source file: m1589.txt
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1998 17:06:54 -0500 (EST)

Subject: Re: TUNING digest 1586

From: Stephen Soderberg <ssod@loc.gov>

Re:
> > Could someone explain to me why many on this list appear to be hung up on
> > the triad as a systemic harmonic basis?
Gary Morrison responded:
>    It's hard to escape the influence of history.  Whether desirable or not,
> the truth is that most audiences and people in general interpret new
> experiences in terms of what they already know.

Hi Gary,
	I don't totally disagree with you, but imagine the following
conversation:

COMPOSER: Why are you so hung up on 12tET?  Since ancient times and in
other cultures there have been other tunings, and now, with the aid of
computers and synthesized sound, we can have virtually any tuning we want
at the drop of a hat.  Why not open your ears to these other regions, both
historically based ones as well as ones no one has ever been able to
access before?  Some of these are quite interesting, rich and complex. 

MAN ON THE STREET: It's hard to escape the influence of [recent] history. 
Whether desirable or not, the truth is that most audiences and people in
general interpret new experiences in terms of what they already know. 

Would you, as the composer, close up shop at this point and just write in
12tET?  How do you *know* that an audience (and we should all distrust
this collective noun) is responding to the "triad-ness" of a piece, or its
"12tET-ishness" or some other element?  When you come right down to it,
why should you even draw an audience's attention to "microtonality" at
all?  Should the audience care?  If so, why ... since historically(?) 
general(?) audiences(?) haven't had the foggiest idea about the
intricacies or simplicities of the tuning they were hearing?

Further, don't you unnecessarily pigeonhole yourselves when you have a
"microtonal festival"? And don't such festivals confuse the audience (and
worse, the critics who are always looking for convenient labels) into
believing there is such a thing as "a microtonal composer" or a
"microtonalist school"  when, as we've seen just on this list, there's a
stunning variety of ways to compose with an astounding variety of
microtonal pallettes?  (I'm playing devil's advocate in all of this, and
would rather argue the other side -- but I think none of these questions
is inconsequential.)

Returning to the difficulties of trying to override historical (or any
other kind) of prejudice, I'm reminded of the 19th(?) century astronomer,
Maria Mitchell, who noted, "If the earth had waited for a precedent, it
never would have turned on its axis." 

Steve Soderberg

PS: Please don't any literalists who may be lurking out there think I'm
anti-triadic! My response to my own question is that, in the context of
the complexities of 20th century music, it's a matter of texture.  In
fact, one of the interesting things about the particular pentachords
generated with the Erlich string that I noted in an earlier post is that
they can be broken into third-order maximally even triads.  Thus, the
pentachords can be viewed as forming an architechtonic layer BETWEEN the
scale and the triads... an interesting "composing out" possibility for
mega scale structures such as this.