612, here we come!

The membership is up to 600 today. We also have

MMM 118 Good job, MMM!

SpecMusic 31

tuning-math 71 One more to go, tuning-math--you can do it!

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Gene Ward Smith <genewardsmith@j...>"
<genewardsmith@j...> wrote:
> The membership is up to 600 today.

why don't we take this opportunity to allow the 570-odd lurkers to
step up, introduce themselves, and maybe even bring up subjects
*they*'d like to talk about here.

come on, folks, speak and be heard!

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "wallyesterpaulrus
> why don't we take this opportunity to allow the 570-odd lurkers to
> step up, introduce themselves, and maybe even bring up subjects
> *they*'d like to talk about here.

Oh, Paul, you've tried that a few times before! If they wanted to talk, they would. But I second the motion, anyhow, because it would be nice to have some different opinions in the mix.

> come on, folks, speak and be heard!

Or rather: type and be read!

Cheers,
Jon

>

I have a vague feeling that sometimes when i look at post and realize how much of specialized language this list can become
20 min in the tuning dictionary can be more taxing than not. Not because of the dictionary for god sakes either. Monz has done an invaluable service. One can easily spend over 40-80 min a day with this stuff.
Perhaps when we use 6 of 7 abbreviations in a post we might want to use the long hand version just one of those times to make it easier. Often the longer version has a little more poetic flavor to it. I mean if some one offered you two boxes would you take the one called MOS or would you dive head first and roll down the hill with Moments of Symetry.
If we have to have a specialized language , it should be more oriented to our musical language than a Atomic Biology

>
> From: "Jon Szanto <JSZANTO@ADNC.COM>" <JSZANTO@ADNC.COM>
>
>
> . But I second the motion, anyhow, because it would be nice to have some different opinions in the mix.
>
> > come on, folks, speak and be heard!
>
> Or rather: type and be read!
>
> Cheers,
> Jon
>
>

-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
KXLU 88.9 FM 8-9PM PST

>why don't we take this opportunity to allow the 570-odd lurkers to step up, >introduce themselves, and maybe even bring up subjects *they*'d like to >talk about here.

>come on, folks, speak and be heard!

Well, I thought that I _had_ introduced myself, and even opened my yap before, but with an invite like that, how can I resist? Although I'm sure you'll wish I hadn't...

I have been bemused and even mildly irritated by the dissing of so-called `serialism' which has been taking place lately to some extent. I'm not sure - speaking as an ignoramus producer of pop - how it can be said that, (if I understand correctly) a producer of music based on tone-rows can NECESSARILY be `mathematical' and `empty' ipso facto, as opposed to composers who painstakingly (and quite legitimately) calculate ratios for JI systems on thoroughly mathematical (and even, dare I say it, theoretical) principles?

To me, at any rate, the existence of one method or approach does not invalidate the other. (In fact, reading the list over the past few days has created an urge to develop, oh, say, a 19-tone JI scale, and then write NINETEEN-TONE rows in _that_! Just to annoy everyone!)

To illustrate more specifically what I mean, while I will refrain from opining on, say, Boulez or Liegti or ...Ferneyhough..., with the best will in the world, I cannot regard Webern as somehow less legitimate than Partch because of their different compsitional methods. Neither can I consider Webern's music as `empty' or `mathematical'. When listened to attentively, to me, as Schoenberg said, it is capable of expressing an entire novel in a sigh. I deeply love the music of Harry Partch as well, and classical Indian music for that matter, and I would have to say that my response to all of them is primarily emotional.

The fact that serialism is currently championed academically, and therefore, in some people's opinion, is the impetus for a great deal of uninspired music, does not necessarily invalidate it as a method. What if the boot was on the other foot, and the professors were all doing bad microtones?

After all, Partch himself said that the best thing any conservatorium could do for a genuinely talented student was to throw them out as quickly as possible...

There you go. That's ONE unwelcome contribution out of 570...

->Zx<-

____________________________________________________________

The proliferation of children who can reach the heights of computer creation brings to light a basic feature of the computer itself - it is infantile...[t]he microcomputer is above all a game and is infantile. But it is also very dangerous. We need to know whether it does not also 'infantalize'.

-Jacques Ellul, `The Technological Bluff'
________________________________________________

The disciple Hui-K'e asked Bodhidharma, "Please help me to quiet my mind." Bodhidharma said, "Bring me your mind so that I can quiet it." After a moment Hui-K'e said, "But I can't find my mind." "There," said Bodhidharma, "I have now quieted your mind."

