source file: mills3.txt Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 10:59:29 +0100 Subject: Re: Xenharmonic? From: mr88cet@texas.net (Gary Morrison) >It has to do with the idea that there ought to be a new paradigm, a new >"main thing" in music at all. I agree that there should be no one "main" tuning. Each tuning ought to stand for its own merits, and drawbacks of course. As for new paradigms though, I think the fact that each tuning presents new paradigms of composition to be very interesting. But perhaps that depends on what you mean by paradigm. I take the term to mean a set of bounds that you put yourself into. As I've suggested before on the list, I think that systematic limitations can be valuable rather than detrimental to composers. For one thing, if you find limits on the available solutions stiffling, then systematic limitations at least have the advantage of also limiting the problems you could run into! But more importantly, having a limited scope of solutions doesn't restrict, but enhances, creativity. The fact, for example, that 9TET, Pierce-Bohlen, 88CET, and many other tunings with a fairly large step size, provide no means of realizing diatonic melody strikes me as a valuable compositional paradigm to work under. You have no choice but to break away from a diatonic mindset completely! Limitations force you to use creativity to find a different solution, or a different problem. Also, many times when I'm forced to experiment, I accidentally chance upon something that's even better than what I had in mind in the first place. So I think that pushing a button to get any arbitrary thing you want is boring. The other advantage of composing within a paradigm, is that it can make the results easier for your audiences to follow. They may not hear a diatonic scale for example, but if your melodies outline some nontraditional scale pattern, they'll get a firm grasp of that nontraditional pattern. Avoiding patterns altogether will produce the effect of randomness. True, chaos could be a meaningful idea to portray under some circumstances, but there's also certainly a lot to be said for giving your audience a crystal-clear image of something unusual and unexpected. SMTPOriginator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu From: Johnny Reinhard Subject: Re: Woodwinds and Systems PostedDate: 19-11-97 14:12:19 SendTo: CN=coul1358/OU=AT/O=EZH ReplyTo: tuning@eartha.mills.edu $MessageStorage: 0 $UpdatedBy: CN=notesrv2/OU=Server/O=EZH,CN=coul1358/OU=AT/O=EZH,CN=Manuel op de Coul/OU=AT/O=EZH RouteServers: CN=notesrv2/OU=Server/O=EZH,CN=notesrv1/OU=Server/O=EZH RouteTimes: 19-11-97 14:10:53-19-11-97 14:10:54,19-11-97 14:11:02-19-11-97 14:11:03 DeliveredDate: 19-11-97 14:11:03 Categories: $Revisions: Received: from ns.ezh.nl ([137.174.112.59]) by notesrv2.ezh.nl (Lotus SMTP MTA SMTP v4.6 (462.2 9-3-1997)) with SMTP id C1256554.00486686; Wed, 19 Nov 1997 14:10:48 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA02824; Wed, 19 Nov 1997 14:12:19 +0100 Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 14:12:19 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA02822 Received: (qmail 2832 invoked from network); 19 Nov 1997 05:12:11 -0800 Received: from localhost (HELO ella.mills.edu) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 19 Nov 1997 05:12:11 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu