source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1996 19:36:10 -0800 Subject: Re: composing From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@compuserve.com> I suspect that Neil was refering to the same thing as (Bill Alves was it?), when Neil said that he usually work with modal music, and when Bill said that the only limitation with JI (on a fixed number of tones per octave) is making everything sound the same on all tonal centers. Neil could perhaps be said to be presenting the microtonal equivalent of the traditional view of modality. The two are exactly analogous if not exactly identical: Modulating a melody within a seven-steped diatonic scale without adding the appropriate chromatics, changes major thirds into minor, producing the familiar modal feeling change. Similarly, starting with a justly tuned 12 (or whatever) toned scale, and modulating it to another tonal center without adding additional pitches as needed, will change 5:4s into 81:64s for example. It's a different sort of feeling change, in that we don't hear major-to-minor shifts, but it's exactly identical in that we hear shifts between very different sounding major thirds. Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 22 Mar 1996 09:15 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id AAA29883; Fri, 22 Mar 1996 00:15:33 -0800 Date: Fri, 22 Mar 1996 00:15:33 -0800 Message-Id: <960322015934_174491721@emout09.mail.aol.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu