source file: m1608.txt Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1998 21:28:12 -0500 Subject: a gentleman and... an academic From: "Debra Shea-Stearns" In the TUNING digest 1607 (topic No. 16), Carl Lumma wrote: "…Partch would have been greatful for the DX7. He who says otherwise is a gentleman and... an academic." While I'm certainly not an academic (or can I claim to be the ‘gentleman’ so depicted in this context), I am reasonably certain that I don’t really know much about this or that intent of someone I never knew… so this may very well be true; 'Partch would have been grateful for the DX7'... I can’t say—But I will offer a personal point of view or two, to which (I am fairly certain) someone is bound to have some heartfelt objections. I do not own a copy of Partch’s ‘GENESIS OF A MUSIC’. But I have taken it out of the library (a couple of times), and seem to recall a passage in which he talks about (new?) instruments and how music has always grow around and out of them... Though I’ve no doubt butchered the judicious literatim of what he wrote, hopefully I’ve conveyed something of it as well (?). It is my humble opinion that the more unforgettable characteristics of Partch’s music (assuming that the actual music one creates carries with it something distinct from the ideologies that buttress it) are tied a lot tighter to the creation and implementation of new instruments, than they are the advancement of a tuning that happened to resolutely embrace aural causation… And though the tuning the instruments the ideologies and the man and the music all seem inseparable to me now... I for one am pretty darn thankful someone was seduced by carpentry! Would the ‘inimical leer’ that permeates much of his writing on the subject tuning have lost a bit of its punch (or charm) had his radical, spirited MUSIC not shined so brilliantly? I (for whatever that’s worth) certainly would have found the shrillness of the intonation reform minded rhetoric unendurable had the music been some underwhelming, imaginatively anemic quotidian—'Natural, reasonable, and inherently pleasing...' or not. Would one with alternative tuning inclinations truly find an unanticipated audio encounter with an instrument such as Ivor Darreg’s Megalyra any less ‘impressive’ or ‘interesting’ were it tuned to (and played in) 12TET? Would the same go for a DX7... Does a compilation like EMI’s 1st ‘GRAVICHORDS, WHIRLIES AND PYROPHONES’ make a better ‘argument’ for the design and implementation of interesting new instruments than a compilation like the tuning forums ‘A MICROTONAL MUSIC EXPERIENCE’ does for the design and implementation of interesting new tunings? In the end I would suppose that the divination's either in the work, or it ain’t, regardless of whether it is in the gross tactical bone and marrow of the procedure (or it ain’t), and ultimately that it’s more or less for each to say… As if its not clear by now—I profoundly disagree with the [arch] remedial minded ‘intonationalist’… I tend to see the systemic components of music (and be those components the beneficial mediation of de-occulting literatim... ‘where natural phenomena obeys blind necessity’, or be they some detachments from the physically exact… ‘at what cross-purpose the world is dreamt’), as a varied lot of inspiriting, and metaphorically speaking—enclitic understandings, put into their determinant position by the successful (and influential) realization of their MUSIC… But this is not exactly why I wrote, so I guess I’ve run out my "personal point of view or two…" Intonation and music are not the same… Having said as much I would hope not to hie to my grave having said, "therefore; mutually exclusive…" Respectfully, D—Stearns