From: mclaren
Subject: A nuclear-powered cybernetic artificially intelligent buggy whip
--
Musical modernism was never so much a technique or a philosophy as a smell--a noisome pall of rancid pessimism. Beyond the tonal triad, we were told, lay nothing but the sterile mathmematical masturbation of a Milton Babbitt or a Pierre Boulez.
"Learn to like it," we were told. "This is as good as it gets."
Our only choices? Faux Stravinsky or post-Webern serialism. One or the other. No third possibility existed.
In fact, microtonality offers such a third possibility. And as a microtonalist, I often feel like one of the inhabitants of the famous book "Flatland." At the end of the book, an inhabitant of 2-dimensional Flatland--having witnessed a visit by a sapient sphere from the third dimension--excitedly speaks to the ruling council of Flatland about the third, fourth, and even higher dimensions.
Of course the ruling council declares the 2-dimensional inhabitant insane. The rulers of Flatland decree that he must be imprisoned and his words stricken from all public records.
Just so, have would-be musiKKKal oligarchs like Daniel J. Wolf and Greg Taylor begged that my posts be deleted and erased, my words suppressed. They fear and loath my ideas for the same reason that the rulers of 2-dimensional Flatland feared and loathed the concept of a third dimension--for this new possibility would reduce their grand fiefdom to a mere inconsequential footnote...a trivial and uninteresting paper-thin plane overshadowed by a realm of infinitely many musical dimensions.
Microtonality offers a viable alternative, a third dimension at right angles to BOTH tired reiterations of 12-TET neo-19th-century compositional cliches AND tiresome extensions of 12-TET pitch-class matrix serial atonality... Yet Daniel J. Wolf and Greg Taylor cannot permit this concept to be given credence.
Indeed, they can scarcely contain their fury when these concepts are even *uttered* by such as I.
To the Daniel J. Wolfs and Greg Taylors of the world, this is a matter of their very survival.
Were freewheling non-modernist non-schlockmusic microtonality to become a universally practiced alternative to the stunted and dry-as-dust 12-TET po-mo music theory served up in graduate composition courses in universities, music students would immediately start asking questions which Daniel J. Wolf and his ignorant arrogant cronies could not answer. Questions like: "How can non-just non-equal-tempered scales be used most adroitly in a compositional setting?" and "What are the properties of the various equal temperaments?" and "What quantitative and qualitative properties characterize just intonation scales aside from the idea of 'limit'?"
Such questions would leave Daniel J. Wolf and his ignorant arrogant ilk utterly at a loss.
Wolf and company would goggle, Orphan-Annie-eyed, and wobble their lips impotently, making "glug-glug" noises.
Long minutes would pass, and still no answer would come. For Daniel J. Wolf and his yakademic cronies are uninformed outside their microscopic subspecialties, and thus utterly unequipped to answer such questions.
And so Wolf and company would stand there, a warm puddle growing around their shoes, as they desperately tried to think of something to say.
O horrible prospect!
O unspeakable portent!
Such inability to answer simple microtonal questions would raise doubt about the musical qualifications of yakademics such as Daniel J. Wolf.
How, music students would ask pointedly, can we justify paying fifty, seventy, a hundred thousand dollars per year to a musical academic who can't answer such basic elementary questions about non-12 music?
How can we justify continuing to employ on the faculty of a major university PhDs with no expertise outside the microscopic subspecialty of 16th-20th century 12-TET music nad a few aspects of East Indian music?
Such questions would fill the Greg Taylors and Eric Lyons of the world with unutterable terror.
Yes, Daniel J. Wolf, faced with such a question, would hem and haw.
He'd fumble and stumble. Asked such a question by an uppity student, he'd stutter and stammer. He'd utter lots of big words with Latin and Greek roots, spout plenty of po-mo yakademic jargon, and ultimately sneer at any student who dared ask such impertinent questions... He'd spit exactly the words he has sneered at me on this tuning forum: "[Such a student] is simply unable to read a text. Nearly all of his comments to citations show that he has never aquired [sic] the ability to read a text for its overt semantic content, let alone is he in possession of the critical reading or writing skills that might allow him to form cogent opinions of more complicated tropes and put them down on paper or disk. His incapacity to read and argue within an aesthetic context is a fine advertisement for the poverty of his own education." -- Daniel J. Wolf, Digest 910, Topic 8, 29 November 1996
(Apparently Daniel J. Wolf needn't have learned how to spell "acquired," such is his mastery of the fine art of reading. Ah well. Chalk such quibbles up to my inability "to read a text for its overt semantic content." Who am I to complain that Daniel J. Wolf can't spell, when--after all--I can't even read?)