-Charles Luk

________________________________________________

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

-Democritos

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

Dear ArchD'Ikon Zibethicus,

>I have been bemused and even mildly irritated by
>the dissing of so-called
>`serialism' which has been taking place lately
>to some extent. I'm not sure
> - speaking as an ignoramus producer of pop - how
>it can be said that, (if I
>understand correctly) a producer of music based
>on tone-rows can NECESSARILY
>be `mathematical' and `empty' ipso facto, as
>opposed to composers who
>painstakingly (and quite legitimately) calculate
>ratios for JI systems on
>thoroughly mathematical (and even, dare I say it, theoretical) principles?

>...I cannot regard Webern as somehow less legitimate than Partch
>because of their different compsitional methods. Neither can I consider
>Webern's music as `empty' or `mathematical'. When listened to attentively,
>to me, as Schoenberg said, it is capable of expressing an entire novel in a
>sigh. I deeply love the music of Harry Partch as well, and classical Indian
>music for that matter, and I would have to say that my response to all of
>them is primarily emotional.

I did feel (as an oft-lurker myself; actually, I ordinarily check in about once a month, and if I find nothing going on but diagrams whose origins I would have to trace back for fifty e-mails to understand, I move on) that someone should have responded to your comments about serialism-bashing, but I was afraid that my friend Monz might roar in with the Off-Topic Police and tell me to hit the road. So I promise not to pursue any protracted argument on the subject.

I imagine I'm pretty typical of members of this list in having a complex relationship to serialist music. I was steeped in Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, and Stockhausen - our pantheon - in college. Webern was no less than the prophet of a New Musical Order. But I had also already fallen in love with Ives, Cage, Messiaen, and Partch, and over the years, I found myself wanting to listen to Ives and Partch more and more, while the idea of sitting down to relish Schoenberg's Variations or Le Marteau seemed more and more ludicrous. In particular, I now believe that I was brainwashed in grad school to listen to 12-tone music in a certain way that made it meaningful, becoming able to follow the rows and pitch areas by ear. And in the process, I was enjoying other music less. During the '80s, in a rather painful but liberating process, I rejected the kind of pitch set thinking that 12-tone music encouraged, and as a result began enjoying other music more, especially jazz, and also started composing much better.

An example that strikes me as poignant: around 1977 I analyzed Boulez's Second Sonata before ever hearing it, and the first time I listened to a recording, I was so into the intricacies of the piece that tears rolled down my cheeks. It was an honest emotional reaction, one conditioned not just by the music itself, but by all the analytical time I had spent getting into the structure.

Today, if you played the Boulez Second Sonata for me in a blindfold test along with three other 12-tone piano pieces, I wouldn't be able to identify it. Of course that music can be extremely emotionally satisfying if you go to the necessary amount of work to make it that way. But there are tons of music that can give me just as much pleasure or much more without so much work, in which the music itself elicits the emotion without requiring special pleading and analysis. And ultimately, Boulez's Second is an unmemorable piece unless you've just analyzed it.

I still teach 12-tone music in my classes. Every other year I analyze Webern's Symphony, Stockhausen's Gruppen, Babbitt's Post-Partitions, along with the occasional odd Schoenberg or Dallapiccola piece. My students gravitate enthusiastically toward Messiaen, Bartok, Nancarrow, Feldman, but with Webern and Babbitt they start to resist, and eventually beg me to admit that I don't find that way of composing rewarding. I present the music with all the objectivity I can muster, but ultimately I think they're right. I worshipped Webern's every note (I analyzed all 31 of his opuses in college), but over the years his music has come to sound more and more thin and arbitrary and uninspired. I'll keep teaching him, and I have a certain affection for his Piano Variations and Second Cantata, but the best I can say for him is, he was an awfully good composer for a musicologist.

It's not that 12-tone music isn't a "valid" way to compose. Eating with six-foot long chopsticks isn't an "invalid" way to eat, but experience would suggest that it's a pointless self-limitation, and that more satisfying results are almost certainly likely without them. The fact that I can think of four or five 12-tone pieces, out of hundreds I know, that I still love to listen to - Dallapiccola's Piccola Musica Notturna, Stockhausen's Mantra - is almost the exception that proves the rule. And the works that come to mind, including those two named, so far subvert 12-tone technique that they almost prove that the 12-tone language only produced listenable results when you subverted it.

