RE Brian's Posts and Gary's 88CET Posts

By the way, Marion mentioned implicitly a philosophical question that I
suppose bears asking: I've been working with 88CET tuning for something like a
year and a half now, and have been posting many of my findings here.

I pointed out earlier that it's perhaps a little risky to get too carried
away in formal research into how the ear works, when all that ultimately matters
is the much higher-level question of how it sounds.

Well, that can also be carried to too much research in the vein of more
traditional music theory. Ivor Darreg was always aware, and quite frankly
afraid, that he was pressed for time. He always realized that he would die
before he could finish the work he wanted to accomplish in unusual musical
tunings.

He therefore shunned getting too carried away in the mechanics of notation
systems, the time required to write down music, formally researching chord
progressions, interpreting effects of these new constructs on typical notions of
counterpoint, and such endeavors. He instead concentrated upon getting a quick
feel for a tuning, and then improvising in it to get the music out fast.

I always admired Ivor's drive, and his ability to improvise wonderful music
with very little prior experimentation. Still, there are also risks in pure
improvisation. As Wendy Carlos pointed out in "Secrets of Synthesis", many
orchestrational devices that have exciting effects, are almost impossible to
improvise. Also, even among highly skilled improvisationalists, improvised
music can often have very fuzzy meaning at the top level - where did we start
and where did we go over the course of the composition?

So when Marion points out to me the fact that I've posted a lot of theory and
ideas about 88CET here, he has (unwittingly of course) evoked Ivor's ghost to
remind me that preparation alone doesn't make music. Of course, what's not
obvious in these postings is that I have in fact produced a fair amount of music
in 88CET thus far - about half a CD's worth. So it's certainly not a case of
Ivor's "silent writing on paper".

What do you folks think about the relative importance of understanding,
systematizing, and experimenting with a tuning, compared to that of simply
diving in headlong and just seeing where improvisation takes you? I've been
wrestling with that question a bit, and have concluded that it's pretty much the
trade-off we know it is: Both are important, and the balance between the two is
finer-detailed than mere rules of thumb and maxims can get you.


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