Brian, tuning, and yakademia

First, thanks to Brian for a wonderful term (I knew we were all nuts!) -- I
will no longer think of myself as a slackademic but a yackademic.

But seriously, it could be that the situation Brian describes is more hopeful,
:

or at least changing, more quickly and profoundly than it seems. At one point,
at Mills, David Rosenboom, Lou Harrison, and I were all teaching tuning related
things in our classes (and when Lou wasn't there, Terry Riley was, teaching
just intonation and composition). James Tenney and Ben Johnston have also
made enormous contributions, besides their artistic life, as teachers, and
a great many students have been influenced by their yakademic contact. Here at
Dartmouth, both Charles Dodge and I share a deep interest in tuning, and
deal with it in classes in lots of ways, and of course Jon Appleton has had a
long involvement with the tuning via his own composing. In fact, if you look
at a lot of the more prominent composition departments, the kinds of places
where I try to reccommend people think about going (if they want to do
graduate study), most of them have composers or theorists who are pretty
interested in at least some aspect of experimental intonation.

I'm an inveterate optimist, I know, but I do think that if a student wants
to be at a place where this kind of thinking is encouraged, it's definitely
doable.

yours from quackademia
lp

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