Another Positive Experience

Last night, a friend from work who has helped me get into the saxophone,
invited me over for dinner. (I've been getting into the soprano sax recently in
order to improve my skills in WX-11-based sequencing of microtonal music, and to
have fun of course.)

After a really nice dinner, he proposed that we play some saxophone quartets
with his wife and her sister. I was not up to that since I've only played sax
for a couple months or so, and since many of my basic performance skills have
faded dreadfully after about six years of composing and theorizing instead of
performing!

So upon embarrassing myself over that, I hoped to impress them with a demo
tape on 88CET tuning. In it I went over 88CET's unusual thirds and 7:4, using
my "Alternative Fuels" suite to let them get a feel for each. It then went on
to show how you can, with effort, do traditional harmony in 88CET.

Well, the good news is that I redeemed myself. (Well, I'm exaggerating; the
quartets went OK.) But the good part is that 88CET demo went off quite well.
They got exactly right impression. Beyond just general comments of it being
"interesting" and such, here are two approximate quotes:

"I was afraid that it would be unbearable to listen to, but it was
actually quite enjoyable."

"It's unusual, but there's a definite, alien logic to it. It's not
just haphazard."

But perhaps more importantly, they asked a lot of meaty questions, like:

"How do you notate this?"

"Is it difficult to voice chords in a nonoctave framework?"

"Have you considered writing this stuff for movie music?"

"Are you pretty much limited to electronic instruments for this sort of
tuning?"

"How did you come up with a step size of 88 cents?"

"Have you written in other tunings?"

So there's another band (literally!) of musicians to greet xenharmonics
positively.


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