Add to all this the fact that, for a few decades, serialism was laid out for us as the language of the future to which we would all have to conform; and the fact that while many of us were interested in both serialism and minimalism, the serialist composers fascistically forbade any interest in non-serialist music - I was THERE, and I saw Mario Davidovsky hand any student piece that wasn't serialist back to the guilty culprit with no comment and a look of withering scorn - and it's no wonder that serialism leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many of my generation. And chances are that the type of musicians who are interested in alternative tunings are going to be, on average, even less sympathetic to serialism than the general population of musicians, due to the types of musical concerns that drive a person to consider more subtle degrees of consonance and dissonance in the first place.

Once again: there is no reason in the world that Partch's *methods* of composing make him a more *valid* composer than Webern. Partch had no *method* in the 12-tone sense; just intonation is not a method of composing. 12-tone music was the basis of a dogmatic ideology, but the composers I know who dismiss it don't do so on dogmatic or ideological grounds, but as a result of a heavy preponderance of bad experiences. I just feel, after 30 years of experience of 12-tone music, that Partch was a *better* composer than any of the 12-tone people, Schoenberg emphatically included. I think the best composers could intuitively sense that 12-tone technique was a ridiculous self-limitation. In any case, please don't think that all those of us who "diss" serialism necessarily do so from ignorance, nor from ideology; in some cases, we are all too well-versed in it.

Back to tuning and/or lurking.

Yours,

Kyle Gann

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Kyle Gann <kgann@e...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_41493.html#41592

I think the best composers
> could intuitively sense that 12-tone technique was a ridiculous
> self-limitation. In any case, please don't think that all those of
us who "diss" serialism necessarily do so from ignorance, nor from
> ideology; in some cases, we are all too well-versed in it.
>
> Back to tuning and/or lurking.
>
> Yours,
>
> Kyle Gann

***I wonder if there are any other composers on this list who have
either written 12-tone pieces and thrown them out (I have!) or
written *parts* of pieces in the serial method and then thrown out
those pages and re-written them in a more *intuitive* fashion (I
have!)...

J. Pehrson

Kyle,

I just have to publically say how wonderful it is to have your writings in/on this group, and I've welcomed virtually every posting of yours. We are all better for your (occasional) missives...

And, to second JP, I have also used, and later abandoned, serial techniques in some pieces. It just wasn't me.

Cheers,
Jon

>I just have to publically say how wonderful it
>is to have your writings in/on
>this group, and I've welcomed virtually every
>posting of yours. We are all
>better for your (occasional) missives...

>And, to second JP, I have also used, and later
>abandoned, serial techniques in
>some pieces. It just wasn't me.

>Cheers,
>Jon

Thanks, Jon. The feeling is entirely mutual.

I've never completed a 12-tone piece. I must have tried a dozen (appropriately) times. But I felt exactly the way John Cage described it: "You run up and down that row matrix like a rat caught in a trap." I did write a few pieces in the early '80s using rows of fewer than 12 notes. And Nancarrow achieved wonderful effects with tone rows of 31, 53, even 99 notes, though never controlling the music with then in any kind of global way.

Kyle

hi Kyle, Joe, and Jon,

> From: <jpehrson@rcn.com>
> To: <tuning@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2002 12:14 PM
> Subject: [tuning] Re: 600 non-bouncing e-mail addresses
>
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Kyle Gann <kgann@e...> wrote:
>
> /tuning/topicId_41493.html#41592
>
> > I think the best composers could intuitively sense that
> > 12-tone technique was a ridiculous self-limitation.
> > In any case, please don't think that all those of
> > us who "diss" serialism necessarily do so from ignorance,
> > nor from ideology; in some cases, we are all too well-versed
> > in it.
> >
> > Back to tuning and/or lurking.
> >
> > Yours,
> >
> > Kyle Gann
>
>
> ***I wonder if there are any other composers on this list who have
> either written 12-tone pieces and thrown them out (I have!) or
> written *parts* of pieces in the serial method and then thrown out
> those pages and re-written them in a more *intuitive* fashion (I
> have!)...
>
> J. Pehrson

just thought you might be interested in my story ...

when i was a composition student at Manhattan, by the
end of my second year i had gotten to the point where
i wanted to try writing 12-tone pieces. i made a couple
of attempts, notably for a String Trio, but never got
very far with any of them.

