ATDTDA (33) - p. 939-42 Balkan music

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Laura:
          TRP's being facetious about the natural B being 
          forbidden. If anyone knows otherwise, speak up.

I don't think so, no--it really was a problem, this "devil in music" thing. I remember Grandpa Johnson coming out of his Bible study to demand that his daughters turn off that "Devil Music" [Motown/Tamala/Gordy] that was making them shake their collective asses.

Sounds like a separate issue but it's not. I'll bet it's only natural that a fiddler would sometimes slide into some banished musical mode, get captured by some Orisha the folks downtown don't approve of.

Joseph Spencer [my boss at the Musical Offering] was a maven on tunings as he was a huge Harpsichord buff, producing his own CDs of keyboard music from the Baroque era:

http://www.musicaloffering.com/wildboar/index.html

. . . .and as I recall OBA gets it right.

          "Any tendency for a tonality to emerge may be avoided by introducing 
          a note three whole tones distant from the key note of that tonality"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritone

. . . .it's almost as if one is going astray, traversing over to some land of musical anarchy where Charles Ives is  being performed by a prison band stoned on reds and muscatel.

Them Monks had every intention of "Staying the Course." Thus these musical rules.

Bulgarian music is truly hair-raising, this I know first-hand. Whole lotta dissonance goin' on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_FocSrz6pU