Brian descends from Sinai. Film at 11 (other stuff, too)....

It would appear that my hopes for a bit of newfound
self-reflection (you know, the sort that might occur
to the rest of us when we arrive late to an ad-hoc
technological construct already in progress) on Brian's
part are dashed again.

Did the regular mantra "you people" remind anyone else
of H. Ross Perot seated at a table with a bunch of charts
and tables? :-).

So - who will volunteer to let Brian know that there isn't
a Design Police we can call and that *we* didn't write the
search engines? And while we're at it, perhaps we could get
the boy to telecommute to our day jobs so that we've got time
to implement his directives. I'm getting the impression that
this sprawly PoMo stuff annoys him because it doesn't offer
a sufficiently robust vehicle for replacing the orthodoxies
he fulminates against with orthodoxies of his own (that
old seductive Rortian "Final Vocabulary"). Plus ca change....

On a less tiresome note, this past weekend found me down in
Chicago for the second "Table of the Elements" festival. It was,
in ways I might not have predicted, a real monument to some
particularly visceral examples of Plomp and Levelt and the
Japanese brothers K in action; we got two doses of Tony Conrad
(once with Gastr del Sol, once in a trio [2 violins, 1 'cello]),
some high amplitude studies in "roughness" and consonance at
very low frequencies from Bernard Guenther, and Keiji Heino's
high amplitude timbral engine along with Fushitsusha. I did my
stealth recruitment thing by patiently trying to explain to the
folks sitting with me what it was they were hearing. I tried as
hard as I could to stick to layman's language, and it seemed to
work pretty well - they bought me drinks for several evenings.

Returning home, we actually *did* broadcast LaMonte Young's
"The Well-Tuned Piano" all the way through from 9:00-2:00 AM.
One youthful caller rang up to whine for "something that doesn't
suck" [Hardfloor, I think he meant], but the rest of the calls
were overwhelmingly curious and positive conversations of the
"I thought at first that this was outta tune, but what are those
little high noises I keep hearing?" or "How does he get the sound
of the piano to 'slide' like that?"

This is an indirect reminder that I'm still soliciting work from
any of you who're interested in being included in the playlist of
the upcoming all-non12TET RTQE special. LaMonte was the plow
that broke the soil. Join your pals messrs. Polansky and Sethares
Scholz and Haverstick. If you're interested, drop me a line.

With regards,
Gregory

_
I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one,
paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only
maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard
Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI



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> My apologies, Bruce; I didn't see the word "melodically," but seeing it now
> I think you are quite correct. Harmonically, though, the situation is quite
> different, if you're talking about anything beyond 3-limit harmony (perfect
> fourths and fifths).

Uhmmm... Perhaps I'm missing something then. It seems to me that a diatonic
half-step 1/4 the size of the whole step would sound pretty darned strange
melodically too. It's a little bit disconcerting in 17 as it is. To my ears
anyway.


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I wrote,

>> My apologies, Bruce; I didn't see the word "melodically," but seeing it
now
>> I think you are quite correct. Harmonically, though, the situation is
quite
>> different, if you're talking about anything beyond 3-limit harmony
(perfect
>> fourths and fifths).

Gary wrote,

>Uhmmm... Perhaps I'm missing something then. It seems to me that a
>diatonic
>half-step 1/4 the size of the whole step would sound pretty darned strange
>melodically too. It's a little bit disconcerting in 17 as it is. To my
ears
>anyway.

Really? I think diatonic melodies in 17 are quite beautiful. Witness
Blackwood's 17-tone etude, for example. By avoiding major triads in
structural places, he makes the piece work wondefully. Take a simple melody
in a major mode and play it in a tuning where the half-step is 1/4 or 1/3
the size of the whole step (22- and 17-tet, respectively). Sounds great to
me! As soon as you add the slightest bit of harmony, say a tonic or dominant
drone, YUCK! Actually, minor modes in 22 work pretty well, since the
Pythagorean minor triad there closely approximates a 6:7:9. Randy
Winchester's 22-tone improvisation works beautifully on this principle.

I'm putting some finishing touches on a Xenharmonikon paper right now, and I
just happened to note that theorists who derive the diatonic scale from
three triads are perpetrating a historico-geographic fallacy. The diatonic
scale happens to have lots of good triads in some tunings, but it is a
melodic entity first and foremost. Otherwise, why don't we find a 5-note
scale that is derived from two triads, or a 4-note scale that is derived
from three dyads (perfect fifths) in use anywhere?


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> I think diatonic melodies in 17 are quite beautiful. Witness
> Blackwood's 17-tone etude, for example.

Notice that I said that a diatonic half-step very small compared to the whole
step struck me as sounding "strange", not "ugly". Presumably it's a case of
sociological conditioning.

One of Ivor Darreg's observations about 17TET is that it reverses one of the
usual premises of harmony. In particular, the major third is such a dreadful
dissonance that it must be resolved outward to fourths. That then makes it a
good candidate for quartal and quintal harmony (Ivor didn't say that
specifically though). So it's not necessarily a case of putting any kind of
harmony behind a 17TET melody sounding "YUCK!", but triadic harmony in
particular.



> I just happened to note that theorists who derive the diatonic scale from
> three triads are perpetrating a historico-geographic fallacy.

Is that the topic of your up-coming Xenharmonikon paper? It sounds
interesting, since that's one of two ways that come to mind immediately as the
basis for the construction of the traditional major scale. The other of course
is tetrachord. Since there are big dissimilarities between the scales
constructed by those means, and since the scale itself came about before triadic
harmony, I can imagine that there is fertile ground for a paper there.


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