Includes a chronological list (in ten sections, with citations of opinions of the books), alphabe... more Includes a chronological list (in ten sections, with citations of opinions of the books), alphabetical lists of titles and authors (with cross-references to the chronological list) etc.
Mainly an account of Gandhi's views in regard to the major religions and to issues of theism and ... more Mainly an account of Gandhi's views in regard to the major religions and to issues of theism and atheism. Includes Lavanam's personal reminiscences of Gandhi.
“Lindley verfolgt mit souveräner Kenntnis eine in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte übliche Methode, Ge... more “Lindley verfolgt mit souveräner Kenntnis eine in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte übliche Methode, Geschichte als Folge von Lösungsversuchen zu einem Problem zu konstruieren. Seine Notenbeispiele, die vom Buxheimer Orgelbuch bis zu einer Sarabande von d’Anglebert reichen, zeigen, wie bestimmte kompositorische Wendungen die Grenzen der akustischen Verträglichkeit einer Stimmung offenbaren.” ("Neue Zeitschrift für Musik")
Surveys various approaches to tuning a lute or viol really well (seeing to the exact spacing of t... more Surveys various approaches to tuning a lute or viol really well (seeing to the exact spacing of the frets) as described from the 1520s to the 1740s. Attention is given to some distinguished composers (Milán, Dowland, Monteverdi, Marais), some seminal figures in the early history of modern science (V. Galilei, Mersenne, Lord Brouncker) and a number of encyclopedic or didactic writers on music (Gerle, Bermudo, Ganassi, Zarlino, Praetorius). Includes practical instruction, conclusions about Renaissance and Baroque performance practices, and an appendix by Gerhard Söhne on the historical use of proportions and geometric curves in lute design.
This set of Webpages is about the meaning for J. S. Bach – and the potential musical significance... more This set of Webpages is about the meaning for J. S. Bach – and the potential musical significance for performers today – of the expression "wohl temperirt" (meaning "well tempered") in the title of "Das wohl temperirte Clavier" (Part I, 1722).
Everyone agrees that "Clavier" meant "keyboard instrument," and that the word "temperirt" referred to an aspect of keyboard tuning. Nearly everyone agrees also that Bach intended a single kind of tuning to accommodate the musical content of the work (preludes and fugues in twelve major and twelve minor keys). But there is disagreement as to whether he is more likely to have preferred uniform semitones (as normally in modern piano-tuning) and hence no nuances of intonation among the various keys, or, instead, subtle nuances giving each major and each minor key a more distinct acoustical character than those due merely to differences in overall pitch level. And, among those who think he preferred nuances there is disagreement as to exactly which kind.
One purpose of this set of Webpages is to give some answers based on my documentary, musical and craftsmanly research during the last 35 years. There will be a few oblique references to relevant documentary (i.e. non-musical) evidence, but no attempt to offer a comprehensive survey of it as in some of my printed publications. Most of the presentation here will be like a long lecture-demonstration (much of it *was* a long lecture-demonstration), but with some of the material shunted to subsidiary pages accommodating the backgrounds and interests of different viewers/auditors.
I have another purpose as well: to show (as I believe the lecture-demonstration did successfully) that the nuances of a Bach-style, subtly unequal temperament can be of value not just to harpsichordists and organists but also to pianists when performing compositions which were in fact conceived implicitly in the context of such nuances.
Am Beispiel von Beethovens1802 komponierten Variationen für Klavier F-Dur op.34 wird in historisc... more Am Beispiel von Beethovens1802 komponierten Variationen für Klavier F-Dur op.34 wird in historischanalytischem und instrumentenkundlichem Kontext die Angemessenheit einer aus der Stimmungsgeschichte abgeleiteten, nicht gleichstufigen Art von Temperatur postuliert und erprobt. Mit Hilfe der dem Buch beiliegenden CD können die Resultate dieses Versuchs in direktem Vergleich zur herkömmlichen Stimmung überprüft werden, anhand zahlreicher Klangbeispiele auch aus anderen Klavierwerken Beethovens, dargeboten auf dem historischen Brodmann-Flügel aus dem Besitz Carl Maria von Webers im Berliner Musikinstrumenten-Museum. Eine auf die Praxis zielende Stimmanweisung möchte dazu ermuntern, eigene Proben auf das vorgestellte Exempel zu machen.
Turkey is one of the most Westernized Muslim countries and is, geographically as well as cultural... more Turkey is one of the most Westernized Muslim countries and is, geographically as well as culturally, "between" the West and much of the rest of the world. The first masterful Turkish composer of polyphony, Cemal Resit Rey (1904-85), was the son of an important Ottoman statesman who happened to be posted to Paris in 1913. Alfred Cortot, said in 1928 that Rey was for Turkey what Albeniz had been for Spain or Borodin for Russia. In our opinion, Rey's historical achievement was more than that. Ex.1 shows the beginning and end of Rey's La légende du bebek ("The Legend of the [Turkish] Baby"): Poème symphonique pour orchestre (1928). The opening sonorities are close to tone-clusters; the conclusion, written with equal assurance and aplomb, differs remarkably from the kind of thing one would expect to hear at the end of a 19th-century-type symphonic poem. The overall range of musical styles in Rey's compositions did not change very much in later years. It was fairly "contemporary" by Western standards in the 1920s, but no longer so in the latter part of the century. The last of his three piano concertos (composed in 1960-61) consists of a set of 21 "Variations on an Istanbul Folk-Song"; a Western listener might readily be reminded of certain music by Fauré (whose course in musical aesthetics Rey had attended in Paris), Mussorgsky, Ravel, Stravinsky (before 1913) etc. Exx.3 and 4 are from the vocal score of his last major work, an opera entitled "Çelebi." Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-72) was born in Istanbul, the son of culturally erudite parents. His teachers in Paris included Isidor Philipp and Nadia Boulanger. When a state-sponsored conservatory was founded in 1936 in Ankara, Erkin was appointed head of the piano department, a position which he held with distinction for the rest of his life. He was an expert composer as well. Ex.5 illustrates his magisterially skillful pianism and clear use of contemporary kinds of chords. Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-1991), the greatest 20th-century Turkish composer, studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ and Gregorian chant at the Paris Conservatoire, and composition with Vincent D'Indy at the Schola Cantorum. He collaborated in 1936 with Bartók in collecting Anatolian songs, and his study of folk music went well beyond this as it included archival research in Istanbul and technical analysis of songs from Hungary, Finland and the Urals as well as Turkey. That study was adjunct to his technical progress, as a composer, from making use of folk tunes to developing a polyphonic quasi-Turkish modalism which, in effect, reduced or eliminated altogether the need to cite particular songs. His "Yunus Emre Oratorio" (Opus 26,1947) is comparable in stature to the Verdi and Britten requiems. More germane to the focus of this essay, the String Quartet No. 1, Opus 27, which was the first of his several compositions based motivically and harmonically on a small "module" or "nucleus." Ex.6a shows how the work begins; Ex.6b shows the last six bars of the first movement and the beginning of the second movement, which is (like Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings composed ten years later) in a mode which an academic Western musician is likely to hear as Phrygian transposed up a semitone from E to F; but here, unlike in Barber's Adagio, the radiance of the notes does not depend on chords but on a freshly conceived kind of contrapuntal exploitation of direct relations among the scale degrees, with quasi-canonic imitations and with neighbor notes hovering around the main pillars of the mode. The third movement (see Ex.7) is a Minuet making use of the module but with a Trio almost entirely, except for a quasi-Lydian F# about three-fourths of the way through, in the simplest kind of pentatonic scale. The last movement evokes unmistakably a horon—a kind of rural Turkish dance full of additive-rhythm-type vigor—preceded by a slow introduction to separate the two different kinds of stylized dance: the one from 18th-century Western Europe and the other from the Black-Sea region of Turkey. The second movement of Saygun's Symphony No. 4, Opus 53 (1974), in Ab-minor, is an example of his mature mastery of quasi-Phrygian modalism. Ex.8 shows how the second movement begins in Ab but soon modulates (see bars 4-7) to Gb/F#-minor, the main key of the movement. Saygun's most popular work of piano music has been the bright and straightforward "Twelve Preludes on Aksak-Rhythms," Opus 45 (1967). Ex.9 is the first half or so of the first of them. Ex.10 is the first four pages of his fifth and last symphony, Opus 70 (1984). It begins with is a masterful passage of Klangfarbenmusik-like embellishment of a G7 chord, but then an analogous treatment of F establishes a quasi-mixolydian VII as the first point of modulation.... It would be more appropriate to call the composer of this symphony "a Beethoven who happened to be Turkish" than "a Turkish Albinez." The harmonic language is based less on mere triads (and indeed none of the first three movements ends on a triad or on a root of a triad) than on a variety of other kinds of pitch-class sets. Many of the chords combine two interlocked triads, at least one of them garnished with a dominant-7th interval, while one slow line indicates which of the two belongs to the momentarily governing key. The richness of the chords has a decisive effect on the logic of the chord progressions, and the composer understood the new logic so well that the progressions are very sure-footed. The instrumentation is vital to the harmony; the composer, evidently always imagining the specific timbres and types of articulation and not just the notes, fused an innovative and powerful use of tonality with a quasi-Schoenbergian sense of Klangfarbenmusik. Saygun as a teacher of young musicians tried to compensate for the negative effect of solfège—a bane of Turkish conservatory drilling—by composing a set of 150 musically artful sight-reading exercises, three of which are shown in Ex.11. Necil Kâzam Akses (1908-99), less Francophile than the three composers