Theory/Composition
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Home / Blogs “You have to learn the rules before you can break them.” I have no idea where I first heard this phrase. I may have heard it so many times, in so many different contexts, that it’s lost all meaning. I’m sure I’ve uttered it myself without giving it much thought. But lately, what once seemed like an innocuous adage has started to feel more and more like a poisonous platitude, something completely inimical to the actual methodology of artistic practice.
Learning the Rules
In music , the undertone series is a sequence of notes that results from inverting the intervals of the overtone series . While overtones naturally occur with the physical production of music on instruments, undertones must be produced in unusual ways. The overtone series being based on harmonic division , the undertone series is based on arithmetic division. [ 1 ] [ edit ] Methods for producing an undertone series
Undertone series
composing for film essay
By ANNE S. LEWIS The principal bassoonist at the New York Philharmonic got some good news recently: The bassoon part in Maurice Ravel's "Mother Goose" ballet ("Ma Mère l'Oye"), which will be performed on the orchestra's program for three consecutive evenings beginning Wednesday (and reprised Jan. 4), just grew by four full measures. "She was tickled pink," says Arbie Orenstein, the Queens College musicologist who, while examining the work's original manuscript, came across a musical line that, strangely enough, had never made it into the score that has been performed for the past 100 years. Ravel's 'Mother Goose'
Ravel| Mother Goose| New York Philharmonic| Arbie Orenstein
Note : Last November, a Twitter exchange revealed that certain members of the small subset of science writers who were humanities majors (including your humble cocktail party blogger), also have a shared taste for classic murder mysteries. They thought they would co-post, on their respective blogs, various takes on the science of classical mystery writers. And they had so much fun, they decided to do so again!
The Science of Mysteries: Leave Us the Counterpoint | Cocktail Party Physics
Scales and emotions
Following up and expanding on a post about learning music theory with Auto-tune . See also a post about the major scale modes and an intro to minor keys . So maybe you want to write a song or an instrumental in a particular mood or style, and you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the scales. Here’s a handy guide to the commonly used scales in western pop, rock, jazz, blues and so on.
If you sense I’m in microtonal heaven lately, that’s pretty much true. Except for a six-minute piano piece, I haven’t written one of the normal pitches since December. One event that I would have highlighted in advance, but somehow I didn’t have the final information for, was a microtonal performance of Satie’s Vexations that took place last Sunday at the Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles. Pianist Aron Kallay and guitarist John Schneider asked seventeen microtonalists, myself included, to come up with a microtonal tuning for Vexations that would take into account Satie’s peculiar notation, which spells the same piano notes differently in exasperating ways. You probably know the original version: As written, there are 21 different pitches, D coming back as E-double-flat, C differentiated from B-sharp, and so on.
Second-Guessing Satie
composition resources
Getting Off the Assembly Line
Your generous responses to my little outburst about being tired of blogging certainly made it clear what most useful direction this blog can continue to go in. I may be out of ideas I haven’t expounded, but my file cabinets and hard drives are still chockablock with music that’s not in general circulation, and listeners are eager to have their experience widened. If I do no more than satisfy that longing, I will have felt that my trip to this planet was not in vain. If I become in the process sort of the Dick Cavett of avant-garde music, so be it. One of the themes of my life has become something I never expected.
John Adams: Hell Mouth: On surviving a first rehearsal
Oct 20, 2009 You go into a nervous sweat to finish the full score and meet the deadline, feeling resentment at those famous architects and painters who have entire armies of assistants to whom they can hand over the tedium of small decisions. The composer always seems to work alone. Has to. Can’t trust anyone with any aspect of the piece.
Springtime for PSNY: Awards! String Quartets! Opera! by Ted Gordon on March 13, 2013, 10:53 a.m.