of Alois Haba); this generalization
term allowed also to avoid derivatives such as микротональность (microtonality,
which could be understood in Russian as a sub-tonality, which is subordinate to the
dominating tonality, especially in the context of European music of the 19th century)
and микротоника (microtonic, "a barely perceptible tonic"; see a clarification in
Kholopov [2000][62]). Another Russian authors use more international adjective
'microtonal' and rendered it in Russian as 'микротоновый', but not 'microtonality'
('микротональность').[63][64][65][66] However, the terms 'микротональность'[67] and
'микротоника'[68] are also used. Some authors writing in French have adopted the term
"micro-intervallique" to describe such music. [69][70] Italian musicologist Luca Conti
dedicated two his monographs to microtonalismo,[71][72] which is the usual term in Italian,
and also in Spanish (e.g., as found in the title of Rué [2000] [73]). The analogous English
form, "microtonalism", is also found occasionally instead of "microtonality", e.g., "At the
time when serialism and neoclassicism were still incipient a third movement emerged:
microtonalism".[74]
The term "macrotonal" has been used for intervals wider than twelve-tone equal
temperament,[75][permanent dead link][better  source  needed] or where there are "fewer than twelve notes per
octave", though "this term is not very satisfactory and is used only because there seems
to be no other".[76] The term "macrotonal" has also been used for musical form. [77]
Examples of this can be found in various places, ranging from Claude Debussy's
impressionistic harmonies to Aaron Copland's chords of stacked fifths, to John Luther
Adams' Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1995), which gradually expands
stacked-interval chords ranging from minor 2nds to major 7thsm. Louis Andriessen's De
Staat (1972–1976) contains a number of "augmented" modes that are based on Greek
scales but are asymmetrical to the octave. [78]

History