Dante Rosati gives us a Monty Python skit

In his latest vowel movement, Dante Rosati descends
to the level of a Monty Python skit:

Message 7066 of 7075
Msg #
From: "Dante Rosati" <dante@i...>
Date: Sun Apr 11, 2004 3:34 am
Subject: RE: [metatuning] The usual rebuttal

>What up dude-
>You can hurl all the citations you want. I trust my ears.

Notice Dante Rosati's garbled reasoning and scrambled logic.
He started out in his previous post by appealing to physical
acoustics as the basis for his claim that 5-lmit diatonic
just intonation intervals are somehow "the" real true intervals
of music...

Yet the instant his attempt to seem scientific blows up in
his face (because the peer-reviewed psychoacoustic articles
systematically disprove Dante Rosati's bogus claim that
the 3:2 just perfect fifth is "the" one real true perfect
fifth) Dante Rosati immediately changes his tune and falls
back on blind faith. It's like the Monty Python skit about
the Inquisition: five deadly sins - six, six deadly -- no!
Seven! Seven deadly sins! Except Dante Rosati's version
goes: Science is the basis of music! Physics and science --
no, it's my personal preference! My personal preference
is the basis of all music!

All we need now is for Rosati to try to torture us with
The Comfy Pillow...

Once again we see why it was so urgently necessary for Dante
Rosati to tell lies ("you are mentally deranged") and use hysterical
name-calling ("you baboon"), rather than offering a rational
argument. Dante Rosati's attempt at a rational argument in
favor of 5-limit JI has collapsed like a house of cards
built on quicksand, and he has now found himself forced back
on blind faith and unverifiable touchy-feely claims that "he
likes it." Or in other words: "It works for me." (To use
Gene "Woolly-Headed Numerology" Smith's version of the
unfalsifiable touchy-feely crystal power-and-psychic-
surgery-type claim.)

An appeal to touchy-feely personal preference is the last
refuge of the pseudoscientist. We see this nightly with
the 3 am infomericals for those miracle magnetic Q-ray
bracelets which claim to relieve pain. And what evidence
do the oleaginous pitchmen hawking the miracle magnetic
pain-relieving Q-ray bracelet offer us?

Nothing more than blind faith from the suckers who bought
the Q-ray bracelet. Nothing more than unverified personal
preference.

"I like the q-ray magnetic bracelet," person after person
avers. "I trust my joints, and my joints tell me my pain
is gone!"

Sound familiar?

"It works for me," chirps gullible dupe after gullible dupe
about the magical pain-relieving magnetic bracelets.

Unfortunately, scientific tests of the magical magnetic
pain-relieving bracelets show that they do nothing:

http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/QA/magnet.html

Unfazed, the supporters of the magical magnetic pain-relieving
bracelets sneer "You can hurl all the citations you want. I
trust my own body, and the pain is gone." They've never heard
of the placebo effect...or of self-delusion, alas.

Dante Rosati's statement is as pure an expression of
mindless superstition as you could hope to find:

To hell with the facts (he tells us), I'm going to
cling to my superstitious belief no matter what.

Notice how rapidly Dante Rosati has been reduced to a
statement of blind mindless superstition. Starting with
what seemed to be an appeal to the physics of mathematical
acoustics, Dante Rosati immediately landed on his behind
when the facts shot out from under his feet. With no evidence
to support him, Dante Rosati started shooting like a greased
pig down the slippery slope of unreason, until, flailing and
thrashing on his backslide, he ended up in a tarpit of
openly admitted insupportable belief ("You can hurl all the
citations you want...") for which there is no verifiable
factual evidence.

And what is a belief for which there is no verifiable
factual evidence?

"A superstition is a belief, usually stated in definitive
terms, for which there is no verifiable, factual
evidence." [Postman, Neil, "Conscientious Objections,"
Vintage Books: 1988, pg. 94]

When Dante Rosati has nothing more to offer in support
of his pseudoscientific claim about the alleged basis
of Western musical intervals than to fall to his knees
like a member of a religious cult and proclaim that
he doesn't care _what_ the evidence says, _he_ still
believes it... Well, it's hardly surprising that Dante
Rosati find it necessary to tell lies about me and
assassinate my character in public. Of course he
has to call me mentally deranged and a baboon. Of
course he had to call the superb JI composer Jacky
Ligon a "slow brain." What else has Rosati got?

