Top Six Reasons to Wander in the Wilderness

1. the strangeness of some of the intervals, which give me the thrill of hearing phenomena that I can’t (as a music theory teacher all too used to analyzing music by ear) automatically process and label; 

2. the stretching of one’s pitch perception toward harmonics higher than the fifth (since the decision to stop with the fifth harmonic was an arbitrary academic mandate of the Italian 17th century); 

3. the ability to have lots of pitch variety within a very small space (since I’m a minimalist at heart – I rarely listen to Reich and Glass without wishing I could hear it really in tune); 

4. the extreme chromaticism available (as a lover of late Romantic music like Max Reger, for whom there never seem to be half-steps small enough); 

5. the pleasure of writing chord progressions never heard before (countering the deadening feeling in my equal-tempered music that there’s really nothing new I can do in the area of harmony); and 

6. the tendency toward hearing the actual sound in its totality, as opposed to the filtering out of acoustic beats we have to subconsciously perform to make equal tempered music make sense.