Correspondence.(Letter to the Editor)

30 March 2003

Dear Editors:

It was troubling to read Julia Werntz's "Adding Pitches" in your issue 39:2. What might have been a valuable introduction to the remarkable and subtle 72-tone-equal-temperament music of Joseph Maneri was disturbingly compromised, I felt, by a lengthy introductory section that did little more than disparage just tuning and the many composers who have used and are using this musical resource. ("Just intonation, as an idea,.... ignores and devalues the music of all the great composers,.... and it denies the beauty of human complexity--the humanity--that is art" (169).)

I limit myself to a couple of remarks. (A lengthier rebuttal by David Doty, who composes in and promotes just intonation, is "From the Editor: A Response to Julia Werntz," 1/1 11:2 (Winter 2003): 2, 17-8.) Werntz's contention that "historically ... just intonation never took hold" (168) is simply wrong, as anyone with knowledge of music theory of the Renaissance and experience singing music of that era in a small group with proper attention to the intonation--which is perforce just--can confirm. A later, important example is the Tonic Sol-fa method of John Curwen, based on just intonation, that was a great popular and musical success in training choral singers throughout the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Second, I know of no just-tuning composers who would accept Werntz's imaginary "credo" (168) that "just intonation ... limits the composer stylistically to a sparse, simple triadic idiom." My own recent music, for example, isn't harmonic or triadic at all, but uses a variety of 13-limit just intervals for their melodic expressiveness (much as Maneri appears to me to use the third-, quarter-, sixth-, and twelfth-tones of 72-equal).

And third, there is a noteworthy irony in setting 72-equal in opposition to just tuning: 72-equal contains the best approximations, as I recall, to just intervals of the 3, 5, 7, and 11 identities of any double-digit equal temperament (cf. my "Tuning Systems," American Grove 4: 423, Table 1). About this aspect of 72-equal Werntz is silent.

To me one of the most gratifying aspects of alternative tunings is that the field has been open and welcoming to every sort of approach and idea, and remarkably non-judgemental. Yes, we just-tuning composers have attacked the deficiencies of 12-equal (one complaint about equal temperaments that echoes Werntz is that they are an arbitrary, "scientific"--thus "inhuman"--way of producing musical intervals, themselves ipso facto "inhumanely" irrational), and there may be a natural impulse to counter-attack just tuning in response. But I don't think we have attacked the great heroes of 12-equal: Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Babbitt, and many others--either their music or their philosophy. It is unbecoming to belittle just intonation by demeaning its heroes, mainly Partch, Harrison and Johnston, as Werntz has done: it diminishes her arguments, and clouds her championing of her mentor, Joseph Maneri.