the diatonic-chromatic-noise paradigm

["loop.pool" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

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