the kiss of death

In his 2008 article, "Why teaching microtonality from familiar -> exotic is a bad idea", Brian McLaren makes the case, one I agree with FWiW, that if if swimming is your goal , you should forgo timidity as a matter of course and jump in the deep waters…by analogy, something akin to what McKenna would refer to as a meaningful, committed, or heroic dose.

Why Teaching Microtonality from Familiar -> Exotic is a Bad Idea
Brian McLaren
March 3, 2008

The entire idea of trying to introduce microtonality to people by starting with what's familiar and gradually moving by baby steps to more exotic tunings is a disastrously bad idea. A lot of people have done this, and it has _always_ worked out badly.

Let me explain why.

[1] People who are interested in learning about microtonality are generally not shrinking violets. Any folks who sign up for a class on microtones are usually among the more adventurous musicians in a group. Easing these folks into microtonality by starting with trite junk like quartertones will at first frustrate, and soon annoy and eventually enrage them. These folks want to hear the real deal, music that sounds radical and striking. They don't want to hear a bunch of 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI and listen to someone try to tell 'em that's microtonal -- they know damn well it isn't. That's pissing on peoples' legs and telling 'em it's raining. They get fed up with that kind of condescending treatment _fast_.

[2] If you're dealing with a casual listener who just asks "So what's all that xenharmonic stuff about?" you want to show casual listeners _right off_ just how awesome and powerful microtonality can be, and that means you hit 'em with the wild exotic stuff. Many people mistakenly imagine that the average listener is conservative or fearful of novelty. In my experience, not so. The average listener is much more open-minded and much more eager to immerse hi/rself in radical new sounds than most folks think. What the average listener does NOT want is jargon and numerology. You start spouting a bunch of fancy Greek words (diatoniaion and epimore and epimere and comma) and drawing lotsa geometric diagrams and numbers on a blackboard, and the average listener's eyes glaze over. They get sick of that crap _fast_.

So for an average listener, just hit 'em with radical novel microtonal music. Don't bother to go into details. You don't even have to tell 'em it's non-octave. If they want to know, you can go into details, but the music's what matters. Shoot, don't even tell 'em it's microtonal. Just play it for 'em. They'll love it.

[3] The biggest problems with starting with familiar tunings is that these are by far the least interesting-sounding of all microtonal tunings. In fact, most of 'em are boring as crap. So there you are, droning on through this familiar bland stuff, 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI, 19 equal in the diatonic mode that sounds just about exactly like 12 equal, and everybody is nodding off. People are starting to leave the freakin' room. They're rolling their eyes. They're whispering to one another, "THIS is MICROTONAL? Ye gods, this is BORING!" BAD way to introduce microtonality. Bad, B*A*D*, _BAAAAD_ idea. Half your group is likely to sidle out of the room before you work your way, slowly and gradually, by baby steps, up to the point where the xenharmonic tunings sounds distinctly Unlike conventional music, and start to sound spicy and vivid and startlingly new.

[4] Starting with familiar-sounding novels unconsciously creates an "anchor point." And it's a piss-poor anchor point. See Khaneman and Tversky's Nobel-prize-winning work on the irrationalities of human judgment -- "anchoring," which they first categorized and quantified, is one of the most notable examples.

Anchoring occurs when you skew peoples' beliefs by the way you present information. For example: let's assume you don't know the population of Turkey (you probably don't) and I ask you "What's the population of Turkey? 80 million? 120 million? 140 million?" You'll give me an answer and it's probably going to be around the middle of the choices I gave you. But if I ask a different group of people "What's the population of Turkey? 10 million? 20 million? 30 million?" I'll get a different set of answers, grouped around the middle of the second set of choices.

The way the information is presented created an "anchor point" which distorts people's expectations. In the first example, people's answers will tend to cluster around 120 million, while in the second example peoples' answers will tend to cluster around 20 million.

The population of Turkey is 71 million, by the way. Notice how we can distort people's judgment about the size of the Turkish population just by using this anchoring technique. Political polls do this all the time, as do product evaluation polls set up by companies that want to sell a product. It's all a form of psychological manipulation. Creeps do this today with the post-9/11 hysteria: "Which do you prefer? Freedom? Or security?" Anyone who's not brain-damaged will obviously answer security. Freedom doesn't do you much good if you're dead. But suppose you change the question -- "Which do you prefer? Having every aspect of your life controlled by the security state? Or being free?" Guess which answer people give _then_...?

Such is the power of anchoring.

The problem with starting with a familiar set of 12-like tunings and gradually moving toward unfamiliar tunings that don't sound like 12 is that you've created an anchor point -- and your anchor is 12. This is a bad mistake. By the time you're halfway through giving your introduction to microtonality, your audience will get the idea -- THE WRONG IDEA: any tuning is good insofar as it is like 12. If doesn't sound like 12, it's not so good.

This results in the kind of dismal crap you see on sinkholes of deluded folly like the Alternative Lying List, where all tunings get judged in a foolish continuum that runs from "very similar to 12 = good" and "very different from 12 = bad." This naturally leads to crazy and insanely stupid conclusions, like "all non-octave tunings = bad."

The musical reality turns out to be just the opposite. The real value of microtonal tunings involves getting away from what's familiar. History shows that the most popular microtonal tunings are those which audibly differ most drastically from 12 equal. 15 equal is extremely popular, used by Wendy Carlos, Augusto Novaro, Ivor Darreg, Bill Wesley, Easley Balckwood, myself, and many many others. 15 equal is popular because it sounds radically and wildly different from 12 equal. You don't get anything like a conventional diatonic scale. You get major and minor triads, but they sound noticeably different from the major and minor triads in 12. You don't have a conventional leading tone. Everything is different. This makes music in 15 equal sound fresh and lively and vivacious. 15 equal breaks open a smelling salts capsule under the audience's nose and really wakes 'em up. By contrast, 19 equal can sound almost identical to 12, and this tends to bore the audience. "If we wanted to hear 12," their attitude tends to be, "we would've stayed with 12. Why bother with this?"

Once again, 9 equal sounds radically different from conventional western music. You hit an audience with 9 equal, and they'll get excited. But if you have the bad judgment to start the audience out with the Greek chromatic and diatonic genera, the audience is likely to snooze off. That stuff sounds almost identical to conventional western music. The audience fidgets. They shift in their seats. They start to get antsy. "When are we going to hear the real stuff/" they start to ask. They get impatient.

Back in the 60s and 70s it used to be chic to play a familiar song like "Greensleves" in 31 equal and call that "microtonality." Bad bad bad idea. Ivor Darreg had a better idea -- he used to play visitors 13 equal melodies on a bunch of bronze slats he had set up as tubulongs. The exotic inharmonic percussive timbre combined with the novel sound of 13 always perked people up. They got interested. It piqued their curiosity. They wanted to know more.

Playing "Greensleeves" in 31 equal never worked. 31 equal used to be touted back in the 60s as some kind of "universal tuning" which, academics claimed, would be ideal because you could play conventional western music in it and it would sound almost identical to what we're familiar with, as well as playing new music.

Well, that didn't fly. No one interested in new music gives a damn about hearing the same old thing played in the same old way. They want something NEW. The "old wine in new bottles" is an absolute plague in cesspools of musical ignorance like the Alternative Lying List, and you constantly find people wasting their goddamn time playing Fur Elise in 5-limit diatonic JI. That's crap. It's death. It sounds lethally boring. No one cares. Jettison that junk. Deep six it. Press the eject button on that garbage. The way to get people excited about microtonality is show 'em vividly and audibly, first-hand, just how different and exciting microtonal tunings can be... And that means playing radical new tunings. 9 equal, the Greek enharmonic, pelog slendro, not this "start with what's familiar" crap. Starting with what's familiar is the kiss of death.

--------------------/

There may be an analogy between the ear, the mind, and the arm muscles. They don't get stronger with disuse. Any art or habit of life, if it is limited chronically to a few processes that are easiest to acquire (and, for that reason, are said to be some natural laws), must at some time, quite probably, become so weakened that it is neither a part of art nor a part of life. Nature has bigger things than even-vibration-ratios for man to learn how to use. Consonance is a relative thing (just a nice name for a nice habit). It is a natural enough part of music, but not the whole, or only one. The simplest ratios, often called perfect consonances, have been used so long and so constantly that not only music, but musicians and audiences, have become more or less soft. If they hear anything but doh-me-soh or a near cousin, they have to be carried out on a stretcher --Charles Ives

http://www.myspace.com/danstearns

for anyone who might be interested, i found this thing buried in a box the other day.it dates all the way back from when I was interested in Guitar player mag,as they used to run a "lick of the month" type thing, and I wrote this for that (though it was never accepted). anyway, it was funny for me to see it again, and I can tell I was listening to a lot of Brouwer at the time

http://tinyurl.com/penbhm

anyway, made this pretty rough and raw take i made with my new Olympus LS-10, a very cool field recorder i'm still trying to learn how to best use--and FWiW, it's a lot easier to play on nylon string with the wider string spacing as regards all the open notes and i recorded it on my son's old fret-buzzy 7/8 size steel string. So while it's probably a little more ragged than i'd prefer,it's still "there" and it should give you an idea of what it's supposed to sound like....though the last measure of quintuplets are quite a bit too much up on the beat and too fast/hyper (probably should've been sextuplets up on the tempo, but i kind of like it that better anyway

http://tinyurl.com/ok6sr7

i guess there are a lot of different ways you could notate these kinds of things, but i think here it's the phrasing that is mostly being altered inside of what are pretty straightforward measures of 4/4, so all the 5:4s aren't really better set in something like 5/4. There are also a lot of different opinions regarding these types of complex rhythms, but I think for solo instrumental writing their exact precision is not so important as their overall intent, but with any kind of ensemble rhythmic unison it's obviously important to playit "straight" .

