Happy New Year -- belated musical gift

Hello, there, everyone, and I'd like, however belatedly, to wish
everyone a Happy New Year and to share a small musical gift which
Jacky Ligon has helped to make possible.

Also, thanks to Dan and Jacky and others for the great history lesson;
having seen my recent cassette so generously, skillfully, and artfully
translated by Jacky into .mp3 files, I feel an especially fortunate
member of the circle of "Home Tapers."

From a bit of offline dialogue with you, Jacky, I got the idea of a
sonority with a ratio of 7:10:13, with a reasonably close
approximation in a beautiful tuning, 29-tET.

Here's a General MIDI file of a progression I came up with featuring
this sonority, and also the 29-tET diesis step of a fifthtone, or
about 41 cents. Here an asterisk (*) shows a note raised by a diesis:

F#4 G4
C#*4 D4
G*3 G3

<http://value.net/~mschulter/en29_001.mid>

The lower pair of voices, as it happens, move in contrary motion by
diesis steps, while the upper voice ascends by the usual diatonic
semitone of 2/5-tone, about 83 cents -- a bit more compact than in
Pythagorean tuning (about 90 cents), but not too far from it.

Maybe this could be taken as a curious variation on a progression
which I suspect was very striking 800 years or so ago when the great
composer Perotin wrote it, as it still is now, with the upper voices
resolving obliquely above the stationary lowest voice:

F#4 G4
C#4 D4
G3

What the traditional version and the new share in common is that
ascending semitone F#4-G4 -- and also the contrast between the tension
and complexity of the first sonority and the pure concord of the
resolving 2:3:4, actually very gently tempered in 29-tET (with the
fifth at about 703.45 cents, or ~1.49 cents wide).

While it was my discussion with Jacky that set the stage for this
7:10:13-type sonority, a vital part of the process was getting to a
keyboard and trying it out.

From there, it was easy to write down the progression, and then to
type it in the ASCII text format for a Scala EXAMPLE file that Manuel
Op de Coul's fine freeware program uses to generate the MIDI file that
I've uploaded to my ISP.

Thank you all for helping to make possible an experiment curiously
mixing tradition, innovation, and the joy of "actually trying it out."

Also, my special greetings to Jon and Mary, who have helped make this
such a special place.

With love and peace for 2002,

Margo