Re: Top ten

In-Reply-To: <39D23828.3E058F94@which.net>
Alison Monteith wrote:

> I would be extremely grateful if any of you can take the time to post
> your top ten (or thereabouts) CDs and top ten books and/or scores with
> references if possible. I could then draw up a shortlist and charm him
> into 'branching out' a little. I think Blackwood's own studies would be
> appropriate. Does anyone have the details? Also, Neil Haverstick might
> care to suggest one of his own excellent recordings.

Don't know about top tens, but the book/CD you absolutely *must* have is
"Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale" by William Sethares. This is an incredible
book -- it's new, original, rigourous and readable. I found it similar to
Formalized Music and Genesis of a Music (which are both in Bristol
library) in that rather than being dull theory, it connects directly with
the creative process. But especially in this case, the great music it's
describing hasn't been written yet -- the examples are alluring, but
there's a lot more work to be done in the field. A field which barely
existed before.

As if that wasn't enough:

The author is on the List -- Hi Bill!

The List gets plugged in the book!!!

Is this the Central Library in Edinburgh you're talking about? You should
already have it, but I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't. It was
declared unobtainable on an interlibrary loan from Keynsham, which
probably means there isn't a copy in the whole of South-West England.
Ironically, the copy I bought from Amazon.com was printed in Britain, but
I've never seen it in a library or bookshop over here.

Published by Springer, you can get the details easily enough, but if not I
can supply them.

Check that you have Partch's Genesis.., and Helmholtz's Sensations... .
You probably do.

Matthieu's "Harmonic Experience" is also good, even though it ends up as
12-equal propoganda. It should be more useful for the general reader than
Sethares, but also less respectable to academics of whatever kind. You're
supposed to do the exercises as you go along, so I haven't got very far.
This book was declared unobtainable by both Keynsham and Clevedon.

John Chalmers has a book out, but we've e-mailed each other far too often
for me to offer an unbiased opinion of it. One thing I will say, however,
is that the quality if the glue holding it together is very poor, so it
could fall apart quickly in a library.

> Thank you in advance for any efforts you might make to assist me.

People have been saying such nice things about my software, I thought I'd
pass the favour along.

>I would be extremely grateful if any of you can take the time to post
>your top ten (or thereabouts) CDs and top ten books and/or scores with
>references if possible. I could then draw up a shortlist and charm him
>into 'branching out' a little. I think Blackwood's own studies would be
>appropriate. Does anyone have the details? Also, Neil Haverstick might
>care to suggest one of his own excellent recordings.

Alison,

I've put together a list of my ten favorite microtonal recordings,
from my collection of about 800 cds (over 100 of which are explicitly
microtonal). It lives at http://www.lumma.org/, and gets updated every
time I get a new recording. Right now, both Blackwood and Haverstick are
represented. I'm always open to suggestions; if you know of any good
recordings I missed, I'd be happy to review them.

-Carl