\FWiW,there were a few errors/discrepancies:

the "and "of the 3rd and 4th beat of the first measure the
notation is written as G B G# and the tab is written as D G G# and
either of these work fine, what i actually ended up playing was D G G
as 0 0 8 on the D, G, and B string .I guess i just liked /licked this
better because it gave the ending cadence of open strings against half-step dissonances a little more oomph ImO. also the 3rd not of the 3rd quintuplet of the forth measure should be Gb (which is what i played and how it's written in the tab) and not the Ab of the notation (thatwas just a mistake) .

Anyway, on these types of difficult rhythms there are a lot of
different ways to think of them....i mean i made the ending
quintuplets easy by phrasing them in groups of six which are more
normalish for most players.But hey, even someone as ferociously
rhythmically difficult as Braxton has said something to the effect of
"count the ones strong and cram the rest in"!

Daniel \\\\\\

hi paul, i'd be happy to post some other short and (relatively) simple
lick type stuff, and would encourage others to play them or share
theirs and let others take a stab at them.....anyway, Brouwer is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Brouwer

I always loved Villa Lobos' guitar writing, and Brouwer kind of took
it a step down the road IMO......there are a several nice guitar
collections on Naxos FWiW
anyway, thanks for kind words about the myspace, i'm happy with all
those pieces but i really think Orpheus is as far out as i can take
that kind of phantasmagoric simultaneity in a notated piece.okay,be
well, be creative
daniel

http://tinyurl.com/3m7egu

I thought Keel's Moth man Prophecies was actually a very good read
(depending on your tolerance for these sorts of things)
but in the very opening paragraphs he also cleverly sets up the gambit
that the lines between hoax, misinterpretation, and truth are more
breakable carapaces of the hard-governed world than most people would
like to consider......
anyway, anybody like to give the lick a go?
it's short and guitaristic and easy enough given you can navigate the
phrasing
anyway, i'd love to see some of these lists do more of this sort of
thing (play-alongs, takes on tunes etc.).
this particular one was done for the guitar oblique site as people
wanted there wanted to here it/try it out

http://www.gtroblq.com/

music is good,
imagination is better

theres only one problem: anyone who says:
>trite junk like quartertones

and

>They don't want to hear a bunch of 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI and listen
to someone try to tell 'em that's microtonal

doesn't know their ass from their elbow about either music or
microtonality.

Fri, May 15, 2009 at 10:59 PM, dasdasdva <dasdasdva@...> wrote:

