platt-debussy-harmonic-series-readme.txt

The late Professor Sir Peter Platt's essay

                 `Debussy and the Harmonic Series'*

was published in an almost-inaccessible, out-of-print compendium.
It deserves to be far more widely known and I am making it available
here.

Platt, a deep thinker among musicologists and a composer in his own right,
recognizes as central the ear-brain system's innate knowledge of the
harmonic series, a framework or `template' of relative pitches whose role
in music is far from accidental.

The essay offers us a beautiful discussion, with detailed examples, of
some of Debussy's far-reaching innovations.  These amounted to recognizing
the perceptual importance of the harmonic series and its subsets, with none
of the traditional, arbitrary restrictions on the choice of subsets.
(Even the great physicist Hermann von Helmholtz missed this point!  He
might not have missed it had he heard Debussy's music, or the beauty of
jazz blue notes.)

Today we know the biological reason  _why_  the ear-brain system recognizes
the harmonic series as a special (and movable) template.  It's the
role of auditory scene analysis in the survival of species.  For further
discussion and literature references see `Footnote for composers' in
http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/papers/LHCE/music-index.html
and thence the `extended Note 58 from Lucidity Part I',
http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/papers/LHCE/lucidity-note-58.pdf
-- and for evidence that other species use the harmonic-series template
(because, of course, they need auditory scene analysis too), see the
examples of tui and kokako song in hay-lucidity-sci-acausality.ppt, in
http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/oldftp/HAY-LUCIDITY-SCIENCE-TALK/

Of course today's Western music has _two_ templates, firstly the harmonic
series and secondly the equal-tempered chromatic scale, which evolved from
Bach's original and slightly different well-tempered scale.  The slight
conflict between today's two templates is habitually spoken of as something
negative, as a grubby compromise -- completely missing the point that the
conflict is itself an artistic resource offering subtle possibilities for
tension and resolution.  Consciously or unconsciously, it is a resource
routinely exploited by composers who know the value of sparse scoring,
providing opportunities for the fine-tuning of notes by singers and by
string and wind players with good ears and good technical control.
Among the many examples are the `blue notes' in jazz that flirt with
the natural seventh harmonic, and time-honoured, and wonderful,
`tonic flat seventh' in folk and country music, with its strong
influence on Carl Nielsen's wonderful symphonies.

Platt also touches on some of the reasons why some 20th century composers
and musicologists have dismissed the first template as unimportant, as with
Milton Babbitt's famous `overtone follies'.  Reactions like Babbitt's
were perhaps provoked by others who, conversely, have viewed the
harmonic series as the Answer to Everything -- which of course it isn't.

Platt points to Indian classical music as another clear example of fine
tuning.  Conspicuously, Indian classical music demonstrates many ways of
flirting with the harmonic series, which of course is very different
from being enslaved to it.

By recognizing the perceptual importance of the harmonic series and its
subsets, along with the organic-change principle, Debussy opened up a huge
range of possibilities not only for new chordal sonorities but also for new
forms of powerful, continuous harmonic motion -- going far beyond even Bach
and Wagner in both respects.  One interesting insight is that polychords --
using subsets from more than one harmonic series -- long predate the
innovations of 20th-century music, since they include not only the
time-honoured ninth and sharp-seventh chords, for instance, but also
the standard minor triad, whose minor third is _not_ tuned like the
flat seventh harmonic!

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*Platt, P., 1995: Debussy and the harmonic series. In: Essays in honour of
David Evatt Tunley, ed.  Frank Callaway, pp. 35-59.  Perth, Callaway
International Resource Centre for Music Education, School of Music,
University of Western Australia. ISBN 086422409 5.
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Individual page scans in
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