Not content to do the old switcheroo (cited above) from
an argument ostenibly based on physical acoustics to
a statement of blind mindless pseudo-religious faith
of the kind we found from the Heavens Gate cultists,
Dante Rosati compounds his garbled reasoning and
scrambled logic by stating:

"A 3:2 fifth sounds way more consonant than fifths that
deviate from it. A 5:4 third sounds way more in consonant
than a 12edo third or a pythagorean third. Consonance
graphs for harmonic timbres clearly show the reason for
this. This is not to say that JI triads are `better' than
tempered ones, simply that they are more consonant."

Here Dante Rosati not only shows his lack of knowledge about
music by mistaking musical consonance for acoustic
beatlessness...he also confuses one form of consonance
(known in psychoacoustics as sensory consonance) for
all other forms of consonance. This is the classic
logical fallacy of reductio ad absurdum.

Even an elementary school child taking an Introduction
To Music course immediately learns that there exist
different forms of consonance. There is musical
consonance, there is musical tension, and there is
sensory consonance (AKA acoustic smoothness). A musical
interval may be acoustically smooth while being musically
dissonant; and a musical interval may create musical
tension while being musically consonant. Moreover, a
musical interval may be acoustically rough while being
musically consonant, yet creating musical tension. Even
an elementary school child realizes this...but Dante Rosati
does not realize it.

Let us consider some obvious examples.

A I-IV-V progression of major thirds which
ends in a perfect fourth dyad on the root I
goes from acoustically rougher intervals to
an acoustically smoother interval -- yet this
chord progression sounds musically dissonant.

The reason is obvious even to a fifth grade
music student, yet Dante Rosati does not
seem to realize what is going on. Even a
small child immediately understands that the
final perfect fourth dyad sounds, in the context
of that musical scale and that tonal center,
like an inverted perfect fifth based on a
root note which is not the tonic but rather a
perfect fifth below the tonic. As a result,
the progression sounds like it has suddenly
shifted to the wrong note instead of the tonic,
and this sounds musically dissonant in the context
of 18th century through late 19th century
music.

A small child immediately recognizes this -- yet
Dante Rosati does not.

Notice, furthermore, that if we set the Wayback
Machine for the 12th century A.D., the above
progression ending in a perfect fourth suddenly
sounds musically *consonant.* Because Gothic
organum treated a finalis on a p4th dyad as a
final-sounding and conclusive consonance within
that musical style, it is musically consonant
in the compositions of Perotinus and Longinus --
yet the exact same progression sounds ending on
a p4th dyad sounds and functions as a musical
dissonance in the compositions of Bach and
Beethoven.

And if we set the wayback machine instead for
the 1930s and 1940s, we now discover that
in the neo-gothic music of Paul Hindemith the
exact same progression (I-IV-V in major thirds
to ending perfect fourth built on I) now sounds
consonant once again. In the style of Hindemith's
middle period music, this progression sounds as
functions a consonance because Hindemith built his
harmonies on parallel fourths and stacked perfect
fifths, rather than on stacked thirds.

An obvious example of musical tension occurs when
a perfectly smooth interval or chord makes its
debut in a distant key. Consider, for example,
a triadic C major progression I-IV-V ending in
a major triad built on F#. This creates musical
tension, yet once again the final chord is entirely
smooth. If we want to move from rougher to smoother
chords, imagine major seventh jazz chords C-E-G-B
moving in I-IV-V C major progression to a simple major
triad beuilt on F#. Now we have extremely rough
acoustic complexes moving to a smooth acoustic
complex -- yet the result still sounds musically
dissonant.

Like so many 5-limit diatonic JI kooks,
Dante Rosati here shows his lack of the most basic
elements of Western music. In his claim that
consonance = acoustic smoothness, Dante Rosati
takes no account of the fact that there exist
many different types of consonance. Acoustic
roughness is the lowest cognitive level, since
it requires active attention to discern individual
beats at all, as opposed to the gestalt impression
produced by the cumulative effect of acoustic roughnee;
on the next higher level of cognition, musical
consonance occurs when the key center is disrupted:
and on the very highest level, musical tension occurs
when some stylistically unexpected element makes
its debut.