>
>
> On In his 2008 article, "Why teaching microtonality from familiar -> exotic
> is a bad idea", Brian McLaren makes the case, one I agree with FWiW, that if
> if swimming is your goal , you should forgo timidity as a matter of course
> and jump in the deep waters�by analogy, something akin to what McKenna would
> refer to as a meaningful, committed, or heroic dose.
>
> Why Teaching Microtonality from Familiar -> Exotic is a Bad Idea
> Brian McLaren
> March 3, 2008
>
> The entire idea of trying to introduce microtonality to people by starting
> with what's familiar and gradually moving by baby steps to more exotic
> tunings is a disastrously bad idea. A lot of people have done this, and it
> has _always_ worked out badly.
>
> Let me explain why.
>
> [1] People who are interested in learning about microtonality are generally
> not shrinking violets. Any folks who sign up for a class on microtones are
> usually among the more adventurous musicians in a group. Easing these folks
> into microtonality by starting with trite junk like quartertones will at
> first frustrate, and soon annoy and eventually enrage them. These folks want
> to hear the real deal, music that sounds radical and striking. They don't
> want to hear a bunch of 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI and listen to someone
> try to tell 'em that's microtonal -- they know damn well it isn't. That's
> pissing on peoples' legs and telling 'em it's raining. They get fed up with
> that kind of condescending treatment _fast_.
>
> [2] If you're dealing with a casual listener who just asks "So what's all
> that xenharmonic stuff about?" you want to show casual listeners _right off_
> just how awesome and powerful microtonality can be, and that means you hit
> 'em with the wild exotic stuff. Many people mistakenly imagine that the
> average listener is conservative or fearful of novelty. In my experience,
> not so. The average listener is much more open-minded and much more eager to
> immerse hi/rself in radical new sounds than most folks think. What the
> average listener does NOT want is jargon and numerology. You start spouting
> a bunch of fancy Greek words (diatoniaion and epimore and epimere and comma)
> and drawing lotsa geometric diagrams and numbers on a blackboard, and the
> average listener's eyes glaze over. They get sick of that crap _fast_.
>
> So for an average listener, just hit 'em with radical novel microtonal
> music. Don't bother to go into details. You don't even have to tell 'em it's
> non-octave. If they want to know, you can go into details, but the music's
> what matters. Shoot, don't even tell 'em it's microtonal. Just play it for
> 'em. They'll love it.
>
> [3] The biggest problems with starting with familiar tunings is that these
> are by far the least interesting-sounding of all microtonal tunings. In
> fact, most of 'em are boring as crap. So there you are, droning on through
> this familiar bland stuff, 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI, 19 equal in the
> diatonic mode that sounds just about exactly like 12 equal, and everybody is
> nodding off. People are starting to leave the freakin' room. They're rolling
> their eyes. They're whispering to one another, "THIS is MICROTONAL? Ye gods,
> this is BORING!" BAD way to introduce microtonality. Bad, B*A*D*, _BAAAAD_
> idea. Half your group is likely to sidle out of the room before you work
> your way, slowly and gradually, by baby steps, up to the point where the
> xenharmonic tunings sounds distinctly Unlike conventional music, and start
> to sound spicy and vivid and startlingly new.
>
> [4] Starting with familiar-sounding novels unconsciously creates an "anchor
> point." And it's a piss-poor anchor point. See Khaneman and Tversky's
> Nobel-prize-winning work on the irrationalities of human judgment --
> "anchoring," which they first categorized and quantified, is one of the most
> notable examples.
>
> Anchoring occurs when you skew peoples' beliefs by the way you present
> information. For example: let's assume you don't know the population of
> Turkey (you probably don't) and I ask you "What's the population of Turkey?
> 80 million? 120 million? 140 million?" You'll give me an answer and it's
> probably going to be around the middle of the choices I gave you. But if I
> ask a different group of people "What's the population of Turkey? 10
> million? 20 million? 30 million?" I'll get a different set of answers,
> grouped around the middle of the second set of choices.
>
> The way the information is presented created an "anchor point" which
> distorts people's expectations. In the first example, people's answers will
> tend to cluster around 120 million, while in the second example peoples'
> answers will tend to cluster around 20 million.
>
> The population of Turkey is 71 million, by the way. Notice how we can
> distort people's judgment about the size of the Turkish population just by
> using this anchoring technique. Political polls do this all the time, as do
> product evaluation polls set up by companies that want to sell a product.
> It's all a form of psychological manipulation. Creeps do this today with the
> post-9/11 hysteria: "Which do you prefer? Freedom? Or security?" Anyone
> who's not brain-damaged will obviously answer security. Freedom doesn't do
> you much good if you're dead. But suppose you change the question -- "Which
> do you prefer? Having every aspect of your life controlled by the security
> state? Or being free?" Guess which answer people give _then_...?
>
> Such is the power of anchoring.
>
> The problem with starting with a familiar set of 12-like tunings and
> gradually moving toward unfamiliar tunings that don't sound like 12 is that
> you've created an anchor point -- and your anchor is 12. This is a bad
> mistake. By the time you're halfway through giving your introduction to
> microtonality, your audience will get the idea -- THE WRONG IDEA: any tuning
> is good insofar as it is like 12. If doesn't sound like 12, it's not so
> good.
>
> This results in the kind of dismal crap you see on sinkholes of deluded
> folly like the Alternative Lying List, where all tunings get judged in a
> foolish continuum that runs from "very similar to 12 = good" and "very
> different from 12 = bad." This naturally leads to crazy and insanely stupid
> conclusions, like "all non-octave tunings = bad."
>
> The musical reality turns out to be just the opposite. The real value of
> microtonal tunings involves getting away from what's familiar. History shows
> that the most popular microtonal tunings are those which audibly differ most
> drastically from 12 equal. 15 equal is extremely popular, used by Wendy
> Carlos, Augusto Novaro, Ivor Darreg, Bill Wesley, Easley Balckwood, myself,
> and many many others. 15 equal is popular because it sounds radically and
> wildly different from 12 equal. You don't get anything like a conventional
> diatonic scale. You get major and minor triads, but they sound noticeably
> different from the major and minor triads in 12. You don't have a
> conventional leading tone. Everything is different. This makes music in 15
> equal sound fresh and lively and vivacious. 15 equal breaks open a smelling
> salts capsule under the audience's nose and really wakes 'em up. By
> contrast, 19 equal can sound almost identical to 12, and this tends to bore
> the audience. "If we wanted to hear 12," their attitude tends to be, "we
> would've stayed with 12. Why bother with this?"
>
> Once again, 9 equal sounds radically different from conventional western
> music. You hit an audience with 9 equal, and they'll get excited. But if you
> have the bad judgment to start the audience out with the Greek chromatic and
> diatonic genera, the audience is likely to snooze off. That stuff sounds
> almost identical to conventional western music. The audience fidgets. They
> shift in their seats. They start to get antsy. "When are we going to hear
> the real stuff/" they start to ask. They get impatient.
>
> Back in the 60s and 70s it used to be chic to play a familiar song like
> "Greensleves" in 31 equal and call that "microtonality." Bad bad bad idea.
> Ivor Darreg had a better idea -- he used to play visitors 13 equal melodies
> on a bunch of bronze slats he had set up as tubulongs. The exotic inharmonic
> percussive timbre combined with the novel sound of 13 always perked people
> up. They got interested. It piqued their curiosity. They wanted to know
> more.
>
> Playing "Greensleeves" in 31 equal never worked. 31 equal used to be touted
> back in the 60s as some kind of "universal tuning" which, academics claimed,
> would be ideal because you could play conventional western music in it and
> it would sound almost identical to what we're familiar with, as well as
> playing new music.
>
> Well, that didn't fly. No one interested in new music gives a damn about
> hearing the same old thing played in the same old way. They want something
> NEW. The "old wine in new bottles" is an absolute plague in cesspools of
> musical ignorance like the Alternative Lying List, and you constantly find
> people wasting their goddamn time playing Fur Elise in 5-limit diatonic JI.
> That's crap. It's death. It sounds lethally boring. No one cares. Jettison
> that junk. Deep six it. Press the eject button on that garbage. The way to
> get people excited about microtonality is show 'em vividly and audibly,
> first-hand, just how different and exciting microtonal tunings can be... And
> that means playing radical new tunings. 9 equal, the Greek enharmonic, pelog
> slendro, not this "start with what's familiar" crap. Starting with what's
> familiar is the kiss of death.
>
> --------------------/
>
> There may be an analogy between the ear, the mind, and the arm muscles.
> They don't get stronger with disuse. Any art or habit of life, if it is
> limited chronically to a few processes that are easiest to acquire (and, for
> that reason, are said to be some natural laws), must at some time, quite
> probably, become so weakened that it is neither a part of art nor a part of
> life. Nature has bigger things than even-vibration-ratios for man to learn
> how to use. Consonance is a relative thing (just a nice name for a nice
> habit). It is a natural enough part of music, but not the whole, or only
> one. The simplest ratios, often called perfect consonances, have been used
> so long and so constantly that not only music, but musicians and audiences,
> have become more or less soft. If they hear anything but doh-me-soh or a
> near cousin, they have to be carried out on a stretcher --Charles Ives
>
> http://www.myspace.com/danstearns
>
> for anyone who might be interested, i found this thing buried in a box the
> other day.it dates all the way back from when I was interested in Guitar
> player mag,as they used to run a "lick of the month" type thing, and I wrote
> this for that (though it was never accepted). anyway, it was funny for me to
> see it again, and I can tell I was listening to a lot of Brouwer at the time
>
>
> http://tinyurl.com/penbhm
>
> anyway, made this pretty rough and raw take i made with my new Olympus
> LS-10, a very cool field recorder i'm still trying to learn how to best
> use--and FWiW, it's a lot easier to play on nylon string with the wider
> string spacing as regards all the open notes and i recorded it on my son's
> old fret-buzzy 7/8 size steel string. So while it's probably a little more
> ragged than i'd prefer,it's still "there" and it should give you an idea of
> what it's supposed to sound like....though the last measure of quintuplets
> are quite a bit too much up on the beat and too fast/hyper (probably
> should've been sextuplets up on the tempo, but i kind of like it that better
> anyway
>
> http://tinyurl.com/ok6sr7
>
> i guess there are a lot of different ways you could notate these kinds of
> things, but i think here it's the phrasing that is mostly being altered
> inside of what are pretty straightforward measures of 4/4, so all the 5:4s
> aren't really better set in something like 5/4. There are also a lot of
> different opinions regarding these types of complex rhythms, but I think for
> solo instrumental writing their exact precision is not so important as their
> overall intent, but with any kind of ensemble rhythmic unison it's obviously
> important to playit "straight" .
>
> \FWiW,there were a few errors/discrepancies:
>
> the "and "of the 3rd and 4th beat of the first measure the
> notation is written as G B G# and the tab is written as D G G# and
> either of these work fine, what i actually ended up playing was D G G
> as 0 0 8 on the D, G, and B string .I guess i just liked /licked this
> better because it gave the ending cadence of open strings against half-step
> dissonances a little more oomph ImO. also the 3rd not of the 3rd quintuplet
> of the forth measure should be Gb (which is what i played and how it's
> written in the tab) and not the Ab of the notation (thatwas just a mistake)
> .
>
> Anyway, on these types of difficult rhythms there are a lot of
> different ways to think of them....i mean i made the ending
> quintuplets easy by phrasing them in groups of six which are more
> normalish for most players.But hey, even someone as ferociously
> rhythmically difficult as Braxton has said something to the effect of
> "count the ones strong and cram the rest in"!
>
> Daniel \\\\\\
>
> hi paul, i'd be happy to post some other short and (relatively) simple
> lick type stuff, and would encourage others to play them or share
> theirs and let others take a stab at them.....anyway, Brouwer is:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Brouwer
>
> I always loved Villa Lobos' guitar writing, and Brouwer kind of took
> it a step down the road IMO......there are a several nice guitar
> collections on Naxos FWiW
> anyway, thanks for kind words about the myspace, i'm happy with all
> those pieces but i really think Orpheus is as far out as i can take
> that kind of phantasmagoric simultaneity in a notated piece.okay,be
> well, be creative
> daniel
>
> http://tinyurl.com/3m7egu
>
> I thought Keel's Moth man Prophecies was actually a very good read
> (depending on your tolerance for these sorts of things)
> but in the very opening paragraphs he also cleverly sets up the gambit
> that the lines between hoax, misinterpretation, and truth are more
> breakable carapaces of the hard-governed world than most people would
> like to consider......
> anyway, anybody like to give the lick a go?
> it's short and guitaristic and easy enough given you can navigate the
> phrasing
> anyway, i'd love to see some of these lists do more of this sort of
> thing (play-alongs, takes on tunes etc.).
> this particular one was done for the guitar oblique site as people
> wanted there wanted to here it/try it out
>
> http://www.gtroblq.com/
>
> music is good,
> imagination is better
>
>
>

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Just FYI, that article of Brian's was written before 2008,
possibly long before. I remember reading it years ago,
anyway.

He makes some reasonable points, but it's a lot of ranting.

Some things I'd challenge - 15ET does not necessarily
sound so different from 12. Actually, I submit that just
about any tuning can be made to sound familiar, not
matter how different from 12 it is. So far I think the
pieces I've written in various ETs prove this.

Teaching from familiar to exotic is not necessarily a bad idea.
it all depends how it's done. If a person has a basic Western
music education, I can teach that person in a matter of minutes
to expand their musical worldview from a sandbox to infinity by
building on the knowledge they already possess. What method
have I used? I have 'moved from the familiar to the exotic'. Not
in so many words, mind you.

He doesn't get around to the bigger issues involved in getting
people into understanding that microtonality is what music IS.
It is at the heart of the very stuff that we call music, as basic
as rhythm.

Anyway, once someone opens their mind to accepting a reality
of infinite possibilities, I say how they got there doesn't even
matter. Just my opinion.

