Symbolic Extension and Its Corruption of Music
Barton McLean · Perspectives of New Music · 1981
... composers in the West put the resources of rhythm behind bars and then virtually forgot about them. They rejected most of the world's sounds, including most sounds of the human voice, because they did not reduce to discrete pitches, twelve to the octave. They also rejected countless musical instruments because they were not tuned properly or produced too many subtleties of pitch and articulation. They rejected dissonances that were not closely bound by metrical and tonal controls. They developed taboos against tritones, wolf tones, and other phenomena that threatened the integrity of the system. 1