RE: From McLaren

Whoops, I almost missed this one.

>Pardon the hell out of me, but I don't see a damn thing funny
>about anti-Semitism. If you visit the Holocaust
>museum in Washington D.C. you'll see one entire room with nothing
>but the photographs and the shoes of a whole shetl full of men,
>women and children murdered in a Nazi concentration camp.
>When you leave that room, you'll be shaking.
>I don't find that hilariously amusing. I guess I have to "lighten
>up." Maybe then I'll be able to snicker and giggle when studying
>the boxcars in which families were transported to the gas
>chambers at Auschwitz.

That was my family, not yours, in that shtetl. If you want to put words in
my mouth, like "hilariously amusing" and "lighten up," please restrict it to
musical topics. Anyway, the point is that Mr. Taylor clearly did not accuse
you of being anti-semitic, despite your pleas to the contrary.

>The idea
>that someone might find the neutral third discordant
>would never have occurred to me: and the idea that the
>7/5 might be heard as *more* concordant is extremely
>surprising.

Apparently, barbershop singers use 7/5 all the time. See if you can get them
to sing neutral thirds in front of an audience. Anyone care to back me up?
Neutral thirds are very pungent harmonies.

As for 22-tET vs. 19-tET, isn't it possible to feel that they are very
different but to like both for the unique characteristics that each might
have? You can't really make a direct comparison that covers all potential
uses. I may have said - not "decried" - that 22 sounds "slimy" when used for
diatonic progressions such as I-IV-II-V-I in a major key; this is because
the second scale degree must adjust by a hugely inflated syntonic comma of
55 cents. Blackwood's 22-tone etude continues to strike me as ugly, while I
love his 19-tone etude. Nontheless, I must "like" 22, since I have, and will
continue to, exert the vast majority of my microtonal energy to exploring
22-tET. Randy Winchester's music demonstrates some other effective
approaches to 22-tET.


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