-Aaron
=====

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "dasdasdva" <dasdasdva@...> wrote:
>
> In his 2008 article, "Why teaching microtonality from familiar -> exotic is a bad idea", Brian McLaren makes the case, one I agree with FWiW, that if if swimming is your goal , you should forgo timidity as a matter of course and jump in the deep waters…by analogy, something akin to what McKenna would refer to as a meaningful, committed, or heroic dose.
>
> Why Teaching Microtonality from Familiar -> Exotic is a Bad Idea
> Brian McLaren
> March 3, 2008
>
> The entire idea of trying to introduce microtonality to people by starting with what's familiar and gradually moving by baby steps to more exotic tunings is a disastrously bad idea. A lot of people have done this, and it has _always_ worked out badly.
>
> Let me explain why.
>
> [1] People who are interested in learning about microtonality are generally not shrinking violets. Any folks who sign up for a class on microtones are usually among the more adventurous musicians in a group. Easing these folks into microtonality by starting with trite junk like quartertones will at first frustrate, and soon annoy and eventually enrage them. These folks want to hear the real deal, music that sounds radical and striking. They don't want to hear a bunch of 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI and listen to someone try to tell 'em that's microtonal -- they know damn well it isn't. That's pissing on peoples' legs and telling 'em it's raining. They get fed up with that kind of condescending treatment _fast_.
>
> [2] If you're dealing with a casual listener who just asks "So what's all that xenharmonic stuff about?" you want to show casual listeners _right off_ just how awesome and powerful microtonality can be, and that means you hit 'em with the wild exotic stuff. Many people mistakenly imagine that the average listener is conservative or fearful of novelty. In my experience, not so. The average listener is much more open-minded and much more eager to immerse hi/rself in radical new sounds than most folks think. What the average listener does NOT want is jargon and numerology. You start spouting a bunch of fancy Greek words (diatoniaion and epimore and epimere and comma) and drawing lotsa geometric diagrams and numbers on a blackboard, and the average listener's eyes glaze over. They get sick of that crap _fast_.
>
> So for an average listener, just hit 'em with radical novel microtonal music. Don't bother to go into details. You don't even have to tell 'em it's non-octave. If they want to know, you can go into details, but the music's what matters. Shoot, don't even tell 'em it's microtonal. Just play it for 'em. They'll love it.
>
> [3] The biggest problems with starting with familiar tunings is that these are by far the least interesting-sounding of all microtonal tunings. In fact, most of 'em are boring as crap. So there you are, droning on through this familiar bland stuff, 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI, 19 equal in the diatonic mode that sounds just about exactly like 12 equal, and everybody is nodding off. People are starting to leave the freakin' room. They're rolling their eyes. They're whispering to one another, "THIS is MICROTONAL? Ye gods, this is BORING!" BAD way to introduce microtonality. Bad, B*A*D*, _BAAAAD_ idea. Half your group is likely to sidle out of the room before you work your way, slowly and gradually, by baby steps, up to the point where the xenharmonic tunings sounds distinctly Unlike conventional music, and start to sound spicy and vivid and startlingly new.
>
> [4] Starting with familiar-sounding novels unconsciously creates an "anchor point." And it's a piss-poor anchor point. See Khaneman and Tversky's Nobel-prize-winning work on the irrationalities of human judgment -- "anchoring," which they first categorized and quantified, is one of the most notable examples.
>
> Anchoring occurs when you skew peoples' beliefs by the way you present information. For example: let's assume you don't know the population of Turkey (you probably don't) and I ask you "What's the population of Turkey? 80 million? 120 million? 140 million?" You'll give me an answer and it's probably going to be around the middle of the choices I gave you. But if I ask a different group of people "What's the population of Turkey? 10 million? 20 million? 30 million?" I'll get a different set of answers, grouped around the middle of the second set of choices.
>
> The way the information is presented created an "anchor point" which distorts people's expectations. In the first example, people's answers will tend to cluster around 120 million, while in the second example peoples' answers will tend to cluster around 20 million.
>
> The population of Turkey is 71 million, by the way. Notice how we can distort people's judgment about the size of the Turkish population just by using this anchoring technique. Political polls do this all the time, as do product evaluation polls set up by companies that want to sell a product. It's all a form of psychological manipulation. Creeps do this today with the post-9/11 hysteria: "Which do you prefer? Freedom? Or security?" Anyone who's not brain-damaged will obviously answer security. Freedom doesn't do you much good if you're dead. But suppose you change the question -- "Which do you prefer? Having every aspect of your life controlled by the security state? Or being free?" Guess which answer people give _then_...?
>
> Such is the power of anchoring.
>
> The problem with starting with a familiar set of 12-like tunings and gradually moving toward unfamiliar tunings that don't sound like 12 is that you've created an anchor point -- and your anchor is 12. This is a bad mistake. By the time you're halfway through giving your introduction to microtonality, your audience will get the idea -- THE WRONG IDEA: any tuning is good insofar as it is like 12. If doesn't sound like 12, it's not so good.
>
> This results in the kind of dismal crap you see on sinkholes of deluded folly like the Alternative Lying List, where all tunings get judged in a foolish continuum that runs from "very similar to 12 = good" and "very different from 12 = bad." This naturally leads to crazy and insanely stupid conclusions, like "all non-octave tunings = bad."
>
> The musical reality turns out to be just the opposite. The real value of microtonal tunings involves getting away from what's familiar. History shows that the most popular microtonal tunings are those which audibly differ most drastically from 12 equal. 15 equal is extremely popular, used by Wendy Carlos, Augusto Novaro, Ivor Darreg, Bill Wesley, Easley Balckwood, myself, and many many others. 15 equal is popular because it sounds radically and wildly different from 12 equal. You don't get anything like a conventional diatonic scale. You get major and minor triads, but they sound noticeably different from the major and minor triads in 12. You don't have a conventional leading tone. Everything is different. This makes music in 15 equal sound fresh and lively and vivacious. 15 equal breaks open a smelling salts capsule under the audience's nose and really wakes 'em up. By contrast, 19 equal can sound almost identical to 12, and this tends to bore the audience. "If we wanted to hear 12," their attitude tends to be, "we would've stayed with 12. Why bother with this?"
>
> Once again, 9 equal sounds radically different from conventional western music. You hit an audience with 9 equal, and they'll get excited. But if you have the bad judgment to start the audience out with the Greek chromatic and diatonic genera, the audience is likely to snooze off. That stuff sounds almost identical to conventional western music. The audience fidgets. They shift in their seats. They start to get antsy. "When are we going to hear the real stuff/" they start to ask. They get impatient.
>
> Back in the 60s and 70s it used to be chic to play a familiar song like "Greensleves" in 31 equal and call that "microtonality." Bad bad bad idea. Ivor Darreg had a better idea -- he used to play visitors 13 equal melodies on a bunch of bronze slats he had set up as tubulongs. The exotic inharmonic percussive timbre combined with the novel sound of 13 always perked people up. They got interested. It piqued their curiosity. They wanted to know more.
>
> Playing "Greensleeves" in 31 equal never worked. 31 equal used to be touted back in the 60s as some kind of "universal tuning" which, academics claimed, would be ideal because you could play conventional western music in it and it would sound almost identical to what we're familiar with, as well as playing new music.
>
> Well, that didn't fly. No one interested in new music gives a damn about hearing the same old thing played in the same old way. They want something NEW. The "old wine in new bottles" is an absolute plague in cesspools of musical ignorance like the Alternative Lying List, and you constantly find people wasting their goddamn time playing Fur Elise in 5-limit diatonic JI. That's crap. It's death. It sounds lethally boring. No one cares. Jettison that junk. Deep six it. Press the eject button on that garbage. The way to get people excited about microtonality is show 'em vividly and audibly, first-hand, just how different and exciting microtonal tunings can be... And that means playing radical new tunings. 9 equal, the Greek enharmonic, pelog slendro, not this "start with what's familiar" crap. Starting with what's familiar is the kiss of death.
>
>
> --------------------/
>
> There may be an analogy between the ear, the mind, and the arm muscles. They don't get stronger with disuse. Any art or habit of life, if it is limited chronically to a few processes that are easiest to acquire (and, for that reason, are said to be some natural laws), must at some time, quite probably, become so weakened that it is neither a part of art nor a part of life. Nature has bigger things than even-vibration-ratios for man to learn how to use. Consonance is a relative thing (just a nice name for a nice habit). It is a natural enough part of music, but not the whole, or only one. The simplest ratios, often called perfect consonances, have been used so long and so constantly that not only music, but musicians and audiences, have become more or less soft. If they hear anything but doh-me-soh or a near cousin, they have to be carried out on a stretcher --Charles Ives
>
> http://www.myspace.com/danstearns
>
>
> for anyone who might be interested, i found this thing buried in a box the other day.it dates all the way back from when I was interested in Guitar player mag,as they used to run a "lick of the month" type thing, and I wrote this for that (though it was never accepted). anyway, it was funny for me to see it again, and I can tell I was listening to a lot of Brouwer at the time
>
> http://tinyurl.com/penbhm
>
>
> anyway, made this pretty rough and raw take i made with my new Olympus LS-10, a very cool field recorder i'm still trying to learn how to best use--and FWiW, it's a lot easier to play on nylon string with the wider string spacing as regards all the open notes and i recorded it on my son's old fret-buzzy 7/8 size steel string. So while it's probably a little more ragged than i'd prefer,it's still "there" and it should give you an idea of what it's supposed to sound like....though the last measure of quintuplets are quite a bit too much up on the beat and too fast/hyper (probably should've been sextuplets up on the tempo, but i kind of like it that better anyway
>
>
> http://tinyurl.com/ok6sr7
>
>
> i guess there are a lot of different ways you could notate these kinds of things, but i think here it's the phrasing that is mostly being altered inside of what are pretty straightforward measures of 4/4, so all the 5:4s aren't really better set in something like 5/4. There are also a lot of different opinions regarding these types of complex rhythms, but I think for solo instrumental writing their exact precision is not so important as their overall intent, but with any kind of ensemble rhythmic unison it's obviously important to playit "straight" .
>
> \FWiW,there were a few errors/discrepancies:
>
> the "and "of the 3rd and 4th beat of the first measure the
> notation is written as G B G# and the tab is written as D G G# and
> either of these work fine, what i actually ended up playing was D G G
> as 0 0 8 on the D, G, and B string .I guess i just liked /licked this
> better because it gave the ending cadence of open strings against half-step dissonances a little more oomph ImO. also the 3rd not of the 3rd quintuplet of the forth measure should be Gb (which is what i played and how it's written in the tab) and not the Ab of the notation (thatwas just a mistake) .
>
> Anyway, on these types of difficult rhythms there are a lot of
> different ways to think of them....i mean i made the ending
> quintuplets easy by phrasing them in groups of six which are more
> normalish for most players.But hey, even someone as ferociously
> rhythmically difficult as Braxton has said something to the effect of
> "count the ones strong and cram the rest in"!
>
> Daniel \\\\\\
>
> hi paul, i'd be happy to post some other short and (relatively) simple
> lick type stuff, and would encourage others to play them or share
> theirs and let others take a stab at them.....anyway, Brouwer is:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Brouwer
>
>
> I always loved Villa Lobos' guitar writing, and Brouwer kind of took
> it a step down the road IMO......there are a several nice guitar
> collections on Naxos FWiW
> anyway, thanks for kind words about the myspace, i'm happy with all
> those pieces but i really think Orpheus is as far out as i can take
> that kind of phantasmagoric simultaneity in a notated piece.okay,be
> well, be creative
> daniel
>
>
> http://tinyurl.com/3m7egu
>
> I thought Keel's Moth man Prophecies was actually a very good read
> (depending on your tolerance for these sorts of things)
> but in the very opening paragraphs he also cleverly sets up the gambit
> that the lines between hoax, misinterpretation, and truth are more
> breakable carapaces of the hard-governed world than most people would
> like to consider......
> anyway, anybody like to give the lick a go?
> it's short and guitaristic and easy enough given you can navigate the
> phrasing
> anyway, i'd love to see some of these lists do more of this sort of
> thing (play-alongs, takes on tunes etc.).
> this particular one was done for the guitar oblique site as people
> wanted there wanted to here it/try it out
>
>
> http://www.gtroblq.com/
>
>
> music is good,
> imagination is better
>

