Reading the Lourié thread set me thinking about the earliest use of microtones in Western Art Music (by which I don't include different temperaments and the like). Félicien David used them in Le Désert of 1844 (David did not notate them in the score but instructed the tenor soloist to use them in the passage mimicking Koranic chant) - what are some other early examples (there are probably some really obvious ones I've forgotten)?

Maybe quartertone might have something to say on this?

Simply because that is another subject (equally interesting, but a different one). I am thinking of works which explicitly call for pitches that specifically stand outside the chromatic scale (in whatever tuning, intonation). Of course in any type of tonal music there are various modes of intonation, for reasons of temperament, expression, performance conventions (e.g. sharpening leading notes), etc. that are possible on non-discretely tuned instruments, but these do not fundamentally constitute a break with the chromatic scale, which David's innovations, say, do (let alone the works of Lourié, Wyschnegradsky, Carillo, Hába, etc.).

Information about Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) writings on microtonal music can be found on the website of the Huygens Fokker Foundation:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/english/index.html

"Huygens was not the first one however to describe the 31-tone octave division. A similar division is implicit in the works of authors such as Nicola Vicentino (1555) and Fabio Colonna (1618)."

That is an extremely interesting question - should we have another thread on temperament/tuning in order to discuss this and other related matters? Was equal temperament necessarily in general usage in Russia in Mussorgsky's time?

The thread title makes it a "Greek Music" thread, doesn't it Baz? I'd be very interested in discussing it further. We can always ignore any attempted derailments.

For what it's worth I'm very interested in ancient Greek music (as well as modern Greek music!) and I've made a bit of a study of it, though no doubt entirely superficial by your standards, my ulterior purpose having been to research ways of setting the ancient Greek language to music in a way which reflects its tonal and prosodic structure but not necessarily in the way the Greeks would have gone about it. I've also tried to listen to as many reconstructions of the music as possible, some of which I found unbelievable and boring (Christodoulos Halaris), some unbelievable and rather interesting (Gregorio Paniagua) and some relatively convincing (Conrad Steinmann).

I disagree, RT: For me 'microtones' implies the wilful subdivision of an existing framework into smaller bits that are still defined in terms of the original intervallic sizes. However, 'temperament' is an act of setting up an entire gamut that doesn't build upon an existing one, but rather replaces it. Does that make sense? Thus mean-tone and Vicentino's 19-division or 31-division conception are new 'temperaments', but the idea of quarter-tones or sixth tones, or even inexact, inflected deviations (as in Ives' The Sick Eagle) would be considered microtones.

The two concepts do sometimes collide (can be used to describe similar phenomena), but they can be definitively separated. Who's wit me?

Yes, I did not address the Musorgski example directly. To me that seems like certain passages in contemporary works by Schubert as well (though not as extreme: Schubert just differentiates between Cb and B, but for somewhat practical reasons, apparently, in order to make the transition from flat to sharp keys a little easier to understand and read, cf. Three Piano Pieces D.946, the second one, where Eb minor moves to Ab minor, Cb major, then (enharmonically!) b minor: you get a measure of tonic in Cb, then seven little natural signs, then the same measure repeated (sounding the "same') with B major chords and accidentals, then two little sharps, and he continues in b minor...)

In Musorgski's time, there was surely some consciousness left over that refused to accept the idea of enharmonic 'equivalence'. In the more sophisticated tunings of such folks as Werckmeister and Kalkbrenner*, one did have 'access to all keys', but they sounded distinctly different from one another. On the whole, very flat and very sharp keys sounded more 'exotic' (for want of a better word) than the more 'natural' keys. It took a certain leap of faith to believe that these two exotic 'directions' would meet in the middle, even if this was de facto the case on a traditional piano keyboard.

Also, orchestral instrumentalists would probably have been inclined to finger Db's differently from C#'s. For example, a C# could be overblown as the third of fundament A, but it's a stretch to think of Db as the third of fundament B-double flat. So in a very real sense, C# major would sound different than Db. Still, this ends up being a temperament issue rather than an issue of microtonality.

Sorry if that isn't quite historically grounded (it's as speculative as it sounds), but it is my understanding of the sitch and I welcome corrections!

*Edit: I don't mean Kalkbrenner, I mean Kirnberger!! Duh.

I fully understand your point - and it's a very interesting area to explore (which is why I shall not be pursuing the Greek use of microtones). My only point still stands - it is not feasible to dissociate microtonal usage from Temperament. Your interest lies - for the reasons you have given - in the exploration of the use of microtones within a particular temperament framework. Nobody - except those who perform upon pretuned instruments like keyboards or (say) vibraphones - actually plays in Equal Temperament (but merely plays, on a moment-to-moment basis, IN TUNE). So, perhaps, we might use a term like Modern Working Temperament (i.e. one that takes Equal Temperament as a structural concept, but around which individuals stay "in tune" as far as possible).

What you are therefore asking (I think) is this: how far - within the constraints of Modern Working Temperament - have composers experimented in the use of microtones?

I look forward to seeing the ideas and insights expressed.

Best,

Baz