the indicative "IF"

THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE NEUTRAL...
Well before I was (fully) cognizant of fairly common terms like microtone or
quartertone� I was drawn to manipulating, regulating, and aligning
intonation as a natural outgrowth of curiosity and experimentation�* It
would be several years before it ever occurred to me that there were
(formal) systematized ways to go about this� When I eventually did settled
into using intonational scenarios that weren�t twelve equidistant divisions
of the octave almost exclusively, I did so because I was fascinated (as a so
called composer and soloist) with the usefulness of such a vastly expanded
resource, and (some fourteen or so years on) I have yet to encounter a
single tuning scenario that doesn�t seem to �like� my music... No fifths all
fifths� beats and no beats� melodic commas and harmonic commas� the good the
bad and the neutral...**

JUST INTONATION EXPLAINED...
When I first started to delve into a bit of the written material on
�alternate intonational scenarios�� three things seemed to jump right out at
me: 1) That the theoretical and technical scope was immense, _extremely_
daunting, and (ultimately) as irresistible as the actual sounds� 2) That
until the widespread advent of the Internet, you had to look hard and far to
acquire much more than a misunderstood misrepresentation of Harry Partch and
quartertones� and 3) From the "trista"*** of Hermann Helmholtz� �On the
Sensation of Tone� to the red meat, processed sugars, and violent action
movies**** of Kyle Gann�s �Just Intonation Explained� -- my personal awes
and admiration�s of an undiminished pitch continuum (where all the possible
resources one could find and make useful were as such _fundamentally
useful_) stood in stark contrast to the oft repeated ideological
equilibrium's of Just Intonation�

UNEXHAUSTED TREASURE...
In his introduction to the 1954 edition of �On The Sensation Of Tone�, Henry
Margenau wrote: "�and the musician finds in it unexhausted treasure if he
wishes to understand his art�" He got the unexhausted treasure part
right! -- But the indicative "IF" of an "if he wishes to understand his
art"***** has empowered not only the careful and considered �high
accountabilities� of physiological literatim (et al)� but also a plethora of
axiomatic perorations and inimical broadsides that to this day comprise a
sizable portion of the alternative tuning narrative�

Dan

*For anyone who might be interested in hearing an audio example of these
types of �experiments and curiosities' - see Blue Caro.rm or Silvered.rm @:
http://members.xoom.com/Minor2nd/

**Of course this is neither artistic carte blanche nor righteous character
contingency� (It is largely an autobiographical extrapolation of the
anterior antecedents that take the soul + brain + ear + eye + hand ensemble
of the conditioned and the innate in for a reasonably robust turn or two in
the first place.)

***pg. 230 [Helmholtz, �On the Sensations of Tone�]

****The actual quote from Kyle Gann�s �Just Intonation Explained� @:
http://home.earthlink.net/~kgann/tuning.html is... "Equal temperament could
be described as the musical equivalent to eating a lot of red meat and
processed sugars and watching violent action films."

*****While it�s obviously impossible to say exactly what role �Genesis Of A
Music� played in supplying an example for the germane exculpation from an
unsatisfactory status quo and the UPPERCASE intemperance of an ideology�
Surely Harry Partch embodied as vibrant a dose of the former as could
perhaps be hoped for _and_ preached the latter with a blaring glee of rarely
matched perspicacity and derision! And to be truthful (whether I agree with
it or not) his carrying on rarely rubs me the wrong way� much the same way
as Charles Ives� �Memos� rarely strikes me as anything but �in context�.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
TESTIS UNUS, TESTIS NULLUS...
Personally I just can�t help but feel that if the great anagogic promise of
art lies outside the realm of some wayward humanistic ideomotor
impingement... it most surely must encompass a hell of a lot more than the
refined explications of any one of its teleological simulacrums