Lucy comments on x/y/z scale coding system used by Bill Alves

Lucy has apparently failed to understand that Bill Alves' notation is a
specific and obvious notation for a modest amount of useful and valuable
information for purposes of comparison with no design on making some ''code
to end all codes''. To do so would neccessarily lead to a degree of
specificity that would undermine the entire project, which succinctly
identifies one sent of scalar properties observable in real musics.
Whatever Lucy's own newer notation may do, it does not immediately present
the (systemic collection/scalar collection/alternative membership) pitch
information in a succinct form. And Alves', may I add, does not attempt to
impose, with imperialist certainty, an external analysis upon systems
belonging to persons or cultures with whom the analyst is insufficiently
familiar. That Lucy's 1989 code is similar to Alves' demonstrates only the
obviousness of the procedure; the tenor of Lucy's recent letter to Alves
suggests that the notational similarity is, however, deceptive, in that the
two gentlemen are listening to very different aspects of scales, that Lucy
does not understand this, and thus the resemblance is ultimately
superficial.

I also beg to differ with Lucy's claim to priority for this code. It is
implicit in the work of Bosanquet and Yasser, and Erv Wilson taught me (and
perhaps Bill as well) in the mid seventies to design scales by using a MOS
notation which was vitually identical, including auxillary tones via
substitutions in the chain of generating intervals. Although I have dateddocuments from this study, Wilson was clear-headed enough to always insist
that such methods were obvious consequences of existing music theory and a
modest bit of set theory and I believe he would find expending much effort
into such a priority claim to be silly. In addition, a close look at pitch
class theory will reveal work that is largely homologous with this, if
notated differently and towards different ends.

And that brings us to the crux of the matter: a code like this is nothingspecial in itself and certainly not worth arguing over priority claims.
There are an infinite number of alternative codings for the same
information, but the conceptual basis for the particular assemblage of
information chosen to be encoded is the critical point. On this basis, I
would assign priority here to Yasser. A similar discussion took place earlier on the list regarding lattice
notations for tuning systems, with several enthusiasts promoting Ben
Johnston - although lattices were used already in the nineteenth century
music acoustical literature: Ellis and - already triangulated! - Tanaka,
come immediately to mind. The fact is, however, from an elementary
mathematical viewpoint, the lattice was already described in complete form
by alternative but non-graphic means elsewhere in the music theoretical
literature. As Vogel and his students have amply demonstrated, it is a
trivial exercise to translate a given functional harmonic theory into a
tuning lattice!

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