from whose music we have shown some examples, collaborated with Hindemith in founding in 1936 the Ankara State Conservatory, where he then taught composition. It is fashionable to refer to Rey, Saygun, Erkin, Akses and Hasan Ferit Alnar as "the Turkish Five," but the idea is irrelevant to our topic even though they were all born between 1904 and 1908 and were all masterful composers some ofwhose works are still performed nowadays. Ilhan Usmanbas (1921- )studied composition in Istanbul with Rey, Alnar, Saygun and Dallapiccola (as well as piano with Erkin), and had useful interactions with Babbitt, Cowell and Feldman. He took up serialism in the 1950s. Ex.12 shows the beginning of the third of his "Five Studies" for violin and piano (1953-56). In the 1960s and '70s he devised a remarkably resourceful variety of aleatoric and "mobile-form" techniques. Ex.13 shows one sample of this aspect of his development as a composer. In the 1980s and '90s he probed certain kinds of minimalism. Bülent Arel (1919-1990) studied composition there with Akses, and piano with Erkin, and after spending three years in the USA, mush of it at the Columbia-Princeton electronic-music studio in New York, came home to Turkey in 1962, found it unfeasible to establish an electronic-music studio there, and so returned in 1965 to the USA. His electronic music is remarkably clear and "clean." He used no musique-concrète-type elements, nor any improvisatory techniques. Instead, he would conceive in his imagination and compose carefully, on a separate short bit of tape, each sound destined to become an electronic-music phoneme or brief event (less than three seconds long), having in mind already the musical context where it was to be used; and then he would put the items together by splicing tape-strips and by "mixing." The final result would be analogous to a pointillist painting with each "point" or tiny patch designed microscopically and with all the bits fitted seamlessly together. Upon hearing the result, a sophisticated listener is likely to gloss it with a subtext of delight at the combination of imaginative clarity and craftsmanly refinement. The other great Turkish master of electronic music, Ilhan Mimaroglu (1926- ), is the son of a famous architect. A Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to move in 1955 to Manhattan, where he steeped himself in the music of Charlie Parker, earned a graduate degree at Columbia University, taking a seminar in musicology with P. H. Lang as well as studying composition with Ussachevsky, Varèse and Wolpe. He cultivated a broader range of compositional techniques. (1) He developed some engaging ways of using the studio equipment of the 1960s to improvise aural textures and gestures, and made use of some of the improvised results in some of his compositions. Improvisation has always been the handmaiden of traditional techniques of composition for non-electronic instruments. An analogous approach to electronic composition was an historically fruitful development. (2) Whereas the microphone had no substantial role in the creation of Arel's musical materials, in several of Mimaroglu's short pieces of the 1960s and '70s, all the sounds were, by means of various kinds of electronic processing, derived from the recorded sounds, including the articulative "attacks" of the notes as well as their "steady-state" timbres, of a single musical instrument. His pieces composed with this peculiar kind of investigative discipline have a certain kind of sonorous unity and a distinctive element of cognitive interest. (3) Electronic-music concerts (nearly all of which take place just at universities) routinely make use of four speakers in the four corners of the auditorium, yielding thus a fourfold antiphony. Some of Mimaroglu's later compositions include richly multi-layered textures. For instance, in a composition entitled "Tract" (1972-74) he included a "recording-within-a-recording" section with quite a few layers of simultaneously heard components: a layer originating from a recording-session of a popular singer, plus a "composed re-enactment" of such a session, plus fragments of earlier recordings by the same singer, plus a layer depicting "the outside world as it pertains to her chosen field of activity," plus "further layers consisting of purely musical material (synthesized and processed) ... including vocal ostinatos tying all the other structures together and also defining the climate." (4) Most of Mimaroglu's electronic compositions that are more than five minutes long include spoken statements which are clearly intended to be taken seriously rather than as a mere pretext for musical elaboration. A work making good antiphonal use of simultaneously heard spoken statements is Mimaroglu's Sessions (1975), which includes recordings of piano music (composed by him for this particular use) played by Idil Biret and which presents, in an aesthetically convincing electronic-music texture, the voices of three men with distinctly different ways of speaking English. While a lawyer reads, in an appropriately stiff voice, a contract full of convoluted legalese, an accountant lists in a suitably deadpan voice the various expenses of the re-cording, and a publicist chats, in a virtual telephone call to a crony, about how to publicize it—his gabble being full of phrases like "You know what I mean?", "Does she like organic food?" and "Where were we?—oh yes, the T-shirts...." In the 1950s and '60s, various electronic-music composers were being inventive in various different ways in Paris, Cologne, Milan, Stockholm and Tokyo as well as New York; and Mimaroglu synthesized a broader range of the resulting techniques than did any of the others. Ahmet Yürür (1941- ) is a cosmopolitan ethnomusicologist as well as an expert composer. After spending sevceral years abroad in ethnomusicological studies and research, he returned home in 1986 a serial composer (to the dismay of his Turkish mentor, Saygun). He has contributed to the expansion of contemporary techniques of composition by stretching the concept of concert performance in a somewhat John-Cage-like way but with the narrative flow of the work still due mainly to its aural aspects. Ex.14 is the beginning of a fugue in Yürür's "The Pied Piper" for chamber ensemble (1990). A nice feature of the dodecaphonic aspect of the music is that the row is comprised of four clearly interrelated three-note cells. This is Webern-type erial technique. What was technically new about the composition was that since this part of it narrates a scene of the rats following the Pied Piper as he charms them with his flute, the composer instructs the performers to represent the rats not only by playing the notes in the score but also by suggesting, with physical movements on the stage, a visual image of the rats clambering over one another in pursuit of the Pied Piper—and likewise, mutatis mutandis, in the other sections of the work. Hasan Uçarsu (1965- ) studied composition with Saygun and Cengiz Tanç (an outstanding former student of Saygun's), and world music with Yürür—who suggested that he complete his graduate studies in the USA, where his teachers included George Crumb. He negotiates with sophisticated, Klangfarben-savvy craftsmanship between a style of widely popular appeal and some of Saygun's harmonic techniques. We examine in some detail a work of his which was commissioned by "The Silk Road Project."
Three phases of 20th-century economic theory are described: (1) positing two basic factors of pro... more Three phases of 20th-century economic theory are described: (1) positing two basic factors of production (i.e. for wage-labour and for capital possessions); (2) positing an additional, culture-dependent factor leveraging the productivity of labour; Amartya’s work and that of Robert Solow belong to this phase; (3) taking account also of environmental factors. A chronological sampling of statements by Amartya is cited, mainly from: “An Aspect of Indian Agriculture” (1962), Resources, Values and Development (1984), Sustainable Human Development: Concepts and Priorities (1994, influenced by Solow), the Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress and “The Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress Revisited: Reflections and Overview” (2009), and An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (2013). An emphatic pro-GDP-growth statement made by Amartya in 2006 to the International Society of Ecological Economics is also included. A combination of four reasons why he has not taken ecological economics more to heart is suggested: (1) he has wanted to take it for granted that (as Keynes had put it in 1929) the future would offer “far more wealth ... and possibilities of personal life than the past has ever offered”, and has been unwilling to risk his popularity by proposing that the affluent moderate their rates of per capita consumption; (2) because of his concern about relieving current poverty, he has been afraid that to dwell on concerns in behalf of the unborn would aggravate the exclusive concern of the affluent for their own progeny; (3) as a theorist he wants to avoid dealing in detail with uncertainties; (4) he has therefore hoped that macro-ecological problems wouldn’t be as bad as predicted. Some reasons are described for believing that ecological economics and an ecological sensibility are important: When it is clear that the future will be very different from the past, extrapolations (as in “take-off” theory) from data about the past are of little use for predicting the future; notwithstanding many great uncertainties as to detail, there is a palpable risk that the well-being or even the survival of humankind for the next few centuries is endangered by the current rates, unprecedented in the history of humankind, of several kinds of environmental degradation; to gamble blindly for higher stakes than humankind can afford to lose is crazy unless the cost of not gambling would be similar. This essay has five appendices: (1) a supplementary sketch of Amartya as an economist (apart from ecological economics); a sketch of 21st-century environmental degradation, distinguishing between depletion of non-renewable mineral resources, renewable natural resources being used up faster than the Earth renews them, ecologically destructive dislocations of natural materials, pollution (a matter of natural “sinks” becoming “overloaded”), climate change (related to global warming), a very fast rate of extinctions of biological species (especially of big creatures), and yet a flourishing of “super-bacteria” and more virulent viruses; (3) an account of Solow’s argument against limits-to-growth theory and of an analogous argument made by Friedrich Engels; (4) an explanation of the difference between “strong-sustainability” and “weak-sustainability” reckonings (e.g. as made, in regard to India by Partha Dasgupta, Kenneth Arrow et al.); (5) a relevant text by Amartya published in 2014.
