Stirling S Newberry wrote:

>Western style harmony - which is centered on the simultaneous sounding of
>pitches is far from the only kind of harmony.  *Harmony* ios based on the
>perceptual ability to discern frequencies whose resonance is active - even
>if intermittently and periodicaly.

I have to admit that I don't quite understand what you're getting at here.
First, I don't know in what sense frequencies can HAVE resonance, although
they can induce resonance in a vibrating object.  Second, can there be such
things as "active" and "passive" or "inactive" resonance? An object is
either resonating or it isn't.  Or are you suggesting, as Hindemith did,
that harmony is somehow inescapable because of the universality of the
harmonic series? I think Hindemith's theories (and Rameau's before him, as
well as numerous others in between) were interesting but the fact remains
that nobody has ever proven that the correspondence between traditional
harmonic structures (i.e.  the triad) and the harmonic series is more than
a provocative coincidence.

>This is how even seemingly monodic musical styles can have inflections -
>the placement of the inflections is a sign of harmony.

Once again I am not sure what you mean--this time by "inflections."

>...  one can, instead, assert that Harmony is always present, being
>based on perceptual mechanisms which are universal.  This I am willing to
>do - *Harmony* exists in all musical styles and cultures - even though the
>*application* of harmony may vary wildly.  The mistake people often make
>is to assume that because some perceptual mechanism is used ifferently in
>another culture that it is, *ipso facto*, not present.  This is a hold
>over from the myth of "primitive" cultures, where by certain aspects of
>human-ness were unused by "lesser" people, a myth which ought to be intered
>among such concepts as the flat earth &c.

It seems to me what you are saying is that the harmonic series exists in
all cultures, and since it is the basis of harmony therefore harmony exists
in all cultures, even if all cultures do not make use of it in the same
way.  But you seem to be also saying that all cultures make use of it in
SOME way, and some of those ways may be exclusively melodic.  I would
disagree with that.  I think that factors such as pitch adjacency and
motivic repetition play an equally if not more important role in melody
generation.

I think I know where you're coming from, though because it's hard to escape
the idea that the perception of a tonal center (or central tone) along with
the use of intervals like the third, fourth and fifth are vestiges of some
underlying harmonic structures.  But doesn't this unearth a second fallacy,
which is the one we commit when we assume that just because WE hear the
music of culture X with harmonic implications, it necessarily means that
the members of culture X also hear it that way? Of course you can argue
that human brains are hard-wired to pick up on these relationships, and
they may be.  But more work needs to be done in that area.

Chris Bonds