Consequently, in a tuning like 15-equal with 720-
cent fifths, a just 3/2 sounds distinctly dissonant
because of the musical tension introduced. Likewise,
in a tuning like 21-equal with 685.4-cent perfect
fifths, a just 3/2 again sounds dissonant because
a stylistically unexpected element has made its
debut. If, however, you handle adroitly a tuning
like 35 equal (which boasts both 685.4 cent fifths
_and_ 720 cent fifths) and accustom the audience
to a regualr alternation between the two built-in
circles of audibly different perfect fifths, a
shift from 720-cent perfect fifth to the radically
different-sounding 685.4-cent perfect fifths will
_not_ sound dissonant because the audience has now
been accustomed to hearing it as an expected
sytlistic element. Culture trumps musical style,
and musical style trumps acoustics.

Ivor Darreg constantly pointed out, and proved
by his countless compositions and lecture-demonstration
tapes, that there is no such thing as a good or
bad tuning, or a good or bad musical interval.
There are only different musical intervals and
different musical tunings, each with its own
distinctive flavor and uniquely valuable musical
character.

Julia Werntz makes the same point in her article
in the Summer 2001 issue of Perspectives Of New
Music:

"Therefore, traditional equal temperament, non-just
microtonal tunigns _and_ modern just intonation, as
well as most non-Western music, may indeed be full
of potentially dissonant intervals, but it would
obviously be futile, even absurd, to try to avoid
the feared `incorrectness' of this majority of
relationships by restricting ones to simple pure
triads or seventh chords in one's music. Rather,
the artist will imagine how such potential
dissonance may be _used_, or be alchemically
_transformed by the contrext into perceived
consonances_. (Or perhaps he/she will even
abandon the narrow dichotomy of consonance/
dissonance iteslf in favor of the more versatile
-- albeit idiosyncratic -- notion of interval
`character.') He/she will accept a naturally
complex human world of pitches and intervals with
an ininfite, minute gradation near and far
from the so-called natural consnances, and
which varies from one culture to another."
[Werntz, Julia, "Adding Pitches: Some
New Htoughts, Ten Years After Perspective
of New Music's `Forum: Microtonality
Today,'" Perspectives Of New Music,
Vol., 39, No. 2, pg. 167, 2001]

As any minimally competent musician recognizes,
consonance has many levels and many layers, and
depends hardly at all on physical acoustics. By
far the most powerful components of musical
consonance are the cultural and stylistic
elements. Culture overrides acoustics, as everyone
who has thrilled to Ligeti's or Xenakis' massive
tone clusters knows well. This explains why a plagal
cadence can sound like a satisfyingly final cadence
in gothic music, but a jarring dissonance in
the music of Bach, and once again a rock-solid
final-sounding conclusive chord progression in
the music of Paul Hindemith. Over the course of
the centuries, musical styles change. As the
musical culture changes, musical standards and
perceptions of musical consonance also change.
Culture trumps acoustics. In the deck of cards
of music, culture is the royal flush, while
acoustics isn't even a busted pair.

Paul Erlich has made the foolishly false and
laughably incorrect statement that the Alternative
Lying List is "the most sophisticated" forum for
discussing microtonality. We see here, with
Dante Rosati's ridiculously simplistic discussion
of consonance, that the reality is exactly the
opposite. In actual fact, the discussion of
microtonality on the Alternative Lying List
is shockingly crude and astoundingly primitive --
far below the level of even a fifth-grade
elementary Introduction To Music course.
This is as we would expect, since Paul "All
Attacks, No Facts" Erlich has a miraculous
capacity for getting things wrong. Not only
is virtually everything Paul Erlich says
provably wrong, Erlich is *fractally* wrong...
His statements are false in so many ways,
and on so many levels, that examining one
of Paul "All Pseudoscience, No Music" Erlich's
statements about microtonality is like zooming
into a Mandelbrot fractal. The closer you get,
the more wrong implications and untrue claims
and flatly false assertions you discern hidden in
the initial laughably incorrect Erlich statement.
Rarely does one encounter such intensely rich
fractal wrongness: the last time I met with
a statement as breathtakingly false on so many
different levels as the typical Erlich pronouncement
was when a psychology student confidently explained
to me that "the sky is blue because it reflects
the color of the sea." This was truly amazing.
In one sweep, Rayleigh diffraction, modern physics,
basic optics, the electromagnetic wave theory
of light, Maxwell's equations...all gone. A
fantastic high point in folly.

Not content to make himself ridiculous with the
shocking crudity of his logical error of reductio
ad absurdum in equating musical consonance with
acoustic smoothness, Dante Rosati once again
takes baseball bat in hand proceeds to break
his own legs and smash his own arms:

"So you dont [sic] like perfectly tuned intervals-
fine. a chacon a son gout. But you cant [sic] seriously
contend that there is nothing linking the shape of
consonance graphs, the harmonic series, and the
development of our scales and triads."

