Customer Reviews

20th-Century Microtonal Notation: (Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance)

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Western musical notation evolved to represent 12 tones to the octave, with no intervals smaller than a semitone. From the late 19th century, composers began to explore the use of new scales with quarter tones or even smaller intervals, but they had to find a way to put these down on paper, either notating these intervals in an ad hoc fashion within a traditional score, or proposing extreme new means of musical notation. Gardner Read's 20TH-CENTURY MICROTONAL NOTATION is a handbook for all the many competing solutions for how to represent microtonal intervals.

The book is divided into five chapters on the various microtonal intervals that composers have explored:

* Quarter- and three-quarter-tones
* Eighth- and sixteenth-tones
* Third-, sixth- and twelfth-tones
* Fifth-tones and the 31-tone scale
* Extended and compressed microtonal scales

Essentially, the book proceeds by giving very brief musical examples of each way to represent microtones, followed by a list of representative works. It's not just the microtones in isolation, as Read also covers microtonal glissandi, tremolos and trills.

The survey is vast. The author represents the music not only of the "microtonal composers" -- figures like Carillo and Partch who music was entirely concerned with microtones -- but also the dabbling in microtones by mid-century modernists like Berio and Xenakis. Read shows an awareness of figures like Paavo Heininen and Per Nørgård that are often too peripheral on the continental scene to get mentioned.

All in all, I found this survey informative and I think it a helpful reference for when one comes across a classic 20th century score and cannot see what the composer is getting at with some non-standard symbol.