bolt a 400-horsepower engine to a barn door

[Jay Williams:]
>(Remember that hogwash from the '60's drug scene that advised that
taking peyote was better than taking acid cuz the former was
"natural?" To which I always responded, "Yeah, so leg's try hemlock.
It's natural.")

You certainly don't have to go back to the '60's, as this "hogwash" is
very much alive and well in the 90's (yeah I know, it's not the 90's
anymore, but it takes me awhile to catch up), and has a fairly well
known voice in Terence McKenna. FWIW, I'm apparently a lot more
sympathetic to this view than you are, and wouldn't consider it
"hogwash" at all really... but by the same token, and again by way of
analogy, if you want to fly, imitation of nature is probably only
going to amount to bad engineering... "If you want to make something
that flies, flapping your wings is not the way to do it. You bolt a
400-horsepower engine to a barn door, that's how you fly. You can look
at birds forever and never discover this secret."

>No, there's some weird psychocomplex at work when people can accept a
ravine's "song" as an acceptable part of their world, but not even a
pianissimo minor second in 'Bartok.

I certainly agree.

>Well, not !my bell, but hey! we're talkin' Mother Nature, aren't we?
Or are we? Just what _are we really talking about?

Well not that it's hardly necessary for making great (or good or any)
art, but I'm trying to at least talk about a balanced intonational
view, or at least an attempt to understand the possible benefits of
opposing ones... Awhile back Paul Erlich quoted W. A. Mathieu from
_HARMONIC EXPERIENCE_:

"Play an equal-tempered chromatic scale again, up and down several
octaves in one hand, not too fast, and let your ear savor its
regularity, its newfangled, manufactured, precisely measured
_sameness_. Don't be bored, be fascinated, mesmerized. This
sensibility opens the door for the more complex symmetrical forces
hidden inside the Trojan horse of equal temperament."

I found this to be a *remarkably* refreshing point of view from
someone who is also known as "Dr. Overtone"! Be fascinated... don't be
bored... Sounds like a darn good prescription to me!

Dan

Dan Stearns wrote,

>Awhile back Paul Erlich quoted W. A. Mathieu from
>_HARMONIC EXPERIENCE_:

>"Play an equal-tempered chromatic scale again, up and down several
>octaves in one hand, not too fast, and let your ear savor its
>regularity, its newfangled, manufactured, precisely measured
>_sameness_. Don't be bored, be fascinated, mesmerized. This
>sensibility opens the door for the more complex symmetrical forces
>hidden inside the Trojan horse of equal temperament."

>I found this to be a *remarkably* refreshing point of view from
>someone who is also known as "Dr. Overtone"! Be fascinated... don't be
>bored... Sounds like a darn good prescription to me!

Glad you liked it -- I've been trying, for each new book Ara (my keyboard
player) dumps on me from his music library, to find the germ of material
most interesting and relevant to the discussions I've gotten involved with
here. In this case, here's a perfect example of how music and tuning evolve
together, one influencing the other, and the historico-mathematical accident
that the same 12-equal which allowed the meantone music of one era to move
around to any key ultimately lent itself to symmetrical structures like the
6-tone augmented and whole-tone scales and the 8-tone diminished scales
which led to wonderful musical possibilities (in the hands of
Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Stravinsky, . . .) that may not have been
discovered otherwise.