Leadership Quote by John Eaton

The sentence performs a neat bit of credential-judo: it announces expertise while ducking the expectation that expertise must arrive with a pile of abstractions. Eaton leads with “first of all,” a politician’s throat-clearing that signals message discipline and preemptive damage control. Then comes the deliberately modest disclaimer: “I’ve never been much of a theorist.” It’s an old rhetorical move in public life - claim authenticity by distancing yourself from the priesthood of experts - but here it’s welded to a startlingly niche identity: “as a microtonal composer.”

That juxtaposition is the whole mechanism. “Microtonal composer” is a badge of technical daring, even eccentricity; it implies a person operating beyond mainstream rules. By immediately rejecting “theorist,” Eaton frames his authority as practical and embodied rather than academic. The subtext: don’t mistake complexity for elitism; I’m not here to lecture, I’m here to do. It’s a way to make an esoteric practice sound democratic, even frontier-like - innovation without the ivory-tower sermon.

Contextually, assigning this to a 1790–1856 politician reads like either an anachronistic attribution or a conscious act of mythmaking. Microtonality is a 20th-century musical conversation; “microtonal composer” is modern self-labeling. If the quote is misattributed, that misfit is revealing: we like our public figures as polymaths, but we like them even more when they pretend not to be intellectuals. Either way, the line works because it sells a persona: the radical specialist who insists he’s just a plainspoken practitioner, daring you to follow without making you feel small.