Agronomic terms for interactions between pedosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and litho... more Agronomic terms for interactions between pedosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere are explained; likewise the distinction between meteorological, agricultural and hydrological droughts. Two droughts in Maharashtra – 1970s, 2012 – are compared and it is shown on the basis of data from a Maharashtra State Commissionariate of Agriculture internal Memorandum on Drought Situation in Rabi 2012 and Mitigation Plan (revised, 2013) that the 2012 one was to some extent agricultural but mainly hydrological: its economic consequences were far worse than a 90%-good monsoon would likely have caused in the first half of the 20th century. Arguments drawing upon work of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) are advanced to the effect that such tragedies will recur until environmentally sound policies have been devised and well implemented: Maharashtran farmers and government policies should expect “unpredictable anomalies” getting worse. An appendix by Pranav Bhatnagar provides some additional, district-by-district data to this effect. Long-term damage due to the Green Revolution is analysed. Remedial proposals are set out under five headings. 1: Rejuvenate aquifers and prevent erosion by means of micro-watershed management. 2: Incentivise farmers to grow well chosen combinations of cultivars adapted to local conditions of pedosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. 3: Reallocate uses of some of the state’s land according to its long-term biosustainable capabilities. 4: Persuade and enable people to use water less wastefully and do rain-water harvesting. 5: Get politicians to reverse the environmentally catastrophic policy of building more big dams.
Includes a chronological list (in ten sections, with citations of opinions of the books), alphabe... more Includes a chronological list (in ten sections, with citations of opinions of the books), alphabetical lists of titles and authors (with cross-references to the chronological list) etc.
Mainly an account of Gandhi's views in regard to the major religions and to issues of theism and ... more Mainly an account of Gandhi's views in regard to the major religions and to issues of theism and atheism. Includes Lavanam's personal reminiscences of Gandhi.
“Lindley verfolgt mit souveräner Kenntnis eine in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte übliche Methode, Ge... more “Lindley verfolgt mit souveräner Kenntnis eine in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte übliche Methode, Geschichte als Folge von Lösungsversuchen zu einem Problem zu konstruieren. Seine Notenbeispiele, die vom Buxheimer Orgelbuch bis zu einer Sarabande von d’Anglebert reichen, zeigen, wie bestimmte kompositorische Wendungen die Grenzen der akustischen Verträglichkeit einer Stimmung offenbaren.” ("Neue Zeitschrift für Musik")
Surveys various approaches to tuning a lute or viol really well (seeing to the exact spacing of t... more Surveys various approaches to tuning a lute or viol really well (seeing to the exact spacing of the frets) as described from the 1520s to the 1740s. Attention is given to some distinguished composers (Milán, Dowland, Monteverdi, Marais), some seminal figures in the early history of modern science (V. Galilei, Mersenne, Lord Brouncker) and a number of encyclopedic or didactic writers on music (Gerle, Bermudo, Ganassi, Zarlino, Praetorius). Includes practical instruction, conclusions about Renaissance and Baroque performance practices, and an appendix by Gerhard Söhne on the historical use of proportions and geometric curves in lute design.
This set of Webpages is about the meaning for J. S. Bach – and the potential musical significance... more This set of Webpages is about the meaning for J. S. Bach – and the potential musical significance for performers today – of the expression "wohl temperirt" (meaning "well tempered") in the title of "Das wohl temperirte Clavier" (Part I, 1722).
Everyone agrees that "Clavier" meant "keyboard instrument," and that the word "temperirt" referred to an aspect of keyboard tuning. Nearly everyone agrees also that Bach intended a single kind of tuning to accommodate the musical content of the work (preludes and fugues in twelve major and twelve minor keys). But there is disagreement as to whether he is more likely to have preferred uniform semitones (as normally in modern piano-tuning) and hence no nuances of intonation among the various keys, or, instead, subtle nuances giving each major and each minor key a more distinct acoustical character than those due merely to differences in overall pitch level. And, among those who think he preferred nuances there is disagreement as to exactly which kind.
One purpose of this set of Webpages is to give some answers based on my documentary, musical and craftsmanly research during the last 35 years. There will be a few oblique references to relevant documentary (i.e. non-musical) evidence, but no attempt to offer a comprehensive survey of it as in some of my printed publications. Most of the presentation here will be like a long lecture-demonstration (much of it *was* a long lecture-demonstration), but with some of the material shunted to subsidiary pages accommodating the backgrounds and interests of different viewers/auditors.
I have another purpose as well: to show (as I believe the lecture-demonstration did successfully) that the nuances of a Bach-style, subtly unequal temperament can be of value not just to harpsichordists and organists but also to pianists when performing compositions which were in fact conceived implicitly in the context of such nuances.
Am Beispiel von Beethovens1802 komponierten Variationen für Klavier F-Dur op.34 wird in historisc... more Am Beispiel von Beethovens1802 komponierten Variationen für Klavier F-Dur op.34 wird in historischanalytischem und instrumentenkundlichem Kontext die Angemessenheit einer aus der Stimmungsgeschichte abgeleiteten, nicht gleichstufigen Art von Temperatur postuliert und erprobt. Mit Hilfe der dem Buch beiliegenden CD können die Resultate dieses Versuchs in direktem Vergleich zur herkömmlichen Stimmung überprüft werden, anhand zahlreicher Klangbeispiele auch aus anderen Klavierwerken Beethovens, dargeboten auf dem historischen Brodmann-Flügel aus dem Besitz Carl Maria von Webers im Berliner Musikinstrumenten-Museum. Eine auf die Praxis zielende Stimmanweisung möchte dazu ermuntern, eigene Proben auf das vorgestellte Exempel zu machen.
Turkey is one of the most Westernized Muslim countries and is, geographically as well as cultural... more Turkey is one of the most Westernized Muslim countries and is, geographically as well as culturally, "between" the West and much of the rest of the world. The first masterful Turkish composer of polyphony, Cemal Resit Rey (1904-85), was the son of an important Ottoman statesman who happened to be posted to Paris in 1913. Alfred Cortot, said in 1928 that Rey was for Turkey what Albeniz had been for Spain or Borodin for Russia. In our opinion, Rey's historical achievement was more than that. Ex.1 shows the beginning and end of Rey's La légende du bebek ("The Legend of the [Turkish] Baby"): Poème symphonique pour orchestre (1928). The opening sonorities are close to tone-clusters; the conclusion, written with equal assurance and aplomb, differs remarkably from the kind of thing one would expect to hear at the end of a 19th-century-type symphonic poem. The overall range of musical styles in Rey's compositions did not change very much in later years. It was fairly "contemporary" by Western standards in the 1920s, but no longer so in the latter part of the century. The last of his three piano concertos (composed in 1960-61) consists of a set of 21 "Variations on an Istanbul Folk-Song"; a Western listener might readily be reminded of certain music by Fauré (whose course in musical aesthetics Rey had attended in Paris), Mussorgsky, Ravel, Stravinsky (before 1913) etc. Exx.3 and 4 are from the vocal score of his last major work, an opera entitled "Çelebi." Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-72) was born in Istanbul, the son of culturally erudite parents. His teachers in Paris included Isidor Philipp and Nadia Boulanger. When a state-sponsored conservatory was founded in 1936 in Ankara, Erkin was appointed head of the piano department, a position which he held with distinction for the rest of his life. He was an expert composer as well. Ex.5 illustrates his magisterially skillful pianism and clear use of contemporary kinds of chords. Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-1991), the greatest 20th-century Turkish composer, studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ and Gregorian chant at the Paris Conservatoire, and composition with Vincent D'Indy at the Schola Cantorum. He collaborated in 1936 with Bartók in collecting Anatolian songs, and his study of folk music went well beyond this as it included archival research in Istanbul and technical analysis of songs from Hungary, Finland and the Urals as well as Turkey. That study was adjunct to his technical progress, as a composer, from making use of folk tunes to developing a polyphonic quasi-Turkish modalism which, in effect, reduced or eliminated altogether the need to cite particular songs. His "Yunus Emre Oratorio" (Opus 26,1947) is comparable in stature to the Verdi and Britten requiems. More germane to the focus of this essay, the String Quartet No. 1, Opus 27, which was the first of his several compositions based motivically and harmonically on a small "module" or "nucleus." Ex.6a shows how the work begins; Ex.6b shows the last six bars of the first movement and the beginning of the second movement, which is (like Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings composed ten years later) in a mode which an academic Western musician is likely to hear as Phrygian transposed up a semitone from E to F; but here, unlike in Barber's Adagio, the radiance of the notes does not depend on chords but on a freshly conceived kind of contrapuntal exploitation of direct relations among the scale degrees, with quasi-canonic imitations and with neighbor notes hovering around the main pillars of the mode. The third movement (see Ex.7) is a Minuet making use of the module but with a Trio almost entirely, except for a quasi-Lydian F# about three-fourths of the way through, in the simplest kind of pentatonic scale. The last movement evokes unmistakably a horon—a kind of rural Turkish dance full of additive-rhythm-type vigor—preceded by a slow introduction to separate the two different kinds of stylized dance: the one from 18th-century Western Europe and the other from the Black-Sea region of Turkey. The second movement of Saygun's Symphony No. 4, Opus 53 (1974), in Ab-minor, is an example of his mature mastery of quasi-Phrygian modalism. Ex.8 shows how the second movement begins in Ab but soon modulates (see bars 4-7) to Gb/F#-minor, the main key of the movement. Saygun's most popular work of piano music has been the bright and straightforward "Twelve Preludes on Aksak-Rhythms," Opus 45 (1967). Ex.9 is the first half or so of the first of them. Ex.10 is the first four pages of his fifth and last symphony, Opus 70 (1984). It begins with is a masterful passage of Klangfarbenmusik-like embellishment of a G7 chord, but then an analogous treatment of F establishes a quasi-mixolydian VII as the first point of modulation.... It would be more appropriate to call the composer of this symphony "a Beethoven who happened to be Turkish" than "a Turkish Albinez." The harmonic language is based less on mere triads (and indeed none of the first three movements ends on a triad or on a root of a triad) than on a variety of other kinds of pitch-class sets. Many of the chords combine two