[PD] list issue [Off-topic]

[Jonathan Wilkes]

--- On Fri, 3/6/09, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:

> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> Subject: Re: [PD] list issue
> To: "Jonathan Wilkes" <jancsika at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "YOhannes" <THIS_IS_POP at web.de>, pd-list at iem.at
> Date: Friday, March 6, 2009, 1:29 AM
> On Thu, 5 Mar 2009, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> 
> > Unless you happen to be listening to Carter, Cowell,
> Ferneyhough, Johnston, Nancarrow, or anyone who has ever
> happened to use a quintuplet (Chopin, Elvin Jones, maybe Al
> Pacino in "Heat")
> 
> I didn't say that quintuplets don't happen!
> 
> I mean that quintuplets are relatively rare, and they
> rarely are used that much in one piece. You could take a
> complete piece of 5/4 and write it 4/4 and it would have
> quintuplets all over, and so you could take a piece that is
> mostly made of quintuplets and disguise it as a 5/4 without
> quintuplets, but if it wasn't all made of quintuplets,
> then the result should have some kind of anti-quintuplets,
> that is, multiplying the note durations by 1.25 times
> instead of 0.8 times. But I've never seen this in one
> notational form or another. Independently of how it's
> written, I've never heard it either.

You don't see that because composers generally don't hide quintuplets by adjusting the time signature.  Put anything intended for human musicians into 5/4, for example, and then you must subdivide the measure-- 3+2, 2+3, etc.-- because that's the first thing a player will want to know/feel when reading it.  So now each measure has some assymetrical subdivision.  Then any "anti-quintuplets" would have to be shown as tuplets (e.g., 4 in the space of 5), which, even if there are fewer of them, would be unecessarily complex because common time is, well, common, symmetrical, and easier to subdivide.

With quintuplets, there isn't (or at least ideally shouldn't be) an implicit hierarchy of beats within the quintuplet.  I think that's why they are favored in late-Romantic piano music, like Scriabin's Prelude No. 1, Op. 15, to get a kind of floating, improvisatory quality in a melody against the underlying pulse.  The "anti-quintuplets" here would be everything that's notated in the standard fashion.

> 
> So, there is this asymmetry whereby you can find plenty of
> patterns of accretion of durations in multiples of 5, but
> not much splitting of durations in multiples of 5.

You see plenty of examples of what Kyle Gann, in his Nancarrow biography, calls divisive rhythm-- dividing a measure up into groups of 5, 7, etc.-- in Schoenberg and many others.  There was evidently a big divide between supporters of this procedure, and the additive procedure of Stravinsky et al of building asymmetrical rhythmic groups from a common small subdivision like the 16th-note.  But for divisive rhythm, subdividing three or four levels deep quickly gets complicated and hard to read/conceptualize/perform/etc.  Many of Stockhausen's early scores (ab)use this degree of complexity.  He and others from the 50s evidently didn't find the need to stick strictly to one type of asymmetrical division, however-- there are triplets, nested in quintuplets, nested in whatever.  But who knows, maybe there's some integral serialist "pioneer" out there who decided to break with convention and write a piece only using nested quintuplets.

Henry Cowell divised a system of notation for things like "fifth-notes" in his book "New Musical Resources" from 1930.  I think he actually used them in Quartet Romantic, though I haven't seen the score in a while.

> 
> I'd be glad to get references to specific pieces that
> contain a lot of quintuplets. Of the five composers you
> named, I only heard Nancarrow, I only heard of Nancarrow,
> and then, I don't recall any quintuplets in it, but I
> didn't see the score and perhaps I couldn't grasp
> the rhythm of it just by ear (?).

What is the nature of the rhythm you're trying to grasp by ear?  If it's rhythm within a common pulse that divides strictly into subdivisions of fives (instead of twos), I don't think I know examples of any music that do that.  But it's intriguing to think about some kind of dance music being written with this constraint.

What I have heard are a) quintuplets to notate an independent tempo in a multi-tempo context: Elliott Carter's "A Mirror in Which to Dwell" b) quintuplets as obsessively/excessively written-out rubato: Ben Johnston's "Sonata for Microtonal Piano" and c) tempo ratios like 4/5/6 in Nancarrow's Study No. 49.

There's also the music of Brian Ferneyhough, which I don't know as well as the others.  But it's basically divisive rhythm in which long pulses are divided up into any number of large and small nested tuplets.  In this case the large tuplets have the effect of changing the tempo within the larger pulse.  I'm guessing if you took the patch that's part of this thread and periodically randomized the type of beat divisions, you'd end up with similar-sounding rhythms, with the restriction that any nested tuplet would divide into the same number of parts as it's parent.

> 
> It reminds me, I once applied in music composition at
> UQÀM, but when they sent me a letter telling me they wanted
> to test my piano skills with sheet music, I didn't
> reply, because I don't have any piano skills and
> can't read sheet music in realtime. The only instrument
> I was really ever proficient with was ScreamTracker, and boy
> did I abuse that thing. I made pieces in 21/8 time and
> whatnot. I found that notation much easier to deal with than
> classical notation... except for making quintuplets, that
> is.

So did you have to make your quintuplets in another program and then import them?

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