The Land Beyond the Rim

Neil Haverstick wrote,

> Since the 12 tone eq tempered scale is way out of tune with the
overtone series, does music produced in this system send out "bad
vibes," so to speak, a dissonance that is harmful, ultimately? Of
course, other systems are not "in tune," either...are they somehow
harmful? I have
seen various people mention, over the years, that just intonation is a
natural tuning...does this mean music in this system is inherently
beneficial? Or, again, is the intent, the passion, of the player, a
significant part of the mix as well?

To me, music is like some great multidimensional mobile! And I tend to
see tuning as just one fascinating dimension of that mobile... I see
pitch space as a clean slate where the various tunings I use are a
phantasmagoric myriad of translucent skeletal architectures. And
logarithmic tunings, linear series, and you-name-it all flicker there
like strange constellations on a clear winter's night sky.

Here "unity" and "opposition" are often friends... birds of a feather.

Charles Ives' teeming polychromatic prisms; the Housatonic, the Fourth
Symphony Finale... these were the first things I ever heard in music
that really sounded like this... it really was music as I had long
hoped to hear it. And to this day I still marvel at the potential of
the Ives model; its largeness and its flexibility... its ability to
embrace intuitive wherewithal and vast designs on something like equal
ground...

There's a lot of great Ives quotes (especially in the "Memos"), but
the one that ends his preface to the 4th Symphony's Comedy is one of
my very favorites:

"The future of music may not lie entirely with music itself, but
rather in the way it makes itself a part with -- in the way it
encourages and extends, rather than limits, the aspirations and ideals
of the people -- the finer things that humanity does and dreams of."

- dan

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "D.Stearns" <STEARNS@C...> wrote:
> http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/13463
>
> ... I see pitch space as a clean slate where the various tunings
> I use are a phantasmagoric myriad of translucent skeletal
> architectures. And logarithmic tunings, linear series, and
> you-name-it all flicker there like strange constellations on
> a clear winter's night sky.

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and before your very eyes
here on the Tuning List, see Dan Stearns morph from a composer
into a poet! Yes indeed, step right up!...

-monz