playing in 12 eq

Erlich and Beardsley have been chatting about playing in 12
eq....personally, I myself do an awful lot of 12 tone gigs, and enjoy a
lot of the music in this system...it works really well, has for several
hundred years. My main complaint about it is that it's getting harder to
do anything innovative in this system...it's a bit played out for me. On
the other hand, I just did a show called "Parade," which won a Tony last
year for best score...it's interesting to me, because although the
composer did absolutely nothing innovative, musically, the score,
lyrics, and story line combined were very good, powerful and moving
(it's about a Jewish guy who got lynched in Atlanta in 1915). The longer
I did it, the more I liked it...hated to see them move on to Seattle. I
learned a lot of things from playing/studying this guy's writing
style...he's very good at arranging, orchestrating, meshing lyrics to
rhythms and time signatures, and he covered a wide range of stylistic
genres...plus, he's just a masterful composer. Overall, I can see why he
won a Tony. I don't know if it would been any better in another tuning
or not...it surely would have SOUNDED different, perhaps more innovative
in that one department...but, whether or not it would have had a deeper
emotional impact by being in a non12 tuning, I'll never know...when
everything is added up, tuning is indeed one of many pieces of music
that makes it what it is... whether it's the most important is an
interesting issue...Hstick