Newsletter

Posts from the Love Music More newsletter. Philosophy-of-music pieces are here in full. History, theory, and the rest of the archive stay on Substack. Other essays live on Writing.

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• 440 or 432 Hz — What Frequency Is Better? November 20, 2024 A=440 Hz is a 20th-century compromise, not a cabal. 432 is a beautiful idea that cheapens music if you treat it as the one true frequency. Frequency is a spectrum, not a binary.
• It's the Circle of Fifths July 17, 2024 Stack perfect fifths twelve times and you close a circle, or a spiral, until musicians fudge the math (enharmonics) the way geocentrism fudged the planets.
• Why are there twelve notes? July 10, 2024 Western music's twelve tones come from stacking octaves (2:1) and fifths (3:2): a search for order and divinity in ratios, whether or not the universe is actually that tidy.
• Tuning into the Universe's Frequency (What Are Notes?) June 25, 2024 All notes are frequencies; all frequencies are waves. A note is what an ensemble agrees to call a pitch (culture, not essence) on an infinite gradient.

More on Substack

The rest of the newsletter, including music history, stays on Substack.