Notice the interwoven logical fallacies here, hunchbacked
logic intertwined with clubfooted conclusions. There is
no evidence to show that I don't like "perfectly tuned
intervals" -- the just 3/2 sounds bland and insipid to
me, but in a musical context where blandness is needed
it can work well. If blandness is required, then it's
useful. It all depends on context whether the
interval will work in a given musical composition.
Second, Dante Rosati here uses the loaded weasel words
"perfectly tuned." There is no evidence to show that
a just 3/2 is any more "perfectly tuned" than a
meantone perfect fifth, or the 12-equal perfect
fifths, or the 720-cent perfect fifth of the 10
tone equal tuning, or the 685.4-cent perfect fifth
of the 28 tone equal tuning. Indeed, in the context
of 10 equal,, 720 cents IS a "perfectly tuned interval"
while the just 3/2 sounds and functions like a
badly out of tune interval. Once again, context is all.

Notice the next layer of logical errors in Rosati's
cesspool of garbled thinking:

He next stumnbles into the well known logical fallacy of
post hoc ergo propter hoc, the mistaking of correlation
for causation. As always it is simple and easy to disprove
Dante Rosati's claim that the shape of graphs of acoustic
smoothness + the constitution of the harmonic series,
+ the development of Western scales and triads are
linked. We need only cast our eyes upon non-Western
cultures which use harmonic-series timbres and
harmonic-series instruments, yet do not even remotely
use anything like Western triads or scales.

Consider, by way of example, the Chinese pip'a. This
highly microtonal stringed instrument produces
intensely microtonal scale-runs when played by
a typical Chinese master musician, yet it employs
the harmonic series timbres which Dante Rosati
foolishly assures us must lead to Western triads
and Western scales. The Chinese pentatonic scale
even in its simplest form sounds nothing like the
Western diatonic 7-note scale; yet on the pip'a,
we don't even encounter the nominal Chinese
pentatonic scale, but instead a plethora of
small micro-intervals which appear as basic
structural components of the pip'a melody.
Or consider, once again, Balinese kacapi music.
The kacapi produces a harmonmic series timbre --
yet it is tuned to the same pelog scale of the
typical Balinese gamelan. Or again consider
the bowed string instruments of central Africa;
though they employ the harmonic series, these
are tuned in the typical systems of central
Africa, either 4 equal pitches per octave, or
5 somewhat unequal pitches to the octave, or
7 nearly equal pitches in the octave, or
7 note tunings with 1150 cent non-octaves.
In each of these cases we encounter nothing
remotely like the Western triad.

And so we see not only the obvious folly of
Dante Rosati's claim that the timbre and
the pitches of the Western scale and
the Western triad are somehow mystically
"linked" ... How, Rosati doesn't say -- perhaps
by pyramid power? Or possibly by means of
the "pressor forces" of John Keely's "Sympathetic
Vibratory Physics"?

http://www.svpvril.com/

Or could it be that the harmonic world grids
of Bruce Cathie's globe-girdling network of
ufos are responsible?

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/3460/bruce.html

We also see the shockingly obvious crudity and
laughable folly of Paul "All Numerology, No
Scholarship" Erlich's harmonic entropy scheme.
Simple logic assures us that Erlich's harmonic
entropy superstitions are pure twaddle -- for
if the shape of the acoustic smoothness curve
for harmonic series timbres actually had some
causal connection with the contingent and
random cultural artifact called "musical harmony,"
then all non-Western cultures which employed
harmonic series timbres would tend to converge
on just major and minor triads.

As even the more cursory listen to Japanese Noh
music and Japanese gagaku music assures us,
Western major and minor triads are not to
be found. Paul "All Self Delusions, No
Music" Erlich has no credible explanation
for this, of course...only hand-waving and
smoke and mirrors, just as the dowser has
no credible explanation for his persistent
failure to find water.

Dante Rosti goes on to claim:

"Yes I know that many non-western musics do not
use triads at all or even remotely JI intervals
in their scales. However, the two richest musical
traditions- western music and musics of India - are
perfectly aware of the contours of the consonance
graph (as "ear knowledge") and that the intervals
that coincide with its valleys have a distinctive
and compelling sound."

Here we find a veritable sewage spill of garbled
reasoning and scrambled logic.

