post-Renaissance musicians are control freaks

29 10 2007

Post-Renaissance music differs from nearly all other musics, which love to use noise—sounds, that is of no precise pitch or definite harmonic structure—as well as those pitches which lie between our twelve divisions of the octave, and which our music considers to be “out of tune” [...] Post-Renaissance musicians could not tolerate these acoustically illogical and unclear sounds, sounds which were not susceptible to total control.

Christopher Small