interlocked triads, at least one of them garnished with a dominant-7th interval, while one slow line indicates which of the two belongs to the momentarily governing key. The richness of the chords has a decisive effect on the logic of the chord progressions, and the composer understood the new logic so well that the progressions are very sure-footed. The instrumentation is vital to the harmony; the composer, evidently always imagining the specific timbres and types of articulation and not just the notes, fused an innovative and powerful use of tonality with a quasi-Schoenbergian sense of Klangfarbenmusik. Saygun as a teacher of young musicians tried to compensate for the negative effect of solfège—a bane of Turkish conservatory drilling—by composing a set of 150 musically artful sight-reading exercises, three of which are shown in Ex.11. Necil Kâzam Akses (1908-99), less Francophile than the three composers from whose music we have shown some examples, collaborated with Hindemith in founding in 1936 the Ankara State Conservatory, where he then taught composition. It is fashionable to refer to Rey, Saygun, Erkin, Akses and Hasan Ferit Alnar as "the Turkish Five," but the idea is irrelevant to our topic even though they were all born between 1904 and 1908 and were all masterful composers some ofwhose works are still performed nowadays. Ilhan Usmanbas (1921- )studied composition in Istanbul with Rey, Alnar, Saygun and Dallapiccola (as well as piano with Erkin), and had useful interactions with Babbitt, Cowell and Feldman. He took up serialism in the 1950s. Ex.12 shows the beginning of the third of his "Five Studies" for violin and piano (1953-56). In the 1960s and '70s he devised a remarkably resourceful variety of aleatoric and "mobile-form" techniques. Ex.13 shows one sample of this aspect of his development as a composer. In the 1980s and '90s he probed certain kinds of minimalism. Bülent Arel (1919-1990) studied composition there with Akses, and piano with Erkin, and after spending three years in the USA, mush of it at the Columbia-Princeton electronic-music studio in New York, came home to Turkey in 1962, found it unfeasible to establish an electronic-music studio there, and so returned in 1965 to the USA. His electronic music is remarkably clear and "clean." He used no musique-concrète-type elements, nor any improvisatory techniques. Instead, he would conceive in his imagination and compose carefully, on a separate short bit of tape, each sound destined to become an electronic-music phoneme or brief event (less than three seconds long), having in mind already the musical context where it was to be used; and then he would put the items together by splicing tape-strips and by "mixing." The final result would be analogous to a pointillist painting with each "point" or tiny patch designed microscopically and with all the bits fitted seamlessly together. Upon hearing the result, a sophisticated listener is likely to gloss it with a subtext of delight at the combination of imaginative clarity and craftsmanly refinement. The other great Turkish master of electronic music, Ilhan Mimaroglu (1926- ), is the son of a famous architect. A Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to move in 1955 to Manhattan, where he steeped himself in the music of Charlie Parker, earned a graduate degree at Columbia University, taking a seminar in musicology with P. H. Lang as well as studying composition with Ussachevsky, Varèse and Wolpe. He cultivated a broader range of compositional techniques. (1) He developed some engaging ways of using the studio equipment of the 1960s to improvise aural textures and gestures, and made use of some of the improvised results in some of his compositions. Improvisation has always been the handmaiden of traditional techniques of composition for non-electronic instruments. An analogous approach to electronic composition was an historically fruitful development. (2) Whereas the microphone had no substantial role in the creation of Arel's musical materials, in several of Mimaroglu's short pieces of the 1960s and '70s, all the sounds were, by means of various kinds of electronic processing, derived from the recorded sounds, including the articulative "attacks" of the notes as well as their "steady-state" timbres, of a single musical instrument. His pieces composed with this peculiar kind of investigative discipline have a certain kind of sonorous unity and a distinctive element of cognitive interest. (3) Electronic-music concerts (nearly all of which take place just at universities) routinely make use of four speakers in the four corners of the auditorium, yielding thus a fourfold antiphony. Some of Mimaroglu's later compositions include richly multi-layered textures. For instance, in a composition entitled "Tract" (1972-74) he included a "recording-within-a-recording" section with quite a few layers of simultaneously heard components: a layer originating from a recording-session of a popular singer, plus a "composed re-enactment" of such a session, plus fragments of earlier recordings by the same singer, plus a layer depicting "the outside world as it pertains to her chosen field of activity," plus "further layers consisting of purely musical material (synthesized and processed) ... including vocal ostinatos tying all the other structures together and also defining the climate." (4) Most of Mimaroglu's electronic compositions that are more than five minutes long include spoken statements which are clearly intended to be taken seriously rather than as a mere pretext for musical elaboration. A work making good antiphonal use of simultaneously heard spoken statements is Mimaroglu's Sessions (1975), which includes recordings of piano music (composed by him for this particular use) played by Idil Biret and which presents, in an aesthetically convincing electronic-music texture, the voices of three men with distinctly different ways of speaking English. While a lawyer reads, in an appropriately stiff voice, a contract full of convoluted legalese, an accountant lists in a suitably deadpan voice the various expenses of the re-cording, and a publicist chats, in a virtual telephone call to a crony, about how to publicize it—his gabble being full of phrases like "You know what I mean?", "Does she like organic food?" and "Where were we?—oh yes, the T-shirts...." In the 1950s and '60s, various electronic-music composers were being inventive in various different ways in Paris, Cologne, Milan, Stockholm and Tokyo as well as New York; and Mimaroglu synthesized a broader range of the resulting techniques than did any of the others. Ahmet Yürür (1941- ) is a cosmopolitan ethnomusicologist as well as an expert composer. After spending sevceral years abroad in ethnomusicological studies and research, he returned home in 1986 a serial composer (to the dismay of his Turkish mentor, Saygun). He has contributed to the expansion of contemporary techniques of composition by stretching the concept of concert performance in a somewhat John-Cage-like way but with the narrative flow of the work still due mainly to its aural aspects. Ex.14 is the beginning of a fugue in Yürür's "The Pied Piper" for chamber ensemble (1990). A nice feature of the dodecaphonic aspect of the music is that the row is comprised of four clearly interrelated three-note cells. This is Webern-type erial technique. What was technically new about the composition was that since this part of it narrates a scene of the rats following the Pied Piper as he charms them with his flute, the composer instructs the performers to represent the rats not only by playing the notes in the score but also by suggesting, with physical movements on the stage, a visual image of the rats clambering over one another in pursuit of the Pied Piper—and likewise, mutatis mutandis, in the other sections of the work. Hasan Uçarsu (1965- ) studied composition with Saygun and Cengiz Tanç (an outstanding former student of Saygun's), and world music with Yürür—who suggested that he complete his graduate studies in the USA, where his teachers included George Crumb. He negotiates with sophisticated, Klangfarben-savvy craftsmanship between a style of widely popular appeal and some of Saygun's harmonic techniques. We examine in some detail a work of his which was commissioned by "The Silk Road Project."
Three phases of 20th-century economic theory are described: (1) positing two basic factors of pro... more Three phases of 20th-century economic theory are described: (1) positing two basic factors of production (i.e. for wage-labour and for capital possessions); (2) positing an additional, culture-dependent factor leveraging the productivity of labour; Amartya’s work and that of Robert Solow belong to this phase; (3) taking account also of environmental factors. A chronological sampling of statements by Amartya is cited, mainly from: “An Aspect of Indian Agriculture” (1962), Resources, Values and Development (1984), Sustainable Human Development: Concepts and Priorities (1994, influenced by Solow), the Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress and “The Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress Revisited: Reflections and Overview” (2009), and An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (2013). An emphatic pro-GDP-growth statement made by Amartya in 2006 to the International Society of Ecological Economics is also included. A combination of four reasons why he has not taken ecological economics more to heart is suggested: (1) he has wanted to take it for granted that (as Keynes had put it in 1929) the future would offer “far more wealth ... and possibilities of personal life than the past has ever offered”, and has been unwilling to risk his popularity by proposing that the affluent moderate their rates of per capita consumption; (2) because of his concern about relieving current poverty, he has been afraid that to dwell on concerns in behalf of the unborn would aggravate the exclusive concern of the affluent for their own progeny; (3) as a theorist he wants to avoid dealing in detail with uncertainties; (4) he has therefore hoped that macro-ecological problems wouldn’t be as bad as predicted. Some reasons are described for believing that ecological economics and an ecological sensibility are important: When it is clear that the future will be very different from the past, extrapolations (as in “take-off” theory) from data about the past are of little use for predicting the future; notwithstanding many great uncertainties as to detail, there is a palpable risk that the well-being or even the survival of humankind for the next few centuries is endangered by the current rates, unprecedented in the history of humankind, of several kinds of environmental degradation; to gamble blindly for higher stakes than humankind can afford to lose is crazy unless the cost of not gambling would be similar. This essay has five appendices: (1) a supplementary sketch of Amartya as an economist (apart from ecological economics); a sketch of 21st-century environmental degradation, distinguishing between depletion of non-renewable mineral resources, renewable natural resources being used up faster than the Earth renews them, ecologically destructive dislocations of natural materials, pollution (a matter of natural “sinks” becoming “overloaded”), climate change (related to global warming), a very fast rate of extinctions of biological species (especially of big creatures), and yet a flourishing of “super-bacteria” and more virulent viruses; (3) an account of Solow’s argument against limits-to-growth theory and of an analogous argument made by Friedrich Engels; (4) an explanation of the difference between “strong-sustainability” and “weak-sustainability” reckonings (e.g. as made, in regard to India by Partha Dasgupta, Kenneth Arrow et al.); (5) a relevant text by Amartya published in 2014.
