musica_ficta unhinged keep out the tritone the devil's interval 'false music' it's funny how way back in the 'dark ages' music was more organic and less predictable not leading the listener around by the nose but floating in simplicity and purity less need for tension and release in fact they didn't like tension and banished from music for many centuries not until the baroque age where the enlightenment changed the whole of society including art and we decided it was a good idea to have art imitate life adding more tension and stripping away the purity there is something about singing a two part chant perfectly in tune simple beautiful resonant pure (also you know, a tritone will never be perfectly in tune by the nature of the separate overtone series that the interval is made up of. i think that subconciously alarmed medieval sensibilites. they liked the open intervals; unisons, fifths, octaves. anything else disturbed the purity of their universe. it really does appeal to me somehow. it's more definitive.) 050928 ... oldphebe god. thanyou unhinged. you put that so clearly. I've been thinking recently about that kind of a thing...but you put much more coherently and succinctly then i ever could've. ... 050928 ... oE but then it's interesting that the whole hexachord thing produces a vibrational breath/amplitude that seems to summon from somewhere between the deep groanings of the soul and the whatever a real spooky kinda sound. ... 050928 ... unhinged i would guess that it's because pythagoras invented the initial science/math of music at a time when everything about human civilization was much simpler. but there are still plenty of things in our current society that resonate with plato and aristotle and we still study the geometry that pythagoras also came up with so long ago. we can thank the greeks for modes too and as primitive as some people may call them in the face of the millenia of music history in between now and then, i think they lend more of a universality to western music than tonality does. but anyways, i'm gonna shutup. i'm doing that 'snobby music thing' i get accused of doing. shutup nicole shutup. you always do that to me pheb; draw out the long_winded arrogance of all things musical. 050928 ... oldephebe well..i mean it's not log winded arrogance if you're reaching into your considerable repository of learning to address something honestly for the benefit of someone else. I mean it just comes surging forth, how is that arrogant ... 050928 ... unhinged it was strange to me at first that back in the heyday of modes even thirds and sixths were considered dissonant but i've always had a problem playing those intervals in tune and from what i've read they had an even harder time tuning them back then. i have a sore spot for history. i like to connect the dots across long periods of time; look at the beginning and the end and see how much change has taken place. and i had a good music history prof in my undergrad that liked to connect the initial dots of the larger picture for us instead of spewing a bunch of seemingly meaningless facts at us. i still sometimes struggle with becoming a musicologist. or even an ethnomusicologist. but then i'd be in school forever. and i'd have to become fluent in italian, german, and french. that's a lot of language... 050928 ... unhinged i don't feel like it's particularly arrogant myself, but i've been told on several different occasions that i seem to be that way over the internet so i find myself apologizing for it because the accusation can even be flung at me. and when it comes to blather and music, i still cringe a little to this day when i think of the brahms page. 050928 ... unhinged *before rather gah 050928 ... oldephebe Well, I mean you don't have to accept someone erroneously arrived at assessment. I mean thier own dearth of knowledge in the area could have instinctively triggered thier insecurity and out of some compensatory ego preserving reflex they made the whole arrogant statement. I find your discourses to be pretty enthralling, and that's not pretty with a pink bow, but pretty as in eyes all agog and the you know the whole rapt silence amidst the storm of your erudition but not with the stream of drool wending its way down the right side of my mouth--casue I generally like to think of myself as being as not being too obtuse--but still why feel ashamed of your knowledge? ... 050928 ... unhinged i'm not ashamed of my knowledge but rather how people perceive my expression of it, especially on the internet. in the pure modes before the advent of chromatic alteration the only tritone that existed was the one between f and b and rather than raise the b they lowered it 050929 ... god you love music. nothing to be ashamed of. more power to you. 050930 ... not god p.s. like mickey d's sez: i'm lovin' it! keep up the music talk. it's educational. 050930 ... oldephebe well unhinged - maybe you considerable knowledge will motivate others to educate themselves. ... 051005 what's it to you? who go blather from