Author: oboeblank
Date: 2006-06-21 04:29
Microtones are intervals of less than a semitone, or as Charles Ives put it, the "notes between the cracks" of the piano. The term is also used to refer to any music whose tuning is not based on semitones, such as Indonesian gamelan music, Indian classical music and Bulgarian choral singing.
The Italian Renaissance composer and theorist Nicola Vicentino (1511-1576) experimented with microintervals and built a keyboard with 36 keys to the octave, known as the archicembalo.
Some Western composers have embraced the use of microtonal scales, dividing an octave into 19, 24, 31, 43, 72 and other numbers of pitches, rather than the more common 12.
It is like listening to a Mozart Orchestra, which usually tunes at 420. We are familiar with the "intune" sound of 440, and the "intune" sound of a German Baroque orchestra at 415 or even French Baroque at 392; but 420 is somewhere between the cracks-not an A, not quite a G sharp.
In his book The technique of Oboe Playing, Peter Veale includes a fingering chart for a microinterval chromatic scale.
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