RE: the diatonic-chromatic-noise paradigm

["Hartung, Kris" <kris.hartung@hp.com>]

That's very true, Rick.....I guess I discovered that when I started to
study the sitar a few years ago.  There is a lifetime of study out there
within the frame-work of scale-based music, but not Western diatonic.
It's downright scary.  Although, you would just force me to redefine
"pretty" here to these systems as well.  I should have expanded my
definititon to the beginning to equate to "music that feels bad to
99.99% of the human population! He heh.....I'm sort of joking here, but
sort of not.  It's like I have a pschologically aversion to anything
that could potentially be in the popular section of a music store,
regardless of what country, culture, or ethnic group.  It puts me in the
awkard artistic position of potentially admittin that I DO in fact like
the idea of doing things differently for the sake of being different...I
know that may sound attrocious to some.

Have you ever seen one of those kids who sits back and watches every
other kid start and complete the design of their project, and then
purposely do something that goes completely against the grain of all of
that just because? That would be me, no excuses.

Kris
 

-----Original Message-----
From: loop.pool [mailto:looppool@cruzio.com] 
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2005 3:47 AM
To: LOOPERS DELIGHT (posting)
Subject: the diatonic-chromatic-noise paradigm

Kris Hartung wrote:

"Because I've grown weary of pretty....I've played diatonically for the
last 25 years as a guitarist.... part diatonic blended with "outside" in
the last 5, and now I'm pretty much thinking chromatically when I
improv....no key. It's just a personal quirk of mine at this point in
the game. Who knows, maybe in another 5 years, I'll be playing noise.
:)"


Whatever floats your boat makes me happy for you Kris, but I do want to
point out that with over a 1,000 Indian Rags and hundreds of exotic
world music scales,  let alone just scales, microtonal scales, and found
scales, etc. there are a lot of different places to go out there in the
world of constrained melodic and harmonic systems.

I can't even keep up with the geniuses at the Music Theory tribe at
tribe.net with all their discussions of different systems to
investigate.

"pretty"  only relates to a couple of the greek modes in western
harmony..................................lydian, for example, is far
from pretty. It is bittersweet with a touch of melancholy to my ear and
emotions......................add a flat 7 to the scale and you are in a
different and exotic emotional universe 
altogether.   It's just one of those Rags.

I guess I'm saying that there are other continuums to explore besides
the "diatonic-chromatic-noise" continuum which seems to me to be a
typical paradigmatic trap in western music.

with respect,  Rick