--
The perceptive observer might be excused for mistaking such a reaction (so-and-so is "unable to read") from yakademia as the last resort of the bully and the coward.
But is this surprising?
Having taken as their model the Communist purges of the 1930s, doyens of modern music like the contemptible Daniel J. Wolf seem to have made it their goal to crush all those impudent members of the Great Unwashed who refuse to prostrate themselves before the twin graven idols of numerology and jargon.
As John Cage wrote in "Silence:"
"I see no necessity to put something 'real' behind tongue-
wagging. I do not see that tongue-wagging is any more
significant or insignificant than anything else." [Cage, John,
"Silence," page 45]
Yes indeed.
That sums up the yakademic attitude to a T.
Harry Partch had a few trenchent words to say about that
"gibberish ueber alles" attitude:
"There has been, ever since Aristotle, a certain strong
tendency in the west toward explanation--a kind of
syndrome. The first and initial step is fairly innocent--
to consider a verbal explanation of a creative art as
necessary to an understanding of the art. The second step
is less innnocent. In this second step the explanation of
the art becomes a substitute for the art. But the third
step is really something. It is a sort of apotheosis, where the
explanation actually becomes the art." [Partch, H., "A lecture
delivered at UCLA, preceding a concert of Mr. Partch's music,"
May, 1966]
No psychic help line is required to deduce what Harry Partch would have said about Daniel J. Wolf's posts on this forum defending Cage's gibberish.
--
Among all the bully-worshippers who planted moist smackeroos on the rumps of Milton Babbitt and John Cage and their amen chorus, the most egregious were the products of our so-called system of "higher education." Odd that anyone would stake hi/r career on defending intellectual midgets like Cage and Babbitt; yet a generation of music professors did, and discredited themselves in the process.
"Perhaps what was talked about [in mid-20th century music theory] transcended music entirely. Just as medieval questions of angel populations on pinheads transcended the observable data of vision, so the mid-twentieth-century tapestries of set permutations exceeded the data of aural perception. At their worst they were mere tiptoeing through the tautologies of set theory modulo 12. On occasion the naive incredulous child of Hans Christian Anderson's parable would have been wholly in order to tell the new suit of music clothes: 'There is no emperor!' And this is what became of Schoenberg's tamperings with music's basis." [Thompson, William, "Schoenberg's Error," 1991, pg. 194]
Now, in the 1990s, microtonality has grown into a mass movement. Unlike post-Webern serialism and its mongoloid spawn or chance music and its flipper-footed musical Thalidomide children, xenharmonics is not an occult religion imposed on the concert halls from above by an hermetic academic clerisy. Rather, microtonality is a grass-roots movement arising despite the best efforts of the Ivy League music professors to eradicate it. "Gimme some more of that weed killer, boys!"
Ah, yes. The tenured music prof as lawn care specialist...
Alas, pesky individualists such as I have proven hardy weeds in the past, and methinks 'twill be so in the future.
--
A study of past civilizations proves instructive. Time and
again, the priesthood of the reigning elite proclaimed history at an end. In Akkad and ancient Egypt, the reign of the god-king was eternal and absolute: history had ended. Beyond this stage no further progress was possible.
Then someone invented the aqueduct and the water pump, and cities freed themselves from the need to locate on the banks of a mud plain whose major river annually overflowed its banks. The god-king and his acolytes disappeared.
In Athens and Thebes, the necessity for human slavery was eternal and absolute: history had ended. Most of the world's population were natural slaves (according to the contemptible power freak and bully worshipper Aristotle, who described slaves as "living machines" and classed them with animals and vegetables), and beyond human slavery no further stage of social progress was possible.
Then Watt perfected Newcomen's steam engine in 1796 and human slavery disappeared.
In Communist Russia, the need for a centralized state which systematically crushed all human initiative was eternal and absolute: history had ended. Beyond the soviet (which Lenin defined as "communism plus electricity"), no further progress was possible.
Then the fax and the modem and the personal computer and the Nintendo-like world economy appeared with trillions of dollars and zillions of bits of information flashing around the world infosphere at the speed of light, and the Berlin Wall came crashing down.
