Description:
Why is it that certain intervals, scales, and tones sound genuine, while others sound false? Is the modern person able to experience a qualitative difference in a tone's pitch? If so, what are the implications for modern concert pitch and how instruments of fixed tuning are tuned?
Renold tackles these and many other questions and provides a wealth of scientific data. Her pioneering work is the result of a lifetime of research into the Classical Greek origin of Western music and the search for modern developments. She deepens our musical understanding by using Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science as a basis, and she elucidates many of his puzzling statements about music.
The results of her work include the following discoveries:
- The octave has two sizes (a 'genuine' sounding octave is bigger than the "perfect octave")
- There are three sizes of "perfect fifths"
- An underlying "form principle" for all scales can be found
- Equal temperament is not the most satisfactory method of tuning a piano
- She provides a basis for some of Steiner's statements, such as, "C is always prime" and "C = 128 Hz = Sun."
Intervals, Scales, Tones is a valuable resource for those who wish to understand the deeper, spiritual aspects of music.
Brief description: Maria Renold (1917-2003) spent her childhood in the United States, where her parents emigrated to found a eurythmy school in New York. She studied eurythmy and later violin and viola and toured with the Bush Chamber Orchestra and the Bush String Quartet. One of Maria Renold's deeply-felt questions concerned the correct concert pitch. When she heard of Rudolf Steiner's concert pitch suggestion of c = 128 Hz she put it into practice immediately, and experimented with it over many years in America and Europe. She also discovered a new method of tuning the piano, closer to the tuning of stringed instruments, arriving at the concert pitch of a1 = 432 Hz. First published in German in 1985, her book has become a modern classic of musical research.