Agronomic terms for interactions between pedosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and litho... more Agronomic terms for interactions between pedosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere are explained; likewise the distinction between meteorological, agricultural and hydrological droughts. Two droughts in Maharashtra – 1970s, 2012 – are compared and it is shown on the basis of data from a Maharashtra State Commissionariate of Agriculture internal Memorandum on Drought Situation in Rabi 2012 and Mitigation Plan (revised, 2013) that the 2012 one was to some extent agricultural but mainly hydrological: its economic consequences were far worse than a 90%-good monsoon would likely have caused in the first half of the 20th century. Arguments drawing upon work of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) are advanced to the effect that such tragedies will recur until environmentally sound policies have been devised and well implemented: Maharashtran farmers and government policies should expect “unpredictable anomalies” getting worse. An appendix by Pranav Bhatnagar provides some additional, district-by-district data to this effect. Long-term damage due to the Green Revolution is analysed. Remedial proposals are set out under five headings. 1: Rejuvenate aquifers and prevent erosion by means of micro-watershed management. 2: Incentivise farmers to grow well chosen combinations of cultivars adapted to local conditions of pedosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. 3: Reallocate uses of some of the state’s land according to its long-term biosustainable capabilities. 4: Persuade and enable people to use water less wastefully and do rain-water harvesting. 5: Get politicians to reverse the environmentally catastrophic policy of building more big dams.
A 12,000-word account (with ten figures), forthcoming in the University of Allahabad’s “Journal o... more A 12,000-word account (with ten figures), forthcoming in the University of Allahabad’s “Journal of Social and Political Studies,” of a recent book (2014; 650+ pages, with 81 tables and 132 figures) written at a European Center of Research for Energy Resources and Consumption. The senior author of the book has vetted this account.
Profiles and evaluates succinctly J.C. Kumarappa, the first economist to put ecological concerns ... more Profiles and evaluates succinctly J.C. Kumarappa, the first economist to put ecological concerns at the center of his theory.
This article considers a national tradition of harpsichord music, that of France, and the relatio... more This article considers a national tradition of harpsichord music, that of France, and the relationship between the known tunings in use and the music that used them. Technical descriptions of five kinds of 17th- and 18th-century French keyboard temperament are provided, and the significance of these historically successive styles of tuning in relation to the development of harmonic style in French harpsichord music is illustrated in detail through works by Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, Louis Couperin, Jean-Henri D’Anglebert, François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau. This is supported by substantial citations from relevant writings by Marin Mersenne (1636), Jacques Ozanam (1691), Marc-Antoine Charpentier (mid-1690s), Charles Masson (1697), Etienne Loulié (1698), Joseph Sauveur (1701, 1707, 1711), an anonymous writer for the Mémoires de Trevoux (1718), Rameau (1726, 1737), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1752) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1743, 1752).
Journal of Social and Political Studies (University of Allahabad), Jun 2014
A traditional, persistently mercantilist tendency of nation-states has recently prevented them fr... more A traditional, persistently mercantilist tendency of nation-states has recently prevented them from cooperating sufficiently on urgent macro-ecological problems. The strength of this tendency is due historically to the fact that nation states, and the kind of patriotism which they engender, emerged together with internationally competitive capitalism. The paper puts this fact in the context of a theory of four broad historical stages of economic and political development. After describing succinctly those four stages (and some aspects of transitions between them), we mention some features of 17th- and 18th-century economic theory which were to favour the flourishing of capitalism and of nation states, and then describe some aspects of that flourishing – and of political and economic theories accompanying it – in the USA (which became during the 19th century the preëminent model of a nation state with a saliently growing economy) and in France, Britain and Germany. Then, after calling attention to Gunnar Myrdal’s insight into a nationalist, neo-mercantile aspect of the welfare state, we discuss at some length the late-20th and 21st-century ecologically dangerous trend which is the occasion for writing this paper. In pondering how a macro-ecologically benign kind of patriotism might be fostered, we mention hopefully some evidence from recent research into the historical origins of human reciprocity. We say that some international institutional innovations are called for, and that one such innovation might be the development of a worldwide set of a moderate number (we suggest nine, but the exact number is not essential to the proposal) of regional international political entities.
Truly scientific economic theory would consider in detail the exosomatic aspects, including the e... more Truly scientific economic theory would consider in detail the exosomatic aspects, including the ecological ones, of human activity, while medical science deals with the endosomatic physical aspects of the human organism.
This essay is about economic theory. The first part focuses on two problems to which certain grea... more This essay is about economic theory. The first part focuses on two problems to which certain great economists of the last 250 years have called attention: the inadequacies of the economic-man concept in microeconomics and of closed-system models in macroeconomics (models taking account of social exchanges only, to the exclusion of material exchanges between humankind and the rest of nature). The second part of the essay begins with a brief consideration of the traditional metaphor of the benign “invisible hand” and of some related aspects of the work of John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge and of Frank Knight in Chicago. Then it shifts, via a critical assessment of a statement by Keynes’ most knowledgeable biographer, to a description of what seems to us to be the main challenge (a "trilemma") facing economics nowadays. The last main part of the essay is about some past and present ideological excesses which 21st-century economists and politicians ought to avoid. An appendix describes briefly three lines of recent research: ecological footprint, experimental economics and "happiness theory."
Six ways are described in which the current phase of globalization has apparently tended to cause... more Six ways are described in which the current phase of globalization has apparently tended to cause destructive violence notwithstanding all its benefits to many people: (1) a fast-expanding gap between rich and poor, (2) the media making the gap evident worldwide, (3) ruthless big-business practices overwhelming weak international (and some national) laws; (4) worldwide availability of very destructive weapons; (5) a disturbingly fast rate of mutual cultural penetrations, (6) fear of macro-ecological catastrophes due to excessive increases in world population and in per-capita consumption and waste. The cause-and-effect relations are not simple but are a matter of intricate compounds. Some of the problems have to be addressed by strong government.
Es werden sechs Möglichkeiten beschrieben, die zeigen, wie die Globalisierung trotz aller Wohltat... more Es werden sechs Möglichkeiten beschrieben, die zeigen, wie die Globalisierung trotz aller Wohltaten für viele Menschen offensichtlich zu zerstörerischer Gewalt führt: (1) eine Kluft zwischen Reich und Arm, die immer größer wird; (2) die Medien, die diese Kluft weltweit sichtbar machen; (3) skrupellose Geschäftspraktiken, die die schwachen internationalen (und manchmal auch die nationalen) Gesetze außer Kraft setzen; (4) die weltweite Verfügbarkeit äußerst zerstörerischer Waffen; (5) eine erschreckend schnelle Verflechtung verschiedenartiger Kulturen; (6) die Furcht vor makro-ökologischen Katastrophen wegen einer übermäßigen Zunahme der Weltbevölkerung und des pro-Kopf Verbrauchs und Abfalls. Die Beziehungen zwischen diesen Ursachen und die gewaltigen Wirkungungen sind komplex. Einige der Probleme müßten von einer starken Regierung angegangen werden.
After citing some typical modern formulations of the EMP, and pointing out that in recent years, ... more After citing some typical modern formulations of the EMP, and pointing out that in recent years, psychologists have convinced some mainstream economists that it is scientifically weak, I argue that it is socially noxious (while also pointing out that the Communist “New Man” premiss was catastrophic), show that Adam Smith did not subscribe to it, and offer some suggestions as to what it should be replaced with.
Bodky founded in 1949 the Brandeis University Music Department. This talk, given at that universi... more Bodky founded in 1949 the Brandeis University Music Department. This talk, given at that university on 19 October 2014, supplements my essay about him ("Erwin Bodky (1896-1958): a Prussian in Boston") published in 2011 by the German National Music-Research Institute.
