When the in-between notes of a musical tradition are actually measured, they do not fall on a neat grid that splits the octave into equal steps. A tidy theoretical scale of 24 equal parts misdescribes what musicians really play. Practice carries its own intonation that the clean model smooths away.
Faced with differing tunings across regions, a standards body can either impose one norm or let each place keep its own. Choosing to preserve local scales treats the variations as part of each region's musical character, not mistakes to be corrected. Uniformity would erase exactly what makes each tradition itself.
A music spread across many countries can still count as a single tradition when it shares a common pitch system, rhythmic structures, and instruments built and played the same way. Melodies are organized by a set of melodic frameworks rather than free invention. These shared building blocks, not any single place, are what define the whole.
A long-lived musical tradition can lose touch with its own authentic language in a single century of outside influence. The author treats this drift away from native forms as a kind of cultural catastrophe, not a natural evolution.