(the String Trio ultimately morphed into a whole other
thing which i still think is one of my best efforts ever

http://sonic-arts.org/monzo/strtrio/str-trio.mid

... and it was the first piece in which i experimented
with microtones, way before i absorbed Partch's work.)

it wasn't until a little later, after i had dropped out
of school and read _Genesis of a Music_ several times,
that i realized *why* i had composer's block when trying
to use serialism: i had an innate sense that all 12 notes
bore harmonic relationships to each other, and serialism
denied those relationships (or at least made them irrelevant).
at that point in my life/career, Partch's work suddenly
seemed like a beacon in the darkness, and i've never
been the same since.

at the same time, most of you who read this list know
that i have a profound admiration and respect for Schoenberg's
work, both theoretical and compositional. and Ben Johnston
is the guy i always tout here for his combining of
serialism and just-intonation ... i've written plenty
about that in the list archives.

-monz

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "monz" <monz@a...> wrote:

> it wasn't until a little later, after i had dropped out
> of school and read _Genesis of a Music_ several times,
> that i realized *why* i had composer's block when trying
> to use serialism: i had an innate sense that all 12 notes
> bore harmonic relationships to each other, and serialism
> denied those relationships (or at least made them irrelevant).

I don't think it does, unless you add a codicil to avoid obvious harmonic relationships. Since serialism revolves around the octave, but mostly in a sort of negative sense, this codicil makes sense and is commonly applied. In any case, serialism is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a/pan/tonality. In other words, I could write tonal serial music, or atonal JI music, easily enough.

As a mathematician, serialism is intriguing; it seems to me the full mathematical resources have never been explored. As a music theorist, I note that the techniques of serialism are not based on how we hear, and that it is therefore an artificial system. As such, it is a worthy idea for experimenting, but building a whole school on it seems a dubious enterprise. One could just as easily make up other artificial rules and build schools of music on them.

"Joseph Pehrson " wrote:

***I wonder if there are any other composers on this list who have

> either written 12-tone pieces and thrown them out (I have!) or
> written *parts* of pieces in the serial method and then thrown out
> those pages and re-written them in a more *intuitive* fashion (I
> have!)...
>
> J. Pehrson

I have written several though I bypassed the whole serial trip - I might have been too young and
it wasn't such a big deal in the UK anyway.

I find serial composition easy and unfulfilling despite the fact that I had a measure of success
premiering a mostly serial piece for two guitars and percussion at the Edinburgh Festival. People
found it "interesting" which doesn't say much (psychopaths are "interesting") and most listeners
enjoyed the rearranged non serial Goldberg section most. I've more or less binned it, and the
others, but there are elements of serialism that might come in handy in microtonal composition,
particularly on a bad day.

Happy Christmas (whether you indulge or not : - )

Kyle Gann wrote:

I just feel, after 30 years of experience of 12-tone
music, that Partch was a *better* composer than any of the 12-tone
people, Schoenberg emphatically included.

I wish someone would tell this to John Adams, who, though anything but a serialist, is of the
opinion that Partch (and Glenn Branca) is unworthy of consideration because of his lack of
conventional musical training.

Regards
a.m.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Gene Ward Smith <genewardsmith@j...>"

/tuning/topicId_41493.html#41602

<genewardsmith@j...> wrote:
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "monz" <monz@a...> wrote:
>
> > it wasn't until a little later, after i had dropped out
> > of school and read _Genesis of a Music_ several times,
> > that i realized *why* i had composer's block when trying
> > to use serialism: i had an innate sense that all 12 notes
> > bore harmonic relationships to each other, and serialism
> > denied those relationships (or at least made them irrelevant).
>
> I don't think it does, unless you add a codicil to avoid obvious
harmonic relationships. Since serialism revolves around the octave,
but mostly in a sort of negative sense, this codicil makes sense and
is commonly applied. In any case, serialism is neither a necessary
nor a sufficient condition for a/pan/tonality. In other words, I
could write tonal serial music, or atonal JI music, easily enough.
>

****Yes! Think Berg?? (And maybe Forte's famous book on
serial "tonality...")

> As a mathematician, serialism is intriguing; it seems to me the
full mathematical resources have never been explored. As a music
theorist, I note that the techniques of serialism are not based on
how we hear, and that it is therefore an artificial system. As such,
it is a worthy idea for experimenting, but building a whole school on
it seems a dubious enterprise. One could just as easily make up other
artificial rules and build schools of music on them.

***This is really well put. Sometimes I seems we need somebody who
comes a little outside of the music world to lay this out for us...