The recorded examples started with a Gregorian plainchant hymn (“Ave Maris Stella”) and included ... more The recorded examples started with a Gregorian plainchant hymn (“Ave Maris Stella”) and included some 15th, 16th and 17th century polyphonic treatments of that melody, and then two pieces by Bach (a chorale prelude and a fugue) and excerpts of music by Vivaldi (from “The Seasons”), Händel (from “Israel in Egypt”), Mozart (from “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” and from "Don Giovanni”), Beethoven (from two symphonies), Schubert (from the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony), Brahms (a Lied), Verdi (“La donna è mobile”), Wagner (the conclusion, adulating Sati, of his monumental operatic tetralogy), Stravinsky (from “Le Sacre du Printemps”) and, for relief, Irving Berlin (from “Annie Get Your Gun”). Two topics treated in this set of examples are ‘Woman’ (as regarded and treated historically) and ‘Nature’ (starting with “Ave Maris Stella”, which is at once a hymn to Mary and to the ‘evening star’, i.e. the planet Venus).
Attenborough’s magnificent film "Gandhi" has been one of the most popular movies in the world for... more Attenborough’s magnificent film "Gandhi" has been one of the most popular movies in the world for nearly half a century, and a great source of information about the mahatma (“great soul”) who invented nonviolent, win-win politics and who used that technique to remove the biggest colony from the biggest empire in history. But there is a lot of poetic license in the way the movie treats history. It not only omits important things that happened (as must be the case in just three hours covering many eventful years), but also depicts things that never happened.
Kumarappa was the first economist to put ecological concerns at the center of his theory (next to... more Kumarappa was the first economist to put ecological concerns at the center of his theory (next to welfare concerns).
This is my translation of a recent essay published in Korean (see http://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/worl... more This is my translation of a recent essay published in Korean (see http://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/world/world_general/40905.html) by Jan Otto Andersson, a distinguished Finnish economist and professor emeritus at Åbo Akademi University.
Translation of an analytical story by the great Turkish writer Aziz Nezin (1915-95) about governm... more Translation of an analytical story by the great Turkish writer Aziz Nezin (1915-95) about government-sponsored torture and its effect on the torturers.
Profiles of Frederick Soddy, J.C. Kumarappa, E.F. Schumacher, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman D... more Profiles of Frederick Soddy, J.C. Kumarappa, E.F. Schumacher, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, WIlliam Rees & Mathis Wackernagel, Robert Costanza, and Joan Martinez-Alier, and their main contributions to ecological economists.
Lecture given on 5 September 2014 in the University of Hyderabad's Department of Economics; mostl... more Lecture given on 5 September 2014 in the University of Hyderabad's Department of Economics; mostly a simplified version of James Farmelant’s and my article with the same title, but with a postscript about Milton Friedman.
Uploads
Everyone agrees that "Clavier" meant "keyboard instrument," and that the word "temperirt" referred to an aspect of keyboard tuning. Nearly everyone agrees also that Bach intended a single kind of tuning to accommodate the musical content of the work (preludes and fugues in twelve major and twelve minor keys). But there is disagreement as to whether he is more likely to have preferred uniform semitones (as normally in modern piano-tuning) and hence no nuances of intonation among the various keys, or, instead, subtle nuances giving each major and each minor key a more distinct acoustical character than those due merely to differences in overall pitch level. And, among those who think he preferred nuances there is disagreement as to exactly which kind.
One purpose of this set of Webpages is to give some answers based on my documentary, musical and craftsmanly research during the last 35 years. There will be a few oblique references to relevant documentary (i.e. non-musical) evidence, but no attempt to offer a comprehensive survey of it as in some of my printed publications. Most of the presentation here will be like a long lecture-demonstration (much of it *was* a long lecture-demonstration), but with some of the material shunted to subsidiary pages accommodating the backgrounds and interests of different viewers/auditors.
I have another purpose as well: to show (as I believe the lecture-demonstration did successfully) that the nuances of a Bach-style, subtly unequal temperament can be of value not just to harpsichordists and organists but also to pianists when performing compositions which were in fact conceived implicitly in the context of such nuances.
Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-72) was born in Istanbul, the son of culturally erudite parents. His teachers in Paris included Isidor Philipp and Nadia Boulanger. When a state-sponsored
conservatory was founded in 1936 in Ankara, Erkin was appointed head of the piano department, a position which he held with distinction for the rest of his life. He was an expert composer as well. Ex.5 illustrates his magisterially skillful pianism and clear use of contemporary kinds of chords.
Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-1991), the greatest 20th-century Turkish composer, studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ and Gregorian chant at the Paris Conservatoire, and
composition with Vincent D'Indy at the Schola Cantorum. He collaborated in 1936 with Bartók in collecting Anatolian songs, and his study of folk music went well beyond this as it included
archival research in Istanbul and technical analysis of songs from Hungary, Finland and the Urals as well as Turkey. That study was adjunct to his technical progress, as a composer, from making use of folk tunes to developing a polyphonic quasi-Turkish modalism which, in effect, reduced or eliminated altogether the need to cite particular songs. His "Yunus Emre Oratorio" (Opus 26,1947) is comparable in stature to the Verdi and Britten requiems. More germane to the focus of this essay, the String Quartet No. 1, Opus 27, which was the first of his several compositions based motivically and harmonically on a small "module" or "nucleus." Ex.6a shows how the work begins; Ex.6b shows the last six bars of the first movement and the beginning of the second movement, which is (like Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings composed ten years later) in a mode which an academic Western musician is likely to hear as Phrygian transposed up a semitone from E to F; but here, unlike in Barber's Adagio, the radiance of the notes does not depend on chords but on a freshly conceived kind of contrapuntal
exploitation of direct relations among the scale degrees, with quasi-canonic imitations and with neighbor notes hovering around the main pillars of the mode. The third movement (see Ex.7) is a Minuet making use of the module but with a Trio almost entirely, except for a quasi-Lydian F# about three-fourths of the way through, in the simplest kind of pentatonic scale. The last movement evokes unmistakably a horon—a kind of rural Turkish dance full of additive-rhythm-type vigor—preceded by a slow introduction to separate the two different kinds of stylized dance: the one from 18th-century Western Europe and the other from the Black-Sea region of Turkey. The second movement of Saygun's Symphony No. 4, Opus 53 (1974), in Ab-minor, is an
example of his mature mastery of quasi-Phrygian modalism. Ex.8 shows how the second movement begins in Ab but soon modulates (see bars 4-7) to Gb/F#-minor, the main key of the
movement. Saygun's most popular work of piano music has been the bright and straightforward "Twelve Preludes on Aksak-Rhythms," Opus 45 (1967). Ex.9 is the first half or so of the first of them. Ex.10 is the first four pages of his fifth and last symphony, Opus 70 (1984). It begins with is a masterful passage of Klangfarbenmusik-like embellishment of a G7 chord, but then an analogous treatment of F establishes a quasi-mixolydian VII as the first point of modulation.... It would be more appropriate to call the composer of this symphony "a Beethoven who happened to be Turkish" than "a Turkish Albinez." The harmonic language is based less on mere triads (and indeed none of the first three movements ends on a triad or on a root of a triad) than on a variety of other kinds of pitch-class sets. Many of the chords combine two interlocked triads, at least one
of them garnished with a dominant-7th interval, while one slow line indicates which of the two belongs to the momentarily governing key. The richness of the chords has a decisive effect on the logic of the chord progressions, and the composer understood the new logic so well that the progressions are very sure-footed. The instrumentation is vital to the harmony; the composer, evidently always imagining the specific timbres and types of articulation and not just the notes, fused an innovative and powerful use of tonality with a quasi-Schoenbergian sense of
Klangfarbenmusik. Saygun as a teacher of young musicians tried to compensate for the negative effect of solfège—a
bane of Turkish conservatory drilling—by composing a set of 150 musically artful sight-reading exercises, three of which are shown in Ex.11.
Necil Kâzam Akses (1908-99), less Francophile than the three composers from whose music we have shown some examples, collaborated with Hindemith in founding in 1936 the Ankara State
Conservatory, where he then taught composition. It is fashionable to refer to Rey, Saygun, Erkin, Akses and Hasan Ferit Alnar as "the Turkish Five," but the idea is irrelevant to our topic even though they were all born between 1904 and 1908 and were all masterful composers some ofwhose works are still performed nowadays.
Ilhan Usmanbas (1921- )studied composition in Istanbul with Rey, Alnar, Saygun and Dallapiccola (as well as piano with Erkin), and had useful interactions with Babbitt, Cowell and
Feldman. He took up serialism in the 1950s. Ex.12 shows the beginning of the third of his "Five Studies" for violin and piano (1953-56). In the 1960s and '70s he devised a remarkably
resourceful variety of aleatoric and "mobile-form" techniques. Ex.13 shows one sample of this aspect of his development as a composer. In the 1980s and '90s he probed certain kinds of
minimalism.
Bülent Arel (1919-1990) studied composition there with Akses, and piano with Erkin, and after spending three years in the USA, mush of it at the Columbia-Princeton electronic-music studio in
New York, came home to Turkey in 1962, found it unfeasible to establish an electronic-music studio there, and so returned in 1965 to the USA. His electronic music is remarkably clear and
"clean." He used no musique-concrète-type elements, nor any improvisatory techniques. Instead, he would conceive in his imagination and compose carefully, on a separate short bit of tape, each sound destined to become an electronic-music phoneme or brief event (less than three seconds long), having in mind already the musical context where it was to be used; and then he would put the items together by splicing tape-strips and by "mixing." The final result would be analogous to a pointillist painting with each "point" or tiny patch designed microscopically and with all the bits fitted seamlessly together. Upon hearing the result, a sophisticated listener is likely to gloss it with a subtext of delight at the combination of imaginative clarity and craftsmanly refinement.