First, Dante Rosati makes the classic logical error
of selective data: first he admits that "many non-
Western musics do not use triads at all or even remotely
JI intervals in their scales" -- but then Rosati goes
on to pick out the only two musical systems on the
planet (Indic and Euro-American) that even remotely
support his claim, and proclaims that these two
isolated minority cases prove his case. Forget the
other 4.9 billion people on earth, he tells us...only
pay attention to the 1.4 billion people in Europe /
North America and India.

The logical error of selective data is a favorite
scam of Paul "All Pseudoscience, No Science"
Erlich -- cherry-pick data points, use hand-waving,
then falsely proclaim that he has proven his claim.
According to this kind of scrambled logic,
because 1 times zero = zero times 1, all numbers
equal zero and therefore the multiplication
table does not exist. _Anything_ can be proven
by selectively cherry-picking only those data
which support your case.

In his classic book "Why People Believe Weird
Things," skeptic Michael Shermer points out
that one of the surest signs of pseudoscience
is that its proponents "immediately form a
hypothesis and look only for examples to confirm
it," and "do not seek evidence to disprove the
hypothesis."
We see this archetypal process of pseudoscience
at work in Dante Rosati's selective cherry-
picking of musical cultures to discuss. Of the
hundreds of musical cultures on planet earth, he
deems only 2 worthy of discussion: India and
Europe/North America. The south seas islands?
Bad data point. The Amazon basin? Bad data
points. Bali? Bad data point. Java? Bad
data point. The steppes of central Asia?
Bad data point. China? Bad data point.
Central America? Bad data points. Mexico?
Bad data point. Aboriginal central Australia?
Bad data point. New Guinea? Bad data point.
The Andaman Islands? Bad data point. All the
countries of Africa? Bad data points. Madagascar?
Bad data point. The Balkans? Bad data point.
Turkey? Bad data point. The countries of the
middle east? Bad data points. The countries
of Southeast Asia? Bad data points.

Dante Rosati's claim sounds uncannily like the
joke I tell in lectures to explain why the
logical fallacy of selective data is deadly:
how does a physicist prove that all numbers
are prime? Simple. 1 is prime. 2 is prime.
3 is prime. 4 is a bad data point. 5 is
prime. 6 is a bad data point...

More odiously, Dante Rosati slides toward
white supremist racism when he declares
(sans objective verifiable proof) that
European/North American and Indic musics
are "the two richest musical traditions"
on the planet. This kind of cultural
imperialism proves sickening, and harks
back to the Eurocentric proclamations of
German music theorists of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries who asserted
that "fully 2/3 of the population of the
earth is too barbaric and too primitive
to sing a simple lullaby correctly."
Because non-Western peoples did not
use the same tuning (German music
theorists concluded) that gave rise to
the Brahms lullaby, that supposedly
proved that non-Western peoples had
crude undeveloped brains and less
musical ability than Western Europeans.

Fortunately Western culture has grown
out of this kind of thinking. Except
for the Date Rosatis of the world.
Perhaps when Dante Rosati called me
a "baboon" he really meant "jigaboo"?
Or "jungle bunny"?

"Sine waves may be a different story but
no acoustic instruments I know of,
unless you include the tuning fork (and
even then not really) produce single
sine tones."

Here Date Rosati shows us his lack of
knowledge of musical acoustics, for he
has apparently never heard of the
tubulong (which produces a perfect
sine wave after the initial hit) or
the ocarina or the tuning fork. Warren
Burt uses justly tuned tuning forks
as musical isntruments in some of his
most popular microtonal compositions,
which of course Dante Rosati is unaware
of since he has had to spent the bulk of
his time dreaming up names to call me.
Dante Rosati has no time to listen to
the music of the people I've cited because
he must furrow his brow and bite his lip
in bizarre spasms of spavined logic
with which to attempt to support his
insupportable superstitions.

Dante Rosati sinks further into the tarpit
of faulty reasoning when he claims:

"Since the phenomena of consonance and
dissonance that shaped western (and Indian)
music is based on complex harmonic tones
that exhibit these phenomenab of consonance
and dissonance, the perception (or mis-perception)
of intervals between single sine waves is not
relevant."

