RE Brian's Post

Last night Brian McLaren dropped off some new messages to
be posted to our list as he is on his way back from San Diego
to his home in Oregon. The vast majority of these are informative
and temperate.The first one, however, I am posting with some
reluctance because of its content and lack of current topicality.
Nevertheless, I am doing so because upon re-reading some posts
by Greg Taylor early in May, I agree with Brian that the charges
and innuendos of bigotry, racism, and anti-Semitism demand a
reply. In the present social climate, such statements are "fighting
words," and Brian is entitled to access to the same forum as his
accuser.

To be fair to Greg, I don't think he meant to libel Brian and I suspect
that his statements represented rhetorical excess rather than malice.
(In fact Greg partially apologized for one of them.)

Let's get this episode over with and get back to microtonal/xenharmonic
music.

Brian said that his visit to the Sonic Arts Gallery was very product
and that he had recorded 86 hours of new music in the last six weeks.
Bill Wesley completed a new instrument, the Quadulator, a percusion
instrument made of tuned weighted metal tongues. Depending upon how it
is played, certain of the tones resemble kettle gongs, and Partch's Cloud
Chamber bowls and Whang Gun.

An article describing Wesley's instruments is being prepared for
submission to Experimental Musical Instruments. Most of Bill's instruments
are variations on the Kalimba/Mbira plucked tongue concept and are
tuned in a quas-pythagorean system.


--John


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Not to bust the whole ugly subject wide open again, but I do feel that
someone who spends 200+ lines defending himself against (among other
things) a charge of antisemitism that Greg never made, then turned
around and compared Greg to Nixon, who just a few days ago referred to
current music education practices as "Naziistic" and "Orwellian", etc.
etc., is certainly living in a greenhouse as far as throwing stones
about "rhetorical excess" is concerned.

MHO. Now back to your regularly scheduled tuning discussion.

--pH (manynote@library.wustl.edu or http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote)
O
/\ "Hey--do you think I need to lose some weight?"
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