Shock of the New

There's a wonderful French music blog called Le Journal de Papageno, very much worth a look if you can read the language. Currently there's an interesting post about a live recording of the first Parisian performance of Edgard Varese's Deserts. Apparently one can hear quite distinctly the cries and whistles of the audience, including one person who waggishly shouted, "It's too slow!" Maybe not the kerfuffle that the first performance of The Rite of Spring was, but still an interesting document.

There's another post that reviews a book (Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale by William Sethares) on the organization of pitches into scales; the book's argument is that an instrument's timbre should best determine the scale it uses. Voice, violin, piano are well suited to the well-tempered scale, but, goes the argument, certain percussion instruments do better with the scale of the gamelan. Apparently there is some science to back this up. It's an interesting argument--can one expect to hear a piece scored for Harry Partch-type percussion instruments and traditionally pitched string instruments?