Notice the wealth of faulty logic in this
one paragraph. First, there is no evidence
to show that "the phenomena of consonace and
dissonance...shaped western (and Indian) music."
In fact, the similarity of Indic instruments
like the vina to Western instruments like the
rebec assures us that the pheonomena of [sensory]
consonannce and [sensory] dissonance did NOT
shape either Western music _or_ Indic music --
else Indic music would today use the same
triadic chord progressions which Western music
does. Of course, Indic music does not.
Second, Dante Rosati dismisses the
psychoacoustics of the perecption of sine
tones on the basis of an unsubstantiated
assumption for which there is no evidence.
Indeed, much evidence _disproves_ the
vacuous assumption that sensory consonance
is somehow magically responsible (by some
undisclosed causal process which mysterically
failed to operate for 2000 years out of the
2500 years of Western music history) for the
Western use of triads. Finally, Dante
Rosati makes the foolishly false claim that
acoustic smoothness is based on complex
harmonic tones. It is not. As Plomp &
Levelt demonstrated in their classic 1965
paper, "Tonal Consonacne and Critical Bandwidth,"
J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 1965, acoustic smoothness
has nothing to do with whether tone complexes
are harmonic or inharmonic. Acoustic smoothness
is determine solely and entirely by whether
individual partials coexist within the same
critical band. (The critical band is roughly
275 cents in width in the upper midrange of
human hearing, but increases radically below
100 Hz because the critical bandwidth stays
constant in Hz, which means that it becomes
progressively larger in cents below 100 Hz.)
Jean-Claude Risset and James Dahsow and
John CHowning and Max Mathews and John R.
Pierce and William Sethares and many other
polymaths, true giants of music, have
produced unimaginably beautiful inharmonic
music based on inharmonic series which
nonetheless sounds acoustically smooth
and beatless because the inharmonic
series of the timbres are matched to the
inharmonic pitches of the scale and the
inharmonic tones of the chords. Naturally,
Dante Rosati is not aware of this because
he is pervasively uniformed about even
the most basic elements of modern
psychoacoustics. Thus his need to descend
to name-calling ("asshole," "baboon") rather
that offer a rational argument.

Dante Rosarti delivers the coup de grace
to his own reputation by concluding:

"So, if you reject the theory that the major
triad became (and remains to this day, 20th
c. avant garde notwithstanding) the fundamental
unit of western music (and of course I'm talking
about the last 500 years or so, not 2500) due
to the presence of its components in the lower
reaches of the harmonic series, and coincident
with the significant consonances marked by the
consonance graph, then where, pray tell, did it
come from?"

The major triad in Western music came from
the same place the pet rock came from --
the random and contingent whirlpool of
cultural happenstance.

Notice once again the familiar Dante Rosati
method of selective data -- we must ignore
the 20th century's music. How about that,
Kyle Gann? Sound good to you? Throw the
20th century out, it's musically unimportant.
Messiaen? Gone. Dutilleux? Gone. Stockhausen?
Gone. Dockstader? Gone. Stravinsky? Gone.
Bartok? Gone. Chowning? Gone. Vaughan
Williams? Gone. Luening and Ussachevsky?
Gone. Steve Reich? Gone. Terry Riley? Gone.
All unimportant, all superfluous, all scrap
material to be tossed in the wastebin of history.
Sounds like a plan, eh? And then not content
to toss the music of the 20th century into
an Orwellian memory hole, lest we jettison
peurile superstitions about harmonic series
1 through 6 instead, Dante Rosati gets
ambitious and informs us ex cathedra,
presumably as the newly elected Pope Of
Music History, that we can throw out the
2000 years of musical history prior to the
year 1500 as well. Hot diggity! Now we're
cookin'! Ars Nova? Delete it! Organum?
Delete it! Plainchant? Delete it! The
Greek genera? Delete 'em! Wahooo! At
this point, Dante Rosati is waving his
cowboy hat and giving rodeo yelps as he
rides his music-theoretic H-bomb right
down onto 2000 years of music history, like
Slim Pickens at the end of "Dr. Strangelove."

No wonder the rest of the world doesn't like
Americans nowadays.

Lastly, Dante Rosati unwisely taunts me with
the jibe:
"And how come I don't get a fun `middle name' in
quotes any more!!! I feel deprived!"

You don't get a fun `middle name,' Dante Rosati,
because you have shown yourself to be a liar
and a character assassin -- and there are
so many liars and character assassins on the
Alternative Lying List that describing you
as "Dante `Proven Liar and Character Assassin'
Rosati" would be superfluous.
----------
--mclaren

so where did major triads come from, O boobala?

Dante