Satoshi Akima writes:

>I am not some sort of 'atonalist'.  I am just someone that loves music.
>I do not even have a formal musical education.  In fact that's probably
>why I really love this music because nobody forced this sort of thing on me

Yes -- young people who have never been formally taught anything about
tonality (or spent years listening to the 'classics') seem to have no
difficulty at all with immediate acceptance of atonal music.  Equal
Temperament made possible the flowering of the sort of music we are
all, I am sure, eternally grateful for; but isn't tonality, like Equal
Temperament, fundamentally merely a contrived system for trying to tame
the untameable?

>All I did was ask that people give music they hear that may seem difficult
>or daunting a second chance rather than dismissing it off hand:

A valuable piece of advice I was once given for getting to know the
unfamiliar is to play the record - but don't listen to it!  The new and
'difficult' can be absorbed subliminally, as it were, until it becomes as
familiar as anything else and we have educated our regimented grey cells
to accept something new.

Alan Moss
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