The other great Turkish master of electronic music, Ilhan Mimaroglu (1926- ), is the son of a famous architect. A Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to move in 1955 to Manhattan, where he steeped himself in the music of Charlie Parker, earned a graduate degree at Columbia University, taking a seminar in musicology with P. H. Lang as well as studying composition with Ussachevsky, Varèse and Wolpe. He cultivated a broader range of compositional techniques. (1) He developed some engaging ways of using the studio equipment of the 1960s to improvise aural textures and gestures, and made use of some of the improvised results in some of his compositions. Improvisation has always been the handmaiden of traditional techniques of composition for non-electronic instruments. An analogous approach to electronic composition was an historically fruitful development. (2) Whereas the microphone had no substantial role in the creation of Arel's musical materials, in several of Mimaroglu's short pieces of the 1960s and '70s, all the sounds were, by means of various kinds of electronic processing, derived from the recorded sounds, including the articulative "attacks" of the notes as well as their "steady-state" timbres, of a single musical instrument. His pieces composed with this peculiar kind of investigative discipline have a certain kind of sonorous unity and a distinctive element of
cognitive interest. (3) Electronic-music concerts (nearly all of which take place just at universities) routinely make use of four speakers in the four corners of the auditorium, yielding thus a fourfold antiphony. Some of Mimaroglu's later compositions include richly multi-layered textures. For instance, in a composition entitled "Tract" (1972-74) he included a "recording-within-a-recording" section with quite a few layers of simultaneously heard components: a layer originating from a recording-session of a popular singer, plus a "composed re-enactment" of such a session, plus fragments of earlier recordings by the same singer, plus a layer depicting "the outside world as it pertains to her chosen field of activity," plus "further layers consisting of purely musical material (synthesized and processed) ... including vocal ostinatos tying all the other structures together and also defining the climate." (4) Most of
Mimaroglu's electronic compositions that are more than five minutes long include spoken statements which are clearly intended to be taken seriously rather than as a mere pretext for
musical elaboration. A work making good antiphonal use of simultaneously heard spoken statements is Mimaroglu's Sessions (1975), which includes recordings of piano music (composed by him for this particular use) played by Idil Biret and which presents, in an aesthetically convincing electronic-music texture, the voices of three men with distinctly different ways of
speaking English. While a lawyer reads, in an appropriately stiff voice, a contract full of convoluted legalese, an accountant lists in a suitably deadpan voice the various expenses of the
re-cording, and a publicist chats, in a virtual telephone call to a crony, about how to publicize it—his gabble being full of phrases like "You know what I mean?", "Does she like organic
food?" and "Where were we?—oh yes, the T-shirts...." In the 1950s and '60s, various electronic-music composers were being inventive in various different ways in Paris, Cologne, Milan, Stockholm and Tokyo as well as New York; and Mimaroglu synthesized a broader range of the resulting techniques than did any of the others.
Ahmet Yürür (1941- ) is a cosmopolitan ethnomusicologist as well as an expert composer. After spending sevceral years abroad in ethnomusicological studies and research, he returned home in 1986 a serial composer (to the dismay of his Turkish mentor, Saygun). He has contributed to the expansion of contemporary techniques of composition by stretching the concept of concert performance in a somewhat John-Cage-like way but with the narrative flow of the work still due mainly to its aural aspects. Ex.14 is the beginning of a fugue in Yürür's "The Pied Piper" for chamber ensemble (1990). A nice feature of the dodecaphonic aspect of the music is that the row is comprised of four clearly interrelated three-note cells. This is Webern-type erial technique.
What was technically new about the composition was that since this part of it narrates a scene of
the rats following the Pied Piper as he charms them with his flute, the composer instructs the
performers to represent the rats not only by playing the notes in the score but also by suggesting,
with physical movements on the stage, a visual image of the rats clambering over one another in
pursuit of the Pied Piper—and likewise, mutatis mutandis, in the other sections of the work.
Hasan Uçarsu (1965- ) studied composition with Saygun and Cengiz Tanç (an outstanding
former student of Saygun's), and world music with Yürür—who suggested that he complete his
graduate studies in the USA, where his teachers included George Crumb. He negotiates with
sophisticated, Klangfarben-savvy craftsmanship between a style of widely popular appeal and
some of Saygun's harmonic techniques. We examine in some detail a work of his which was
commissioned by "The Silk Road Project."
Long-term damage due to the Green Revolution is analysed. Remedial proposals are set out under five headings. 1: Rejuvenate aquifers and prevent erosion by means of micro-watershed management. 2: Incentivise farmers to grow well chosen combinations of cultivars adapted to local conditions of pedosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. 3: Reallocate uses of some of the state’s land according to its long-term biosustainable capabilities. 4: Persuade and enable people to use water less wastefully and do rain-water harvesting. 5: Get politicians to reverse the environmentally catastrophic policy of building more big dams.
Everyone agrees that "Clavier" meant "keyboard instrument," and that the word "temperirt" referred to an aspect of keyboard tuning. Nearly everyone agrees also that Bach intended a single kind of tuning to accommodate the musical content of the work (preludes and fugues in twelve major and twelve minor keys). But there is disagreement as to whether he is more likely to have preferred uniform semitones (as normally in modern piano-tuning) and hence no nuances of intonation among the various keys, or, instead, subtle nuances giving each major and each minor key a more distinct acoustical character than those due merely to differences in overall pitch level. And, among those who think he preferred nuances there is disagreement as to exactly which kind.
One purpose of this set of Webpages is to give some answers based on my documentary, musical and craftsmanly research during the last 35 years. There will be a few oblique references to relevant documentary (i.e. non-musical) evidence, but no attempt to offer a comprehensive survey of it as in some of my printed publications. Most of the presentation here will be like a long lecture-demonstration (much of it *was* a long lecture-demonstration), but with some of the material shunted to subsidiary pages accommodating the backgrounds and interests of different viewers/auditors.
I have another purpose as well: to show (as I believe the lecture-demonstration did successfully) that the nuances of a Bach-style, subtly unequal temperament can be of value not just to harpsichordists and organists but also to pianists when performing compositions which were in fact conceived implicitly in the context of such nuances.
Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-72) was born in Istanbul, the son of culturally erudite parents. His teachers in Paris included Isidor Philipp and Nadia Boulanger. When a state-sponsored
conservatory was founded in 1936 in Ankara, Erkin was appointed head of the piano department, a position which he held with distinction for the rest of his life. He was an expert composer as well. Ex.5 illustrates his magisterially skillful pianism and clear use of contemporary kinds of chords.
Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-1991), the greatest 20th-century Turkish composer, studied harmony, counterpoint, fugue, organ and Gregorian chant at the Paris Conservatoire, and
composition with Vincent D'Indy at the Schola Cantorum. He collaborated in 1936 with Bartók in collecting Anatolian songs, and his study of folk music went well beyond this as it included
archival research in Istanbul and technical analysis of songs from Hungary, Finland and the Urals as well as Turkey. That study was adjunct to his technical progress, as a composer, from making use of folk tunes to developing a polyphonic quasi-Turkish modalism which, in effect, reduced or eliminated altogether the need to cite particular songs. His "Yunus Emre Oratorio" (Opus 26,1947) is comparable in stature to the Verdi and Britten requiems. More germane to the focus of this essay, the String Quartet No. 1, Opus 27, which was the first of his several compositions based motivically and harmonically on a small "module" or "nucleus." Ex.6a shows how the work begins; Ex.6b shows the last six bars of the first movement and the beginning of the second movement, which is (like Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings composed ten years later) in a mode which an academic Western musician is likely to hear as Phrygian transposed up a semitone from E to F; but here, unlike in Barber's Adagio, the radiance of the notes does not depend on chords but on a freshly conceived kind of contrapuntal
exploitation of direct relations among the scale degrees, with quasi-canonic imitations and with neighbor notes hovering around the main pillars of the mode. The third movement (see Ex.7) is a Minuet making use of the module but with a Trio almost entirely, except for a quasi-Lydian F# about three-fourths of the way through, in the simplest kind of pentatonic scale. The last movement evokes unmistakably a horon—a kind of rural Turkish dance full of additive-rhythm-type vigor—preceded by a slow introduction to separate the two different kinds of stylized dance: the one from 18th-century Western Europe and the other from the Black-Sea region of Turkey. The second movement of Saygun's Symphony No. 4, Opus 53 (1974), in Ab-minor, is an
example of his mature mastery of quasi-Phrygian modalism. Ex.8 shows how the second movement begins in Ab but soon modulates (see bars 4-7) to Gb/F#-minor, the main key of the
movement. Saygun's most popular work of piano music has been the bright and straightforward "Twelve Preludes on Aksak-Rhythms," Opus 45 (1967). Ex.9 is the first half or so of the first of them. Ex.10 is the first four pages of his fifth and last symphony, Opus 70 (1984). It begins with is a masterful passage of Klangfarbenmusik-like embellishment of a G7 chord, but then an analogous treatment of F establishes a quasi-mixolydian VII as the first point of modulation.... It would be more appropriate to call the composer of this symphony "a Beethoven who happened to be Turkish" than "a Turkish Albinez." The harmonic language is based less on mere triads (and indeed none of the first three movements ends on a triad or on a root of a triad) than on a variety of other kinds of pitch-class sets. Many of the chords combine two interlocked triads, at least one
of them garnished with a dominant-7th interval, while one slow line indicates which of the two belongs to the momentarily governing key. The richness of the chords has a decisive effect on the logic of the chord progressions, and the composer understood the new logic so well that the progressions are very sure-footed. The instrumentation is vital to the harmony; the composer, evidently always imagining the specific timbres and types of articulation and not just the notes, fused an innovative and powerful use of tonality with a quasi-Schoenbergian sense of
Klangfarbenmusik. Saygun as a teacher of young musicians tried to compensate for the negative effect of solfège—a
bane of Turkish conservatory drilling—by composing a set of 150 musically artful sight-reading exercises, three of which are shown in Ex.11.
