Excerpts from the composer Easley Blackwood's Interview with Bruce Duffie

Easley Blackwood: There was a great deal of exploration done in this [atonal polyrhythmic] idiom, not in one exactly like the one that I was using, but in what you'd call atonal polyrythmic texture which starts out shortly after the close of World War II and comes to a big peak with the Darmstadt school, and then gradually begins to fall into a decline somewhere in the middle of the 1960s. By the 70s, it's been, to a large extent, abandoned except by some die-hards, and you find that it was replaced by aleatoric music. Then a little bit later, minimalists come into it. At the same time, when other people were losing interest in it, I was engaged in a big research project about chord progressions within equal tunings where the number of notes is different from 12. What I was particularly interested in was chord progressions that would give a sensation either of modal coherence or else of tonality. That is to say you can actually identify subdominants, dominants, tonics, and keys. In the process of doing that, plus having taught traditional harmony since I came to the University of Chicago in 1958 and writing the microtonal etudes to illustrate these chord progressions, I got, for the first time, firsthand sensation of what it was to write music in tonal idioms. I must say I found that it was rather more amusing than writing in the atonal polyrhythmic idiom that I'd been using.

BD: So is this the purpose of music? To provide amusement for the composer?

EB: Well, I think it is to provide high class entertainment for somebody. That's at least one purpose of it. There are others. I know it's very fashionable these days to indulge in political or social commentary, but if I look at the history of music, I see a vast repertoire where that's not the case at all.