"random combinations" and "meaningful way[s]..."

-----Original Message-----
From: Jose Manuel Leon

>To me, the quantum leap is not to devise a thousand new exciting new scales
and ways to tune. It is, instead, to develop new musical structures and
logic to use even just a new one in a meaningful way (for human beings) that
does not repeat the same basic implementation of the ideas of classic
harmony (tonic - dominant - subdominant, tension, dissonance and so forth.)
Unfortunately, I haven't heard thus far any "microtonal" music which isn't
conceptually a modification of those classic patterns, or random
combinations

Don�t "random combinations" and "meaningful way[s]" tell at least as much
about the quoted observer as they do they do about the examples observed?

>The challenge is to make sense out of it. On the other hand, which kind of
conditioning would it take to fully understand such a new approach?

Don�t these decidedly human conditions of "sense" and "understanding" (more
or less) settle themselves with a natural fidelity to talent, inspiration,
and resourcefulness?* Hasn�t the common course** of creativity and
inspiration time and time again allowed talented/resourceful individuals to
�hear� (_and give voice to_) �phenomena� the likes of which any "one"
slumbering orderliness [or half-adumbrated contour*** of some underlying
"art of space"****] would be hard pressed to call its own?

Dan

*[Although it was in a different context�] Daniel Wolf offered a wonderfully
instructive example of this when he said: "That brings me back to a point
about minimalism which ought to be made. Many of the landmark works of early
minimalism used as simple a surface (i.e. the "notes") as possible in order
to make it possible to hear phenomena that were not normally in the
perceptual domain of traditional concert music. This required radical shifts
in the ways one listened to music�. It is clear that many listeners never
made those shifts, but that is a matter of individual preference� " [Digest
59, message 3]

**"Practically, metaphysics and philosophy proper are not separated, and
they are not marked off in sharp distinction from science, on the one hand,
and common sense, on the other." [Charles E. Seashore., "Psychology of
Music", pg. 376]

***I remember Joseph Yasser [In his epic 1932 "A Theory of Evolving
Tonality"] using the example of Scriabin�s "mystic chord" to argue for the
prognosticated "preliminary stages" of "such a new approach�"

****"Raumkunst" is an interesting architectural term that was used by Joseph
Yasser while arguing for the validity of a sort of fundamental (or perhaps
deterministic) "art of space."