J. Pehrson

hi Gene,

> From: <genewardsmith@juno.com>
> To: <tuning@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2002 12:13 AM
> Subject: [tuning] Serialism
>
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "monz" <monz@a...> wrote:
>
> > it wasn't until a little later, after i had dropped out
> > of school and read _Genesis of a Music_ several times,
> > that i realized *why* i had composer's block when trying
> > to use serialism: i had an innate sense that all 12 notes
> > bore harmonic relationships to each other, and serialism
> > denied those relationships (or at least made them irrelevant).
>
> I don't think it does, unless you add a codicil to avoid
> obvious harmonic relationships. Since serialism revolves
> around the octave, but mostly in a sort of negative sense,
> this codicil makes sense and is commonly applied. In any
> case, serialism is neither a necessary nor a sufficient
> condition for a/pan/tonality. In other words, I could write
> tonal serial music, or atonal JI music, easily enough.

i should have been on the lookout for that argument.
you're correct, of course, but in those days my familiarity
with serialism was firmly limited to what i knew about
Schoenberg's conception of it, and his precepts were
definitely to avoid anything resembling what we would
call 5-limit harmony/tonality.

> As a mathematician, serialism is intriguing; it seems to
> me the full mathematical resources have never been explored.

perhaps not in actual compositions, but have you been
reading the music-theory journals? looks to me like
theorists have spent several decades exploring every
nook and cranny of 12edo serialism that they could uncover.

> As a music theorist, I note that the techniques of serialism
> are not based on how we hear, and that it is therefore an
> artificial system. As such, it is a worthy idea for experimenting,
> but building a whole school on it seems a dubious enterprise.
> One could just as easily make up other artificial rules and
> build schools of music on them.

i'd be more careful about making this kind of statement.
certainly, one of the objectives of Schoenberg's invention
of serialism was to move away from a type of musical
construction based on hierarchical diatonic tonality.

*but*, as his driving force was recognition of the
musical motive (i.e., a small thematic germ), his
conception of serialism definitely had a lot to do
with "how we hear". he was just using a different paradigm.

i think a case could be made to demonstrate that
"common-practice" tonality is just as artificial
a system as serialism ... and in fact, i'm certain
that it's already been argued in the theory journals.

-monz

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "monz" <monz@a...> wrote:
> > As a mathematician, serialism is intriguing; it seems to
> > me the full mathematical resources have never been explored.

> perhaps not in actual compositions, but have you been
> reading the music-theory journals? looks to me like
> theorists have spent several decades exploring every
> nook and cranny of 12edo serialism that they could uncover.

Permutation groups of order 12 have a rich structure, including one of the only 26 "sporadic" finite simple groups, the Mathieu group M12, as well as M11 and Psl11(2). Not that this mathgibberish means anything on this group, but I've never heard that theorists have gotten around to considering M12, designs, and so forth, and when I've mentioned it in musical contexts, it seems no one has thought about it or tried it.

> > As a music theorist, I note that the techniques of serialism
> > are not based on how we hear, and that it is therefore an
> > artificial system. As such, it is a worthy idea for experimenting,
> > but building a whole school on it seems a dubious enterprise.
> > One could just as easily make up other artificial rules and
> > build schools of music on them.
>
>
> i'd be more careful about making this kind of statement.

Why? It's obviously true, and I have no colleagues whom it will annoy.

> *but*, as his driving force was recognition of the
> musical motive (i.e., a small thematic germ), his
> conception of serialism definitely had a lot to do
> with "how we hear".

In what way is serialism connected to how we hear?

>he was just using a different paradigm.

He can use all the paradigms he likes, but that doesn't make it a natural construction arising out of or related to hearing.

> i think a case could be made to demonstrate that
> "common-practice" tonality is just as artificial
> a system as serialism ... and in fact, i'm certain
> that it's already been argued in the theory journals.

Demonstrate away; I think you will be shot down in flames.

Hi, Joe,

>****Yes! Think Berg?? (And maybe Forte's famous book on
>serial "tonality...")

I'm wondering if you mean George Perle's Twelve-Tone Tonality.

Kyle

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Kyle Gann <kgann@e...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_41493.html#41608

> Hi, Joe,
>
> >****Yes! Think Berg?? (And maybe Forte's famous book on
> >serial "tonality...")
>
> I'm wondering if you mean George Perle's Twelve-Tone Tonality.
>
> Kyle

***Hi Kyle!

Whoopsie... I made a boo boo... You're right. Actually, I never
purchased that book, thinking that "Twelve-Tone Tonality" seemed like
a moronic oxymoron...(at least for $50 :) [Probably just *my*
particular slant...]

I actually rather "enjoyed" Perle's standard "Serial Composition and
Atonality" finding it at least *readable* as opposed to the Forte
_The Structure of Atonal Music_ which I had trouble getting through...

Maybe the math mavens on this list would get more out of the Forte...
I believe P. Erlich has read part of it, but I don't know about
Gene... Gene W.S. might like it...

Joe

Hi Joe,

Don't buy Perle's Twelve-Tone Tonality, and I'll tell you why. I was interested in his system for awhile, long ago, and I tried to read that book three times, and each time I got stuck in chapter five, on a couple of paragraphs I couldn't follow to save my life. Years later I ran into Stephen Dembski, who'd done a lot of work with Perle, and mentioned that to him. He said, "Oh yes, there's something that got left out of the text in chapter five, and if you don't know what it is, you can't figure out the rest of the book."

Doesn't that beat everything? Publishers won't take a chance on books on microtonality by me, or even a genius like Monz, but if you're a hotshot academic at some big university with a lot of modernist credentials, they'll publish your esoteric 12-tone book and make a big deal out of it without even reading through it to confirm that it makes any sense.

Kyle

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kyle Gann" <kgann@earthlink.net>

> Hi Joe,
>
> Don't buy Perle's Twelve-Tone Tonality, and I'll tell you why. I was
> interested in his system for awhile, long ago, and I tried to read
> that book three times, and each time I got stuck in chapter five, on
> a couple of paragraphs I couldn't follow to save my life. Years later
> I ran into Stephen Dembski, who'd done a lot of work with Perle, and
> mentioned that to him. He said, "Oh yes, there's something that got
> left out of the text in chapter five, and if you don't know what it
> is, you can't figure out the rest of the book."
>
> Doesn't that beat everything? Publishers won't take a chance on books
> on microtonality by me, or even a genius like Monz, but if you're a
> hotshot academic at some big university with a lot of modernist
> credentials, they'll publish your esoteric 12-tone book and make a
> big deal out of it without even reading through it to confirm that it
> makes any sense.

And there's probably folks out there who claim that they totally
understand the book. Scary eh?

Have a cool yule folks...

* David Beardsley
* http://biink.com
* http://mp3.com/davidbeardsley

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Kyle Gann <kgann@e...> wrote:

/tuning/topicId_41493.html#41610

> Hi Joe,
>
> Don't buy Perle's Twelve-Tone Tonality, and I'll tell you why. I
was
> interested in his system for awhile, long ago, and I tried to read
> that book three times, and each time I got stuck in chapter five,
on
> a couple of paragraphs I couldn't follow to save my life. Years
later
> I ran into Stephen Dembski, who'd done a lot of work with Perle,
and
> mentioned that to him. He said, "Oh yes, there's something that got
> left out of the text in chapter five, and if you don't know what it
> is, you can't figure out the rest of the book."
>
> Doesn't that beat everything? Publishers won't take a chance on
books
> on microtonality by me, or even a genius like Monz, but if you're a
> hotshot academic at some big university with a lot of modernist
> credentials, they'll publish your esoteric 12-tone book and make a
> big deal out of it without even reading through it to confirm that
it
> makes any sense.
>
> Kyle

***Hi Kyle,

Thanks for the tip. Well that story is very funny... well, *sad* but
funny. I correspond with Dembsky occasionally, so I'll bring it up...

best,

Joe

hi Kyle and Joe,

> From: "Kyle Gann" <kgann@earthlink.net>
> To: <tuning@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2002 1:32 PM
> Subject: [tuning] Re: Serialism
>
>
> Hi Joe,
>
> Don't buy Perle's Twelve-Tone Tonality, and I'll tell you why. I was
> interested in his system for awhile, long ago, and I tried to read
> that book three times, and each time I got stuck in chapter five, on
> a couple of paragraphs I couldn't follow to save my life. Years later
> I ran into Stephen Dembski, who'd done a lot of work with Perle, and
> mentioned that to him. He said, "Oh yes, there's something that got
> left out of the text in chapter five, and if you don't know what it
> is, you can't figure out the rest of the book."
>
> Doesn't that beat everything? Publishers won't take a chance on books
> on microtonality by me, or even a genius like Monz, but if you're a
> hotshot academic at some big university with a lot of modernist
> credentials, they'll publish your esoteric 12-tone book and make a
> big deal out of it without even reading through it to confirm that it
> makes any sense.

and then they'll continue to sell it even after they know that
it's missing part of the text! yikes!

(... and thanks for the great compliment!)

-monz