source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 09:53:16 -0800 Subject: Invitation to Lurkers to Contribute From: randy@tcm.mit.edu As Johnny Reinhard and Gary Morrison have both extended this invitation and since I have been feeling somewhat lurkish lately, here's my introduction. I've been following the tuning list since sometime in 1994. I've been interested in non-12tET tunings for about 10 years. Discussions on this list got me interested in non-12 ETs and non-octave tunings. I have recorded several hours of improvisations in various tunings on my cranky old synth. Whenever I read something about a new tuning that strikes my interest, such as Mayumi Reinhard's Harmonic 13, I just have to try it out to see what I can do with it. I read Hindemith's "Craft of Musical Compositition" in the late 70s, and it made a lot of sense to me at the time, but the discrepancy between the harmonic series and its 12tET representation didn't hit me until I tuned up some actual pitches on a synth in 1985. I recorded some pieces with harmonic series pitches and JI tunings around that time. I had heard some microtonal music during my college studies (in the mid-70s; some Partch and Stockhausen and a few others) and some "non-Western" musics (Gamelan, etc.), but I had always brushed it off as being part of a fringe that didn't interest me much at the time. I even performed in a wind ensemble that tackeled a piece full of big harsh quarter tone clusters. So, some academics cover the topic even if they aren't overly enthusiastic about it. Enthusiasm (or lack of) communicates a lot about the importance of a subject. A couple of years ago, Brian McLaren sent me a copy of Ivor Darreg's "Beyond the Xenharmonic Frontier." My first listening to this music drastically altered my musical perceptions - probably the single most influential musical event for me in 10 years. Since then I've been playing with ETs, JIs and non-octave tunings on a regular basis. Just because I don't post often, please don't get the wrong impression. I read every tuning digest, follow the discussions, and try out many of the ideas presented. If I don't participate in the theoretical discussions, it's because I'm not so inclined to do the scholarly research necessary to follow up on some of the ideas presented and I find that I'm often lacking a means to communicate my non-verbal ideas about them anyway. One of the biggest limitations of this forum is that ASCII is the only means available to represent ideas. It'll be a different world once we're able to include sounds as fluently as we now use text. Randy ************************************************************************ * Randy Winchester * randy@mit.edu * PO Box 1074, Cambridge, MA 02142 * * (617) 253-7431 * http://web.mit.edu/randy/www * ************************************************************************ Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 25 Nov 1996 19:28 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA07424; Mon, 25 Nov 1996 19:29:55 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA07389 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id KAA05629; Mon, 25 Nov 1996 10:29:47 -0800 Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 10:29:47 -0800 Message-Id: <9611251828.AA13362@ ccrma.Stanford.EDU > Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu