Microtone

Quarter tone accidentals residing outside the Western semitone:
quarter tone flat, flat, (two variants of) three quarter tones flat;
quarter tone sharp, sharp, three quarter tones sharp

Microtonal music can refer to any music containing microtones. The words "microtone" and "microtonal" were coined before 1912 by Maud MacCarthy Mann in order to avoid the misnomer "quarter tone" when speaking of the srutis of Indian music.^[2] Prior to this time the term "quarter tone" was used, confusingly, not only for an interval actually half the size of a semitone, but also for all intervals (considerably) smaller than a semitone.^[3][4] It may have been even slightly earlier, perhaps as early as 1895, that the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo, writing in Spanish or French, coined the terms microtono/micro-ton and microtonalismo/micro-tonalité.^[5]

In French, the usual term is the somewhat more self-explanatory micro-intervalle, and French sources give the equivalent German and English terms as Mikrointervall (or Kleinintervall) and micro interval (or microtone), respectively.^[6][7][8][9] "Microinterval" is a frequent alternative in English, especially in translations of writings by French authors and in discussion of music by French composers.^[10][11][12] In English, the two terms "microtone" and "microinterval" are synonymous.^[13] The English analogue of the related French term, micro-intervalité, however, is rare or nonexistent, normally being translated as "microtonality"; in French, the terms micro-ton, microtonal (or micro-tonal), and microtonalité are also sometimes used, occasionally mixed in the same passage with micro-intervale and micro-intervalité.^{[5][14][15][16]}

Ezra Sims, in the article "Microtone" in the second edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music defines "microtone" as "an interval smaller than a semitone",^[17] which corresponds with Aristoxenus's use of the term diesis.^[18] However, the unsigned article "Comma, Schisma" in the same reference source calls comma, schisma, and diaschisma "microintervals" but not "microtones",^[19] and in the fourth edition of the same reference (which retains Sims's article on "Microtone") a new "Comma, Schisma" article by André Barbera calls them simply "intervals".^[20] In the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Paul Griffiths, Mark Lindley, and Ioannis Zannos define "microtone" as a musical rather than an acoustical entity: "any musical interval or difference of pitch distinctly smaller than a semitone", including "the tiny enharmonic melodic intervals of ancient Greece, the several divisions of the octave into more than 12 parts, and various discrepancies among the intervals of just intonation or between a sharp and its enharmonically paired flat in various forms of mean-tone temperament", as well as the Indian sruti, and small intervals used in Byzantine chant, Arabic music theory from the 10th century onward, and similarly for Persian traditional music and Turkish music and various other Near Eastern musical traditions,^[21] but do not actually name the "mathematical" terms schisma, comma, and diaschisma.

"Microtone" is also sometimes used to refer to individual notes, "microtonal pitches" added to and distinct from the familiar twelve notes of the chromatic scale,^[22] as "enharmonic microtones",^[23] for example.

In English the word "microtonality" is mentioned in 1946 by Rudi Blesh who related it to microtonal inflexions of the so-called "blues scales".^[24] In Court B. Cutting's 2019 Microtonal Analysis of “Blues Notes” and the Blues Scale, he states that academic studies of the early blues concur that its pitch scale has within it three microtonal “blue notes” not found in 12 tone equal temperament intonation.^[25] It was used still earlier by W. McNaught with reference to developments in "modernism" in a 1939 record review of the Columbia History of Music, Vol. 5.^[26] In German the term Mikrotonalität came into use at least by 1958,^[27][28] though "Mikrointervall" is still common today in contexts where very small intervals of early European tradition (diesis, comma, etc.) are described, as e.g. in the new Geschichte der Musiktheorie^[29] while "Mikroton" seems to prevail in discussions of the avant-garde music and music of Eastern traditions.^{[citation needed]} The term "microinterval" is used alongside "microtone" by American musicologist Margo Schulter in her articles on medieval music.^[30][31]

Microtonal

The term "microtonal music" usually refers to music containing very small intervals but can include any tuning that differs from Western twelve-tone equal temperament. Traditional Indian systems of 22 śruti; Indonesian gamelan music; Thai, Burmese, and African music, and music using just intonation, meantone temperament or other alternative tunings may be considered microtonal.^[32][21] Microtonal variation of intervals is standard practice in the African-American musical forms of spirituals, blues, and jazz.^[33]

Many microtonal equal divisions of the octave have been proposed, usually (but not always) in order to achieve approximation to the intervals of just intonation.^[32][21]

Terminology other than "microtonal" has been used or proposed by some theorists and composers. In 1914, A. H. Fox Strangways objected that "'heterotone' would be a better name for śruti than the usual translation 'microtone'".^[34] Modern Indian researchers yet write: "microtonal intervals called shrutis".^[35] In Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in the 1910s and 1920s the usual term continued to be Viertelton-Musik (quarter tone music^{[36][page needed]}), and the type of intervallic structure found in such music was called the Vierteltonsystem,^[37][38] which was (in the mentioned region) regarded as the main term for referring to music with microintervals, though as early as 1908 Georg Capellan had qualified his use of "quarter tone" with the alternative term "Bruchtonstufen (Viertel- und Dritteltöne)" (fractional degrees (quarter and third tones)).^[39] Despite the inclusion of other fractions of a whole tone, this music continued to be described under the heading "Vierteltonmusik" until at least the 1990s, for example in the twelfth edition of the Riemann Musiklexikon,^[40] and in the second edition of the popular Brockhaus Riemann Musiklexikon.^[41]

Ivan Wyschnegradsky used the term ultra-chromatic for intervals smaller than the semitone and infra-chromatic for intervals larger than the semitone;^[42] this same term has been used since 1934 by ethnomusicologist Victor Belaiev (Belyaev) in his studies of Azerbaijan and Turkish traditional music.^[43][44][45] A similar term, subchromatic, has been used by theorist Marek Žabka.^[46] Ivor Darreg proposed^{[when?][citation needed]} the term xenharmonic; see xenharmonic music. The Austrian composer Franz Richter Herf [de] and the music theorist Rolf Maedel, Herf's colleague at the Salzburg Mozarteum, preferred using the Greek word ekmelic when referring to "all the pitches lying outside the traditional twelve-tone system".^[47] Some authors in Russia^{[48][49][50][51][52][53]} and some musicology dissertations^{[54][55][56][57][58][59]} disseminate the term микрохроматика (microchromatics), coined in the 1970s by Yuri Kholopov,^[60] to describe a kind of 'intervallic genus' (интервальный род) for all possible microtonal structures, both ancient (as enharmonic genus—γένος ἐναρμόνιον—of Greeks) and modern (as quarter tone scales of Alois Haba); this generalization term allowed also to avoid derivatives such as микротональность (microtonality, which could be understood in Russian as a sub-tonality, which is subordinate to the dominating tonality, especially in the context of European music of the 19th century) and микротоника (microtonic, "a barely perceptible tonic"; see a clarification in Kholopov [2000]^[61]). Other Russian authors use the more international adjective 'microtonal' and have rendered it in Russian as 'микротоновый', but not 'microtonality' ('микротональность').^{[62][63][64][65]} However, the terms 'микротональность'^[66] and 'микротоника'^[67] are also used. Some authors writing in French have adopted the term "micro-intervallique" to describe such music.^[68][69] Italian musicologist Luca Conti dedicated two of his monographs to microtonalismo,^[70][71] which is the usual term in Italian, and also in Spanish (e.g., as found in the title of Rué [2000]^[72]). The analogous English form, "microtonalism", is also found occasionally instead of "microtonality", e.g., "At the time when serialism and neoclassicism were still incipient a third movement emerged: microtonalism".^[73]

The term "macrotonal" has been used for intervals wider than twelve-tone equal temperament,^{[74][better source needed]} or where there are "fewer than twelve notes per octave", though "this term is not very satisfactory and is used only because there seems to be no other".^[75] The term "macrotonal" has also been used for musical form.^[76]

Examples of this can be found in various places, ranging from Claude Debussy's impressionistic harmonies to Aaron Copland's chords of stacked fifths, to John Luther Adams' Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1995), which gradually expands stacked-interval chords ranging from minor 2nds to major 7thsm. Louis Andriessen's De Staat (1972–1976) contains a number of "augmented" modes that are based on Greek scales but are asymmetrical to the octave.^[77]

Limitations of some synthesizers

The MIDI 1.0 specification does not directly support microtonal music, because each note-on and note-off message only represents one chromatic tone. However, microtonal scales can be emulated using pitch bending, such as in LilyPond's implementation.^[98]

Although some synthesizers allow the creation of customized microtonal scales, this solution does not allow compositions to be transposed. For example, if each B note is raised one quarter tone, then the "raised 7th" would only affect a C major scale.

Western microtonal pioneers

Modern Western microtonal composers

Western microtonal researchers