I was just reading some old posts. Why, you don't ask? To tell you the truth,
it's 4:30
a.m. and I'm procrastinating. Being an inescapably human being who absolutely
must
get a grip on and categorize everything and everyone as best as possible, I am
still
trying to get a decent grip on this McLaren guy. Why him in particular? His
writings
are amusing and I find myself agreeing with many of them. He makes some sense.

In the 800 or so messages I had to skim to get to one of his crazymusic posts
that
wasn't deleted (so did that turn out to be Yahoo's doing or what?) I had a lot
of other
reactions of course. As usual, I lament being an oblivious high-schooler during
this
time, which apparently was rich in exchange of ideas and diverse in the
contributing
individuals. Perhaps it's better now that everyone's seemingly gone away to live
real
lives. I also realized that a lot of questions that I think about frequently --
those of
instrument design, technology, notation -- have a long history 'round these
parts. So
I wonder, is it better to try and extract all from 3-years-ago threads by
jumping one
by one through yahoo pages? Or would it behoove me to bring up the same
questions, those which seemingly lie at the root of pRaCtIcAl MiCrOtOnAlItY
itself? Or
maybe there are non-online resources which people could point me toward.

Most importantly to me, I wonder how I shall be able to contribute. For years I
have
thought, yeah!, when I grow up I want to build instruments. I have held myself
to be
capable in both musical and technical matters (my attention span in both is ever
an
issue), still at the point where my education could go in any direction, and I
have
generally thought that I can do well with any direction that I go in. So what
direction
would people benefit most from? A synthesizer with banks of scales, banks of
timbres, on top of banks of bent partials? A family of BP clarinets? Slide
crummhorns?

Jacob