Misconceptions about xenharmony: Difference between revisions

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Consequently, there is essentially no valid information about xenharmonic on the internet. Moreover, as a general rule, the better-connected any xenharmonic commentator is to the internet, the more elaborate hi/r webpage, the more highly visible and polished hi/r YouTube videos, the less that person knows about xenharmonics. People with elaborate and impressive web pages and superb YouTube videos have attained that level of expertise by spending all their waking hours learning web design and video production. This leaves no time for composing and performing music. Contrariwise, the expert musicians who spending all their waking hours composing or performing music don't have years to take off to learn web design or high-definition video editing and production. Invariably, the expert musician who asks someone "Please design a high-quality professional looking web page for me" or "I need three hundred hours of video of performances edited and titles added and the viewpoints of three different cameras intercut, with SMPTE synchronization" gets the response: "I make my living doing web design/video editing and I charge $50 per hour -- why should I do it for you for free?" With the inevitable result that the web page never gets designed or the video never gets edited and put up on YouTube.

There exists a vast amount of superb microtonal music. Brian Eno has never heard it because it's produced by practicing musicians and composers who spend their time making vividly memorable music, not impressive websites or Lincoln Center concerts or thick gilt-edged books published by prestigious academic publishers. There is a great deal of insightful and accurate writing about microtonality, but it was produced by people like Ivor Darreg who cannot get published by conventional academic publishers. (Peer review generally offers a reliable method of academic quality control '''''except''''' in new fields like xenharmonics. With microtonality, peer-review encounters a vicious cycle of Catch-22: the academic to whom the book on microtonality gets sent for peer review responds "Never heard of this. Deep six it." And because of this kind of response in peer review, academic books on microtonality typically don't get published. But because academic books on microtonality don't get published, academics remain unfamiliar with the subject -- leading to a self-reinforcing closed cycle of lack of information about microtonality in academia.) Meanwhile, the books on microtonality which '''''do''''' get published (viz., Harry Partch's ''Genesis of a Music'') contain [http://sonic-arts~~.org~~/mclaren/partch/errors.htm enormous amounts of misinformation about microtonality] and ignore most of the range of xenharmonic tunings and most of the styles of xenharmonic music produced over the last 80 years.

There exists a vast amount of superb microtonal music. Brian Eno has never heard it because it's produced by practicing musicians and composers who spend their time making vividly memorable music, not impressive websites or Lincoln Center concerts or thick gilt-edged books published by prestigious academic publishers. There is a great deal of insightful and accurate writing about microtonality, but it was produced by people like Ivor Darreg who cannot get published by conventional academic publishers. (Peer review generally offers a reliable method of academic quality control '''''except''''' in new fields like xenharmonics. With microtonality, peer-review encounters a vicious cycle of Catch-22: the academic to whom the book on microtonality gets sent for peer review responds "Never heard of this. Deep six it." And because of this kind of response in peer review, academic books on microtonality typically don't get published. But because academic books on microtonality don't get published, academics remain unfamiliar with the subject -- leading to a self-reinforcing closed cycle of lack of information about microtonality in academia.) Meanwhile, the books on microtonality which '''''do''''' get published (viz., Harry Partch's ''Genesis of a Music'') contain [http://www.tonalsoft.com/sonic-arts/mclaren/partch/errors.htm enormous amounts of misinformation about microtonality] and ignore most of the range of xenharmonic tunings and most of the styles of xenharmonic music produced over the last 80 years.

This appears to be the case in the early part of the development of any new art. For the first few years, the people who are most prominent are those who know the least and have produced the worst music or art. Only slowly, after a period of many decades, do the obscure figures eventually become revealed as the great practititioners, and the previously unpublished writings finally get into (and stay in) print. Henry Cowell's ''New Musical Resources'', for example, was written in 1919 but not published until 1930. it then fell out of print in the 1950s, and stayed out of print for well over 40 years.

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 Consequently, there is essentially no valid information about xenharmonic on the internet. Moreover, as a general rule, the better-connected any xenharmonic commentator is to the internet, the more elaborate hi/r webpage, the more highly visible and polished hi/r YouTube videos, the less that person knows about xenharmonics. People with elaborate and impressive web pages and superb YouTube videos have attained that level of expertise by spending all their waking hours learning web design and video production. This leaves no time for composing and performing music. Contrariwise, the expert musicians who spending all their waking hours composing or performing music don't have years to take off to learn web design or high-definition video editing and production. Invariably, the expert musician who asks someone "Please design a high-quality professional looking web page for me" or "I need three hundred hours of video of performances edited and titles added and the viewpoints of three different cameras intercut, with SMPTE synchronization" gets the response: "I make my living doing web design/video editing and I charge $50 per hour -- why should I do it for you for free?" With the inevitable result that the web page never gets designed or the video never gets edited and put up on YouTube.
-There exists a vast amount of superb microtonal music. Brian Eno has never heard it because it's produced by practicing musicians and composers who spend their time making vividly memorable music, not impressive websites or Lincoln Center concerts or thick gilt-edged books published by prestigious academic publishers. There is a great deal of insightful and accurate writing about microtonality, but it was produced by people like Ivor Darreg who cannot get published by conventional academic publishers. (Peer review generally offers a reliable method of academic quality control '''''except''''' in new fields like xenharmonics. With microtonality, peer-review encounters a vicious cycle of Catch-22: the academic to whom the book on microtonality gets sent for peer review responds "Never heard of this. Deep six it." And because of this kind of response in peer review, academic books on microtonality typically don't get published. But because academic books on microtonality don't get published, academics remain unfamiliar with the subject -- leading to a self-reinforcing closed cycle of lack of information about microtonality in academia.) Meanwhile, the books on microtonality which '''''do''''' get published (viz., Harry Partch's ''Genesis of a Music'') contain [http://sonic-arts.org/mclaren/partch/errors.htm enormous amounts of misinformation about microtonality] and ignore most of the range of xenharmonic tunings and most of the styles of xenharmonic music produced over the last 80 years.
+There exists a vast amount of superb microtonal music. Brian Eno has never heard it because it's produced by practicing musicians and composers who spend their time making vividly memorable music, not impressive websites or Lincoln Center concerts or thick gilt-edged books published by prestigious academic publishers. There is a great deal of insightful and accurate writing about microtonality, but it was produced by people like Ivor Darreg who cannot get published by conventional academic publishers. (Peer review generally offers a reliable method of academic quality control '''''except''''' in new fields like xenharmonics. With microtonality, peer-review encounters a vicious cycle of Catch-22: the academic to whom the book on microtonality gets sent for peer review responds "Never heard of this. Deep six it." And because of this kind of response in peer review, academic books on microtonality typically don't get published. But because academic books on microtonality don't get published, academics remain unfamiliar with the subject -- leading to a self-reinforcing closed cycle of lack of information about microtonality in academia.) Meanwhile, the books on microtonality which '''''do''''' get published (viz., Harry Partch's ''Genesis of a Music'') contain [http://www.tonalsoft.com/sonic-arts/mclaren/partch/errors.htm enormous amounts of misinformation about microtonality] and ignore most of the range of xenharmonic tunings and most of the styles of xenharmonic music produced over the last 80 years.
 This appears to be the case in the early part of the development of any new art. For the first few years, the people who are most prominent are those who know the least and have produced the worst music or art. Only slowly, after a period of many decades, do the obscure figures eventually become revealed as the great practititioners, and the previously unpublished writings finally get into (and stay in) print. Henry Cowell's ''New Musical Resources'', for example, was written in 1919 but not published until 1930. it then fell out of print in the 1950s, and stayed out of print for well over 40 years.