NEW MUSICAL HORIZONS, ISSUE 2

WHAT IS
ARMODUE?
SECOND PART
What music with Armodue.
Armodue is a new musical system in the sense that it adopts a
general scale of sounds (chromatic scale) based on 16 different
notes instead of 12 (there are 12 notes in the chromatic scale
currently used in Western music).
This wealth of “new” notes available, in relation to the composition,
is comparable to a vast range of “new” colors in the palette
in relation to the painting.
The Armodue system therefore does not necessarily aim to revolutionize,
to recreate styles and genres of music from scratch;
it is proposed to musicians first and foremost as an enrichment
of the range of pitches (frequencies) available.
In practical terms this enrichment consists in a contribution of
new intervals, new chords, new scales, new melodic-harmonic-polyphonic
formulas.
Armodue radically modifies the qualities of music, but the
transformation carried out is primarily at the level of melody
and harmony, therefore of everything concerning the pitches
(including the writing system).
Everything concerning styles, forms, rhythms, metrics, the representation
of sound durations, dynamic and diacritical signs,
arrangement criteria, timbral choices is not distorted by the use
of Armodue, unless whether it is a precise choice of a composer
to invent a new musical genre or style with Armodue.
This means that, even by adopting Armodue, it will be possible
to compose music in known genres: thus there will be classical
music, jazz, rock, blues, pop music and any other musical genre
also known in the new hexadecaphonic system.
Also in Armodue there will be a sequence of chords such as
“turn of C”, there will be the eight bars of a phrase, the verse and
the chorus, the fundamentals and the bass of the chords, the inversions,
the four-quarter time, the sections of the strings and wind
instruments of an orchestra, the Blue notes, the polychords so dear
to jazz musicians, the rhythms and percussions already known and
everything else.
The birth of new musical styles that will be added to the already
existing ones will perhaps be necessary but everything will depend
on the developments that the new system will take.
Here, however, we only underline that Armodue does not want to
erase the great resources of current and past music: the styles,
genres and inherited forms.
Armodue represents a future of music that will incorporate the legacies
of the past to enrich them with new resources, a great novelty
in the color palette of sounds, a broader sonic horizon. Composers
who used hexadecaphony in microtonal music
Among the composers who until now have used tunings based on
the equalized sixteen-note scale, Op de Coul, J. Goldsmith, Easily
Blackwood, Miller, Wilson deserve mention. The composer Lou
Harrison deserves a separate discussion as he used a sixteen-note
scale that was not already equalized but based on pure intervals
(Just intonation).
The three main Armodue temperaments that can be created for all
musical instruments
The intonation of the sixteen notes of the Armodue chromatic scale
varies depending on the temperament adopted.
There are three possible temperaments:
- the Equalized temperament
- division of the octave into sixteen equal microtones;
- the Just Intonation temperament which applies Lou Harrison’s
sixteen note scale;
- the Semi-equalized temperament which extrapolates sixteen
notes from the thirty-one note equalized scale.
Both of these three temperaments have been designed to be as
practical and functional as possible, and can also be obtained in
instruments that are problematic regarding different or non-equalized
tunings (such as the guitar).
4 NEW MUSICAL HORIZONS
CONTINUE 5