Necil Kâzam Akses (1908-99), less Francophile than the three composers from whose music we have shown some examples, collaborated with Hindemith in founding in 1936 the Ankara State
Conservatory, where he then taught composition. It is fashionable to refer to Rey, Saygun, Erkin, Akses and Hasan Ferit Alnar as "the Turkish Five," but the idea is irrelevant to our topic even though they were all born between 1904 and 1908 and were all masterful composers some ofwhose works are still performed nowadays.
Ilhan Usmanbas (1921- )studied composition in Istanbul with Rey, Alnar, Saygun and Dallapiccola (as well as piano with Erkin), and had useful interactions with Babbitt, Cowell and
Feldman. He took up serialism in the 1950s. Ex.12 shows the beginning of the third of his "Five Studies" for violin and piano (1953-56). In the 1960s and '70s he devised a remarkably
resourceful variety of aleatoric and "mobile-form" techniques. Ex.13 shows one sample of this aspect of his development as a composer. In the 1980s and '90s he probed certain kinds of
minimalism.
Bülent Arel (1919-1990) studied composition there with Akses, and piano with Erkin, and after spending three years in the USA, mush of it at the Columbia-Princeton electronic-music studio in
New York, came home to Turkey in 1962, found it unfeasible to establish an electronic-music studio there, and so returned in 1965 to the USA. His electronic music is remarkably clear and
"clean." He used no musique-concrète-type elements, nor any improvisatory techniques. Instead, he would conceive in his imagination and compose carefully, on a separate short bit of tape, each sound destined to become an electronic-music phoneme or brief event (less than three seconds long), having in mind already the musical context where it was to be used; and then he would put the items together by splicing tape-strips and by "mixing." The final result would be analogous to a pointillist painting with each "point" or tiny patch designed microscopically and with all the bits fitted seamlessly together. Upon hearing the result, a sophisticated listener is likely to gloss it with a subtext of delight at the combination of imaginative clarity and craftsmanly refinement.
The other great Turkish master of electronic music, Ilhan Mimaroglu (1926- ), is the son of a famous architect. A Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to move in 1955 to Manhattan, where he steeped himself in the music of Charlie Parker, earned a graduate degree at Columbia University, taking a seminar in musicology with P. H. Lang as well as studying composition with Ussachevsky, Varèse and Wolpe. He cultivated a broader range of compositional techniques. (1) He developed some engaging ways of using the studio equipment of the 1960s to improvise aural textures and gestures, and made use of some of the improvised results in some of his compositions. Improvisation has always been the handmaiden of traditional techniques of composition for non-electronic instruments. An analogous approach to electronic composition was an historically fruitful development. (2) Whereas the microphone had no substantial role in the creation of Arel's musical materials, in several of Mimaroglu's short pieces of the 1960s and '70s, all the sounds were, by means of various kinds of electronic processing, derived from the recorded sounds, including the articulative "attacks" of the notes as well as their "steady-state" timbres, of a single musical instrument. His pieces composed with this peculiar kind of investigative discipline have a certain kind of sonorous unity and a distinctive element of
cognitive interest. (3) Electronic-music concerts (nearly all of which take place just at universities) routinely make use of four speakers in the four corners of the auditorium, yielding thus a fourfold antiphony. Some of Mimaroglu's later compositions include richly multi-layered textures. For instance, in a composition entitled "Tract" (1972-74) he included a "recording-within-a-recording" section with quite a few layers of simultaneously heard components: a layer originating from a recording-session of a popular singer, plus a "composed re-enactment" of such a session, plus fragments of earlier recordings by the same singer, plus a layer depicting "the outside world as it pertains to her chosen field of activity," plus "further layers consisting of purely musical material (synthesized and processed) ... including vocal ostinatos tying all the other structures together and also defining the climate." (4) Most of
Mimaroglu's electronic compositions that are more than five minutes long include spoken statements which are clearly intended to be taken seriously rather than as a mere pretext for
musical elaboration. A work making good antiphonal use of simultaneously heard spoken statements is Mimaroglu's Sessions (1975), which includes recordings of piano music (composed by him for this particular use) played by Idil Biret and which presents, in an aesthetically convincing electronic-music texture, the voices of three men with distinctly different ways of
speaking English. While a lawyer reads, in an appropriately stiff voice, a contract full of convoluted legalese, an accountant lists in a suitably deadpan voice the various expenses of the
re-cording, and a publicist chats, in a virtual telephone call to a crony, about how to publicize it—his gabble being full of phrases like "You know what I mean?", "Does she like organic
food?" and "Where were we?—oh yes, the T-shirts...." In the 1950s and '60s, various electronic-music composers were being inventive in various different ways in Paris, Cologne, Milan, Stockholm and Tokyo as well as New York; and Mimaroglu synthesized a broader range of the resulting techniques than did any of the others.
Ahmet Yürür (1941- ) is a cosmopolitan ethnomusicologist as well as an expert composer. After spending sevceral years abroad in ethnomusicological studies and research, he returned home in 1986 a serial composer (to the dismay of his Turkish mentor, Saygun). He has contributed to the expansion of contemporary techniques of composition by stretching the concept of concert performance in a somewhat John-Cage-like way but with the narrative flow of the work still due mainly to its aural aspects. Ex.14 is the beginning of a fugue in Yürür's "The Pied Piper" for chamber ensemble (1990). A nice feature of the dodecaphonic aspect of the music is that the row is comprised of four clearly interrelated three-note cells. This is Webern-type erial technique.
What was technically new about the composition was that since this part of it narrates a scene of
the rats following the Pied Piper as he charms them with his flute, the composer instructs the
performers to represent the rats not only by playing the notes in the score but also by suggesting,
with physical movements on the stage, a visual image of the rats clambering over one another in
pursuit of the Pied Piper—and likewise, mutatis mutandis, in the other sections of the work.
Hasan Uçarsu (1965- ) studied composition with Saygun and Cengiz Tanç (an outstanding
former student of Saygun's), and world music with Yürür—who suggested that he complete his
graduate studies in the USA, where his teachers included George Crumb. He negotiates with
sophisticated, Klangfarben-savvy craftsmanship between a style of widely popular appeal and
some of Saygun's harmonic techniques. We examine in some detail a work of his which was
commissioned by "The Silk Road Project."
Long-term damage due to the Green Revolution is analysed. Remedial proposals are set out under five headings. 1: Rejuvenate aquifers and prevent erosion by means of micro-watershed management. 2: Incentivise farmers to grow well chosen combinations of cultivars adapted to local conditions of pedosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. 3: Reallocate uses of some of the state’s land according to its long-term biosustainable capabilities. 4: Persuade and enable people to use water less wastefully and do rain-water harvesting. 5: Get politicians to reverse the environmentally catastrophic policy of building more big dams.
(1) a fast-expanding gap between rich and poor,
(2) the media making the gap evident worldwide,
(3) ruthless big-business practices overwhelming weak international (and some national) laws;
(4) worldwide availability of very destructive weapons;
(5) a disturbingly fast rate of mutual cultural penetrations,
(6) fear of macro-ecological catastrophes due to excessive increases in world population and in per-capita consumption and waste.
The cause-and-effect relations are not simple but are a matter of intricate compounds. Some of the problems have to be addressed by strong government.
(1) eine Kluft zwischen Reich und Arm, die immer größer wird;
(2) die Medien, die diese Kluft weltweit sichtbar machen;
(3) skrupellose Geschäftspraktiken, die die schwachen internationalen (und manchmal auch die nationalen) Gesetze außer Kraft setzen;
(4) die weltweite Verfügbarkeit äußerst zerstörerischer Waffen;
(5) eine erschreckend schnelle Verflechtung verschiedenartiger Kulturen;
(6) die Furcht vor makro-ökologischen Katastrophen wegen einer übermäßigen Zunahme der Weltbevölkerung und des pro-Kopf Verbrauchs und Abfalls.
Die Beziehungen zwischen diesen Ursachen und die gewaltigen Wirkungungen sind komplex. Einige der Probleme müßten von einer starken Regierung angegangen werden.