Harmonic Code, book on CD

by Robert Ross
$45.00


Artwork by Barbara Hero

EXCLUSIVE! This is an exceedingly rare book on the natural musical scales that derive from how numbers self-organize. A lifetime's work. Here is a sample from Tonality:

Tonality, a term known by all musicians, evokes the sense of one tone being the pivotal center within an entire musical environment. In a modal system (as put forward in this text), the monad is a tonal connector for all the modes rather than a tonal center. It binds the modes together, but does not serve as a center to which all the musical movements and meanderings within a single piece must inevitably return. This distinction creates a profound difference in the ways the modal and tonal systems each operate. The use of word tonality in this book bears sufficient relevance to the commonly understood concept to justify maintaining the very same term. There is no valid reason to abandon it and coin some new term. “Tonality” as used here extends the culturally conditioned parlance. I believe the Western term involves a concept that has been on the right track but became diverted from its full realization through the faulty and conflicting theories of equal temperament, theories which try to balance arbitrary historical/social convention with natural order. The discussion here primarily focuses on the possibilities of tonality within the natural harmonic systems. This understanding will likewise prove useful in rethinking the musical theory underpinning equal temperament, which I believe fails even on its own terms. As Harry Partch has pointed out, equal temperament is built on a concept of the parameters of natural sound and then twists those fundamental sounds out of tune. The focus here will be on how a new concept of tonality betters one’s understanding of just-intonation rather than on how the theories under the auspices of equal temperament lead to confusion.

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Jan. 20, 2005