I'm not at all sorry! Thank you so much for taking the time to share all of this, I see it took you the better part of a day to get it all up here. And thanks for the link to Tony's thesis too. I'm about halfway through reading it but wanted to comment on some of the loose ends you mention. Apologies if I retread anything talked about in the latter half of the email correspondence:
1. I'm having trouble with this one too. I've reached out to a couple of people, including Annika Forkert who shows an excerpt of Stein's piece in her paper "Microtonal Restraint." However, she renotates every piece in her paper with the Stein-Couper system. She told me she saw the score in Munich, but they wouldn't let her take scans of it at all. Inter-library loan failed me on this front as well, so I may have to take a trip to Europe to solve this one. I also reached out to Johnny Reinhard at the AFMM, as they've put on performances of the piece and I've been told he has quite the collection of microtonal scores, but I haven't heard from him.
2. Zimmermann's Cello Sonata (1960, Read gives the incorrect date of 1961) was his earliest piece to use quarter-tones and thus the sesquiflat symbol (corroborated by Larousse's Dictionary of Music: https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/mu ... ann/170713). There's a YouTube video that shows the score and you can see the sesquiflat symbol (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOPWdBZ2MHo). Some of Zimmermann's later quarter-tone scores can be found on IMSLP.
3. My conjecture on this is that Stone misquoted the IMS report on notation, which recommends Fokker's system for fifth-tone systems (like 31-ET). The IMS credits both the semiflat and sesquiflat symbols to Tartini (obviously we know now that the semiflat symbol was the result of Van Blankenburg, but the committee must not have known), but talks about the flat symbols in short succession with the sharp symbols. I was thankfully able to get this report through the ILL! I felt that the wording was pretty clear, but this is my best guess as to Stone's source since, as stated earlier, his bibliography is laughably tiny. Notably, the IMS report never recommends these symbols for quarter-tones, despite what Read says.
There's a couple other errors with Read's book regarding Stein that I've found that aren't explicitly relevant to the present conversation. I'm unsure whether Read's errors are his own or if they are errors of the Index for New Musical Notation survey that Read references. The original documents for the survey are at the NYPL, so I'm hoping to be able to visit those some day.
1. I'm having trouble with this one too. I've reached out to a couple of people, including Annika Forkert who shows an excerpt of Stein's piece in her paper "Microtonal Restraint." However, she renotates every piece in her paper with the Stein-Couper system. She told me she saw the score in Munich, but they wouldn't let her take scans of it at all. Inter-library loan failed me on this front as well, so I may have to take a trip to Europe to solve this one. I also reached out to Johnny Reinhard at the AFMM, as they've put on performances of the piece and I've been told he has quite the collection of microtonal scores, but I haven't heard from him.
2. Zimmermann's Cello Sonata (1960, Read gives the incorrect date of 1961) was his earliest piece to use quarter-tones and thus the sesquiflat symbol (corroborated by Larousse's Dictionary of Music: https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/mu ... ann/170713). There's a YouTube video that shows the score and you can see the sesquiflat symbol (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOPWdBZ2MHo). Some of Zimmermann's later quarter-tone scores can be found on IMSLP.
3. My conjecture on this is that Stone misquoted the IMS report on notation, which recommends Fokker's system for fifth-tone systems (like 31-ET). The IMS credits both the semiflat and sesquiflat symbols to Tartini (obviously we know now that the semiflat symbol was the result of Van Blankenburg, but the committee must not have known), but talks about the flat symbols in short succession with the sharp symbols. I was thankfully able to get this report through the ILL! I felt that the wording was pretty clear, but this is my best guess as to Stone's source since, as stated earlier, his bibliography is laughably tiny. Notably, the IMS report never recommends these symbols for quarter-tones, despite what Read says.
There's a couple other errors with Read's book regarding Stein that I've found that aren't explicitly relevant to the present conversation. I'm unsure whether Read's errors are his own or if they are errors of the Index for New Musical Notation survey that Read references. The original documents for the survey are at the NYPL, so I'm hoping to be able to visit those some day.
Statistics: Posted by ButterBuilding11 — Thu Apr 17, 2025 1:34 am