Schoenberg embracing 12-tet

In a private email exchange with a member of the
Mahler list, i wrote something i thought worth
posting here ...

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monz, computer realization of Mahler 7th/I
http://66.98.148.43/~xenharmo/bifrostmus.html

This link is to Gene's site ... he's the one who did the
retuning into "bifrost" 12-tone circulating temperament,
rendered my MIDI into an audio file, and created the .ogg
and .mp3 files. So a lot of the quality of the final product
is due to him.

But for sure, the proper retuning for Mahler is meantone.
He himself said to Schoenberg that he regretted that
European music "lost a lot of harmonic subtleties" by
switching from meantone to 12-tone equal-temperament.

It says a lot for Schoenberg's own strength of character
that despite his great admiration for Mahler, he clung to
exactly the opposite position, enthusastically embraced
12-tet, and created a whole new system of musical composition
based on that tuning.

In fact, Schoenberg really deserves a tremendous amount
of credit, for being the composer who was brave enough
to recognize the fact that 12-tet by his time had been accepted
as the standard tuning, and that music-theory all thru the
"common-practice" period (1600-1900) was based on
meantone and therefore by his day was limited, because
12-tet is not only a member of the meantone family of tunings
but also belongs to many other families.

-monz
http://tonalsoft.com
Tonescape microtonal music software