source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 1 Dec 1996 11:34:03 -0800 Subject: Another Positive Experience From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@CompuServe.COM> Last night, a friend from work who has helped me get into the saxophone, invited me over for dinner. (I've been getting into the soprano sax recently in order to improve my skills in WX-11-based sequencing of microtonal music, and to have fun of course.) After a really nice dinner, he proposed that we play some saxophone quartets with his wife and her sister. I was not up to that since I've only played sax for a couple months or so, and since many of my basic performance skills have faded dreadfully after about six years of composing and theorizing instead of performing! So upon embarrassing myself over that, I hoped to impress them with a demo tape on 88CET tuning. In it I went over 88CET's unusual thirds and 7:4, using my "Alternative Fuels" suite to let them get a feel for each. It then went on to show how you can, with effort, do traditional harmony in 88CET. Well, the good news is that I redeemed myself. (Well, I'm exaggerating; the quartets went OK.) But the good part is that 88CET demo went off quite well. They got exactly right impression. Beyond just general comments of it being "interesting" and such, here are two approximate quotes: "I was afraid that it would be unbearable to listen to, but it was actually quite enjoyable." "It's unusual, but there's a definite, alien logic to it. It's not just haphazard." But perhaps more importantly, they asked a lot of meaty questions, like: "How do you notate this?" "Is it difficult to voice chords in a nonoctave framework?" "Have you considered writing this stuff for movie music?" "Are you pretty much limited to electronic instruments for this sort of tuning?" "How did you come up with a step size of 88 cents?" "Have you written in other tunings?" So there's another band (literally!) of musicians to greet xenharmonics positively. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 1 Dec 1996 20:37 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA13660; Sun, 1 Dec 1996 20:39:14 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA13654 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id LAA28631; Sun, 1 Dec 1996 11:39:12 -0800 Date: Sun, 1 Dec 1996 11:39:12 -0800 Message-Id: <961201193012_71670.2576_HHB45-11@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu