Apollo vs. Dionysus in an eternal football match

I was writing all kinds of positive and negative canons and weird inverted this and retrograde that and getting as spaced-out mathematically as I could and I was going "Wait a minute (laughs), who cares about that stuff?" I had always liked rhythm and blues so here I was stuck between the slide rule and the gut bucket somewhere and I decided that I would opt for a third road someplace in between.

--Frank Zappa, interview with Martin Perlich, 1972

There's a concept in philosophy: a dichotomy between the Apollonian aspects of art (intellectual, logical, "left-brained") and the Dionysian (emotional, "right-brained"). Nietzsche (with whom I've always had a love-hate relationship) is famous for developing this theory in The Birth of Tragedy, though he was not the first in doing so, even among modern German philosophers.

I'm oversimplifying a bit, but art music (i.e. classical traditions from around world; also jazz) tends to be Apollonian; popular and folk music Dionysian. My goal is to make my music a balance of both, intellectual and emotional.

The intellectual aspects come from many sources, from Baroque fugues and other counterpoint, to Classical form, to Modernist serialism and mathematical experimentation. The emotional from Romanticism, music from film, television and video games, and of course, popular music forms. Beethoven and Stravinsky both sought a balance of Apollonianism and Dionysianism, the latter in his later Neoclassicism and his earlier primitivism of The Rite of Spring.

My use of microtonality is also linked to this opposition. I arrived at 72 equal divisions of the octave after doing some middle-level mathematical calculations, finding a convenient equal temperament that approximates just intonation best, beyond the imperfection of 12-tone tuning. I also wanted to "paint with more colors", expressing moods well beyond the major and minor dichotomy.

I'm also taking a balanced populist approach to composing, writing for a broad audience and avoiding too much elitism while not dumbing myself down. I do the same for philosophy and other sciences.

Edit: I use the website TV Tropes a lot when talking about philosophy. There is an article on Enlightnment (in music, the Baroque and Classical eras) versus Romanticism.