Now the priesthood of the reigning musiKKKal elite which holds sway in Lincoln Center and Princeton and Frankfurt informs us that the need for "modern" techniques of musical composition is eternal and absolute: history has ended. Microtonality must hew to the principles of mathematical-theoretic musical modernism, or go the way of the passenger pigeon.
Beyond modernism, no progress in music is possible.
Ah, yes.
Progress.
Ain't it grand?
The modernist schlockmusic excreted by Milton Babbitt, Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, ad nauseum--which Greg Taylor and his ignorant arrogant ilk so fervently defend--is founded at its base on the concept of musical progress and the notion of an avant garde in the arts.
But ever since around 1980 the idea of "progress" in music has been called into question. Music changes, to be sure--but does it *progress* toward some utopian goal?
To put it bluntly, if music was forver and ever progressing toward 12-tone serial atonality, why has 12-tone serial atonality died off and vanished from the concert halls?
The nearest equivalent to the musical professoriat whose feeble and brain-dead hand still tries to keep a stranglehold on "serious" music is: Communism.
That particular escapade did not end well.
Methinks the efforts of the musical academics to define themselves as THE sole arbiters of "serious" modern music won't end well either, especially when yakademics like D. J. Wolf try to export their schlockmusic gibberish to the virgin shores microtonality.
Alas, microtonality is a Sudetenland not so easily annexed by the goose-stepping lad from Frankfurt, nor by his unindicted musical co-conspirators.
Speaking of the dead communist soviet dictatorship and its still-living musical cousin the 12-TET dictatorship in Lincoln Center, "We are now in the midst of learning the hard lesson that glamorous neo-artistocratic temples of art like Lincoln Center in New York...tend in our culture to officialize the art of the past (as in the U.S.S.R.) or else to deteriorate into centers for commercial mass entertainment." [Johnston, Ben, "How To Cook An Albatross," Source: The Music of the Avant-Garde, 1970, pg. 65]
Ah, yes. "Mostly Mozart" at Lincoln Center.
Each performance played over the graves of a million adventurous American composers...
"What is so interesting is the suddenness with which these applications of science--some have said pseudo-science--to economics and music have been rejected and are now seen as merely interesting experiments that failed because they denied basic human realities: economic and cultural diversity in the political realm and the necessity for perceptual forms of organization and the power of intuitive processes in the world of music." [Appleton, John, "Machine SOngs III: Music in the Serive of Science--Science in the Service of Music," Computer Music Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall 1992, pg. 19]
In the realm of economics, communism has already collapsed. And in the visual arts modernist eerie-theory-euber-alles gibberish-based art is all but dead. "Modernism is, quite simply, no longer the only game in town. (It never was, of course, but it was often seen to be.) What is important, in any case, is that it is now being seriously challenged for the first time in about a century or more. Which, considering the really awful degree of narcissism, nihilism, inanity and self-indulgence that late modernism has allowed itself to wallow in, is probably the best thing that could happen to it. What has been permanently lost, I think, is the sense of the absolute that the modernist movement once gave to its loyal followers. And to that we can say: good riddance! We are none of us now--either artists or critics or the public--quite as suspceptible as we once were to the idea that at a given moment in time, history ordains that one and only style, one vision, one way of making art or one way of thinking about, must triumph and all others must be consigned to oblivion. If we are not actually wiser now, we are at least a little less foolish than we were." [Kramer, Hilton, "When Modernism Became Orthodoxy," New York Times,
28 march 1982, section 2, pg. 2]
Less foolish in the realm of the visual arts, perhaps...but in music?
Well, that's a good question.
And so we must ask: in what sense is a composition written for an American gamelan any kind of "progression" or "retrogression" toward or away from tonality as compared to a 12-TET composition written for a 12-TET western piano?
Does the 19th-century-based notion of tonality have anything to do it?
Isn't "progress" toward or away from 12 chromatic tones a musty 19th century notion, inappropriate to the concept of fluidly and effortlessly moving between different tunings...whether from 12 to 13 to 41 to 72 to 116 equal tempered tones per octave, or from 12 equal to 7 non-just non-equal-tempered pelog pitches?
Does it even make sense to ask "along which axis of musical progress do we travel when we start to compose for an American gamelan?"
Hardly.
