The Quarter-Tone Problem (and Hába's "Field Shifting" Solution)

One of the ways to make 24-EDO manageable.
Link to quarter-tone dissertation: www.tierceron.com/diss/haba/h...
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Classical Nerd is a weekly video series covering music history, theoretical concepts, and techniques, hosted by composer, pianist, and music history aficionado Thomas Little.
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Music:
- Thomas Little: Dance! #2 in E minor, Op. 1 No. 2, performed by Rachel Fellows, Michael King, and Bruce Tippette
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[@HAFCToner]

This was good stuff. Think it could have involved more audio examples though

[@ClassicalNerd]

*Two things:* 1. This wasn't Hába's _only_ microtonal approach, or even his only approach to 24-EDO. I think I made that clear in the video but I just wanted to be extra clear here. 2. One of my resolutions for the channel in 2019 is to intersperse videos on interesting topics that I've come across in my research with videos pulled from the request pool. It keeps things interesting for me from a writing and editing perspective, and should provide more content for the channel than just composer biographies-which I enjoy doing, but not to the point that it consumes everything else!

[@jessicamateus2074]

Would be really cool if you created a topic where you analyse classical music pieces in detail. Could you analyse Rachmaninov n2 and 3 and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concertos? that would be REALLY awesome

[@meyerbeer13]

Do you know anything about Egyptian music?

[@nathanbeebe7604]

I thought that the last chord change was very interesting! I've been trying to get into quarter tones as a way of getting new chords and dissonances, but field shifting is also an interesting use of quarter tones. I just really like those creepy sounds you can get, or playing around with neutral chords. My bass and guitar teacher both thought I was weird for that. Anyways, I enjoyed the video.

[@ClassicalNerd]

I'm a big fan of the neutral seventh, actually-the perfects fifths from the two "fields" make everything sound more intentional than a standard neutral triad.

[@FASTFASTmusic]

Finally I found a name for what I've been experimenting with!

[@joshscores3360]

I had a similar idea myself, but instead of there being two "fields", there would be other intervals instead of perfect fourths and fifths. On 16-EDO, for example, there is a circle of sixths instead of a circle of fifths.

[@lisaayres-zp5jj]

the 3rd harmonic is overrated i only enjoy intervals with multiples of 5 or higher primes /s

[@buttclef]

Schnittke used them so well in his Piano Quintet.

[@alsatusmd1A13]

The other problem with 24-EDO is that it still fails to distinguish chromatic and diatonic "semitones", which is a reason that people go into practicing microtones that has nothing necessarily to do with pure Just Intonation intervals, "semitones" being generally handled as dissonances anyway. But it is possible to have "quarter"tones and distinguish chromatic and diatonic "semitones", it's just that, underneath 28-EDO, you can't really do it without noticeably tempering perfect fifths (22-EDO stays the closest, but it still doesn't manage better than ~1/3 of a syntonic comma sharp).

[@thenameisgsarci]

You should do a video on Ivan Wyschnegradsky. :)

[@ClassicalNerd]

Duly noted: lentovivace.com/classicalnerd.html

[@Androslop]

The video is very instructive but there is just one example of how it sounds and it is at the end. I would like to hear more examples during the video, so that I can understand everything better. Greetings from Catalonia.

[@aakashchakrabarty4262]

Videos like this are very are appreciated and wish to have more of them 😀

[@ClassicalNerd]

I really enjoy doing more unusual, theory-related videos like this one, but I always have to do them of my own volition because I rarely-if ever-get viewer requests for them.

[@aakashchakrabarty4262]

@@ClassicalNerd I guess your viewer are not that nerdy haha Anyway I myself as a viewer would love have a series where you could teach orchestration and yes such weirdo theory related stuffs too.😀

[@nowandxenpodcast]

That resolution at the end makes the D sesqui-flat mM7 sound like the tonic to me :)

[@Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

Part of the reason for field shifting may have been the difficulty of playing notes on both of the tonally interleaved 12EDO keyboards at the same time unless you got all the quarter tone note on one hand and all of the whole and half tone notes on the other -- with the keyboards close, you could do some reaching to get some combinations with one hand, but it would be limited. You can see the same phenomenon in KZbin videos of much earlier music played on the arcicembalo and arciorgano, which also used 2 keyboards to get more notes. As far as I know, nobody invented an isomorphic keyboard until the 1800s,and none for a piano until the late mid 1800s, since that is not just a matter of ergonomics for the player, but also the requirement to make a mechanism that works, which is harder on a piano than on a harpsichord or organ. Look how massive the quarter tone piano is -- a truly blended microtonal piano would require some kind of radical redesign for anything over 19 notes per octave (and without a radical redesign, even 19 notes per octave would compromise strings per note and thus sound output), whereas people eventually figured out how to cram 19, 24, or even 31 notes per octave into a single manual harpsichord.

[@cewill3322]

Another note is people have told me that I have the vocals of Australian throat-singing. I don't know if this means that quarter notes are thing in that.

[@maherabdelkhalek]

How it's possible to be interested in Quarter tones melody and harmony and you didn't even mention the Arabic, Turkish and Persian Music which own the soul, the theory and the innovation in tonalities with quarter, half-quarter and even quarter of the quarter tones?!!

[@ClassicalNerd]

This is just about bringing an interesting theory of Hába to light, not quarter-tones as a whole.

[@maherabdelkhalek]

Hába did like he reinvented the wheel with wrong way (in term of tonality discordance and concordance), at that time there were lots of compositions done in Quarter tones 24-Tet and even 96-Tet in Arabic world with beautiful melodies and based on some theories, I'm sure if he was informed about that he would have composed more meaningful songs than these discordance. Here is an example where 96-Tet are used without discordance : kzbin.info/www/bejne/aperqmdjo9uJj5Y

[@cewill3322]

I'm trying to find an actual solution to my singing. For some reason, I sing in quarter tune(frequently). No one has an answer to it yet, as far as I've seen. I just want to know if I can make this a new age singing thing. Or am I just that far gone?

