> Remember I am basically reporting what I read. I don't know much about
> making music and only a little history. I have a good friend in music. I
> was over at their place for dinner last year and they were trying to
> explain many of things you mentioned. I didn't really understand it. But
> it sounded to me like what they were showing me amounted to the idea
> that many different kinds of scales can be derived by beginning with 12
> tones and then reducing it to various subsets and then altering parts of
> the subset.
You can start with any tone system and use clever transformations to generate any other tone system. This doesn't demonstrate that there is anything important or universal about the 12-tone system.
Miles