does tuning matter

I went to see a local band play last night, and the opening act was
pretty mediocre...good bassist and drummer, weak singer and guitarist,
bland material. The thought came to me...what if they were playing in a
non 12 tuning system? Would it have rescued the music? And, the answer
was no in this case...it would have been mediocre music in a different
tuning, which may have made that aspect of the music more interesting,
but the playing and compositional skills would still have been pretty
poor; thus, bad music...Hstick

>I went to see a local band play last night, and the opening act was
>pretty mediocre...good bassist and drummer, weak singer and guitarist,
>bland material. The thought came to me...what if they were playing in a
>non 12 tuning system? Would it have rescued the music? And, the answer
>was no in this case...it would have been mediocre music in a different
>tuning, which may have made that aspect of the music more interesting,
>but the playing and compositional skills would still have been pretty
>poor; thus, bad music...Hstick

While i agree that poor music wouldn�t be any better in any other tuning,there are much music i feel are lacking something that makes it stand out,often it gives the impression that they are certainly not worthless but in some way unable to express what they are trying to well.

Some ideas are just not suitable for 12-tet,and while some musicians seem to make everything they do slip into 12-tet extremely well-they�re often talked about as masters of writing good harmonic progressions etc...so what about the rest of em?

I think that a major reason is that they have ideas which would be better expressed in another tuning...besides,there�s a lot music i just don�t like because it has a hackneyed feeling to it,harmonically and melodically,that might work better in a tuning system with greater choice.For example,how many damn guitar rock tunes begin with a E5-F5 vamp?If they would use some different intervals for it,it would sound very different and probably better to most ears.

����������������������������������������������������������������������
Mats �ljare
Eskilstuna,Sweden
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/oljare
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.

--- In tuning@egroups.com, Neil Haverstick <STICK@U...> wrote:

http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/13893

> I went to see a local band play last night, and the opening act
was
> pretty mediocre...
> poor; thus, bad music...Hstick

Correspondingly, recently I heard a string quintet which included a
violist who absolutely could not play in tune. The piece in question
was from the baroque era and was in 12-tET.

Since I have been *very* interested in non-12 sonorities of late...
might one think that this "out of tuneness" would mean that some of
the sounds, although wrong, would be somewhat more interesting to me??

Nope. The violist was just "out of tune" exactly like it would have
seemed to me in the past before me involvement with alternate
tunings...
_________ ___ __ __
Joseph Pehrson

> Nope. The violist was just "out of tune" exactly like it would have
> seemed to me in the past before me involvement with alternate
> tunings...

Certainly being different from 12TET in itself isn't particularly interesting. It has to be
different in a way that has some musical meaning to it.