[@Dayanto]

This system of using multiple parallel scales works in any non-prime TET system, and is generally referred to as "polychromatic".

[@rubengilquinonez7273]

Hi, Classical Nerd. What's your take on Julian Carrillo's microtonal music?

[@ClassicalNerd]

I've not done a deep analytical dive into it (although I'd like to some day). I find his music to be very similar to a lot of the other microtonal experimentalists of that era: extremely bold and innovative on a conceptual level, but-as the times in which they lived lacked synthesis technology-practicality and dissemination proved too difficult for their theories to catch on ... so while I enjoy Carrillo, Hába, Wyschnegradsky, etc., almost all the microtonal/xenharmonic stuff I listen to is by contemporary composers, because a larger theoretical basis has been built and synthesizers have come such a long way.

[@alamooji3716]

Subscribed

[@vitulus_]

I think quarter tone music could sound fine if people knew how to use it. Over use of quarter tones sounds horrible. However, a touched of subminor and supermajor triads goes a long way. I like to differientiate between microtonal chord qualities and microtonal chord progressions. The qualities is where people will have the most trouble but can still be useful. For example, I found that a subdiminished triad (triad built from subminor thirds) sounds very cramped while a supermajor triad sounds overly bright and sappy. However with progressions, it is much easier, you do some neat stuff like a major third to a perfect fourth by a quarter tone which also subsequencly goes from I to half-sharp III (I like to call it a subchromatic mediant).

[@classicalmusic3334]

Interesting video! I've already given a few suggestions before, but (only if possible) I would like to upvote George Enescu. I'm also really looking forward to the Frank Zappa video, I'm sure it's going to be amazing! Another composer who worked a lot with quarter-tones was Ivan Wyschnegradsky. He even composed a 31st-tone piece, for the Fokker 31-tone organ. What would we be your take on his music?

[@ClassicalNerd]

Enescu has been bumped, although-given the sheer number of requests in the pool-I can't take any more from you until one of the ones you've already requested has been published. The Zappa video has proven one of the most difficult scripts I've had to write thus far. I could devote this entire channel to talking about Zappa's works from various angles and still never get to the bottom of it, as he was just so prolific and eclectic. Of the early 20th century quarter-tone enthusiasts, Wyschnegradsky is one of my favorites ... that said, he and his contemporaries were just starting to dig into this really wide world and didn't have the synthesis technology of today. As a result, I really enjoy the xenharmonic music of contemporary composers; the theoretical foundation laid by Wyschnegradsky, Hába, Carrillo, Ives, etc., combined with advances in music technology have resulted in some really fantastic, diverse stuff.

[@EarlyMusicGrooves]

dude please come back to your channel, pls

[@Gargantupimp]

I agree with Habas method. But I think you were too negative about quarter tones and making them seem insufficient... In listening to microtonal music, I've found quarter tones the most compelling. Why? Because, as much as I love the sound of a perfectly tuned third, music isn't about pure intervals, but about expressing artistic and clever ideas through fascinating and recognizable motion. 24 tet contains 12 tet, and so you get all the recognizability and tropes of 12 tet but expanded with more possibilities. Techniques such as chromatic passing tones can be expanded to be passing quarter tones. Chromatic bassline which is so popular can be made even more "crawly". The example you gave at the end is perfect! It shows how voice leading can be even more intense using quarter tones. Compare this to Bohlen-Pierce which has pure intervals but just sounds like unrecognizable weirdness. Haba's sonata sounds like a normal 20th century "jazzy" sonata just turned up a notch. I wouldn't even call most 24 tet pieces "xenoharmony" since it is more like an extension of 12 tet. However 24 is divisible by 8 and a piece using that "whole and a quarter" scale would be truly alien, "desert island rain" from Sevish uses a scale of whole step followed by quarter step. So I guess that's another awesome thing about quarter tones, it contains the familiar as well as the alien, where's Bohlen-Pierce is just alien.

[@MrLanceDaily]

Do a video on the composer Ilayaraja

[@ClassicalNerd]

I don't cover living composers as their careers are not over.

[@MrLanceDaily]

How about Ravi Shankar?

[@MuzikJunky]

Mohamed Abdel Wahab, then, maybe? Peace.

[@ZachSeely]

I wish the rest of these words were used with apprehension. This is quite a misrepresentation of a number of topics. In any case...keep going.

[@klisd]

4:10

[@cactusowo1835]

So no neutral chords and harmony? No 11/8? I don't know who made these rules, yet I kinda fail to see why would I use 24edo just to have two sets of 12edo instead of using other scales like 22edo or 31edo that can give lead out creativity since these step out of the boundaries of traditional harmony.

[@ClassicalNerd]

This is just one way you can use quarter-tones-even Hába himself didn't stick to it all of the time. (And his best pieces, in my view, are the ones that go even further afield.)

[@davidmcleod1760]

Didnt understand a word of that

[@cactusowo1835]

"Microtonal music is not all quarter tones" -Me 2022

[@MuzikJunky]

Why didn’t you use any Arabic classical music, such as songs sung by Umm Kulthum? That’s not out of tune-it’s just the way it is! And what about so-called Oriental keyboards? Peace.

[@ClassicalNerd]

This is a particular way that a particular Western composer figured out how to use these intervals-not intended to be a comprehensive look at quarter-tones across all of human music-making. That would be a _much_ longer video!