“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
2 comments:
You are emphasizing that equal temperament creates a consistent world of sepia fudge that is especially optimal for the wandering story-telling of Mahler, but it also creates a mode of listening where there is a big 'distance' between me and the music. It becomes like a figurative painting with very rough brushwork where the painting is putting me on a far distance to get the optimal grip of it and see what the picture is.
If I listen too close to ET, I find it false and I can't hear what the sweeping gestures (Terry Riley: Western music is fast because it's not in tune) are representing.
So Just Intonation, because it is exact, invites to a close listening and intimacy with the physical material, just as you write.
Beautifully.
The bit that caught me was Pre-Socratics / Plato transition in Heidegger--the big Fall from a prior state of some kind of purity. It's as though objects demonstrated no nothingness before that point in time.
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