The question of which axis of musical progress we traverse when doing non-12 music is simply meaningless. "Progess" is a musty 19th century notion. Scientists in the 19th century thought that evoluation inevitably generates complex forms of life from simpler ones, but we now understand that evolution does not necessarily involve any kind of "progres" "toward" anything. Evolution occurs as organisms adapt in response to changing evniorments. If the environment changes so that a bug doesn't need its eyes (as in, say a cave), the bug loses its eyes. This is not "progress," it is simply transformation--change, not any kind of directed "movement" toward any final goal.
In the same way, music changes. But it does "progress." It does not "move toward" any teleological goal, contrary to the fantasies of Shoenberg and company.
And so music is now changing, incorporating non-12 elements in what was a previously entirely 12-TET culture. Thisis change--but it's not progress. It's merely another transformation in the way we make music. If we compare a 12-TET piano piece with a slendro gamelan piece, the two types of compositions are different, clearly -- we can *hear* that. But progress?
The idea is meaningless. Musical "progress" is a foolish 19th century fantasy, ill-conceived and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of music history.
Yet modernist yakademics continue to the apply the moldy ridiculous measure of "progress" to modern music. They still see all of western music as being confined to a single musical axis, one end of which is labelled "the primitive ancient 16th century church modes" and the other end of which is labelled "complex and sophisticated modern 12-TET serial atonality"...
What tommyrot.
We've flown off that musical axis entirely once we've broken from 12 and started to compose microtonally.
The idea that Javanese music is more or less advanced than western 12-TET music?
That's like asking whether a nose is an inadequately designed finger. It's crazy.
Such notions don't even pass the "straight face test," in the lawyer's argot.
As the blinders of 19th century racist Eurocentric prejudice have fallen away, by the 1980s we have come to realize the true complexity of intonation in our own culture as well as in others.
In the 19th century, no less a composer than Berlioz wrote that Oriental music is made up of "nasal, guttural, moaning, hideous sounds, similar to those of dogs, when, after a long sleep, they stretch their limbs and yawn strenuously."
Few western composers today would make such a claim. With the advent of ethnomusicological scholarship and CD-quality recordings of the music of other cultures, we have come to recognize the utter foolishness of the notion (universally acknowledged throughout the 19th century) that the "Orientals are still sunk in the deepest shadows of infantile ignorance" (Berlioz again) and that the music of non-western cultures was obviously "inferior" because China and Indonesia and Japan and Africa and South America never produced a Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
This kind of bizarre reasoning was accepted and approved by musical "experts" in the 19th century, but it sounds utterly ludicrous and assinine to us today.
Clearly, western understanding of music (that of its own culture, as well as of other cultures) has changed profoundly. We now recognize what Arnold Schoenberg did NOT understand--that the church modes used in 13th century polyphony were not mere transpositions of our 12 equally tempered pitches, but instead a sophsticated set of Pythagorean cyclic just intonations built out of a cycle of perfect 3/2s and designed to cover different ranges so as in each range to avoid the inevitable "wolf" fifth produced by an unclosed cycle of 12 Pythagorean just tones.
Schoenberg had no idea, no inkling, no clue of the true complexity and sophistication of the medieval church modes--and thus Schoenberg made his shocking blunder of claiming that "these [church modes] reveal a remarkable phenomenon: the key of the underlying tonal series of whichthey are composed is different from the key in which the piece really exists." [Schoenberg, Arnold, "Style and Idea," 1951, pg. 276]
Schoenberg did not understand that to composers of the Middle Ages, who thought in terms of Pythagorean just intonation, 19th-century notions of key and 12-TET triadic major/minor tonality were as useless as a bicycle to a fish.
And so Schoenberg's entire fantasy of musical evolution toward some ultimate 12-TET serialist utopia was founded on a systematically ignorant misreading of musical history--a colossal blunder based on even larger blunders, a Mount Everest of musical ignorance.
--
Yes, Your Humble E-Mail Correspondent is clearly an inhabitant of a musical third dimension. Below me, the 2-dimensional rulers of their tiny little musical domain curse and fume, and forbid the mention or discussion of such blasphemous and abominable concepts as mine.
Ye gods!
A *third* alternative?
A musical direction orthogonal to BOTH cloying neo-19th century "new tonality" AND brain-dead post-Schoenberg neo-Babbitt pitch class matrix schlockmusic???
Heaven forfend!
Such a musical direction is unimaginable! Impossible! Unthinkable!
There are only 2 dimensions in the musical universe! To discuss *other* musical dimensions is heresy! It is forbidden!
