Yasser’s ideas were indeed, at least in rudimentary form, a source of how to apply segmentation to various microtonal scales. Eventually, I did find a copy of Yasser’s book, read it, and Milton was, of course, right. This, mind you, after he had given a 3 hour seminar on Schoenberg. What was supposed to be a 10 minute walk across campus, bringing a guest to one place or another, turned into an extended personal seminar. Without missing a beat, he began telling me about Joseph Yasser’s Theory of Evolving Tonality, and had I heard of it, and I should get a copy and read it, but basically, Yasser says…. After the talk, I was walking somewhere with Milton, and I asked him if any of the segmentation ideas he had been discussing would have any application to microtonality. Listening to the talk, old memories came flooding back, as well as familiar voices during the question and answer period. Years later, that copy emerged in his archives, found by David Dunn, who copied it to mp3 form, and emailed it to me. I remember afterward that Kenneth Gaburo wanted a copy of the seminar, so I dubbed it off to cassette and gave him a copy. It ran well overtime – no one wanted it to end – and I recorded it all. Milton gave an amazing talk about Schoenberg’s work one afternoon during the symposium. Milton was one of the featured guest speakers, and as one of the Graduate Assistants there, I was heavily involved with the organizing and running of the Symposium. It was in 1974 at UC San Diego, at the Center for Music Experiment, when we held a Schoenberg Symposium. 100 Warren Burt: The Shape of the Voice 1: Milton Babbitt I only had one extended encounter with Milton. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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