The best method is always to find out what one is interested musically already and then supply the person with as many of those options one knows and let them choose, hopefully informed by the questions that arise out of the options. Often what someone is interested might not call for microtones at all.

I do think McLaren realizes via the critical preference of his experience what attracts people to microtones is not usually historical assumptions of what already been implied by 12ET especially on how it is no longer practiced.

/^_,',',',_ //^ /Kraig Grady_ ^_,',',',_
Mesotonal Music from:
_'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere:
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>

_'''''''_ ^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>

',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',

dasdasdva wrote:
>
>
> In his 2008 article, "Why teaching microtonality from familiar -> > exotic is a bad idea", Brian McLaren makes the case, one I agree with > FWiW, that if if swimming is your goal , you should forgo timidity as > a matter of course and jump in the deep waters�by analogy, something > akin to what McKenna would refer to as a meaningful, committed, or > heroic dose.
>
> Why Teaching Microtonality from Familiar -> Exotic is a Bad Idea
> Brian McLaren
> March 3, 2008
>
> The entire idea of trying to introduce microtonality to people by > starting with what's familiar and gradually moving by baby steps to > more exotic tunings is a disastrously bad idea. A lot of people have > done this, and it has _always_ worked out badly.
>
> Let me explain why.
>
> [1] People who are interested in learning about microtonality are > generally not shrinking violets. Any folks who sign up for a class on > microtones are usually among the more adventurous musicians in a > group. Easing these folks into microtonality by starting with trite > junk like quartertones will at first frustrate, and soon annoy and > eventually enrage them. These folks want to hear the real deal, music > that sounds radical and striking. They don't want to hear a bunch of > 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI and listen to someone try to tell 'em > that's microtonal -- they know damn well it isn't. That's pissing on > peoples' legs and telling 'em it's raining. They get fed up with that > kind of condescending treatment _fast_.
>
> [2] If you're dealing with a casual listener who just asks "So what's > all that xenharmonic stuff about?" you want to show casual listeners > _right off_ just how awesome and powerful microtonality can be, and > that means you hit 'em with the wild exotic stuff. Many people > mistakenly imagine that the average listener is conservative or > fearful of novelty. In my experience, not so. The average listener is > much more open-minded and much more eager to immerse hi/rself in > radical new sounds than most folks think. What the average listener > does NOT want is jargon and numerology. You start spouting a bunch of > fancy Greek words (diatoniaion and epimore and epimere and comma) and > drawing lotsa geometric diagrams and numbers on a blackboard, and the > average listener's eyes glaze over. They get sick of that crap _fast_.
>
> So for an average listener, just hit 'em with radical novel microtonal > music. Don't bother to go into details. You don't even have to tell > 'em it's non-octave. If they want to know, you can go into details, > but the music's what matters. Shoot, don't even tell 'em it's > microtonal. Just play it for 'em. They'll love it.
>
> [3] The biggest problems with starting with familiar tunings is that > these are by far the least interesting-sounding of all microtonal > tunings. In fact, most of 'em are boring as crap. So there you are, > droning on through this familiar bland stuff, 5-limit diatonic 12-note > JI, 19 equal in the diatonic mode that sounds just about exactly like > 12 equal, and everybody is nodding off. People are starting to leave > the freakin' room. They're rolling their eyes. They're whispering to > one another, "THIS is MICROTONAL? Ye gods, this is BORING!" BAD way to > introduce microtonality. Bad, B*A*D*, _BAAAAD_ idea. Half your group > is likely to sidle out of the room before you work your way, slowly > and gradually, by baby steps, up to the point where the xenharmonic > tunings sounds distinctly Unlike conventional music, and start to > sound spicy and vivid and startlingly new.
>
> [4] Starting with familiar-sounding novels unconsciously creates an > "anchor point." And it's a piss-poor anchor point. See Khaneman and > Tversky's Nobel-prize-winning work on the irrationalities of human > judgment -- "anchoring," which they first categorized and quantified, > is one of the most notable examples.
>
> Anchoring occurs when you skew peoples' beliefs by the way you present > information. For example: let's assume you don't know the population > of Turkey (you probably don't) and I ask you "What's the population of > Turkey? 80 million? 120 million? 140 million?" You'll give me an > answer and it's probably going to be around the middle of the choices > I gave you. But if I ask a different group of people "What's the > population of Turkey? 10 million? 20 million? 30 million?" I'll get a > different set of answers, grouped around the middle of the second set > of choices.
>
> The way the information is presented created an "anchor point" which > distorts people's expectations. In the first example, people's answers > will tend to cluster around 120 million, while in the second example > peoples' answers will tend to cluster around 20 million.
>
> The population of Turkey is 71 million, by the way. Notice how we can > distort people's judgment about the size of the Turkish population > just by using this anchoring technique. Political polls do this all > the time, as do product evaluation polls set up by companies that want > to sell a product. It's all a form of psychological manipulation. > Creeps do this today with the post-9/11 hysteria: "Which do you > prefer? Freedom? Or security?" Anyone who's not brain-damaged will > obviously answer security. Freedom doesn't do you much good if you're > dead. But suppose you change the question -- "Which do you prefer? > Having every aspect of your life controlled by the security state? Or > being free?" Guess which answer people give _then_...?
>
> Such is the power of anchoring.
>
> The problem with starting with a familiar set of 12-like tunings and > gradually moving toward unfamiliar tunings that don't sound like 12 is > that you've created an anchor point -- and your anchor is 12. This is > a bad mistake. By the time you're halfway through giving your > introduction to microtonality, your audience will get the idea -- THE > WRONG IDEA: any tuning is good insofar as it is like 12. If doesn't > sound like 12, it's not so good.
>
> This results in the kind of dismal crap you see on sinkholes of > deluded folly like the Alternative Lying List, where all tunings get > judged in a foolish continuum that runs from "very similar to 12 = > good" and "very different from 12 = bad." This naturally leads to > crazy and insanely stupid conclusions, like "all non-octave tunings = > bad."
>
> The musical reality turns out to be just the opposite. The real value > of microtonal tunings involves getting away from what's familiar. > History shows that the most popular microtonal tunings are those which > audibly differ most drastically from 12 equal. 15 equal is extremely > popular, used by Wendy Carlos, Augusto Novaro, Ivor Darreg, Bill > Wesley, Easley Balckwood, myself, and many many others. 15 equal is > popular because it sounds radically and wildly different from 12 > equal. You don't get anything like a conventional diatonic scale. You > get major and minor triads, but they sound noticeably different from > the major and minor triads in 12. You don't have a conventional > leading tone. Everything is different. This makes music in 15 equal > sound fresh and lively and vivacious. 15 equal breaks open a smelling > salts capsule under the audience's nose and really wakes 'em up. By > contrast, 19 equal can sound almost identical to 12, and this tends to > bore the audience. "If we wanted to hear 12," their attitude tends to > be, "we would've stayed with 12. Why bother with this?"
>
> Once again, 9 equal sounds radically different from conventional > western music. You hit an audience with 9 equal, and they'll get > excited. But if you have the bad judgment to start the audience out > with the Greek chromatic and diatonic genera, the audience is likely > to snooze off. That stuff sounds almost identical to conventional > western music. The audience fidgets. They shift in their seats. They > start to get antsy. "When are we going to hear the real stuff/" they > start to ask. They get impatient.
>
