echurchill

But it's not "rubbish"; in fact it is fairly deep in meaning. LOrem Ipsum dOlor sit Amet, consEctetur adipisIcing Elit, sed do Eiusmod tEmpor incIdidunt ut labOre et dolOre mAgna Aliqua. Ut Enim ad mInim vEniam, quis nOstrud exercitAtion Ullamco labOris nIsi ut Aliquip ex ea commOdo consEquat. DUis AUte irUre dOlor in reprehendErit in voluptAte... but half of the words are damaged in that version anyway. There is no real way to accent a damaged Latin word.

Antiatonality, if it's any help, I have wanted for a long time to master several historic styles from the Renaissance and Baroque, and I've invested considerable time studying the music and practicing the techniques. For me it is not really enough to sound "Baroque-ish," but to sound as close to possible to my favorites like Froberger, Buxtehude, Gesualdo and many others. But that sort of skill takes long hours of studying scores and research. I cannot say I am very good at it (or that I will ever be), but I continue because, like you, I feel total mastery offers innumerable small skills that really make the difference between good and great. But I have never expected to get this in the classroom. It is one thing to teach how to voice lead chords or make a progression, quite another to understand the subtle nuances and idiosyncrasies of, say, Bach or Mozart. That takes study alone - though some of the subtleties have been written about. Also I do have an interest in a few modern ideas. I have been working to use my experiments with microtonality and experience in the Baroque to create something entirely new. And I am not the only one... by coincidence there was another harpsichordist-composer at my university who was a great success, combining just intonation, polytonality and the Baroque. So old styles can be the foundation, even the major component of new styles. It is entirely acceptable to make Bach 50% of your style... or 80%... or 90%. Admittedly the extra 10% modern is necessary today - but I, for one, am glad to have so many fascinating 20th century ideas to choose from.

"As an organisational entity, Vox S

Then honestly I think there's no need to comment. Anyway, I liked the textures very much. The structure seems very clear, the contrast between "pillars" and "swarms" sounds very direct and they are both powerful sounds. I almost wished there were clearer contrast... or if not, more blending between the two. Most of all, I wish you had a live performance to show us! The pillars sound especially bland on MIDI; I know in a live performance they would be much more interesting. Thank you for posting; keep sharing your music with us.

Pachelbel wrote some really nice music; too bad we just remember him for that cheesy canon. :(

Well, I understand that the septimal and undecimal intervals only really appear around the 31-ET area (and with surprising accuracy!) but what I really meant was the keyboard layout. Chords like C E G A# don't look very convenient to play. And it isn't very clear where all the notes are in the different tunings. I'm assuming the diagrams name notes the pythgorean way, so that we call everything by it's place on the circle of fifths. So where are all 31 notes of 31-ET? Do you sell extended keyboards with all the double sharps and flats? (The keyboard looks ideal for 19-ET though... or a 19 note subset of 31-ET which I've been exprimenting with lately.) What really bothers me is that the system seems designed for tonal music. And by tonal I mean common practice harmony or popular music harmony. There's talk of temperaments and overtones and such, but I don't see much for the true microtonalist; however I would like to look at the system in closer detail before I judge. Also, what you say about the augmented sixth's history is not really true. The augmented sixth only shows up as an "accident" here or there in the Renaissance and early Baroque. In the late Baroque they are more frequent (though not common); by then well-temperaments were the standard all around Europe except perhaps on older organs. The augmented sixth only became really common in the Romantic period, well after meantone was forgotten (though slightly before the rise of equal temperament).

I've read a bit about these dyanamic tonality ideas, and I honestly believe they're worth looking into. But I think perhaps you should approach potential users a bit differently, especially online. I've studied microtonality for a few years now and the terminology can get awfully obscure. Many musicians today have never heard of syntonic tuning or commas, limmas, pythagorean thirds or subminor triads. It just sounds like gibberish unless you've heard these things and experimented with them. For many western musicians, 12 ET feels pefectly natural or inevitable, and the piano defines what "in tune" means. So I think it might help to go a bit further in explainig "polyphonic tuning bends, tuning progressions, temperament modulations, and the like," so that we know why we might want them. Now on to a real question, your chart mentions septimal and undecimal intervals but it doesn't look like your "syntonic tuning continuum" is particularly adapetd to such chords....

.... "fuga" once meant what we now call canon.... so I'm not sure why we can't just listen to the music and enjoy....

Exactly what I think.... But as for the thread title, I would never call any composer "bad" or "worst".

I won't criticize the counterpoint or text setting in the Ave Maria since I understand you are still in the process of figuring out the techniques. And I probably couldn't do any better. I really enjoyed the variety of textures you employed, some more contrapuntal than others. "Absolute" counterpoint can make for some very boring choral music in my opinion, so I enjoyed how you alternated between counterpoint and homophony. I think many students of counterpoint today don't realize the subtlety involved in mixing counterpoint and homophony and the various levels of independence and interdependence in between. So even if you're still working out issues in counterpoint and harmony (whether your ultimate goal is Renaissance or common-practice or something modern) I really liked the textures. [Note: All this refers to the Ave Maria.]

Very nice! I'm glad you finally got around to writing something... though I would like to see some of those assigned melodies too... but I think this little phrase is the beginning of much finer musicality in you. You now know how to deploy chromatic harmonies and those melodies show careful design. Try writing a bit more of that! I would be posting a lesson today but I have graduation parties to attend... but I will try to post tomorrow.

I think you already know parts of this are outside the range of the hand... :D but it's nice happy piece. It does sound like two keyboards in a way.

Actually the 31 note octave would have had keys for F Gbb F# Gb F## G... which is even more amazing! Or maybe you're thinking of a keyboard with 19 notes, which would be F F# Gb G like you say. The latter was fairly common on both organs and harpsichords in the 16th and 17th centuries, though many only had a couple of pairs like D#/Eb and G#/Ab. In fact, not only Handel but a whole group of composers from the generation before the previous were taught on such instruments... composers like Frescobaldi, Luzzaschi and Valentini and presumably many of their pupils as well. And you're right that they were only used to make the traditional harmonies of their times more in tune. But we do know that even further back in time, in the early 16th century, composers had an intense interest in reviving what they thought was ancient Greek theory. You see, the Greeks had a tetrachord, a half-scale of four notes, of two quarter tones and a major third. Various Greek authors and the early Christian writer Boethius carefully described it. And in the early Renaissance, classical thinking was the model for many of the arts. Naturally, however, no musician could get the enharmonic tetrachord to sound melodious; it sounded too foreign and could not integrate into the mostly consonant polyphonic style of the times. But the theorist Nicola Vincentino and various of his followers thought they could revive the enharmonic tetrachord and create truly microtonal music, which of course predates what you're referring to Musicthor. These early composers were actually looking for new sonorities and bizarre intervals. In fact the movement even predated Vincentio. The style was called musica reservata and composers as eminent as Lassus and I think Cipriano de Rore wrote occasional pieces as chromatic as Gesualdo's famous madrigals. I think Lassus's collection of musica reservata was called Prophetiae Sibyllarum. But anyway Vincentino was the first to advocate true microtonality. In his famous book (and he was among the two most famous theorists of that century along with Zarlino) L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica, he includes a chapter on his inventions, the arcicembalo and the arciorgano (oddly enough it is modern authors that spell that arcHicembalo) both which include 36 keys to the octave. Today we speculate that a subset of those 36 notes included something like 31 note equal temperament. As you say, Musicthor, the main use for the instrument was to play triads in perfect tune, but we know that Vincentino advocated going even further into true microtonality, becuase in his book, he encourages the reader to experiment with lowering and raising all the pure intervals to reproduce the subtle inflections of the human voice. I think, for example, he specifically mentions the neutral third which is right between the minor and major thirds. And finally he published his collection of madrigals intended to showcase his techniques. And indeed they do employ microtonal progressions. I know that L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica has been translated into English, though I doubt much of his music has been published in moder editions. Vincentino's radical ideas led to a famous debate with his rival Lusitano. In fact, the last few chapters of Zarlino's Le institutioni harmoniche are dedicated to discrediting Vincentio's ideas. Vincentio's rivals objected because the complex microtonal system of L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica had little to to with the enharmonic genus of the "antica musica" Vincentio claimed to be reviving. In that sense their criticism was certainly valid, and Lusitano won the debates in Rome, but to microtonalists like me he remains a source of inspiration. EDIT: You can see a facsimile of Vincentino's book here Gallica - Vicentino, Nicola. L' antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica, con la dichiaratione : et con gli essempi de I tre generi, con le loro spetie, et con l'inventione di uno nuovo stromento, nelquale si contiene tutta la perfetta musica, con. Of course I can't read Italian, and much less dense Renaissance Italian :(. And at http://www.cipoo.net/downloads/scores/ProphetiaeChromatico.pdf you can see the first piece of Lassus's Prophetiae Sibyllarum, Carmina Chromatico, which begins with the progression C Maj, G Maj, B Maj, c# min!!! And Wikipedia of course has interesting articles on both Vincentino and the archicembalo. Finally, at Four enharmonic madrigals can be bought Vincentino's madrigals, edited by the eminent musicologist Alexander Silbiger; I don't own this but I think it must be a quality edition if Silbiger's name is attached to it.

