More thoughts

I don't want to fight over whether 12-tET is or is not a good thing. I
hate it; some people love it; that's fine. There is room in the
universe of music for tastes widely varied, that's for sure! I wouldn't
even consider trying to write music in an ET lacking basic consonances,
but others do and are very happy with the results.

I'll probably be gone before the historical verdict on 12-tET is
written. My own guess is that the period of its complete dominance in
Western music, a period marked by the temporary near-death of consonant
thirds and sixths, will be judged by history to be a "dark age" for
music. Music majors finish college today without ever studying the
harmonic series; can we wonder why their sense of intonation is so poor?
Once trained, other options are no longer obscure, and even old dogs can
learn new tricks if they're open to doing so.

Even I, a consonance junkie, freely acknowledge that other factors are
as important, or more so, in music. Good intonation is more the icing
on the cake.

JdL

JdL,

Yes.

If the vitamins, minerals, calories, and carbohydrates are in the icing,
then yes.

Intonation is the icing on the cake.

Respectively,

GZ

"John A. deLaubenfels" wrote:

>
>
> Even I, a consonance junkie, freely acknowledge that other factors are
> as important, or more so, in music. Good intonation is more the icing
> on the cake.
>
> JdL
>

[Dan Stearns wrote:]
>I know John deLaubenfels to be a good hard working guy when it comes
>to his interest; all just, or near-just, sonorities all the time...
>but an aesthetic that would retune every major triad to the nearest
>possible 4:5:6 gives me a big time case of the creeps!

>I see it the same way I see 12-tet homogeneity (only we should know
>better now): less options equals less expressive and raumkunst (art of
>space) potential for music, period.

>When I read Helmholtz I'm sort of taken aback at the prudish
>conservatism, but hey, folks like John deLaubenfels prove that he's
>not just some antiquated esthete, and like it or not you've got to
>respect that to some degree -- and I think this is especially true in
>John's case, as he has done some brilliant work as a programmer
>towards that which personally interests him... just don't expect me to
>agree that it's a good idea in the broad sense, because to my mind it
>most definitely is not!

Thanks very much for your compliments, Dan! Coming from someone who
is also unabashedly critical of my work, it is in a strange way all the
more sweet.

Tell you what, though: if it ever happened that my (type of) treatments
were all that we could hear, I'd get the creeps too!! That _would_ be
strange. But 12-tET (and now, other) options are never going to die, I
don't believe. Yes, we should know better than to substitute one kind
of homogeneity with another, and I think that we (as a world of music
creators and listeners) _do_ know better.

The contradictory constraints of a complex piece limit the extent to
which it can receive JI treatment, but beyond that, a piece might want
to save its sweetest consonances for special moments, and make the
audience wait for those moments. Or, goodness knows, a piece may
forego consonances altogether and still be a wonderful work.

As I've said many times, my work represents adaptive tuning in its
extreme infancy (howbeit perhaps more than has been achieved before).
I happen to enjoy wallowing in as much consonance as I can get, but it's
certainly not the whole story, nor will it ever be.

JdL

[George Zelenz wrote:]
>JdL,

>Yes.

>If the vitamins, minerals, calories, and carbohydrates are in the
>icing, then yes.

>Intonation is the icing on the cake.

>Respectively,

>GZ

Hi, George! Yeah, don't get me wrong, I don't ever want to be without
control over tuning if I can help it. Love that icing!! At the same
time, 12-tET wouldn't have had its 150 year run unless it did a _fairly_
good job, and did allow _some_ beautiful expression. Thank goodness we
can break free now!

Take care of that hand.

JdL