Introduction to “microtonal music”, pt. I
by Cameron Bobro
What if we took all that stuff about “feeling” and “expression” in music seriously and honestly? What happens if we are genuine in our claims that music is more than mere language, and also operates at rawer physical levels?
Rhythm would probably be the first place we would experience such things in music, I’m sure you will agree.
So, we’d turn on the radio and we’d hear every imaginable kind of rhythm. One piece of music would have a tempo so quick as to be almost a blur, another piece would move at a glacial pace. Others would limp, or skip, or change rhythm continually. Some rhythms would be simple, others hopelessly complex. Something we would certainly hear if musical rhythm were physically linked to our experience would be what is called “polyrhythm”, which is more than one rhythm playing at the same time.
In other words, the rhythms would be like our feelings, our experiences: extremely varied. Rhythms would range from the most simple and clear to hopelessly confusing, and everything in between… like our emotions and our lives do.
Would we have all kinds of crazy rhythmic stuff running 24/7, endless variety without a pattern in sight? No. For one thing, I’m not talking about crude mimesis, artistic expression via direct imitation. In our lives, we may feel a romantic lilt no longer than a butterfly’s blink, but when that moment is expressed in music, we do want the waltz to last a few minutes, don’t we.
If simple mimesis were what the arts are about, we wouldn’t need the arts at all. Brute mimesis, simple imitation of the “real thing”, is just a step on the path to cutting out the middleman of art and expression altogether. Simply hire some lunatic to fire up a chainsaw, rip through the silver screen and leap into the audience to hack them to pieces, and voila, scariest horror film ever! With significant savings on the production budget.
No, I’m not talking about recording squeaking bed springs to use as rhythm tracks in love songs. And I am not saying that any one musician would or could express “everything”, or even express every emotion they themselves experience. Any single musician, or school or style, might very well concentrate on some very specific sensations. And an expressive rhythm might vary wildly in a literal sense from what it is expressing, much as great speed in films is sometimes expressed or emphasized by using slow motion. And I am emphatically NOT saying that every musician and listener would feel the same rhythms for the same expressive purposes.
What I am saying is something that I think no one could honestly deny: if there really are physical connections between music and feelings, emotions, and so on, then however the connections might be made, it must be the case that if music is expressive of anything but a tiny subset of human experience, this music will have at the very least a variety – a great variety- of different rhythms.
One thing that can not happen when music is physically connected to us in any kind of sensual, sexual, animal, real life way, is that we would turn on the radio and hear only variations on a four-square boom-chick boom-chick rhythm.
Now I would ask you to turn on the radio and roll the dial about a bit.
Hmmmm…
Cameron Bobro 
Brilliant stuff, I’d love for this sort of thing to take flight and for the general public to start reading listening to and exploring the stuff we’ve been fascinated by in our little cliques. Microtonal music for me has so far been a bit of a solo venture, but I’d love to jump on the bandwagon and start actively spreading the word a bit more
Cam
Thanks, Cam! Swank moniker you’ve got there, by the way.
Well, really I’m writing from the viewpoint of “musician”- my relationship with the online “microtonal” and “xenharmonic” community is “attempting damage control”.
The heavy thing few want to confront is that it’s defaulting to
12-tET that’s the geeky “math” thing. The “normal” thing, the “standard” thing, for a musician as contrasted to a theatrical athlete or combinatorist, is “the tuning your soul desires, whatever that may be”.
Indeed, although this kind of ‘defaulting’ has probably been around in some form ever since there were instrumentalists who couldn’t tune their instruments. Even in the Pythagorean and Meantone eras organists, guitarists, and the like must have either struggled with their instruments to produce the sounds they were after, or else given up and defaulted, just as the general mass have done much more absolutely in the last century or so.