> Back in the 60s and 70s it used to be chic to play a familiar song > like "Greensleves" in 31 equal and call that "microtonality." Bad bad > bad idea. Ivor Darreg had a better idea -- he used to play visitors 13 > equal melodies on a bunch of bronze slats he had set up as tubulongs. > The exotic inharmonic percussive timbre combined with the novel sound > of 13 always perked people up. They got interested. It piqued their > curiosity. They wanted to know more.
>
> Playing "Greensleeves" in 31 equal never worked. 31 equal used to be > touted back in the 60s as some kind of "universal tuning" which, > academics claimed, would be ideal because you could play conventional > western music in it and it would sound almost identical to what we're > familiar with, as well as playing new music.
>
> Well, that didn't fly. No one interested in new music gives a damn > about hearing the same old thing played in the same old way. They want > something NEW. The "old wine in new bottles" is an absolute plague in > cesspools of musical ignorance like the Alternative Lying List, and > you constantly find people wasting their goddamn time playing Fur > Elise in 5-limit diatonic JI. That's crap. It's death. It sounds > lethally boring. No one cares. Jettison that junk. Deep six it. Press > the eject button on that garbage. The way to get people excited about > microtonality is show 'em vividly and audibly, first-hand, just how > different and exciting microtonal tunings can be... And that means > playing radical new tunings. 9 equal, the Greek enharmonic, pelog > slendro, not this "start with what's familiar" crap. Starting with > what's familiar is the kiss of death.
>
> --------------------/
>
> There may be an analogy between the ear, the mind, and the arm > muscles. They don't get stronger with disuse. Any art or habit of > life, if it is limited chronically to a few processes that are easiest > to acquire (and, for that reason, are said to be some natural laws), > must at some time, quite probably, become so weakened that it is > neither a part of art nor a part of life. Nature has bigger things > than even-vibration-ratios for man to learn how to use. Consonance is > a relative thing (just a nice name for a nice habit). It is a natural > enough part of music, but not the whole, or only one. The simplest > ratios, often called perfect consonances, have been used so long and > so constantly that not only music, but musicians and audiences, have > become more or less soft. If they hear anything but doh-me-soh or a > near cousin, they have to be carried out on a stretcher --Charles Ives
>
> http://www.myspace.com/danstearns <http://www.myspace.com/danstearns>
>
> for anyone who might be interested, i found this thing buried in a box > the other day.it dates all the way back from when I was interested in > Guitar player mag,as they used to run a "lick of the month" type > thing, and I wrote this for that (though it was never accepted). > anyway, it was funny for me to see it again, and I can tell I was > listening to a lot of Brouwer at the time
>
> http://tinyurl.com/penbhm <http://tinyurl.com/penbhm>
>
> anyway, made this pretty rough and raw take i made with my new Olympus > LS-10, a very cool field recorder i'm still trying to learn how to > best use--and FWiW, it's a lot easier to play on nylon string with the > wider string spacing as regards all the open notes and i recorded it > on my son's old fret-buzzy 7/8 size steel string. So while it's > probably a little more ragged than i'd prefer,it's still "there" and > it should give you an idea of what it's supposed to sound > like....though the last measure of quintuplets are quite a bit too > much up on the beat and too fast/hyper (probably should've been > sextuplets up on the tempo, but i kind of like it that better anyway
>
> http://tinyurl.com/ok6sr7 <http://tinyurl.com/ok6sr7>
>
> i guess there are a lot of different ways you could notate these kinds > of things, but i think here it's the phrasing that is mostly being > altered inside of what are pretty straightforward measures of 4/4, so > all the 5:4s aren't really better set in something like 5/4. There are > also a lot of different opinions regarding these types of complex > rhythms, but I think for solo instrumental writing their exact > precision is not so important as their overall intent, but with any > kind of ensemble rhythmic unison it's obviously important to playit > "straight" .
>
> \FWiW,there were a few errors/discrepancies:
>
> the "and "of the 3rd and 4th beat of the first measure the
> notation is written as G B G# and the tab is written as D G G# and
> either of these work fine, what i actually ended up playing was D G G
> as 0 0 8 on the D, G, and B string .I guess i just liked /licked this
> better because it gave the ending cadence of open strings against > half-step dissonances a little more oomph ImO. also the 3rd not of the > 3rd quintuplet of the forth measure should be Gb (which is what i > played and how it's written in the tab) and not the Ab of the notation > (thatwas just a mistake) .
>
> Anyway, on these types of difficult rhythms there are a lot of
> different ways to think of them....i mean i made the ending
> quintuplets easy by phrasing them in groups of six which are more
> normalish for most players.But hey, even someone as ferociously
> rhythmically difficult as Braxton has said something to the effect of
> "count the ones strong and cram the rest in"!
>
> Daniel \\\\\\
>
> hi paul, i'd be happy to post some other short and (relatively) simple
> lick type stuff, and would encourage others to play them or share
> theirs and let others take a stab at them.....anyway, Brouwer is:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Brouwer > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Brouwer>
>
> I always loved Villa Lobos' guitar writing, and Brouwer kind of took
> it a step down the road IMO......there are a several nice guitar
> collections on Naxos FWiW
> anyway, thanks for kind words about the myspace, i'm happy with all
> those pieces but i really think Orpheus is as far out as i can take
> that kind of phantasmagoric simultaneity in a notated piece.okay,be
> well, be creative
> daniel
>
> http://tinyurl.com/3m7egu <http://tinyurl.com/3m7egu>
>
> I thought Keel's Moth man Prophecies was actually a very good read
> (depending on your tolerance for these sorts of things)
> but in the very opening paragraphs he also cleverly sets up the gambit
> that the lines between hoax, misinterpretation, and truth are more
> breakable carapaces of the hard-governed world than most people would
> like to consider......
> anyway, anybody like to give the lick a go?
> it's short and guitaristic and easy enough given you can navigate the
> phrasing
> anyway, i'd love to see some of these lists do more of this sort of
> thing (play-alongs, takes on tunes etc.).
> this particular one was done for the guitar oblique site as people
> wanted there wanted to here it/try it out
>
> http://www.gtroblq.com/ <http://www.gtroblq.com/>
>
> music is good,
> imagination is better
>
>

Aaron Andrew Hunt wrote:
> Just FYI, that article of Brian's was written before 2008, > possibly long before. I remember reading it years ago, > anyway.
> > He makes some reasonable points, but it's a lot of ranting.
> > Some things I'd challenge - 15ET does not necessarily > sound so different from 12.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/midi/mlgt3-15.mid
:-)

I have to wonder if Beethoven was consciously avoiding the syntonic comma in that one or if it just happened that way.

> Actually, I submit that just
> about any tuning can be made to sound familiar, not > matter how different from 12 it is. So far I think the > pieces I've written in various ETs prove this.

And there's nothing wrong with music that approaches familiarity, for that matter. There are good reasons why 12-et is such a popular tuning; many microtonal systems have similar reasons for being good tunings. Besides, the most familiar 12-ET music is tonal music that follows patterns from meantone temperament, with occasional progressions that divide the octave into 3 or 4 equal parts. 19-ET can be used as just another way of tuning meantone, and even our musical notation is based on a chain of fifths as in meantone or schismatic temperaments. Atonal 19-ET music would be at least as hard to appreciate as atonal 12-ET music can be.

Still, it's hard to imagine Bohlen-Pierce for instance sounding anything like 12-ET.

>
> >They don't want to hear a bunch of 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI and listen
> to someone try to tell 'em that's microtonal
>
> doesn't know their ass from their elbow about either music or
> microtonality.

I was just about to write something very similar but since you allready did
I'll second that :)

Marcel

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hi Herman.

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com,
> Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
> > Some things I'd challenge - 15ET does not necessarily
> > sound so different from 12.
>
> http://www.io.com/~hmiller/midi/mlgt3-15.mid
> :-)

Nice! Thanks for sharing this.

