Kyle Major wrote:

>...  Does anyone know if a composer, or perhaps another culture,
>has utilized a system similar to this? Also, I would like to expose myself
>more to "microtonal" music and non-traditional (at least in a modern
>Western sense) tuning systems.  If anyone has any suggestions of recordings
>or books for me I would greatly appreciate it.

I think this is a worthy, if somewhat lonely endeavor.  For starters you
should certainly find out everything you can about the American iconoclast
Harry Partch, who not only developed his own 43-tone scale based on the
harmonic series and wrote a rather thick book on it (Genesis of a Music),
but built his own acoustic instruments to play it.  The instruments
themselves are unique masterpieces of craftsmanship and include bowed,
plucked and hammered stringed instruments and tuned percussion.  One of my
favorites is the "marimba eroica" which has wood bars the size of railroad
ties.  Recordings of his music are still in print, although I'm not sure
how easy to obtain they are.

Another book of interest might be Joseph Yasser's A Theory of Evolving
Tonality.  This is a rather old book whose central thesis is that scales
evolve by filling in gaps thus creating smaller intervals.  Thus the
pentatonic scale becomes the diatonic by adding half steps, and the
diatonic becomes chromatic.  But a chromatic scale based on harmonic
division rather than equal temperament.  The Fibonacci series comes in
there somewhere too, I think (It's been 30 years or so since I looked at
the book).  So a 2-tone "scale" becomes 3, 5, 7, 12...and the next steps:
NINETEEN tones, and then guess what!  31!

Another composer who worked in this area was the Mexican J.  Carrillo
(sp?); some other Americans like Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell worked
with microtones as well but not exclusively.  Gotta go!

Chris Bonds