source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 07:03:57 -0800 Subject: RE: Reply to Bruce Gilson From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@CompuServe.COM> > I think diatonic melodies in 17 are quite beautiful. Witness > Blackwood's 17-tone etude, for example. Notice that I said that a diatonic half-step very small compared to the whole step struck me as sounding "strange", not "ugly". Presumably it's a case of sociological conditioning. One of Ivor Darreg's observations about 17TET is that it reverses one of the usual premises of harmony. In particular, the major third is such a dreadful dissonance that it must be resolved outward to fourths. That then makes it a good candidate for quartal and quintal harmony (Ivor didn't say that specifically though). So it's not necessarily a case of putting any kind of harmony behind a 17TET melody sounding "YUCK!", but triadic harmony in particular. > I just happened to note that theorists who derive the diatonic scale from > three triads are perpetrating a historico-geographic fallacy. Is that the topic of your up-coming Xenharmonikon paper? It sounds interesting, since that's one of two ways that come to mind immediately as the basis for the construction of the traditional major scale. The other of course is tetrachord. Since there are big dissimilarities between the scales constructed by those means, and since the scale itself came about before triadic harmony, I can imagine that there is fertile ground for a paper there. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 17:40 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA16394; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 17:41:39 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA16593 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id IAA01958; Mon, 18 Nov 1996 08:41:32 -0800 Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 08:41:32 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu