source file: m1558.txt
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 22:17:12

Subject: danielou

From: Brian Lee <blee@dircon.co.uk>

Just to put the record straight. Joe Monzo said 

>Although earlier in this Tuning Digest, Brian Lee discredited the actual
>relevance Danielou's ratios have to Indian musical performance, I have
>accepted the idea, which as far as I know was first propogated by
>Danielou
>and subsequently by Ben Johnston, Scott Makeig and others, that each
>prime number is a unique dimension in terms of both aural and affective
>quality.
>

I am not a practising Indian Classical Musician (although I love the music)
and when I said that the Indian Classical Musicians don't go along with
Danielou's 5 limit ratio theory, all I was doing was reporting what the
musicians themselves had said. There are ratio analyses of ICM which give
prime limits up to 31 and if anyone's interested I'll be happy to dig out
the references.

Secondly, I have no argument with the idea of the quality of prime numbers.
Danielou's writing was the thing that got me into thinking in those terms.
What I cannot go along with however in Danielou's work is that anything
over prime 5 takes you into potentially dangerous areas metaphysically.
There are many musical cultures which tune to higher prime limits than five. 

I hope this makes my position clearer.

Brian Lee