I stumbled into a quiet little music theory forum today and learned about five things in half an hour (just as I did here):
I was looking for an educated gloss on George Russell's "Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization," which apparently discards 350 years of tonal music theory and starts from scratch, from a jazz perspective. Has anyone here studied this, taught it, used it in playing/composing?
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream." - Frank Zappa
I've studied it. LCCOTO appears to be an attempt to “reverse engineer†tonality, seemingly ignorant of the harmonic series and the history of musical tuning. It is not good theory; however, as a pragmatic approach to playing jazz, some people find it useful.
