RE: [tuning] re: harmonic entropy continuing

Carl wrote,

>An interesting question is: what _are_ "major" and
>"minor"?
>[snip]

Clearly these words "major" and "minor" are used to mean several different
things, and I think trying to find a single underlying meaning for these
words is an endeavor which is too oriented on linguistic accident and
ultimately misses the point.

I think Harry Partch's definition of "tonality" is the source of a lot of
trouble. He speaks as if tonality was nothing more than one chord, the tonic
chord. As you know, I (perhaps indoctrinated by contemporary theory :))
believe that tonality is founded, instead, on not only the tonicity of the
tonic chord but also the resolving tendencies of the notes in the scale.
While Partch might lead you to believe that the major-minor duality in
Western music is nothing more than the Otonal-Utonal duality in the
particular case of the 5-limit, the fact of the matter is that we had not
two but six or seven equally viable modes in Western music, and it was only
through the increasing use of dissonance in the Baroque period that the
tritone achieved its pivotal role as the characteristic dissonance of the
diatonic scale, and the resolving tendencies of the tritone reduced the
number of viable modes to two: major and minor. The fact that this duality,
by conicidence, appears parallel to the otonal-utonal duality, and that this
parallelism is linguistically supported, may have misled Partch, and may be
misleading you now.

Just my humble opinion.