source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 1 Dec 1996 20:01:59 -0800 Subject: Yet another non-posting reader From: Howard Rovics I have been a "non-posting reader" for the past two years until this past October when, in the course of changing to another server I lost contact. Johnny Reinhard told me that he was encouraging lurkers to decloak. Curiosity got the better of me and I quickly rejoined. I'll introduce myself and I'll try to state why I like this forum. I'm a composer/pianist and Professor of Music at a college very near to New York City. I teach theory and composition on both undergrad and graduate levels, some music one for the non-musician, piano, MIDI studio skills and all kinds of electives when they come around. All of my composing has been in 12-ET but quite diverse, both tonal and atonal. It was Stefan Wolpe who challenged me 35 years ago to question everything and to be wary of conventions, especially those of standard notation. Early on I loved to extend the sounds of the piano with inside-of-the-piano exploits and keyboard manipulations that would elicit harmonic resonance. In 1967 I began a three year stint at the Columbia-Princeton electronic Music Center while living on Manhattan's upper West side. I am indebted to Mario Davidovsky and others for some insightful training. Here, in this presynthesizer studio where most compositions were created with 3 or 4 stereo reel-to-reel tape recorders, hand splicing tape like it was movie film, pitch would drift as the vacuum tubes warmed up and precise time synchronization was all but impossible to achieve. And so I created a number of spacey things, developing a taste for elusive pitch and floating musical sound shapes that were disassociated from meter. I also had my first hands-on experience with computer music around this time. There were no video monitors yet. It was punch carding in the basement of the Columbia U computer building, waiting for your stack to run upstairs, and if successful (a rare event) the digital tape they'd hand you would have to be sent to Westchester (some 40 miles away) to be converted into analog, a two or three day delay. I decided to drop out for a decade or so after one semester of this. It was the hardest imaginable way to make music. I did learn o appreciate those hardy souls who did the pioneering and made it work. In that decade before the PC, in addition to lots of 12-ET composing I did some writing for percussion ensemble, a lot of free improv related to the study of music therapy and several summers of vocal improv along the lines of the Harmonic Choir. All of these musical experiences expanded my sense of sonic resources. The rest is "modern times". Early in the '80's I embraced the PC starting with Radio Shack's Color Computer and IBM's PC Junior and became reasonably adept at the practical technologies that are around, namely desktop publishing, MIDI and high quality home studio recording. A short course with Johnny Reinhard some seven years ago quickly turned me onto this world of the xenharmonic. Soon thereafter I took a semester in the physics of sound at a nearby university and a lot of the math that surrounds acoustics and sound engineering started to make sense. And so I hang around this forum to enjoy the poetry of engineering ( sometimes, understanding something), the world view that permeates xenharmonic thinking; recommendations in regard to CD's, software and books and what feels like a glimpse into what Johnny calls "the beginning of the future." Visit my home page if you'd like to get better acquainted. There's nothing xenharmonic there yet but I'm working on it. Howard Rovics rovics@nai.net http://w3.nai.net/~rovics. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 2 Dec 1996 05:03 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA13583; Mon, 2 Dec 1996 05:05:44 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA13271 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id UAA04694; Sun, 1 Dec 1996 20:05:40 -0800 Date: Sun, 1 Dec 1996 20:05:40 -0800 Message-Id: <199612020403.NAA01656@judy.sfc.keio.ac.jp> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu