source file: m1555.txt Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 05:35:17 -0500 Subject: Re: co-op... From: Gary Morrison > It has occured to me that we (theorists/inventors/musicians/composers) > might benefit by forming a corporation (possibly non-profit)to promote > our work in microtonality/just intonation. As with a promotional body for any area of endeavor, that could have value. There have been quite a few attempts at that, or at least in that direction. None have been as comprehensive as you suggest, probably because even subsets of that have proven very difficult to accomplish. By "comprehensive", I mean promoting all of the things you mentioned - publishing, promotion, advertising, and such. All have put a greater emphasis on parts of that task. The Interval Foundation was centered around the "Interval" publication, but had regular meetings in the San Diego area. AFFM concentrates mostly on concerts, and to some degree so does Stichting Huygens Fokker. You mentioned patent ownership. That poses some very difficult problems that I definitely don't recommend getting into. People don't like consigning patents unless they work for the consignees as regular employees, and owning a patent is pretty pointless unless you can prosecute violators, or sell the patents. Either of those involves the transfer of big money, which in turn means politics, which in turn means fostering ill-will between members. But beyond the issues that patents bring up, and despite the fact that I agree that there are potential benefits to such a corporation, I think you'll find that it's just simply too difficult to accomplish. Microtonalists of the world are just simply too geographically dispersed to make such a thing possible. Because of that dispersal, we have also become too much of a bunch of mavericks. Isolation means that we have to draw our own microtonal plans, and each having different plans, it would be exceptionally difficult to get any two of us moving on the same plan. Now I'm not suggesting that this state of affairs is ideal, but that's what I think it is.