Harmonic Experience

The best way to extend the possibilities of just intonation: tone by tone, resonance by resonance, ratio by ratio, tuning and singing your way through mazes and lattices of your own design.

Wait patiently until an idea proves musical for you, and have the courage to test its truth through the conscious experience of sounding music.

Don’t believe what you read until it goes well past the page. Print makes suckers out of most of us.

Be wary of elegant systems and cosmic paradigms—they can be a lethal limit

What cures obscenity is empathy, which is precisely what just resonances, whose very essence is connectivity, bring forward in musicians. The more completely musicians are trained to be in tune, the more constructive become the alliances between the equal-tempered and the just-tuned worlds.

It is not enough to listen passively to pure harmonies, or learn to recognize them, or to combine them on an instrument. One has to connect them with one’s feelings by placing them in the body. Sung harmony is embodied intelligence.

As a musician I am fascinated by the objective quantification of experience only to the extent that it will increase my ability to use musical language as a resonator for my life’s portion. Beyond that, the numbers are nonvital curiosities.

Inner knowledge of harmony grows with creative use. You hear things, then you use them to construct the world.

What I want to know is my own ear, because it is the only true path to yours.

ephemeral feelings of longing and aversion