What the experiment shows is actually quite little - it doesn't pin down whether the monkeys "liked or disliked" - merely recognised or did not recognise. It also did not show whether their ability is learned or inherited. Cats have to learn how to meow, and birds learn songs, so it is hazardous to guess without evidence what is and what isn't "learned" behavior. These things being said, it is fairly clear that tonality takes advantage of certain basic parsing habits of human beings - but then, most musical systems do. Some do to a greater degree than tonality, others less. These relationships are interesting, and have practical use, but aren't quality judgements. That 12 tone music was more difficult was considered by Schoenberg as a virtue of the music - he stated that composers were making more difficult music for the most demanding of music lovers. Consider one part of the system of tonal practice which is clearly *not* natural. Namely fixed intonation. Human singers will tune to each other dynamically, intervals will move towards perfect fifths and octaves, even when our tuning system does not provide clear fifths. Hence an extended a capella section with the instruments reentering is quite difficult - by the end of the instruemental section the musicians will be quite out of equal temperment. In the end art must exist at a complex relationship to the underlying mechanics of thought and perception. Tonal practice was one of the most successful system for putting various perceptual mechanisms at tension with each other, and using these tensions to create a medium for expression and impression. Musical perception is natural, artistic expression is natural, but any particular system must be one possibility out of all of the natural ones. What 12 tone and serial music are examples of is taking a materials which are not rooted in perceptual necessity, but in technical necessity. While there were philosophiocal and historical reasons for the modern period being intensly interested in this sort of artistic system, it was by no means the first time in artistic history that this was the case, nor is it the last. Consider some examples from the past - namely artistic systems based on calligraphic design. Letters are not natural. Period. Writing is an invention, and training people to read is process of enculturation. Writing takes advantage of basic perceptual mechanics - but it is an artifact. Several times in the history of art letters have been taken as basic units of artistic design - in the Caliphate period of islam, through out the mandrinate of China, during the court eras in Japan, in medieval Christian writing. Calligraphy is universally recognised as being an artistic expression, and even among the most conservative of art lovers - a thing of beauty. Indeed the name is transliterated from the *koine* "beautiful writing". Where the failure of avant-garde modernism lies is in the concert hall and the attitude of performance practice. All musical systems require two parts - underlying structural tensions, and a performance practice which brings these tensions to life in particular form. Consider Shakespeare's poetry. Consider the thought of a computer rattling off this poetry mechanically. It sounds terrible, it is terrible. Consider Beethoven churned out by sequencer. It sounds terrible, it is terrible. What, until very recently, never seemed to twig with many of the most aggressive supporters of avant-garde music was that making the music sound ugly, while it had a certain cachet, and provided fodder for smug glowering at the "stupid conservative audience" was a disservice to the music, a kind of artistic cowardice not wanting to put the music forward on the same terms and with the same complexity of incarnation as traditional music. It was a kind of not trying for fear of failure. Happily this is finally changing. Consider, if you will, late Boulez versus early Boulez as a conductor, and compare his recent performances of Webern with the earlier ones. Or even the performances of his own music. Before there was an almost terror of allowing sensuousness into the picture, an aggressive desire for abrasiveness, and as a result - music which sounded abrassive. The key to a work becoming a staple is two fold: there must be people willing to go out of their way to hear it, and most of the rest should not be willing to go out of their way to avoid it. For a long time people walking out was a mark of honour - now there is a slowly growing realisation, even among supporters of avant-garde music, that it is no more than being boorish at a party, a mark of bad manners. - - - But again the future beckons, I realise that I am aware of these issues because my own music exists in a form which I regard as being equally unacceptable. The mechanical, unnuanced unartistic - almost anti-musical - renderings that my sequencer and synthesizer produce of my music seem to be to be unhappy necssity, as far from the realisation as the two piano performances of Bruckner's works that were put forward in the last century, the trio transcription of Beethoven's second symphony - and so on. But the cause of this neessity must be dropped in the lap of the supporters of a new music. In my case it is a persistent inability in getting scoring programs to produce readable versions of a score. Each attempt produces a festival of slurs and hand penned in notations. It is not that the music is, itself, that difficult to listen to, merely that, as a resident of an old tradition, it violates norms of notation without violating the deeper artistic norms of the music itself. The makers of scoring programs have every incentive to make the past printable, but little to make the future printable. And I have not solved the problem which, as the composer, it is my responsibility to solve. Modernism is in the same position, by violating norms of practice and tradition, it is the responsibility of the supporters of the music to make it realisable, not by force, but by finesse. I wish for every time someone wrote "it is the moral duty of musicians to play new music", they would stop themselves, erase, and write instead "it is the moral duty of musicians who play new music to realise it as music." stirling s newberry [log in to unmask] http://www.mp3.com/ssn