Well, I'm trying to get to work too! I will be leaving on the 14 to Oberlin College for their Baroque Performance Institute and will probably not be able to teach anymore after that :(, though I could advise you every so often if you wish. But until then I think there is much we can do. Are you still interested in writing a full piece step by step under my guidance? Of course your sarabande turned out very nice but if your still interested in keyboard piece we could start that too. If you're tired of sarabandes it could be another suite movement. Of those last melodies in e minor I like the first and last very much. You have captured some solemn melancholy in the first and the last is flowing (though not really in a singable style!). The two middle ones quite honestly don't work as well for me, but clearly you have put lots of effort into all of them. I would suggest for the last one that you change the first G in bar 15 to F#. That way the G isn't immediately repeated afterwards. So about the topic of melodic curve, most of the time melodies in actual music, particularly contrapuntal music, will not be in simple arch form. But they will have a sense of direction, a sort of purpose, a well defined curve even if not a simple one. The sort of singable melody we have worked on is only one of many sorts of melody. Especially in contrapuntal music melodies are often conceived from motives. Let's take a look at a very nice sonata by Rosenmueller at http://icking-music-archive.org/scores/rosenmueller/1682/03son.pdf. You can hear that at Track 1 of Ensemble Vermillian: Stolen Jewels. You will probably enjoy the recorder-gamba combination. (I recommend the rest of the Rosenmueller sonata and the Buxtehude sonata starting at Track 18. The Biber sonata is one of the absolutely most fantastically amazing awesome sonatas ever written, but I think the intended instrument, the violin, suits it much better. You could hear that at Track 1 of SCD: Biber Violin Sonatas. Track 2 of that collection is by my favorite composer. I would like to hear your thoughts on all this music if you have the time to carefully listen.) I will post the rest of this lesson soon. I just want to keep a steady flow of information even if the exercises are still in progress :). On another note, did you ever analyze that Rameau sarabande from a while back? Because if you did I would like to see the chords and other details you may have noticed. (I'm actually learning to play some of that suite.)

Well this does make sense, to have say C E\ G (I hope I'm understanding the notation right!) D F/ A G B\ A Isn't the F/ fairly important? Or is the ditone F A less dissonant when it is above the (slightly large) minor third? And if I do use F/ is there some sort of ugly cross relation between that and the C of the previous chord? And to go further, if I add passing tones and embellishments, should I use D\ in the first harmony and the D in the next? Wouldn't that be too noticeable? And if we have something like I vi ii V I, don't we get: C E\ G A\ C E\ D\ F G\ G\ B\\ C\ C\ E\\ G\ I guess that could be altered at some point to C E\ G A C/ E D F/ G G B\ C C E\ G which means some very odd shifts from the first to the second chord since we're jumping further away on the lattice (which BTW is how I visualize all this :D). Are those shifts C - C/ and E\ - E noticeable in actual music? Truthfully I prefer the first version with its drift... in my mind that is. I'm not sure how it would actually sound. But like I mentioned, if we add ornaments or passing tones etc... to a progression like I ii V I, won't they too have to shift through new patterns of large and small tones, even without modulation? So I guess in modulation it's convenient to think mostly of the principal triads I V and IV or i v and iv? That makes sense since there is no risk of pitch drift within the key as long as you stick to those triads. Sorry, it sounds like I'm quizzing you :). I'm just curious and a bit confused. Maybe instead of asking so many questions I should actually go try some actual music with these.