One suggestion - You might pad the MIDI file with an
empty measure or 2 at the end to fix the problem of
choking on the last beat. Also, I guess the patch you
were using was intended to be something like a forte-
piano? I would prefer the default piano patch, although
it would sound more dissonant.

> Still, it's hard to imagine Bohlen-Pierce for instance
> sounding anything like 12-ET.

Maybe hard to imagine, but not that hard to demonstrate.
BP does a fine job for triadic music using open voicing
based primarily on a circle of thirds/sixths. I haven't written
such a piece yet in this tuning, but you can try it and
you'll see what I mean.

Aaron
=====

With all due respect I will offer once again a contrary opinion.

Microtonality, via the blues, and world music, is creeping into popular
usage in a big way and has been for a while.
If one wants a place to start the introduction I would suggest this is where
to start in order to demonstrate that indeed the "cracks between the keys"
as Ive's father put it are your friend.

I see here a progression - in general western music has progressed towards
greater and greater chromatic usage in harmony - melodic usage is not nearly
as big of a deal - microtonality is the next logical step in harmony yes -
but how long before that is accepted would depend on microtonal
composers making something compelling enough for the average listener to
make average musician make the effort all of us do now.

It is though great to think that we can do what could only be accomplished
by physically creating your own instruments thanks to computers.

Chris V.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
> microtonal composers making
> something compelling enough for
> the average listener to make
> the average musician to make
> the effort all of us do now.

It's always a bit more difficult to invent or discover a new system than it is to use something that somebody else already figured out. My guess is that there are countless workable musical systems, of which we have only explored a tiny fraction - different cultures typically specializing at most a few systems if not just one.

Musical evolution probably happens through "punctuated equilibria". Most systems can be reached gradually, but some may require bigger leaps. What factors must come together to enable such leaps - positively, the necessary building blocks; negatively, some instability or crisis in the existing systems.

We may well be at a place where leaps are needed and possible. Globalization and computers create both the crisis and the resources. Once the pioneers have suffered through the early mistakes, some fertile new valleys may emerge where beautiful gardens can be cultivated without such huge risks.

Jim

actually it is now in a state where it is being taken out.
There is software that correct the intonation of every single pop song to be in 12 ET. Every single one. I

/^_,',',',_ //^ /Kraig Grady_ ^_,',',',_
Mesotonal Music from:
_'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere: North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>

_'''''''_ ^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>

',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',

Chris Vaisvil wrote:
>
>
> With all due respect I will offer once again a contrary opinion.
>
> Microtonality, via the blues, and world music, is creeping into popular
> usage in a big way and has been for a while.
> If one wants a place to start the introduction I would suggest this is > where
> to start in order to demonstrate that indeed the "cracks between the keys"
> as Ive's father put it are your friend.
>
> I see here a progression - in general western music has progressed towards
> greater and greater chromatic usage in harmony - melodic usage is not > nearly
> as big of a deal - microtonality is the next logical step in harmony yes -
> but how long before that is accepted would depend on microtonal
> composers making something compelling enough for the average listener to
> make average musician make the effort all of us do now.
>
> It is though great to think that we can do what could only be accomplished
> by physically creating your own instruments thanks to computers.
>
> Chris V.
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>

Just one thing, in response to

"Many people mistakenly imagine that the average listener is conservative or fearful of novelty. In my experience, not so. The average listener is much more open-minded and much more eager to immerse hi/rself in radical new sounds than most folks think."

I think that's very true, but they still want a singable chorus and they _really_ _do_ get turned off fast if you don't repeat enough. Don't expect the "average listener" to go wild for Charles Ives or John Cage. Give them a blues with a couple crazy twists at the high points and they'll be gasping.
Educated musicians are a different bunch. Often threatened by something that doesn't fit what they imagine to be their expertise. I have been told "I generally don't like out-of-tune music," by musicians, regardless of any reasoning I threw their way. Others, "That sounds really cool, you should score that for piano and bassoon!"

Not everyone who doesn't already listen to microtonal music is "the average listener".

