Microtonal music

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. 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. 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 (Mann 1912, 44). 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 (Ellis 1877, 665; Meyer 1903). 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 (Donval 2006, 119). 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 (Amy 1961; Anon. 1998; Wallon 1980, 13; Whitfield 1989, 13. 'Microinterval' is a frequent alternative in English, especially in translations of writings by French authors and in discussion of music by French composers (Battier and Lacino 1984, 79; Boulez 1958, 22–23; Rae 2013, 164, 174n40). In English, the two terms 'microtone' and 'microinterval' are synonymous (Maclagan 2009, 109). 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 (Donval 2006, 119, 183; Jedrzejewski 2014, passim; Rigoni 1998, 314). Ezra Sims, in the article 'Microtone' in the second edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music (Apel 1974, 527) defines 'microtone' as 'an interval smaller than a semitone', which corresponds with Aristoxenus's use of the term diesis (Richter 2001). However, the unsigned article 'Comma, Schisma' in the same reference source calls comma, schisma and diaschisma 'microintervals' but not 'microtones' (Apel 1974, 188), 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' (Barbera 2003). 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 (Griffiths, Lindley, and Zannos 2001), 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 (Von Gunden 1986, 59), as 'enharmonic microtones' (Barbieri 2008, 139), 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' (Blesh 1946, 234). 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 (McNaught 1939, 102). In German the term Mikrotonalität came into use at least by 1958 (Prieberg 1958, 288; Prieberg 1960, 29–32, 210–12, inter al), 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 (Zaminer 2006, 94) while 'Mikroton' seems to prevail in discussions of the avant-garde music and music of Eastern traditions. The term 'microinterval' is used alongside 'microtone' by American musicologist Margo Schulter in her articles on medieval music (Schulter 1998; Schulter 2001). 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 (Griffiths and Lindley 1980; Griffiths, Lindley, and Zannos 2001). Microtonal variation of intervals is standard practice in the African-American musical forms of spirituals, blues and jazz (Cook and Pople 2004, 124–26). 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 (Griffiths and Lindley 1980; Griffiths, Lindley, and Zannos 2001). 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'' (Strangways 1914, 127n). Modern Indian researchers yet write: 'microtonal intervals called shrutis' (Datta, Sengupta, Dey, and Nag 2006, 18). In Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in the 1910s and 1920s the usual term continued to be Viertelton-Musik (quarter-tone music; Möllendorff 1917,), and the type of intervallic structure found in such music was called the Vierteltonsystem (Hába 1921,Hába 1922), 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)) (Capellen 1908, 184). 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 (Riemann 1967, 1032–33), and in the second edition of the popular Brockhaus Riemann Musiklexikon (Dahlhaus, Eggebrecht, and Oehl 1995, 304).