I've been working on the "xenharmonic fugue" thing for a few years.
The difficulty comes in whether you think of fugue as a type of
strictly contrapuntal-motivic-formal thing for which there need be no
harmonic- and voice-leading-protocols to function or to "be a fugue,"
or if you think of a fugue as a particular type of
contrapuntal-motivic-formal
manifestation of a larger class of music
where harmony and voice-leading DO function under some kind of
grammar.
If it's the former, where harmony and voice-leading are not
necessarily consistent and don't have a grammar, it's a much easier
problem. If it's the latter, then you have to do some fairly serious
voodoo to get the harmony and voice-leading to function consistently,
in a way that's applicable to formal types other than fugue -- and
then to manage to further apply these rules in highly motivic
situations like fugues is even a step more difficult. And in fact what
counts as a motive or a "fugue subject" in these situations might not
be at all obvious because in such a system you might have an analogue
to "ascending scale" which, because of the nature of the tuning system
at hand, may come across sonically as more a tone row than a scale,
with an internal intervallic consistency (but note that an
ascending
major scale has a certain kind of internal motivic consistency which
has little to do with the fact that it's ascending per se). I think
the relationship between 7 and 12 has as much to do with how tonal
music works as any kind of care for triads mimicking the overtone
series or what have you.
The "scale" C-D-E-B-C#-Eb-F-C is an ordering for which you can create
pretty consistent harmony and voice-leading in the 12-tone tuning
system, but which is nonetheless not an "ascending scale" (it's just
the major scale under the transformation where the chromatic scale is
mapped to the circle of fifths and vice-versa). But figuring out how
to do "motives" in such a scale (which itself sounds like more of a
motive than a scale the way we've been conditioned) is pretty tough. I
can give you a couple of examples from my own work (most of which is
not fugal nor which really has much to do with csound) if you'd
like
to hear them.
Matt
>
> I think you'd lose your wager. Except for a tiny amount of naive/beginner,
> doodling, or "lip-service", work (blazing by so quickly or burying everything
> in such dissonance that the tuning is actually immaterial for example), the
> xenharmonic fugue is an almost non-existent artform. By "xenharmonic", I mean
> that step sizes and harmonies are based on distinctly non 12-tET and
> non-Western intervals (ie, a fugue written in the meantone modality of 31-et,
> as nice as that is, doesn't count).
>
> I'd be utterly delighted to be proven wrong here- go ahead and give me some
> examples.
>
> -Cameron Bobro�
>
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