Such is the frenzied claim of the Daniel J. Wolfs of the world, whose stunted and monochromatic view of music permits only two categories: to Wolfie and his cronies, all music is either glorious 12-TET modernist abstract art music, or kitsch.
Clearly my music is not modernist neo-Babbitt shlock, therefore it MUST be kitsch. No other alternative is possible.
Is it?
Of course not, Wolf assures us.
Thus Wolf describes my music as "a self-similar New Agey wash," New-Agey here standing in as synonym for "kitsch." Other synonyms popular among modernists include: "jingles for a soap commercial," "Muzak," "pap," "Hollywood movie music."
Between these two polar extremes--Muzak on the one hand and Babbitt/Forte/Rahn modernist augenmusik on the other--lies...nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
A vast echoing void.
In the infinite galactic depths of modern music, sparkling with strange and distant eternities, there is nothing--ABSOLUTELY NOTHING--but Babbitt/Forte/Rahn augenmusik, and kitsch. No stars. No galaxies. No galactic clusters. No suns. No moons. No nebulae. No intergalactic dust clouds. No comets. No asteroids.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing but two objects in the entire musical universe: Babbitt/Forte/Rahn/Cage augenmusik, and kitsch.
Or so Daniel J. Wolf and his ilk would have us believe.
The fact that my music is based on extensions of canonic procedures used in the late 14th century (doubtless why Wolf used the term "self-similar": too incompetent to audibly identify the presence of canons in my music, Wolf's ear nonetheless told him something was up)...why, the possibility that there might be MORE than 2 alternatives in the musical universe does not exist.
It cannot be spoken of.
For Wolf, this possibility cannot even be *imagined.*
The music of the late 14th century is systematically ignored by virtually all modern texts on the history of music. In the standard modernist unviersity music courses, compositional models are taken from the late 15th century onward (lip service is given to the Middle Ages solely in the form of a plainchant or two). In the standard western graduate composition course, no mention is made of the late 14th century, nor of the fact that all of Western music from 1450 to Bach's time in the 1710s constitutes a period of rapid decline and degeneration.
And thus the heretical notion that my xenharmonic compositions might be based on extensions of compositional practices used in the late 14th century, which far exceeded in sophistication and complexity anything done in Western music up to the time of Webern...why, such notions could never enter Daniel J. Wolf's head.
To entertain such an idea is, after all, to enter a third musical dimension. My musical heroes are composers whose names cannot be found in any po-mo graduate composition textbook: Jehan Suzay, Petrus de Goldescalc, Baud Cordier. These great composers are nonentities to the Daniel J. Wolfs of the world...Indeed, to the modernists who built post-WW II serialism, Jehan Suzay and Baud Cordier and their contemporaries are UNPERSONS.
The names of these western composers have been erased from the history books; their music has been purged from the realm of allowable discourse.
This is *truly* a third musical dimension!
And thus the modernists, living like creatures in Flatland confined to a 2-dimensional plane, can no more grasp the operative principles behind my music or that of Randy Winchester or William Alves than a Cro Magnon man could grasp the operative principles of a cyclotron.
Modernists like Greg Taylor have based their faulty view of musical history on the ignorant and incorrect music-historical fantasies of Arnold Schoenberg--who thought that the church modes were merely our 12-TET pitches transposed to different finals but maintaining their original 12-TET 19th-century key centers (!)
So *of course* these ignorant and arrogant yakademics immerse themselves to their eyeballs in their own verbal sewage, the better to assassinate my character...of course!
No other method of discouse is possible for characters like Daniel J. Wolf and Greg Taylor, since they do not even have the words in their musical vocabulary to describe the existence of composers like Baud Cordier and Jehan Suzay, let alone recognize or understand extensions of the compositional practices of these composers extruded into the higher musical dimension of non-12 tone microtonality.
Good lord, it's no wonder Wolf and his ilk spit venom at me. I might as well have been speaking in Sanskrit.
Since my compositional models and ideals are utterly alien to BOTH 19th century European 12-TET music AND modernist Babbitt/Forte/Rahn augenmusik, how could it be otherwise?
Already inhabiting a musical third dimension by reason of my utter rejection of BOTH 15th through 19th century European musical practice AND modernist post-WW II musical practice as valid musical paradigms, clearly I'm starting out on a musical axis completely at right angles to anything with which Wolf and Taylor are familiar.
