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This is reminiscent of aged Devil's Island convicts who, being set free of their ball-and-chain, still drag one foot and move with snail-like gait...out of habit. In this case the musiKKKal establishment has admirably attained its implicit goal of brainwashing all & sundry into the use of 12 tones per octave: indeed, the Red Chinese during the Korean war could hardly have hoped for better results with U.N. prisoners. Such a state of mindless (musical) conformity would bring joy to the heart of Stalin, and send Hitler to sleep with an ecstatic smile on his face.
The 12-TET musical elite have a point, but if they comb their hair properly, it won't show. Dashow, Schottstaedt, a few others have explored non-12 computer tunings, and they have been ostracized and marginalized for their troubles. Other than this handful of names, the standard operating procedure at so-called "cutting-edge concerts" of so-called "computer music" is...to wheel out a MIDI grand piano!
Think of it!
A grand piano with some Rube Goldberg clockwork hooked up to it!
My god, people!
This is retrogression with a VENGEANCE. "Forward into the past!"
That's the rallying cry. As we hurtle into the 21st century, concerts of new music still center around...a piece of 19th century wooden machinery.
Incredible.
Just incredible.
Such machine-like zombification would make even Mussolini cringe-- yet, somehow, we accept this grotesque and obscene lockstep mentality as "the progress of music." ("From 12 to 12...in the beginning was 12, and 12 was the Word, and the Word was 12..." One's puke- meter pegs and one's gag reflex kicks in. When will it end???)
Of course, the best example of the ruthless 12-tone-only mind control exerted by conservatories and the university music departments is: the string quartet.
Offhand, there's no reason at all why 4 fretless string instruments couldn't perform in any scale at all-- 19-TET, 31-TET, 53-TET, 11-TET, the free-free metal bar scale, the Bohlen-Pierce scale, or any other tuning. Naturally, any string quartet that gets handed such a score will burn the offending sheaf of manuscript paper and bury the ashes. Naturally, all string players have been programmed to perform in 12, only 12, always 12, forever 12.
After playing some pieces recently in the Greek emharmonic genus, the true savagery of the current musiKKKal status quo become appallingly clear to me:
For the last 250 years years, it would have been a simple matter to retune a harpsichord or a piano to the Greek enharmonic...yet *no one* did so. Not a single composer. No western piano or harpischord or virginal composers ANYWHERE. This is an example of conformity unexampled in the history of brainwashing... The enharmonic genus is, as Ralph David Hill has pointed out, "almost the most beuatiful of all the Greek genera," and quite simple to obtain on a 12-TET retunable instrument. No note would need to be retuned by more than about half a semitone. Yet not a single composer, not a single adventurous soul, dared to compose a piano sonata in the Greek enharmonic genus. Too, with 12 pitches available, more than one key center could have been explored: yet this was apparently too terrifying an extremum for generation upon generation of composers to contemplate.
Yet not even one out of the millions of people who lived during the last 250 years, not even one lone soul, ever thought of composing a sarabande or a gigue or even on single piece of keyboard music in the Greek enharmonic genus.
THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is mind control with a vengeance! In the words of the Outer Limits episode "O.B.I.T.": "O savage despairing planet! When we come here to live, you will fall without a single shot. Enjoy the few years left to you..." Naturally these brutal and disgusting facts will be prestidigitated away by gtaylor and his cronies with yet more smoke and mirrors, reason upon complicated and unlikely reason why the iron fist of 12 equal tones doesn't *actually* rule inside the velvet glove of the musiKKKal concert-hall-and-conservatory establishment.
--mclaren
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