source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 8 Oct 1995 11:47:19 -0700 Subject: Re: RE Brian's Posts and Gary's 88CET Posts From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@compuserve.com> By the way, Marion mentioned implicitly a philosophical question that I suppose bears asking: I've been working with 88CET tuning for something like a year and a half now, and have been posting many of my findings here. I pointed out earlier that it's perhaps a little risky to get too carried away in formal research into how the ear works, when all that ultimately matters is the much higher-level question of how it sounds. Well, that can also be carried to too much research in the vein of more traditional music theory. Ivor Darreg was always aware, and quite frankly afraid, that he was pressed for time. He always realized that he would die before he could finish the work he wanted to accomplish in unusual musical tunings. He therefore shunned getting too carried away in the mechanics of notation systems, the time required to write down music, formally researching chord progressions, interpreting effects of these new constructs on typical notions of counterpoint, and such endeavors. He instead concentrated upon getting a quick feel for a tuning, and then improvising in it to get the music out fast. I always admired Ivor's drive, and his ability to improvise wonderful music with very little prior experimentation. Still, there are also risks in pure improvisation. As Wendy Carlos pointed out in "Secrets of Synthesis", many orchestrational devices that have exciting effects, are almost impossible to improvise. Also, even among highly skilled improvisationalists, improvised music can often have very fuzzy meaning at the top level - where did we start and where did we go over the course of the composition? So when Marion points out to me the fact that I've posted a lot of theory and ideas about 88CET here, he has (unwittingly of course) evoked Ivor's ghost to remind me that preparation alone doesn't make music. Of course, what's not obvious in these postings is that I have in fact produced a fair amount of music in 88CET thus far - about half a CD's worth. So it's certainly not a case of Ivor's "silent writing on paper". What do you folks think about the relative importance of understanding, systematizing, and experimenting with a tuning, compared to that of simply diving in headlong and just seeing where improvisation takes you? I've been wrestling with that question a bit, and have concluded that it's pretty much the trade-off we know it is: Both are important, and the balance between the two is finer-detailed than mere rules of thumb and maxims can get you. Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 8 Oct 1995 22:54 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id NAA00043; Sun, 8 Oct 1995 13:54:33 -0700 Date: Sun, 8 Oct 1995 13:54:33 -0700 Message-Id: <199510082053.NAA17901@osiris.ac.hmc.edu> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu