source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995 16:00:01 -0800 From: "John H. Chalmers" From: mclaren Subject: unsavory habits of the musical intelligentsia -- or -- the 12-TET musical elite have a point, but if they comb their hair properly, it won't show --- The savage dictatorship of the concert-hall-and-conservatory musical establishment, which Greg Taylor is pleased to imagine the product of my paranoid delusions, will brook no deviation from the totalitarian musical status quo. The clearest example of this Orwellian and ruthless state of musical conformity is of course the string quartet. Offhand, there's no reason at all why 4 fretless string instruments couldn't perform in any scale desired-- 19-TET, 31-TET, 53-TET, 11-TET, the free-free metal bar scale, the Bohlen-Pierce scale, or any other tuning. Naturally, any string quartet that gets handed such a score will burn the offending sheaf of music paper and bury the ashes. Naturally, all string players have been programmed to perform in 12, only 12, always 12, forever 12. Another example of ruthless 12-TET tyranny is the computer music scene. Given the opportunity to explore any possible musical scale, any possible set of harmonies, any conceivable set of melodic pitches, the contributors to Confuser Music Urinal choose to...explore 12 tones per octave. (For the most part. There are a few exceptions. Dashow, Schottstaedt, a few others. All have been ostracized and marginalized for their troubles.) This is reminiscent of aged Devil's Island convicts who, being set free of their ball-and-chain, still drag one foot and move with snail-like gait. In this case the musiKKKal establishment has admirably attained its implicit goal of brainwashing all & sundry into the use of 12 tones per octave: indeed, the Red Chinese during the Korean war could hardly have hoped for better results with U.N. prisoners. Such a state of mindless (musical) conformity would bring joy to the heart of Stalin, and send Hitler to sleep with an ecstatic smile on his face. After composing some pieces recently in the Greek enharmonic genus for an upcoming performance in a San Diego experimental music club, the true bestiality of the current musiKKKal status quo really began to become clear to me. Think of it: for hundreds of years, it would have been a simple matter to retune a harpsichord or a piano to the Greek enharmonic...yet *no one* did so. This is an case of conformity unexampled in the history of mind control. Such machine-like zombification would make even Mussolini cringe-- yet, somehow, we accept this grotesque and obscene lockstep mentality as "the progress of music." ("From 12 to 12...in the beginning was 12, and 12 was the Word, and the Word was 12..." One's puke- meter pegs. One's gag reflex kicks in. And *still* it continues...) The enharmonic genus is, as Ralph David Hill has pointed out, "almost the most beautiful of all the Greek genera," and simple to obtain on a 12-TET retunable instrument. No note would need to be retuned by more than about half a semitone. Yet not a single composer, not a single adventurous soul, dared to compose a piano sonata in the Greek enharmonic genus. Too, with 12 pitches available, more than one key center could have been explored: yet this was apparently too terrifying an extremum for generation upon generation of composers to contemplate. In the words of the Outer Limits episode "O.B.I.T.": "O savage despairing planet! When we come here to live, you will fall without a single shot. Enjoy the few years left to you..." Naturally these brutal and disgusting facts will be prestidigitated away by gtaylor and his cronies with yet more smoke and mirrors, reason upon complicated and unlikely reason why the iron fist of 12 equal tones doesn't *actually* rule inside the velvet glove of the musiKKKal concert-hall-and-conservatory establishment. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 22 Dec 1995 16:29 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id HAA22330; Fri, 22 Dec 1995 07:29:49 -0800 Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 07:29:49 -0800 Message-Id: <9512220730.aa20418@cyber.cyber.net> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu