Sagittal apologies

Dear Carl,

I apologise for accusing you of "slandering" Sagittal. This was a silly thing for me to say, because to slander means to make a false statement or report that damages a _person's_ reputation.

I obviously identify too strongly with, (have too much of an ego-investment in), the Sagittal notation system, having spent so much time on it (nearly two years now). I expect I'll get over this as I spend more time away from it.

And I must say it was an enjoyable two years, as the arguments back and forth with George (and occasional others) were always civil and carried out with humour.

I am sorry you found my failure to listen to your examples disgusting and an example of arrogance. I am glad at least that you found my apparent arrogance "exquisite". Is that "delicately constructed", or "finely balanced between pleasure and pain"? :-)

In the hope that you will not be so quick to judge others harshly in future, a quality usually required of a moderator, I would like you to know that I was replying in the wee hours of the morning my time, my wife and children were asleep and I did not want to risk waking them with strange music (we live in a very quiet location), and since I didn't expect that listening to the examples would have any bearing on translating the notation, I chose not to scrabble around to find a pair of headphones either. My wife had also asked me to come to bed soon because our daughter keeps waking her if she cannot reach out and touch me in her sleep. Sorry. I would normally spare the list such gruesome off-topic detail.

But I admit that I was also angry with you because I felt you had given me that work to do, at a time when I would rather not have had to.

It is so easy to sound authoritative and fire off a sound-bite discrediting something you know little about (and of which others know even less) - a sound-bite that may remain in the memories of people who do not have the knowledge or patience to follow a refutation which cannot be expressed so easily. There's enough of that on the world political stage at the moment. Nor do later admissions of "an unfortunate choice of words" undo all the damage.

So perhaps both of us could be more careful with our choices of words in future.

I have listened to your kleismic-8 MIDI examples since then. They were interesting. Thanks for going to the trouble.

Dear Carl and Joseph (Pehrson),

I find it quite amusing that Sagittal's chain-of-best-fifths-nominals are too reactionary for you Carl, but too revolutionary for you Joseph, e.g. in 19-ET. :-)

In general I find them "evolutionary". But in the case of 19-ET or 1/3-comma meantone, they have of course been its standard notation for many hundreds of years, which is why I put "Sagittal" in scare-quotes in my notation of Carl's examples.

I wonder Carl whether you are annoyed with Sagittal because, like all revolutionaries, you dislike anything that might make people more comfortable with the status quo?

I note that because 19 and 72-ET share the kleismic linear temperament, it is possible to notate 19-ET in 72-ET Sagittal notation Joseph, but it isn't pretty. And as I have often said Carl, there is a place for notations like yours too, and I believe the Sagittal accidentals can help.

Dear List,

I also wish to apologise for what must by now be looking rather like the promotion of vapourware on my part. Although it can't be entirely so, since Joseph Pehrson is using it, and it is implemented in Scala (albeit poorly so far, but that's the fault of George and I, not Manuel who has bent over backwards to implement the algorithms we have so far been able to describe to him).

What _is_ vapourware is the documentation for it, unless you count the hundreds of messages entitled "A Common notation for JI and ETs" in the archives of the tuning and tuning-math lists. But at present we find ourselves in a difficult situation.

Quite some time ago, George and I offered our introduction to Sagittal to John Chalmers for publication in the paper-based journal Xenharmonikon in the hope of reaching a wider audience (in space and time) than just us present-day web-denizens. This was at a time when John was adamant he would publish it in the "Fall" of 2003 (northern hemisphere), i.e. Sep/Oct/Nov. Unfortunately John fell very ill before he could do so and may still not be fully recovered. And even when he does feel up to working he will have much of his own work to catch up on before he can turn his attention again to Xenharmonikon.

Xenharmonikon works like many other journals, in that it buys the copyright to the article. Payment is two copies of the Xenharmonikon issue it appears in. But copyright is freely returned to the authors after the initial publication. XH then retains only the right to reprint the article as part of a reprint of the whole issue.

We always intended to publish the intro to Sagittal on the web as soon as it appeared in XH18. At this stage we still have hopes that XH18 will be published soon, and we do not wish to break the contract. Nor do we wish to pressure John in any way.

By the way, from what I've heard, there will be lots of other good stuff in this long-overdue issue, so it will have been well worth waiting for.

Regards,

-- Dave Keenan
Brisbane, Australia
http://dkeenan.com/

I also owe the list an apology for immature behavior. Like Dave, I
was writing in the wee hours, not taking my own advice about e-mail
waiting.

As for the 'getting in a fight with a moderator' thing, please pull
no punches. I'm very practiced at wearing multiple hats at the same
time, and seeing as how good moderators should be active posters,
any good moderator must strive to keep these roles as separate as
humanly possible. As a poster, I must say that any implication that
my correspondent's time is more valuable than my own is bound to
upset me.

Of course my offer to pdf the XH article is utterly unaffected by
this ordeal.

I look forward to seeing more musical examples of Sagittal in the
future,

-Carl