-Chuckk

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "dasdasdva" <dasdasdva@...> wrote:
>
> In his 2008 article, "Why teaching microtonality from familiar -> exotic is a bad idea", Brian McLaren makes the case, one I agree with FWiW, that if if swimming is your goal , you should forgo timidity as a matter of course and jump in the deep waters…by analogy, something akin to what McKenna would refer to as a meaningful, committed, or heroic dose.
>
> Why Teaching Microtonality from Familiar -> Exotic is a Bad Idea
> Brian McLaren
> March 3, 2008
>
> The entire idea of trying to introduce microtonality to people by starting with what's familiar and gradually moving by baby steps to more exotic tunings is a disastrously bad idea. A lot of people have done this, and it has _always_ worked out badly.
>
> Let me explain why.
>
> [1] People who are interested in learning about microtonality are generally not shrinking violets. Any folks who sign up for a class on microtones are usually among the more adventurous musicians in a group. Easing these folks into microtonality by starting with trite junk like quartertones will at first frustrate, and soon annoy and eventually enrage them. These folks want to hear the real deal, music that sounds radical and striking. They don't want to hear a bunch of 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI and listen to someone try to tell 'em that's microtonal -- they know damn well it isn't. That's pissing on peoples' legs and telling 'em it's raining. They get fed up with that kind of condescending treatment _fast_.
>
> [2] If you're dealing with a casual listener who just asks "So what's all that xenharmonic stuff about?" you want to show casual listeners _right off_ just how awesome and powerful microtonality can be, and that means you hit 'em with the wild exotic stuff. Many people mistakenly imagine that the average listener is conservative or fearful of novelty. In my experience, not so. The average listener is much more open-minded and much more eager to immerse hi/rself in radical new sounds than most folks think. What the average listener does NOT want is jargon and numerology. You start spouting a bunch of fancy Greek words (diatoniaion and epimore and epimere and comma) and drawing lotsa geometric diagrams and numbers on a blackboard, and the average listener's eyes glaze over. They get sick of that crap _fast_.
>
> So for an average listener, just hit 'em with radical novel microtonal music. Don't bother to go into details. You don't even have to tell 'em it's non-octave. If they want to know, you can go into details, but the music's what matters. Shoot, don't even tell 'em it's microtonal. Just play it for 'em. They'll love it.
>
> [3] The biggest problems with starting with familiar tunings is that these are by far the least interesting-sounding of all microtonal tunings. In fact, most of 'em are boring as crap. So there you are, droning on through this familiar bland stuff, 5-limit diatonic 12-note JI, 19 equal in the diatonic mode that sounds just about exactly like 12 equal, and everybody is nodding off. People are starting to leave the freakin' room. They're rolling their eyes. They're whispering to one another, "THIS is MICROTONAL? Ye gods, this is BORING!" BAD way to introduce microtonality. Bad, B*A*D*, _BAAAAD_ idea. Half your group is likely to sidle out of the room before you work your way, slowly and gradually, by baby steps, up to the point where the xenharmonic tunings sounds distinctly Unlike conventional music, and start to sound spicy and vivid and startlingly new.
>
> [4] Starting with familiar-sounding novels unconsciously creates an "anchor point." And it's a piss-poor anchor point. See Khaneman and Tversky's Nobel-prize-winning work on the irrationalities of human judgment -- "anchoring," which they first categorized and quantified, is one of the most notable examples.
>
> Anchoring occurs when you skew peoples' beliefs by the way you present information. For example: let's assume you don't know the population of Turkey (you probably don't) and I ask you "What's the population of Turkey? 80 million? 120 million? 140 million?" You'll give me an answer and it's probably going to be around the middle of the choices I gave you. But if I ask a different group of people "What's the population of Turkey? 10 million? 20 million? 30 million?" I'll get a different set of answers, grouped around the middle of the second set of choices.
>
> The way the information is presented created an "anchor point" which distorts people's expectations. In the first example, people's answers will tend to cluster around 120 million, while in the second example peoples' answers will tend to cluster around 20 million.
>
> The population of Turkey is 71 million, by the way. Notice how we can distort people's judgment about the size of the Turkish population just by using this anchoring technique. Political polls do this all the time, as do product evaluation polls set up by companies that want to sell a product. It's all a form of psychological manipulation. Creeps do this today with the post-9/11 hysteria: "Which do you prefer? Freedom? Or security?" Anyone who's not brain-damaged will obviously answer security. Freedom doesn't do you much good if you're dead. But suppose you change the question -- "Which do you prefer? Having every aspect of your life controlled by the security state? Or being free?" Guess which answer people give _then_...?
>
> Such is the power of anchoring.
>
> The problem with starting with a familiar set of 12-like tunings and gradually moving toward unfamiliar tunings that don't sound like 12 is that you've created an anchor point -- and your anchor is 12. This is a bad mistake. By the time you're halfway through giving your introduction to microtonality, your audience will get the idea -- THE WRONG IDEA: any tuning is good insofar as it is like 12. If doesn't sound like 12, it's not so good.
>
> This results in the kind of dismal crap you see on sinkholes of deluded folly like the Alternative Lying List, where all tunings get judged in a foolish continuum that runs from "very similar to 12 = good" and "very different from 12 = bad." This naturally leads to crazy and insanely stupid conclusions, like "all non-octave tunings = bad."
>
> The musical reality turns out to be just the opposite. The real value of microtonal tunings involves getting away from what's familiar. History shows that the most popular microtonal tunings are those which audibly differ most drastically from 12 equal. 15 equal is extremely popular, used by Wendy Carlos, Augusto Novaro, Ivor Darreg, Bill Wesley, Easley Balckwood, myself, and many many others. 15 equal is popular because it sounds radically and wildly different from 12 equal. You don't get anything like a conventional diatonic scale. You get major and minor triads, but they sound noticeably different from the major and minor triads in 12. You don't have a conventional leading tone. Everything is different. This makes music in 15 equal sound fresh and lively and vivacious. 15 equal breaks open a smelling salts capsule under the audience's nose and really wakes 'em up. By contrast, 19 equal can sound almost identical to 12, and this tends to bore the audience. "If we wanted to hear 12," their attitude tends to be, "we would've stayed with 12. Why bother with this?"
>
> Once again, 9 equal sounds radically different from conventional western music. You hit an audience with 9 equal, and they'll get excited. But if you have the bad judgment to start the audience out with the Greek chromatic and diatonic genera, the audience is likely to snooze off. That stuff sounds almost identical to conventional western music. The audience fidgets. They shift in their seats. They start to get antsy. "When are we going to hear the real stuff/" they start to ask. They get impatient.
>
> Back in the 60s and 70s it used to be chic to play a familiar song like "Greensleves" in 31 equal and call that "microtonality." Bad bad bad idea. Ivor Darreg had a better idea -- he used to play visitors 13 equal melodies on a bunch of bronze slats he had set up as tubulongs. The exotic inharmonic percussive timbre combined with the novel sound of 13 always perked people up. They got interested. It piqued their curiosity. They wanted to know more.
>
> Playing "Greensleeves" in 31 equal never worked. 31 equal used to be touted back in the 60s as some kind of "universal tuning" which, academics claimed, would be ideal because you could play conventional western music in it and it would sound almost identical to what we're familiar with, as well as playing new music.
>
> Well, that didn't fly. No one interested in new music gives a damn about hearing the same old thing played in the same old way. They want something NEW. The "old wine in new bottles" is an absolute plague in cesspools of musical ignorance like the Alternative Lying List, and you constantly find people wasting their goddamn time playing Fur Elise in 5-limit diatonic JI. That's crap. It's death. It sounds lethally boring. No one cares. Jettison that junk. Deep six it. Press the eject button on that garbage. The way to get people excited about microtonality is show 'em vividly and audibly, first-hand, just how different and exciting microtonal tunings can be... And that means playing radical new tunings. 9 equal, the Greek enharmonic, pelog slendro, not this "start with what's familiar" crap. Starting with what's familiar is the kiss of death.
>
>
> --------------------/
>
> There may be an analogy between the ear, the mind, and the arm muscles. They don't get stronger with disuse. Any art or habit of life, if it is limited chronically to a few processes that are easiest to acquire (and, for that reason, are said to be some natural laws), must at some time, quite probably, become so weakened that it is neither a part of art nor a part of life. Nature has bigger things than even-vibration-ratios for man to learn how to use. Consonance is a relative thing (just a nice name for a nice habit). It is a natural enough part of music, but not the whole, or only one. The simplest ratios, often called perfect consonances, have been used so long and so constantly that not only music, but musicians and audiences, have become more or less soft. If they hear anything but doh-me-soh or a near cousin, they have to be carried out on a stretcher --Charles Ives
>
> http://www.myspace.com/danstearns
>
>
> for anyone who might be interested, i found this thing buried in a box the other day.it dates all the way back from when I was interested in Guitar player mag,as they used to run a "lick of the month" type thing, and I wrote this for that (though it was never accepted). anyway, it was funny for me to see it again, and I can tell I was listening to a lot of Brouwer at the time
>
> http://tinyurl.com/penbhm
>
>
> anyway, made this pretty rough and raw take i made with my new Olympus LS-10, a very cool field recorder i'm still trying to learn how to best use--and FWiW, it's a lot easier to play on nylon string with the wider string spacing as regards all the open notes and i recorded it on my son's old fret-buzzy 7/8 size steel string. So while it's probably a little more ragged than i'd prefer,it's still "there" and it should give you an idea of what it's supposed to sound like....though the last measure of quintuplets are quite a bit too much up on the beat and too fast/hyper (probably should've been sextuplets up on the tempo, but i kind of like it that better anyway
>
>
> http://tinyurl.com/ok6sr7
>
>
> i guess there are a lot of different ways you could notate these kinds of things, but i think here it's the phrasing that is mostly being altered inside of what are pretty straightforward measures of 4/4, so all the 5:4s aren't really better set in something like 5/4. There are also a lot of different opinions regarding these types of complex rhythms, but I think for solo instrumental writing their exact precision is not so important as their overall intent, but with any kind of ensemble rhythmic unison it's obviously important to playit "straight" .
>
> \FWiW,there were a few errors/discrepancies:
>
> the "and "of the 3rd and 4th beat of the first measure the
> notation is written as G B G# and the tab is written as D G G# and
> either of these work fine, what i actually ended up playing was D G G
> as 0 0 8 on the D, G, and B string .I guess i just liked /licked this
> better because it gave the ending cadence of open strings against half-step dissonances a little more oomph ImO. also the 3rd not of the 3rd quintuplet of the forth measure should be Gb (which is what i played and how it's written in the tab) and not the Ab of the notation (thatwas just a mistake) .
>
> Anyway, on these types of difficult rhythms there are a lot of
> different ways to think of them....i mean i made the ending
> quintuplets easy by phrasing them in groups of six which are more
> normalish for most players.But hey, even someone as ferociously
> rhythmically difficult as Braxton has said something to the effect of
> "count the ones strong and cram the rest in"!
>
> Daniel \\\\\\
>
> hi paul, i'd be happy to post some other short and (relatively) simple
> lick type stuff, and would encourage others to play them or share
> theirs and let others take a stab at them.....anyway, Brouwer is:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Brouwer
>
>
> I always loved Villa Lobos' guitar writing, and Brouwer kind of took
> it a step down the road IMO......there are a several nice guitar
> collections on Naxos FWiW
> anyway, thanks for kind words about the myspace, i'm happy with all
> those pieces but i really think Orpheus is as far out as i can take
> that kind of phantasmagoric simultaneity in a notated piece.okay,be
> well, be creative
> daniel
>
>
> http://tinyurl.com/3m7egu
>
> I thought Keel's Moth man Prophecies was actually a very good read
> (depending on your tolerance for these sorts of things)
> but in the very opening paragraphs he also cleverly sets up the gambit
> that the lines between hoax, misinterpretation, and truth are more
> breakable carapaces of the hard-governed world than most people would
> like to consider......
> anyway, anybody like to give the lick a go?
> it's short and guitaristic and easy enough given you can navigate the
> phrasing
> anyway, i'd love to see some of these lists do more of this sort of
> thing (play-alongs, takes on tunes etc.).
> this particular one was done for the guitar oblique site as people
> wanted there wanted to here it/try it out
>
>
> http://www.gtroblq.com/
>
>
> music is good,
> imagination is better
>

There is such software, but there is also all the other software that can make crazy wild sounds that have never existed, morphing sounds into each other and such, that are very popular. I would bet that many producers also use the software that corrects intonation to be in one key or another. That is, it's not much harder to make hardware that is adaptable to keys than it is to make software that corrects to exact 12-ET. If you can show me that every single pop song really is corrected to exact 12-ET, please do; I suspect even that tendency is fading away with the 90's.

-Chuckk

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...> wrote:
>
> actually it is now in a state where it is being taken out.
> There is software that correct the intonation of every single pop song
> to be in 12 ET. Every single one. I
>
>
> /^_,',',',_ //^ /Kraig Grady_ ^_,',',',_
> Mesotonal Music from:
> _'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere:
> North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>
>
> _'''''''_ ^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
> Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>
>
> ',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',
>
>
>
>
> Chris Vaisvil wrote:
> >
> >
> > With all due respect I will offer once again a contrary opinion.
> >
> > Microtonality, via the blues, and world music, is creeping into popular
> > usage in a big way and has been for a while.
> > If one wants a place to start the introduction I would suggest this is
> > where
> > to start in order to demonstrate that indeed the "cracks between the keys"
> > as Ive's father put it are your friend.
> >
> > I see here a progression - in general western music has progressed towards
> > greater and greater chromatic usage in harmony - melodic usage is not
> > nearly
> > as big of a deal - microtonality is the next logical step in harmony yes -
> > but how long before that is accepted would depend on microtonal
> > composers making something compelling enough for the average listener to
> > make average musician make the effort all of us do now.
> >
> > It is though great to think that we can do what could only be accomplished
> > by physically creating your own instruments thanks to computers.
> >
> > Chris V.
> >
> > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> >
> >
>