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Nogrod - I think I more or less agree with you. I certainly don't think that the music of the Elves (or even the Edain or Hobbits) should sound exactly like western music of any variety. I just think that if one is going to take aspects of music of the real world as starting points and try to extrapolate to Middle-earth, western music is the place to start.
It's interesting you mention tuning systems, as this is a topic that has long held a certain fascination for me, though I mention it only briefly in the essay. I have thought that perhaps the Elves would have a system with more than 12 tones, but likely one of which the 12 tone system is a subset. Perhaps when humans sought to imitate Elvish music, they could not quite grasp the subtleties of the Elvish system and ended up with the 12 tone scale. I also rather wonder what system(s) of intonation they used (equal temperament, just intonation, etc.). I imagine Maglor probably wrote a treatise or two laying out the mathematics of the various systems.
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