Extending those already alien practices of mensuration canon into the realm of non-12-tone non-just non-equal-tempered scales is like an inhabitant of the third dimension taking a denizen of 2-D Flatland on a trip through not only through the third but the fourth, fifth and sixth-through-seventieth dimensions.
Of course Daniel J. Wolf *must* describe my music as "New Agey." The limitations of his two-dimensional musical modernist vocabulary (all music is either brave adventurous modernism, measured along the y axis, or backward-looking trivial kitsch, measured along the x axis) cannot allow Wolf to describe my music as anything else. Wolf is still trapped in a musty moldy 19th century worldview, in which music "progresses" or "retrogresses."
What quaint nonsense.
Of course, from the 21st century vantage point--from the convenient perspective of our musical third dimension, in which the late 14th century constitutes the apex of European musical practice, with subsequent eras representing a long slow decline--from this contemporary vantage point we can see that the 19th-century-derived modernist discourse about music is fundamentally flawed.
The modernist vision of music history, which purports to detect an "evolution" from the church modes 15th century to the "more advanced and sophisticated" paradigms of major/minor tonality and chromatic modulation of the 18th century to the "increasing chromaticism" of the 19th century to the "full flowering" of 12-tone serial atonality in the 20th century...why, from our xenharmonic vantage point we can see that such a modernist characterization of western music history is ignorant and false, since it depends on a systematically 19th century-obsessed Eurocentric ignoring of the complex rhythmic and just intonational pitch practice of the glorious European period PRIOR to the 15th century.
But, of course, since my ideas clearly pass beyond the bounds of allowable modernist musical discourse, we must remember to chant the proper ritual code phrases to ward off the imminent danger of thought: my discussion in this post (as in all others) therefore consists of "rantings," "ravings," "blatherings," "conspiracy theory," and so on.
Thus armed with the appropriate code phrases we may safely proceed along with the rest of the 19th-century-obsessed modernist lemmings toward the edge of the nearest musical cliff, safe in the assurance that we will never be troubled by inappropriate facts.
"The self-inflicted apocalypse of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco Texas, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the nerve gas attack in the subways of Tokyo present us with images of a world transformed beyond belief by the process of belief itself. (..) We realize that the civility that is meant to be the foundation of civilization has become an antiquated thing of the past. Our new culture is not so much postmodern as postcivilized, and this culture shift involves not a step forward but an electronic meltdown of civilization in which barbarism and savagery boil up to the surface once again. [Thompson, W. A., "Coming Into Being," pg. 1, 1996: New York, St. Martin's Press]
Surely no one on this tuning forum has exceeded Daniel J. Wolf or Greg Taylor in savagery or barbarism: and when we recognize that the "electronic meltdown of civilization" which characterizes their postcivilized responses to my words is the direct result of their systematic pervasive ignorance of European musical history...
Why, when we remember these facts, we can understand the response of Daniel J. Wolf and his ilk: "[mclaren] is simply unable to read a text. Nearly all of his comments to citations show that he has never aquired [sic] the ability to read a text for its overt semantic content, let alone is he in possession of the critical reading or writing skills that might allow him to form cogent opinions of more complicated tropes and put them down on paper or disk. His incapacity to read and argue within an aesthetic context is a fine advertisement for the poverty of his own education. And his continued attacks upon educational institutions simply illustrate his total lack of familiarity with the variety of what may go on within them." -- Daniel J. Wolf, Digest 910, Topic 8, 29 November 1996
--
Daniel J. Wolf and his fellow yakademics respond this way to my posts because they are engaged in the exciting and impressive project of improving the buggy whip which we know as modernist music.
"Yeah!" shouts Wolf. "Hey...if we extend modernism into microtonality, we can REALLY improve this particular musical buggy whip! Wow! Hot dog! We can give this buggy whip ATOMIC POWER! And we can add COMPUTERS to it! And we can add cybernetic feedback circuits!"
"Yeeeeeee-hah!" yells Greg Taylor, rubbing his hands. "Why...we can build...we can actually build...we could ACTUALLY CREATE...the musical equivalent of a nuclear-powered cybernetic artificially intelligent buggy whip!!!"
Meanwhile, the rest of us roar past in our cars down the autobahn of microtonality, wondering what the hell guys like Daniel J. Wolf on the side of the road are talking about.
Ye gods.
I'd go on, but I'm laughing too hard.
--mclaren
